by P. Homewood, March 5, 2024 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
As noted previously, February 1779 was actually warmer than last month in Central England. It is also worth noting that there is no identifiable trend or pattern in the distribution of warm Februarys:
At a time of climate change (or disruption for some), it’s high time to read Olivier Postel- Vinay’s excellent French book, ‘Sapiens and the climate, a turbulent history’ (original in French: ‘Sapiens et le climat, une histoire bien chahutée (2022)’, which looks at the climate changes our species has undergone since Homo became sapiens, i.e. over the past 233,000 years. What does this book tell us?
It shows us that our species has been confronted throughout its history and evolution with brutal climatic changes of durations and intensities that have no comparison with those of our own time.
This unusually meticulous essay is supported by well-documented historical accounts and facts, supplemented wherever possible by scientific data drawn mainly from archaeology, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, and geology. This perspective paints a detailed picture of the climatic changes faced by the first humans (hunter-gatherers), then by the first civilizations and finally by our modern societies.
Fourteen years ago, a new climate myth was born. A grand solar minimum (GSM) was in the making that would not only reverse global warming but plunge the planet into a new Little Ice Age, surprising the warming alarmists and causing undue suffering. The time has come to bury that myth.
1. The origin of the myth
The deep solar minimum of 2008-2009 was a complete surprise to solar physicists. They did not know that solar activity could become so low because it had not occurred during the time of solar observations with modern instrumentation. In 2009, a solar scientist named Habibullo Abdussamatov published a paper in Russian in which he argued that the following years would see a major cooling based on the onset of a new GSM. His evidence was
The low solar activity of the then ongoing solar cycle (SC) minimum 23-24.
A bicentennial cycle in solar activity that supposedly decreased solar activity after 1600 and after 1800
The pause in global warming since 1998
Figure 1. From Abdussamatov 2009. “The Sun defines the climate”. Nauka i Zhizn, N1, pp. 34-42.
This prediction reached the West and became very popular, like any catastrophic prediction, actually. Articles about the arrival of a GSM proliferated on climate blogs, such as the one on WUWT: The ‘Baby Grand’ has arrived.
Other scientists, such as Livingston & Penn and de Jager & Duhau, joined Abdussamatov in 2009 in proposing the arrival of a GSM, though being more cautious about its climatic effects. It went so far as to threaten the global warming narrative at a time under assault from the Pause and Climategate. Thus, none other than Stefan Rahmstorf came to their defense saying that according to the models
“a new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot compensate for global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.”
by P. Homewood, Aug 20, 2022 , in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Roger Pielke Jr debunks Europe’s “Worst Drought in 500 Years Claim”:
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Conclusion
In Western and Central Europe — basically Atlantic France all the way to Moscow, north of the Mediterranean region and south of the North Sea region — the IPCC and the underlying peer reviewed research on which it assesses has concluded that drought has not increased and, logically, that increased drought cannot be attributed to human-caused climate change. The only exception here is that the IPCC has medium confidence in an increasing trend of soil moisture deficits in some subregions, however the IPCC has low confidence that this trend can be attributed to human-caused climate change. Looking to future, at temperature changes of 2C and more, at present the IPCC does not expect the current state of scientific understandings to change. But stay tuned — that’s why we do science.
For 110 years, climate change has been in the news. Are we finally ready to listen?
Published: August 15, 2022 2.47am EDT
On August 14 1912, a small New Zealand newspaper published a short article announcing global coal usage was affecting our planet’s temperature.
This piece from 110 years ago is now famous, shared across the internet this time every year as one of the first pieces of climate science in the media (even though it was actually a reprint of a piece published in a New South Wales mining journal a month earlier).
So how did it come about? And why has it taken so long for the warnings in the article to be heard – and acted on?
According to Dieng et al., 2017, global sea surface temperatures (SST) cooled slightly (-0.006°C/decade) from 2003 to 2013. This reduced the overall 1950-2014 warming rate to 0.059°C per decade.
Sea and land surface temperatures, ocean heat content, Earth’s
energy imbalance and net radiative forcing over the recent years.
The NCAR/HadCRUT4 global SST record from buoys and ARGO floats also show only modest warming in the last 3 decades. The natural 2015-’16 Super El Nino event is mostly responsible for the overall increasing rate.
It was supposed to be a groundbreaking forecast, the early prediction of the weather phenomena El Niño and La Niña. Both affect the weather in very different ways.
