by Stephen Moore, August 20, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.
The answer to that question is the United States of America. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never signed the Kyoto Protocol some two decades ago.
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by A.J. Kondash et al., August 15, 2018 in ScienceAdvances
Abstract
Unconventional oil and gas exploration in the United States has experienced a period of rapid growth, followed by several years of limited production due to falling and low natural gas and oil prices. Throughout this transition, the water use for hydraulic fracturing and wastewater production in major shale gas and oil production regions has increased; from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770%, while flowback and produced water volumes generated within the first year of production increased up to 1440%. The water-use intensity (that is, normalized to the energy production) increased ubiquitously in all U.S. shale basins during this transition period. The steady increase of the water footprint of hydraulic fracturing with time implies that future unconventional oil and gas operations will require larger volumes of water for hydraulic fracturing, which will result in larger produced oil and gas wastewater volumes.
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by Michaele Bastach, August 10, 2018 in WUWT
With wildfires engulfing over 620,000 acres of California, there’s been a concerted media campaign to single out man-made global warming as the primary force behind the deadly blazes.
But that’s not what the data suggests, according to University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass.
“So there is a lot of misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians,” Mass wrote in the first of a series of blog posts analyzing the California wildfires.
by NOAA, August 2018
One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.
Much early work on tornado climatology in the United States was done by John Park Finley in his book Tornadoes, published in 1887. While some of Finley’s safety guidelines have since been refuted as dangerous practices, the book remains a seminal work in tornado research. The University of Oklahoma created a PDF copy of the book and made it accessible at John Finley’s Tornadoes(link is external)
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See also here
by K. Richard, August 6, 2018 in NoTricksZone
During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.
Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.
Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
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by Anthony Watts, August 6, 2018 in WUWT
During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.
Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.
Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
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by Mike Bastach, August 5, 2018 in WUWT
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But while Scripps is trying to tie the record-high ocean reading to the broader wave of media coverage on global heat waves, there are a few caveats to note about what the scientists found.
First, these measurements are taken from a pier that’s near the shoreline, which would not necessarily make it representative of the entire Pacific Ocean, and therefore easily influenced by local weather events.
The “anomalously warm temperatures for the past week” that Scripps researchers observed at their pier somewhat mirror the temperature pattern in 1931, and indeed, the daily records broken in the past week have been very close to readings from 87 years ago.
There is an upward trend in temperature readings from Scripps’ pier, but the trend seems to also broadly coincide with the flipping of a natural ocean cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, to its warm phase. That flip occurred around 1976.
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by David Middleton, July 31, 1018 in WUWT
This post was inspired by Anthony Watts’ recent post about wildfires and their unwillingness to cooperate with the Gorebal Warming narrative.
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A Geological Perspective of Wildfires
The Fire Window
Geological evidence for ancient wildfires generally consists of sedimentary charcoal deposits (inertinite). Fossil charcoal is also a key factor in understanding the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, particularly oxygen content. The first clear evidence of fire is in the Late Silurian.
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by Tony Heller, July 31, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
July 31 afternoon temperatures have been declining in the US for a century, with the hottest year being 1917 when almost half of the US was over 95 degrees.
by Tony Heller, July 30, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
In 1999, NASA’s James Hansen was concerned that the very high-quality US temperature record didn’t match Hansen’s fake global warming trend.
How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the “answer” is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years.
in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country …
by P. Shrestha, July 27, 2018 in EnergyLiveNews
The European Union plans to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US to diversify its energy supply.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said more terminals will be built in the region during his visit to the White House this week.
He met with President Donald Trump yesterday to launch a new phase in the relationship between the US and the EU, including strengthening their co-operation on energy.
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See also in CNBC
by Cliff Mass, July 25, 2018 in CliffMassWeatherCimateBlog
There appears to be a problem with the temperature sensor at Seattle-Tacoma Airport: it seems to be running several degrees too warm.
This is not the first time this has happened. And excessively warm temperatures at airport stations seems to be a growth industry around here. In a previous blog I talked about the problem at Yakima–which has been fixed. Ellensburg is running too warm as well.
But this blog will be about Seattle-Tacoma Airport, whose official NWS/FAA temperature sensor is located between two of the runways.
Why should you care about this?
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by A. Watts, July 25, 2018 in WUWT
For those that are sure there’s global warming driving tornadoes and other severe weather events, here’s some inconvenient news. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has updated his tornado loss data via his Twitter account. He writes:
2017 update to our normalized US tornado losses based on our 2013 paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17477891.2012.738642 …
by Kemberlee Kaye, July 19, 2018 in LegaIinsurrection
The Lone Star State is poised to pass up Iraq and Iran becoming the world’s third-largest producer of oil next year.
CNN Money reports the shale boom in the Permian Basin, which covers a large swath of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico, is to thank.
by Anthony Watts, July 16, 2018 in WUWT
From the American Enterprise Institute via Twitter. h/t to WUWT reader “Latitude”
Last year the United States had the largest decline in CO2 emissions *in the entire world* for the 9th time this century.
From the June 2018 BP Statistical Review of Global Energy (67th edition) here are some details on C02 emissions in 2017: (…)
by Ph. D. Roy Spencer, July 2, 2018 in GlobalWarming
Summers in the U.S. are hot. They always have been. Some are hotter than others.
Speaking as a PhD meteorologist with 40 years experience, this week’s heat wave is nothing special.
