by James Holloway, April 19, 2018 in NewAtlas,
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have put together the first global carbon dioxide maps based on data from the Chinese satellite TanSat. The satellite also measures what lead researcher Yang Dongxu calls “carbon dioxide flux,” changes in its behavior on Earth and in the Earth’s atmosphere.
by J. Summers and S. Tobben, April 24, 2018 in BloombergMarkets
The Permian shale play is all about setting records. Now, the region may even become the world’s largest oil patch over the next decade.
Output in the basin is forecast to reach 3.18 million barrels a day in May, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s the highest since the agency began compiling records in 2007. By 2023, the basin may produce 4 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s biggest oil field, with capacity of 5.8 million barrels a day, according to a 2017 EIA report.
by Open Mind, April 29, 2018
Lately I’ve been looking closely at sea level time series from the east coast of the U.S. Available stations are marked here with red dots (…)
by F. Bosse and Prof. F. Vahrenholt, April 28, 2018 in NoTricksZone
As the current solar cycle nears an end, it will go down as the weakest in close to 200 years. And as inhabitants of the northern hemisphere dig themselves out of an especially icy and snowy winter and Arctic sea ice rebounds, it may all be in part linked to low solar activity as many scientific studies have long suggested.
Figure 1: The current solar cycle no. 24 (red) compared to the mean of the previous 23 recorded solar cycles (blue) and the similar solar cycle no. 5 (black)
(…)
by Henri Fountain, April 26, 2018 in TheNewYorkTimes
IBRA, Oman — In the arid vastness of this corner of the Arabian Peninsula, out where goats and the occasional camel roam, rocks form the backdrop practically every way you look.
But the stark outcrops and craggy ridges are more than just scenery. Some of these rocks are hard at work, naturally reacting with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into stone.
Veins of white carbonate minerals run through slabs of dark rock like fat marbling a steak. Carbonate surrounds pebbles and cobbles, turning ordinary gravel into natural mosaics.
Even pooled spring water that has bubbled up through the rocks reacts with CO2 to produce an ice-like crust of carbonate that, if broken, re-forms within days.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
And by turning that CO2 into stone (…)
by Ari Jokimäki, April 27, 2018 in SkepticalScience
A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below (…)
by University of California – Irvine, April 26, 2018 in ScienceDaily
By taking a closer look, scientists find resilience in face of heat stress.
Coral reef bleaching is stark evidence of the damage being inflicted by global climate change on marine ecosystems, but a research team has found some cause for hope. While many corals are dying, others are showing resilience to increased sea surface temperatures, pointing to possible clues to the survival and recovery of these vitally important aquatic habitats (…)
See aslo here
by Eric Worrall, April 26, 2018 in WUWT
Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim has warned that unless the Maldives gets its climate cash before 2020, the 1.5C global warming limit will be breached.
Read more: http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/04/26/paris-agreement-starts-2020-will-late/
This call for climate cash echoes a similar demand from African nations a few weeks ago.
I’m not sure how the Maldives reconciles their climate concerns with all their fly-in tourism and their aggressive airport and resort building programmes, but no doubt some of that climate cash will help with the reconciliation if it ever arrives.
by Javier, April 26, 2018 in WUWT
It is a well-known feature of climate change that since 1850 multiple climate datasets present a ~ 60-year oscillation. I recently wrote about it in the 7th chapter of my Nature Unbound series. This oscillation is present in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), Arctic Oscillation (AO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Length of Day (LOD), and Global (GST) and Northern Hemisphere (NHT) temperatures, with different lags.
To me this oscillation is not a cycle because prior to 1850 it had a more variable period and it is not well identified in LIA records. Since the origin of this oscillation is unknown, models have a hard time reproducing it and it is all but ignored by the IPCC. It is a big oscillation with an amplitude of ± 0.3 °C in NHT (0.1-0.2°C in GST; figure 2). While the long-term temperature trend is unaffected by it, there is a large effect on the 30-year trends. If this oscillation is considered, most of the climate alarmism vaporizes.
(…)
by Ph.D. Roy W. Spencer, Apritl 24, 2018 in Global Warming
Global warming “problem” cut by 50%
As readers here are aware, I don’t usually critique published climate papers unless they are especially important to the climate debate. Too many papers are either not that important, or not that convincing to me.
The holy grail of the climate debate is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS): just how much warming (and thus associated climate change) will occur in response to an eventual doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?
Yesterday’s early online release of a new paper by Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry (“The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity“, Journal of Climate) represents one of those seminal papers.
by Anthony Watts, April 25, 2018 in WUWT
Beijing has undergone several important urbanization development stages since late 1978. Linked with urbanization, the so-called “urban heat island effect” is a key problem caused by urban land expansion. Such changes in air temperature in Beijing inevitably have an impact on the daily lives of its inhabitants, and is therefore of considerable interest to scientists and the wider public alike.
Dr. Xiaojuan LIU and Associate Professor Guangjin TIAN from the School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, used the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with a single urban canopy model and high-resolution land cover data to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of summertime urban warming influenced by three stages of urban land expansion during 1990-2010 across Beijing. They found that urban-induced warming increased with urban land expansion, but the speed of warming declined slightly during 2000-10.
by ‘hockeschtick‘, November 27, 2014
A paper published today in Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds a “strong and stable correlation” between the millennial variations in sunspots and the temperature in Antarctica over the past 11,000 years. In stark contrast, the authors find no strong or stable correlation between temperature and CO2 over that same period.