It would have been so nice to know a year in advance what conditions would prevail at a later date. On November 4, 2019, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published what was held as groundbreaking news. Thanks to its new algorithms and a lot of computing power, it was now possible to predict an El Niño or a La Niña a long time in advance. The hit rate was supposed to be 80%.
Unfortunately, one year later exactly the opposite of what was predicted in fact happened, the German Klimaschau reported. Science is settled? Well, maybe not.
Since then, things have been quiet about these PIK long-term forecasts. The US agency NOAA is much more cautious, both in terms of the long term and the probability of occurrence. Perhaps they don’t have as good algorithms and the computing power that Potsdam has? In any case on Twitter, US meteorologist Ryan Maue sees a good chance that a third will follow the two recent consecutive La Niñas.
The last time this happened was 22 years ago at the turn of the millennium.
A new paper published in open access publishing MDPI looks at seven prominent hemispheric and global temperature reconstructions for the past 2000 years (T2k).
The analysis conducted by the authors found that some reconstructions “differed from each other in some segments by more than 0.5 °C” whilst some show negligible pre-industrial climate variability (“hockey sticks”).
Those showing variability would suggest natural factors playing a greater role than those that claim climate had been rather constant over the past 2000 years.
Abstract: Global mean annual temperature has increased by more than 1 °C during the past 150 years, as documented by thermometer measurements. Such observational data are, unfortunately, not available for the pre-industrial period of the Common Era (CE), for which the climate development is reconstructed using various types of palaeoclimatological proxies. In this analysis, we compared seven prominent hemispheric and global temperature reconstructions for the past 2000 years (T2k) which differed from each other in some segments by more than 0.5 °C. Whilst some T2k show negligible pre-industrial climate variability (“hockey sticks”), others suggest significant temperature fluctuations. We discuss possible sources of error and highlight three criteria that need to be considered to increase the quality and stability of future T2k reconstructions. Temperature proxy series are to be thoroughly validated with regards to (1) reproducibility, (2) seasonal stability, and (3) areal representativeness. The T2k represents key calibration data for climate models. The models need to first reproduce the reconstructed pre-industrial climate history before being validated and cleared for climate projections of the future. Precise attribution of modern warming to anthropogenic and natural causes will not be possible until T2k composites stabilize and are truly representative for a well-defined region and season. The discrepancies between the different T2k reconstructions directly translate into a major challenge with regards to the political interpretation of the climate change risk profile. As a rule of thumb, the larger/smaller the pre-industrial temperature changes, the higher/lower the natural contribution to the current warm period (CWP) will likely be, thus, reducing/increasing the CO2 climate sensitivity and the expected warming until 2100.
Scientists admit that 3 different Greenland Summit (GISP2) temperature reconstruction “strategies” produce 3 different paleoclimate temperature results. The reconstructions chosen as the most “robust” are therefore the ones that align best with the authors’ presuppositions.
In a new study published in Quaternary Science Reviews scientists (Döring and Luenberger, 2022) report they reject a reconstruction of Greenland Summit temperatures that shows it has cooled ~4°C since Roman times (shown below as the red trend line, extended to 2000 C.E.).
The temperature record for this region also shows today’s temperatures are not much different than they were during the Little Ice Age.
Another chart contained in the study (Pleskot et al., 2022) shows North America’s and Europe’s mean annual temperatures are nearly the lowest of the last 4,500 years.
In this monthly lookback through the archives, two things are abundantly clear for every month we have checked:
1) Weather was every bit as extreme in the past
2) The weather can vary enormously from one year to another. This can not be better exemplified than the series for December, which has offered up very mild months to very cold ones, very dry ones to very wet, and very snowy ones to very little snow.
A 2020 study (Geirsdóttir et al.) indicated peak Holocene warmth at least “∼3–4 °C above modern in Iceland” prevailed throughout much of the last 8000 years in this region of the northern North Atlantic.
On November 3, 2021, the renowned scientific journal Climate published a paper on solar influence on climate.
The paper by the renowned solar researcher Dr. Frank Stefani from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is entitled: “Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: A Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions” and concludes that the influence of CO2 on the development of global temperatures from 1860 until today was only about half as large as the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumed.
As a reminder, the IPCC concludes that 98% of the warming ( 1.07 degrees out of 1.09 degrees) is human-induced. According to Stefani’s analysis, the solar influence accounts for 30-70%.
