by M Bastach, January 5, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Record snowfall, a “bomb cyclone” and cold Arctic air have once again stirred up the debate over global warming’s impact on winter weather.
Some climate scientists are pointing the finger at manmade global warming as a culprit behind recent wintry weather, but there’s not a lot of evidence or agreement that global warming is currently driving extreme cold and snow (…)
by Thomas Heath, December 31, 2017 in Washington Post
U.S. crude oil production is flirting with record highs heading into the new year, thanks to the technological nimbleness of shale oil drillers .
The current abundance has erased memories of 1973 gas lines, which raised pump prices dramatically, traumatizing the United States and reordering its economy. In the decades since, presidents and politicians have made pronouncements calling for U.S. energy independence.
Activity in Pennsylvania’s gas fields slowed in recent years amid low prices, but operators ramped up drilling in 2017, and they’re expecting to drill even more in the new year.
The indefatigable Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville is the first to declare the global temperature anomaly for December 2017. As Fig. 1 shows, in the 39 years 1 month from December 1978 to December 2017, the planet has warmed by half a Celsius degree. But that is equivalent to 1.28 C°/century, or little more than one-third of the 3.3 C°/century predicted with “substantial confidence” by IPCC in 1990 and also by the fifth-generation general-circulation models of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project in 2013.
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi warned of a cold snap gripping the Eastern US many weeks ago, in October, at his Weatherbell Analytics site, which I visit almost daily.
Today it’s all over the news: The Great Freeze of 2017 is smashing through the entire North American East, bringing with it a wave of record temperatures.
More than 220 million Americans are preparing for the coldest New Year in living memory as the cold snap that has swept across the northern states prompts chaos across the country.
Temperatures atop the highest peak in the north-east, Mount Washington, hit a shocking -37 degrees celsius – breaking the previous record at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire of -35C which was set in 1933.
Does record breaking winter cold cast doubt on climate predictions of milder winters? Could ANY weather or climate shift cast doubt on the dominance of that wicked little trace molecule? Apparently not, according to leading climate explainers.
We’re told that climate change caused or intensified California’s wildfires — and that such fires are getting worse. As usual for such scary stories, these claims are only weakly supported by science — except for the ones that are outright fabrications. See what scientists say and decide for yourself.
(…) All of these press releases appeared within a couple of hours of each other on EurekAlert, which is a Science PR clearing house. They will all inevitably get turned into stories by the media. Who could blame the public for being confused when we have such certainty/uncertainty battles like this going on in climate science?
It seems Yogi Berra was right.
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
(…) However, as so often, the supposed “hockey stick” appeared only after the data had been severely adjusted. The difference is shown at the figure at right. Unadjusted (raw) relative sea level (i.e. how sea level appears locally – the concern of state planners and policy-makers) in North Carolina increased steadily through the last two millennia, with somewhat of an upward inflection in the 19th century; it is only after heavy adjustment that a HS shape appears.
Radical environmentalists continue to claim that CO2 emissions cause climate change and that global warming, aka, climate change, will bring more severe storms.
Every year, the facts prove them wrong: Storms are not getting more severe or more frequent.
A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano’s last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth’s climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth.
by Patrice Geoffron, 23 octobre 2017 in Le CerclesdesEconmistes, Boursorama
(…) le gaz américain pourrait bouleverser les équilibres mondiaux, avec des conséquences non moins drastiques que pour le pétrole. Les ressources américaines de gaz sont abondantes et, en juillet 2017, le prix interne a atteint son point le plus bas depuis 12 ans, augurant de sa compétitivité à l’export.
by S. Kamal et al., September 30, 2017 in Environment SystemsDecisions
Within this scope, the results reveal a pattern of the climatic effect of desert urbanization with nighttime warming and weaker, but significant daytime cooling. This effect is confined to the urban area and is not sensitive to the size of the city or the detailed land cover types in the surrounding areas. The pattern is identified in both winter and summer.
Les émissions américaines de CO2 liées à l’énergie ont baissé de 1,7% en 2016. Elles ont toutefois encore atteint près de 5,2 milliards de tonnes l’an dernier, ce qui fait toujours des États-Unis le 2e émetteur mondial après la Chine.
by Nicole Jacobs, October 3, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The report, which bases its CO2 emissions estimates off International Energy Agency (IEA) and BP data through 2016, found the global CO2 levels essentially remained flat in 2015 and 2016. As BP noted earlier this year, the global trend is “well below the 10-year average growth of 1.6% and a third consecutive year of below-average growth” and that “during 2014-16, average emissions growth has been the lowest over any three-year period since 1981-83.”
Recent findings suggest that episodes of very rapid sea-level rise of about 20m in less than 500 years occurred in the last deglaciation, caused by periods of catastrophic ice-sheet collapse as the Earth warmed after the last ice age about 20,000 years ago.
Lead author, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Kelsey Sanborn, has shown this sea-level rise event was associated with “drowning” or death of coral reefs in Hawaii.
by Tony Heller, September 29, 2017 in DeplorableClimSciBlog
Ninety years ago brought the worst floods in US history. The Mississippi River was flooded for more than six months, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their homes permanently. Vermont’s worst flood on record occurred in November, 1927. The Red Cross described 1927 as the worst year in history.
Energy researchers at IHS Markit have completed the first, three-year phase of a massive Permian Basin research project that models and interprets the giant basin’s key geologic characteristics to better estimate its remaining hydrocarbon potential, and initial results indicate the giant basin still holds an estimated 60 billion to 70 billion barrels of technically recoverable resources.
To conduct this new analysis, researchers used the IHS Markit historical well and production database that includes more than 440,000 Permian Basin wells, and a new proprietary software tool that, for the first time, enables them to leverage interpreted formation ‘tops’ data to identify accurate formations for completion intervals on hundreds of thousands of wells
by P. Homewood, September 22, 2017 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
As Hurricane Maria heads north as a Cat 3 storm, much is being made of the fact that it is the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1928. The implication is that Maria must have been exceptionally strong.
But the reality is that Puerto Rico is little more than a speck in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The odds of the eye of a major hurricane, often just 10 or 20 miles wide, making a direct hit on Puerto Rico are probably hundreds to one, given that there are thousands of miles of ocean through which hurricanes can commonly travel.
by Tony Heller, September 21, 2017 in TheDeplorableClimSciBlog
New England hasn’t had a major hurricane in over 60 years, but on this date in 1938, New Jersey, New York, New England and Quebec were hit by a major hurricane – which would have destroyed Lower Manhattan had it tracked 30 miles to the west
(…) Upon our return to the Hotel after visiting the Glacier, we noticed that our brand-new photos appear to show that the Grinnell Glacier has grown slightly from the 2008 images that are displayed on the Hotel walls. There has been no reporting of this in any newspaper or broadcast that we know of. (In fact, all news coverage reports the precise opposite.) The smaller Gem Glacier—which is visible from the valley miles below—also appears to be slightly larger than it is shown in 2008 pictures on display.