We have thus shown
- Strong correlation between solar activity and climate over the past 11,000 years of the Holocene
- Strong lack of correlation between CO2 and climate over the past 11,000 years of the Holocene
- Solar activity explains all 6 well-known warming periods that have occurred during the Holocene, including the current warm period
- The 20th century peak in sunspot activity is associated with a 40 year lag in the peak global temperature
by J. Curry and N. Lewis, April 24, 2018 in ClimateAudit
There has been considerable scientific investigation of the magnitude of the warming of Earth’s climate by changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration. Two standard metrics summarize the sensitivity of global surface temperature to an externally imposed radiative forcing. Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) represents the equilibrium change in surface temperature to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Transient climate response (TCR), a shorter-term measure over 70 years, represents warming at the time CO2 concentration has doubled when it is increased by 1% a year.
(…)
See also here
by Anthony Watts, April 23, 2018 in WUWT
Twenty years ago today: The infamous “hockey stick” graph that crystalized global warming and ignited the climate wars was published, and became known as MBH98. The science in it was so bad, it is credited with spawning the modern climate skeptic movement.
Original “hockey stick” temperature graph in Nature, 1998. The Y axis shows the Northern hemisphere mean temperature, in degrees Celsius; the zero line corresponds to the 1902 – 1980 mean. Credit: “Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries,” by Michael E. Mann et al. in Nature, Vol. 392, April 23, 1998
by Polar Bear Science, April 21, 2018
New evidence from clams and mussels with temperature-sensitive habitat requirements confirm that warmer temperatures and less sea ice than today existed during the early Holocene period about 10.2–9.2 thousand years ago and between 8.2 and 6.0 thousand years ago (based on radio carbon dates) around Svalbard. Barents Sea polar bears almost certainly survived those previous low-ice periods, as they are doing today, by staying close to the Franz Josef Land Archipelago in the eastern half of the region where sea ice is more persistent (…)
See also CBC.news
by A. Stewart, April 23, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Could someone explain in 100 words or less without complex algebraic formulas how the trace gases, approximately 1% of the atmosphere can overtly control the temperatures of the remaining 99% atmospheric constituents?
by Donna Laframboise, April 23, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
SPOTLIGHT: After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released in 2007, its dramatic findings of species extinction were repeatedly emphasized by chairman Rajendra Pachauri.
BIG PICTURE: When it examined the question of species extinction, the 2007 IPCC report relied heavily on a single piece of research – a Nature cover storypublished early in 2004. Written by Chris Thomas and 18 others, this was the source of Pachauri’s claim that climate change threatened 20 to 30% of the world’s species.
by Eric Worrall, April 16, 2018 in WUWT
Sky News, one of Australia’s most popular news services, just gave climate skeptic and geologist Ian Plimer an honest opportunity to explain what is wrong with Australia’s climate obsessed energy policies.
Geologist Ian Plimer told The Outsiders that Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg had caught himself ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when it comes to the government’s energy policies. Mr Plimer said it wasn’t possible for the energy market to provide cheap and reliable energy, but also reduce emissions.
by M. Velasquez-Manoff, April 2018 in TheNewYorkTimesMagazine
Agriculture could pull carbon out of the air and into the soil — but it would mean a whole new way of thinking about how to tend the land.
by Anthony Watts, April 22, 2018 in WUWT
You think we had a bad winter here in the USA? Look at Japan where they have walls of snow 56 feet tall (almost the height of a 6-story building).
There’s an avalanche of tourists coming to the Tateyama to see the walls of snow.
It has been a rough winter full of snow all over the northern hemisphere, as this newest NOAA-20 satellite image shows
(…)
by Kate Wheeling, April 19, 2018 in PacificStandard
Coral reefs are facing no shortage of threats including ocean acidification, overfishing, plastic pollution, and rising temperatures. Sea surface temperatures have been climbing on average for over a century, and ocean heat waves—which can trigger coral bleaching events—are becoming more common and severe. Scientists have long worried that as coral-killing spikes in temperature become more frequent, corals won’t have enough time to recover between bleaching events and will ultimately go extinct. But a new paper, published today in PLoS Genetics, suggests that corals might be able to adapt to another century of warming.
by Tom Kool, April 17, 2018 in Oilprice
Oil saw significant gains in anticipation of the strikes in Syria, but following U.S. efforts to ease geopolitical tensions in the region, crude prices have stabilized.
(…)
by Michael Kruger, April 21, 2018 in P Gosselin NoTricksZone
Michael Kruger at German skeptic site Science Skeptical here writes about how solar energy indutry in Germany has disintegrated spectacularly.
What follows are 4 charts that show us some shocking trends, and how in reality the German solar industry has seen a bloodbath that can be rated as one of the worst in a long time. The reality is that Germany’s green revolution is far from being a model for the world.
by Anthony Watts, April 22, 2018 in WUWT
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey.
Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started
(…)
by University of Warwick, April 21, 2018 in ScienceDaily
The famous Oxford Dodo died after being shot in the back of the head, according to new research. Using revolutionary forensic scanning technology and world-class expertise, researchers have discovered surprising evidence that the Oxford Dodo was shot in the neck and back of the head with a shotgun.
The significant and unexpected findings, made by Professor Paul Smith, director of the Museum of Natural History, and Professor Mark Williams from WMG at the University of Warwick, only became apparent when mysterious particles were found in the specimen during scans carried out to help analyse its anatomy.