Stefani examined the course of the geomagnetic aa – index, which reflects the strength of the earth’s magnetic field. This index has been measured in Cambridge and Melbourne since 1844 and reflects the influence of solar activity. In earlier publications, Stefani had already been able to prove that the 11-year solar cycle is triggered by the gravitational forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, which are in orbital resonance every 11.07 years (here, here and here).
Since the Sun – influenced by all the planets (especially Jupiter and Saturn) – also moves around the center of gravity of the solar system, solar cycles arise that have become known in temperature history as the 193-year Suess-de Vries cycle and the 90-year Gleissberg cycle.
by P. Homewood, Nov 27, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
A new study throws doubt on the theory that Arctic warming is man made.
The Arctic Ocean has been warming since the onset of the 20th century, decades earlier than instrument observations would suggest, according to new research.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, found that the expansion of warm Atlantic Ocean water flowing into the Arctic, a phenomenon known as “Atlantification,” has caused Arctic water temperature in the region studied to increase by around 2 degrees Celsius since 1900.
Francesco Muschitiello, an author on the study and assistant professor of geography at the University of Cambridge, said the findings were worrisome because the early warming suggests there might be a flaw in the models scientists use to predict how the climate will change.
Greta Thunberg rejects all ideas of the enlightenment. Despite what she wails, she is now living in the best times ever to be a child on planet Earth. She can actually go to FLOP26, something that few of us would want to do. Would she prefer to live in the worst of times when there was panic, suffering, environmental damage, death and no hope which she claims exists today?
We now eat better, are less affected by natural disasters and are able to cope with extremes of weather and climate. During the last 4 of at least 20,000 generations of humans, child mortality has decreased and global human longevity increased from 25 to 79 years. The climate moaners need to get some perspective from history.
The worst years to live since the time of Jesus were 535-550 AD because massive volcanic eruptions, perhaps Kamchatka or Alaska in 535-536 AD and Ilopango in El Salvador from 539-540 AD. The Northern Hemisphere atmosphere with filled with dust and acid sulphate clouds. These volcanic eruptions were coincidental with extraterrestrial impacts in March 536 AD in the Gulf of Carpentaria and elsewhere in August 536 AD. To make matters worse, these were at the time of a Solar Minimum.
The Sun was dimmed for 18 months, a white sulphuric acid aerosol cloud enveloped Europe, global temperature dropped by 1.5 to 2.5°C producing worldwide crop failures and death by starvation. There was migration (e.g. Slavic speaking people), political turmoil and the collapse of empires (e.g. Sasanian Empire in Persia). Tree rings show almost no growth for a few years.
The discovery of whale bones and marine shells at ancient beach sites 32 to 36 meters above today’s shorelines have been dated to the Early to Middle Holocene. Beach ridges were still several meters higher than today during Roman and Medieval times.
The relative sea levels of the ancient past can be discerned by identifying the span of years marine shells were deposited on ancient beaches. Also, whales were as likely to wash up on shore thousands of years ago as they do today.
A new study (Souza et al., 2021) uses an alternative dating method to identify when beach ridge systems were still collection sites for sea shells along the west coast of Greenland (Disko Island). The authors find it “particularly interesting” that beach ridges were still elevated ~6 meters above modern sea levels less than 2,000 years ago, as previous studies have suggested the Disko Bay region’s sea levels should have fallen to below present sea level by this time.
The authors also determined the marine shells located 32 meters above present Disko Island shorelines can be dated to about 5,300 years ago. Whale carcasses collected at sites elevated 36 meters above modern have been dated to the Early Holocene.
The highest sea levels of the Holocene, or the Holocene Marine Limit, has been dated to ~9000 years ago. At that time deposits of sea shells on the southwest coast of Disko were as much as “~70 to 80 m above present sea level.”
From Russia to the Indian Ocean to Antarctica, surface temperatures were much warmer than they are today during Medieval times.
1. The Eastern Russia region was 1.5°C warmer than now during the Medieval Warm Period. The modern warm-up began centuries ago and temperatures have declined in the last few centuries. Relative sea levels were 1 m higher than now 1,000 years ago.
2. Scientists use coral fossil evidence to suggest mean sea surface temperatures (SST) during the Medieval Climate Anomaly were “warmer than today”. At the two Indian Ocean study sites, there has been no obvious SST warming since 1982.