But judging from the memo released on June 22 by Public Citizen (a $17 million per year liberal/progressive consumer rights advocacy grouporiginally formed by Ralph Nader in 1971 and heavily funded by Leftwing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations), every heat wave must now be viewed as a reminder of human-caused climate change. The memo opines that (believe it or not) the news media have not been very good about linking weather events to climate change, which is leading to complacency among the public.
(…)
by Anthony Watts, July 8, 2018 in WUWT
With those hot weather records in Los Angeles being set, it’s important to remember where measurements are taken. I’ve done an investigation and found that every “all time high” reported by the LA Times is from a station compromised by heat sources and heat sinks. In my opinion, the data from these stations is worthless.
It’s been going on for some time, for example, back in 2010, because there’s been a questionable high reading reading at USC of 113°F.
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by Ernest Scheyder, June 27, 2018 in Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Natural gas production from U.S. shale fields can keep growing for decades, giving Washington a powerful diplomatic tool to counter the geopolitical influence of other energy exporters such as Russia, industry executives and government officials said at a conference here.
Already the world’s largest gas producer, the United States can expand shale gas output another 60 percent in the coming decades, according to at least one estimate. So far, liquefied natural gas (LNG) has been spared from retaliatory tariffs in U.S. President Donald Trump’s intensifying trade conflicts with China and other countries. …
by Geological Society of America, June 28, 2018 in ScienceDaily
On 27 and 28 September 2017, eight large rockfalls occurred from the southeast face of El Capitan. These rockfalls resulted in one fatality and two serious injuries, and spurred a complicated rescue and temporary closure of the main road exiting Yosemite Valley. In order to manage these challenging events, the National Park Service (NPS) had a critical, immediate need for quantitative information about the sequence of rockfalls and the potential for additional activity.
Using new “structure-from-motion” photogrammetry techniques in conjunction with baseline laser-scanning data, scientists from the NPS, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland rapidly analyzed these rockfalls. By comparing 3-dimensional (3D) models of the cliff before, during, and after the rockfalls, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact locations, dimensions, and volumes of the rockfalls, along with the spatial and temporal pattern of their progression up the cliff.
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by Robert Tuttle, June 26, 2018 in Bloomberg
While U.S. drillers deploy more rigs than any time since 2015 amid a fracking surge in the Permian Basin, companies including ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Equinor ASA have sold operations or pulled out of Canada’s oil sands, the world’s third largest source of crude reserves.
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by Utah State University, June 26, 2018 in ScienceDaily
The discovery of the Durmid Ladder reveals the southern tip of the San Andreas Fault changes fairly gradually into the ladder-like Brawley Seismic zone. The structure trends northwest, extending from the well-known main trace of the San Andreas Fault along the Salton Sea’s northeastern shore, to the newly identified East Shoreline Fault Zone on the San Andreas’ opposite edge.
“We now have critical evidence about the possible nucleation site of the next major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault,” says Jänecke, professor in USU’s Department of Geology. “That possible nucleation site was thought to be a small area near Bombay Beach, California, but our work suggests there may be an additional, longer ‘fuse’ south of the Durmid Ladder within the 37-mile-long Brawley Seismic zone.” …
by Prof. F. Vahrenholt, June 12, 2018 in NoTricksZone
Only Europe and Canada exiting coal
Another reason the Paris Accord is collapsing is because it’s not going to do anything we were promised it would.
When it comes to coal, Vahrenholt notes, so far only Europe and Canada have expressed some sort of a commitment to exit coal, and then he reminds us China, India and all developing countries will still be permitted to continue “massively” expanding their use of coal. He writes : (…)
by Bonner Cohen, May 13, 2018 in CFACT
The Kremlin has masterminded an elaborate scheme to undermine American fossil-fuel production and distribution, concludes a report by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Released March 1, the report, “Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media,” reveals how Russia has teamed up with U.S. and European environmental groups to use such popular outlets as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to turn American public opinion against the domestic oil and natural gas industry.
With the United States having surpassed Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and now ranking as the world’s fastest-growing producer of oil, the Russians have reason to fear what is more than a little competition. Saying America’s soaring energy development “poses a direct threat to Russian energy interests,” the report explains: …
by Willis Essenbach, May 29, 2018 in WUWT
Inspired by Richard Keen’s interesting WUWT post on using eclipses to determine the clarity of the atmosphere, I went to the website of the Hawaiian Mauna Loa Observatory. They have some very fascinating datasets. One of them is a measurement of direct solar radiation, minute by minute, since about 1980.
I thought that I could use that dataset to determine the clarity of the atmosphere by looking at the maximum downwelling solar energy on a month by month basis. I’ve described my method of extracting the maximum solar energy from the minute by minute data in the appendix for those interested.
(…)
by Seismological Society of America, May 17, 2018 in ScienceDaily
The experiments conducted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Kayla Kroll and her colleagues were prompted by a recent spike in induced earthquake activity related to oil and gas production in the U.S. and Canada. The rise in induced earthquakes has some scientists proposing changes in injection or production processes to reduce the fluid pressures that destabilize faults in these regions.
In their simulations, Kroll and colleagues “found that active management was most advantageous for wells that were closest to a fault. This scenario is most successful at reducing the total number of seismic events and also the maximum magnitude of those events,” Kroll said. In their simulations, a “close well” was one to four meters away from a fault (…)
