BIG PICTURE: In November 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared for the first time that humans were changing the climate. Its verdict turned on a single piece of then-unpublished research. Four months after the fact, the research was submitted to a prominent journal. Three months later it was published.
The world then learned that 25% of the IPCC personnel tasked with making its most crucial determination were involved with this research. In a naked a conflict-of-interest, these nine people, led by IPCC chapter head Ben Santer, had evaluated the persuasiveness of their own fledgling scientific work – and had judged it sound enough to change history.
Not quite a year ago (April 18, 2017) I authored a post on the completion of the Petra Nova carbon capture project at the W. A. Parrish coal-fired power plant in Fort Bend County, Texas. Petra Nova was billed as “the largest post-combustion carbon capture project in the world.” In addition to capturing CO2 from a very large coal-fired power plant, Petra Nova was also designed to serve a useful purpose: Deliver CO2 for enhanced oil recovery to West Ranch Oil Field in Jackson County, Texas. The ultimate goal is to boost production in the field from around 500 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) to 15,000 BOPD and recover about 60 million barrels that would otherwise have been left in the ground.
EIA had an update on the carbon capture aspect back in October…
The widespread adoption of fracking in the U.S. opened billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to production and transformed the global energy sector in a matter of a few years. Now, a leading global energy agency says U.S. natural gas is about to do it again.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new forecast this week that growth in U.S. oil production will cover 80% of new global demand for oil in the next three years. U.S. oil production is expected to increase nearly 30% to 17 million barrels a day by 2023 with much of that growth coming from oil produced through fracking in West Texas.
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil exporter, is set to join the shale revolution with plans to start producing unconventional natural gas this month and exploit a deposit that could rival the Eagle Ford formation in Texas.
Saudi Arabia’s gas resources from shale and other alternative supplies are “huge,” Khalid Al Abdulqader, general manager of unconventional resources at Aramco, said Wednesday in Manama, Bahrain. Production at the kingdom’s North Arabia basin will start by the end of March and reach its target by the end of this year, he said, without giving details.
by Tony Heller, March 8, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimateScience
Antarctic ice cores show regular swings in temperature of more than 20 degrees. These were all natural, but the recent zero degree swing was caused by your SUV (…)
Well, I’m amazed and impressed. Tight oil production has pushed total United States petroleum output to more than 10 million barrels a day, a rate last seen almost a half-century ago. It’s a new U.S. record. Fifteen years ago I was traveling the world with a Powerpoint presentation featuring a graph of U.S. oil production history. That graph showed a clear peak in 1970 and a long bumpy decline thereafter. (…)
A group of prominent scientists are calling for a global network of advanced weather stations that don’t need to go through controversial data adjustments, and it’s vindication for global warming skeptics.
Seventeen climate scientists co-authored a research article published in the International Journal of Climatology calling for a global climate station network modeled after the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) to use as a baseline for data quality.
by R.F. Cronin, March 5, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Actually, the glaciers of Antarctica form in a very different way than Arctic or mountain glaciers. Steam and meltwater feed the glaciers from below. It is the steam from multiple subglacial volcanoes, rifts, and trenches. Antarctica is very seismically active.
Le forçage climatique principal est l’énergie apportée par le soleil sous la forme primaire de rayonnement visible et UV, l’insolation. Son lieu de stockage principal est l’océan, le thermostat de notre planète. Le gaz le plus abondant à côté de l’azote et de l’oxygène est la vapeur d’eau dont la teneur est éminemment variable dans l’atmosphère (de 0,2 % à 7,6 %). John Tyndall conclut dès 1861 que l’effet de serre est dû essentiellement à cette dernière. Il faut rappeler que le potentiel diffusif thermique induit par la vapeur d’eau est 8 fois supérieur à celui du CO2 à concentration égale (0,04 %). L’immense majorité des articles traitant du changement climatique ne prennent en compte que l’hémisphère nord et l’Antarctique. Or, dans l’hémisphère sud (…)
by Alan Carlin, February 20, 2018 in CarlinEconomicsandScience
Climate alarmists are constantly trying to justify their misguided goal of decreasing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the basic molecules that makes possible life on Earth, by making various claims as to the alleged adverse effects of increasing emissions of CO2. To date these claims have either been shown to be false or better explained by natural causes.
by Francis Menton, February 25, 2018 in ManhattanContrarian
Every day you read about the crisis of climate change and fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions, and commitments from politicians around the world to “act” to “save the planet.” Surely then, CO2 emissions are in steep decline and headed for zero.
The truth is of course the opposite. In the developed world, rapidly increasing use of “renewables” like intermittent wind and solar energy only serves to drive electricity prices through the roof, while having only the most marginal effect on reducing emissions.