3. The modern (1994-2004) surface temperatures in the South China Sea are colder now than any time in the last 6000 years. Except for a brief interval ~500 years ago, SSTs have been consistently 2-4°C warmer than today since the middle Holocene.
4. Modern sea ice extent for Antarctica’s Ross Sea is more extensive today (and temperatures cooler) than nearly any time in 6000 years. It was warmer with less sea ice 1.6 to 0.7k years ago. Penguin numbers decline with cooling/increased sea ice.
A new study by Atwood et al (2021) published in the journal of Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology found there’s “poor agreement” between precipitation reconstructions and model simulations over the past 2000 years. This means future projections made by current models are unreliable.
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Models and reconstructions don’t agree
These comprehensive reconstructions show that from 800 to 1000 CE there was a pronounced drying event relative from the eastern Pacific and parts of Mesoamerica.
Also the period “1400–1700 CE is marked by pronounced hydroclimate changes across the tropics, including dry and/or isotopically enriched conditions in South and East Asia, wet and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the central Andes and southern Amazon in South America, and fresher and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the Maritime Continent.”
The study’s abstract also notes how there’s a glaring disagreement between the simulations done by models and what the reconstructions show: “We find notable dissimilarities between the regional hydroclimate changes and global-scale and hemispheric-scale temperature reconstructions, indicating that more work needs to be done to understand the mechanisms of the widespread tropical hydroclimate changes during the LIA.”
There has been no net warming in the Rocky Mountains in the last 500 years.
The southern Rocky Mountains were as warm or warmer than recent decades during the 1600s and 1700s and they have been cooling since the 1950s (Berkelhammer and Stott, 2012, Heeter et al., 2020).
China’s climate history includes multiple climate warming and cooling fluctuations of 4°C within centuries, with cold periods aligning with declines in solar irradiance.
According to a new study (Zhang et al., 2021), northern China’s coldest temperatures of the last 5000 years occurred 300 calibrated years before present (cal yr BP), coinciding with the Little Ice Age and a decrease in solar irradiance. This frigid period was was followed by a ~4°C warm-up (from about 3.5°C to 7.5°C) within the span of about 150 years during the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE), which was well before anthropogenic CO2 emissions began sharply rising.
The warmest temperatures of the last millennium occurred during the Medieval Warm Period (Song Dynasty, 960-1279 CE).
Rapid cooling periods of multiple degrees per century also coincided with the collapse of ancient civilizations, or dynasties, as wars and social unrest were often associated with competition for access to natural resources (such as water during droughts).
With absolutely no analysis, no historical context, and nothing but conjecture, author Anne. C. Mulkern eschewed science for advocacy in her reporting of the brief Pacific Northwest (PNW) heatwave this week.
Yes, the heatwave set all-time high-temperature records in Washington, Oregon, and Canada. But consider this: At best, we have about 150 years of reliable weather records for the PNW, so a “black swan” outlier eventlike this isn’t surprising.
It’s happened before, most certainly. We just weren’t around to observe it. After all, Native Americans did not keep written weather records.
High- (and low-) temperature records are nothing new. But it is important to look at the past because data shows us that more high-temperature records were set during the first half of the twentieth century than during the past 50 years.
Even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirms this.
In August 1861 the London-based newspaper The Times published the world’s first “daily weather forecast.” The term itself was created by the enterprising meteorologist Robert FitzRoy, who wanted to distance his work from astrological “prognostications.” That story has led to a widespread assumption that weather forecasting is an entirely modern phenomenon and that in earlier periods only quackery or folklore-based weather signs were available.
Data availability and temporal resolution make it challenging to unravel the anatomy (duration and temporal phasing) of the Last Glacial abrupt climate changes. Here, we address these limitations by investigating the anatomy of abrupt changes using sub-decadal-scale records from Greenland ice cores. We highlight the absence of a systematic pattern in the anatomy of abrupt changes as recorded in different ice parameters. This diversity in the sequence of changes seen in ice-core data is also observed in climate parameters derived from numerical simulations which exhibit self-sustained abrupt variability arising from internal atmosphere-ice-ocean interactions. Our analysis of two ice cores shows that the diversity of abrupt warming transitions represents variability inherent to the climate system and not archive-specific noise. Our results hint that during these abrupt events, it may not be possible to infer statistically-robust leads and lags between the different components of the climate system because of their tight coupling.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