In Africa, food abundance may be driving violent conflict rather than food scarcity, according to a new study. The study refutes the notion that climate change will increase the frequency of civil war in Africa as a result of food scarcity triggered by rising temperatures and drought.
London — Britain’s natural gas fracking industry is using a cold snap that’s gripped large swathes of Europe this week and laid bare weaknesses in the UK’s energy supply to make its pitch.
Britain’s natural gas market has been stretched to its limits as the coldest spell since 2010 tests the nation’s energy and transport network. UK pipeline manager National Grid Plc even urged industry to curb its gas usage while the cold weather persisted. (…)
Well, seems there’s a surplus of Penguins now, in a place nobody thought to look, there’s an extra 1.5 million Penguins. From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Continental United States (CONUS) hurricane-related inflation-adjusted damage has increased significantly since 1900. However, since 1900 neither observed CONUS landfalling hurricane frequency nor intensity show significant trends, including the devastating 2017 season.
Two large-scale climate modes that have been noted in prior research to significantly impact CONUS landfalling hurricane activity are El Niño-Southern Oscillation on interannual timescales and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation on multi-decadal timescales. La Niña seasons tend to be characterized by more CONUS hurricane landfalls than do El Niño seasons, and positive Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation phases tend to have more CONUS hurricane landfalls than do negative phases.
As the Earth’s surface and atmosphere warm, the amount of moisture – water vapour – in the atmosphere will increase. Understanding the size of this increase is important for predicting future climates as water vapour is a significant greenhouse gas. Atmospheric moisture content also influences the patterns and intensity of rainfall events.
The relationship between temperature and moisture content can be explored by the study of intervals in Earth’s history when climates where significantly warmer than those seen in modern times, which necessitates a method for estimating ancient atmospheric moisture content.
UPDATE(2/23/18):The previous version of this post had improper latitude bounds for the HadCRUT4 Tsfc data. I’ve rerun the results… the conclusions remain the same. I have also added proof that ENSO is accompanied by its own radiative forcing, a controversial claim, which allows it to cause multi-decadal climate change. In simple terms, this is clear evidence the climate system can cause its own, natural, internally-generated climate changes. This is partly what has caused recent warming, and the climate modelling community has assumed it was all human-caused.
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February, 2018 was +0.20 deg. C, down a little from the January value of +0.26 deg. C (…)
by P. Homewood, March 1, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
One powerful polar bear fact is slowly rising above the message of looming catastrophe repeated endlessly by the media: More than 15,000 polar bears have not disappeared since 2005. Although the extent of the summer sea ice after 2006 dropped abruptly to levels not expected until 2050, the predicted 67-per-cent decline in polar bear numbers simply didn’t happen. Rather, global polar bear numbers have been stable or slightly improved. The polar bear’s resilience should have meant the end of its use as a cherished icon of global warming doom, but it didn’t. The alarmism is not going away without a struggle (…)
In his seminal 1982 book Climate, History, and the Modern World, the renown climatologist Dr. H.H. Lamb revealed that sea ice in the subarctic and Arctic regions was much less extensive during the Medieval Warm Period (9th-13th centuries) compared to today.
For example, records indicate that there were decadal and centennial-scale periods without any sea ice invading any of Iceland’s coasts. These no-ice periods coincided with atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 275 ppm, which is about 130 ppm less than today’s calculated CO2 values.
by P. Homewood, February 28, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
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During the 1930s and 40s, and in earlier parts of the cycle, winters and spring were much warmer than, for instance, the 1960s and 70s. And, again, we see that those warmer decades were just as warm as recently.
It is these two seasons that have largely driven the annual changes.
In other words, the warmer winters we now commonly see in the Arctic are nothing new at all. They only appear unusual because we have started looking at data since 1954.
With over 80 percent of forests already degraded by human and industrial activities, today’s findings underscore the immediate need for international policies to secure remaining intact forests — including establishing new protected areas, securing the land rights of indigenous peoples, regulating industry and hunting, and targeting restoration efforts and public finance. Absent specific strategies like these, current global targets addressing climate change, poverty, and biodiversity may fall short, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Global levels of ethane and propane in the atmosphere have been underestimated by more than 50%, new research involving scientists at the University of York has revealed.
These hydrocarbons are particularly harmful in large cities where, through chemical reactions with emissions from cars, they form ozone – a greenhouse gas which is a key component of smog and directly linked to increases in mortality.
Some recent studies show declines in average weights of polar bears compared to the 1980s, but none recorded an increase in the number of individuals starving to death or too thin to reproduce.14 Although some photos of starving bears have garnered media attention, most bears have been found to be in good-to-excellent condition. In fact, photos of fat bears seem to outnumber those of thin bears in recent years.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
