THE COP21 AGREEMENT – JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE

by Robert Lyman, June9, 2017 in FriendsOfScienceCalgary


French version here

Each country is committed “to prepare and maintain successive individual nationally determined contributions (INDCs) that it intends to achieve”, to update these plans every five years and to pursue and report on the related domestic emission reduction measures. After three years, a Party may withdraw from the Agreement with one year’s notice.

There is an unresolved debate as to whether to call COP21 an agreement or a treaty.

 

US Has Produced More Oil Than Saudi Arabia For 4 Straight Years

by Andrew Follett, July 7, 2017


Saudi Arabia has lagged the U.S. in oil production for the last four years, according to federal data compiled by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry.

Perry created a chart Saturday showing just how far behind Saudi oil production has trailed U.S. production. Rising U.S. production combined with OPEC policies drove crude oil prices down to new lows. Monday, a barrel of oil costs $46.26, while the same barrel would have sold for $109.04 in June 2014.

CO2 Contributed Only 0.12°C To Global Temps Since 1850

by Kenneth Richard, July 17, 2017


A Swiss scientist known to have published hundreds of scientific papers in physics journals has authored a new scholarly paper that casts serious doubts on the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas influencing Earth’s temperatures.

This paper has been added to a growing volume of peer-reviewed scientific papers that seriously question estimates of a high climate sensitivity to significant increases in CO2 concentrations.

Flourishing ocean drives the end-Permian marine mass extinction

by Martin Schobben et al., July 2014,


The Permian geologic period that ended the Paleozoic era climaxed around 252 million years ago with a sweeping global mass extinction event in which 90 to 95 percent of marine life became extinct. It would take 30 million years for planetary biodiversity to recover. Understanding the contributing factors of the end-Permian mass extinction is critical to understanding and perhaps mitigating the current anthropogenic climate change.

Engineers have dispelled a 100-year-old scientific law used to describe how fluid flows through rocks

by Imperial College London, July 17, 2017, in ScienceDaily


The discovery by researchers from Imperial could lead to a range of improvements including advances in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This is where industrial emissions will be captured by CCS technology, before reaching the atmosphere, and safely stored in rock deep underground.

See also here

On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data

by Dr. J. Wallace III et al., June 2017


Abridged research Report, 30 pages, .pdf

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.

See also here

Satellite battle: Five reasons UAH is different (better) to the RSS global temperature estimates

by JoNova, July 10, 2017


There are two main groups that use essentially the same NASA and NOAA satellites to estimate global temperatures. In the last year, they’ve both made adjustments, one down, and one up, getting further apart in their estimates. In ClimateWorld this is a big deal. Believers are excited that now a satellite set agrees a bit better with the maligned “hot” surface thermometers. But UAH still agrees more with millions of weather balloons. The debate continues. Here’s my short synopsis of the  Roy Spencer (and John Christy) from the “Comments on the new RSS lower tropospheric temperature set.” (If something is wrong here, blame me).

Alarm about alarmism

by Judith Curry, July 15, 2017 in ClimateEtc.


In understanding climate change risk, and deciding on the ‘if’ and ‘what’ of ‘action’,  we need to acknowledge that we don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will play out (Deep Uncertainty, folks).  Four possibilities:

  1. It is possible that human-caused climate change will be swamped by much larger natural climate variability.

  2. It is possible/plausible  that the sensitivity of the climate is on the low end of the IPCC envelope (1.0-1.5C), with a slow creep of warming superimposed on much larger natural variability.

  3. It is possible/plausible that the IPCC projections are actually correct (right for the wrong reasons; too much wrong with the climate models for much credibility, IMO).

  4. It is possible that AGW and natural variability could conspire to cause catastrophic outcomes

Arctic Sea Ice Extent

by DMI (Danish Meterological Institute), July 2017


The graphic shows the mean September sea ice extent on the northern hemisphere. The plotted values correspond approximately to the sea ice area that ‘survived’ the summer melt in the respective years

The graph illustrates a decreasing trend in sea ice extent since 1978, with annual variations of occationally more than 1 million square kilometres. The 2012 sea ice minimum extented set a new minimum record.

See also here

The 2400-year Bray cycle

by Javier, July 11, 2017 in ClimatEtc.


In our attempt to better understand the nature of our planet’s abrupt climate changes I have already reviewed the glacial-interglacial cycle, and the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle’s that take place during glacial periods. I now start reviewing the millennial climate cycles that abruptly impact the slowly changing Holocene climate. The most significant and regular one is the ~ 2400-year Bray cycle.

Focusing on worst case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work

by Larry Kummer, July 15, 2017 in WUWT


After 30 years of failure to gain support of the US public for massive public policy measures to fight climate change, climate activists now double down on the tactics that have failed them for so long. This post explains why it will not work. Nor should it. Instead they should trust the IPCC and science, showing both the good and bad news.

The ‘hiatus’ in global warming is the hottest topic in climate science right now, whether alarmists like it or not

by David Whitehouse, June 22, 2017 in Financial Post


Few things illustrate the poor state of the communication of climate science better than the reaction to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s comments about global temperatures in the past 20 years. It was made in written comments to the Senate following his confirmation hearing. He wrote, “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.” Has the temperature increase of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere “stalled” in the past 20 years or so? Does this change our view of climate change?

Abrupt summer sea ice decline has not affected polar bear numbers as predicted

by  Dr. Susan J. Crockford, July 14, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch


Yes, Arctic sea ice has declined since satellite records began in 1979 but polar bears have adjusted well to this change, especially to the abrupt decline to low summer sea ice levels that have been the norm since 2007. Some polar bear subpopulations have indeed spent more time on land in summer than in previous decades but this had little negative impact on health or survival and while polar bear attacks on humans appear to have increased in recent years (Wilder et al. 2017), the reasons for this are not clear: reduced summer sea ice is almost certainly not the causal factor (see previous post here).

Ancient plankton-like microfossils span two continents

by Penn State, July 13, 2017 in ScienceDaily


Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal Craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate microorganisms known, but are also related to other intricate microfossils of the same age found in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, according to an international team of scientists.

New York Times: World’s nations building huge numbers of new coal plants despite emissions growth

by  NY Times, July 13, 2017 in WUWT


The level of renewable use is now so high in Germany that serious electric grid reliability and stability issues now exist which require both fossil power plant emergency backup for failed renewable production and dictate rejecting renewable energy to ensure operation of fossil plants required for electric grid reliability and stability.

Temperature and Forcing

by Willis Eschenbach, July 13, 2017 in WUWT


Over at Dr. Curry’s excellent website, she’s discussing the Red and Blue Team approach. If I ran the zoo and could re-examine the climate question, I’d want to look at what I see as the central misunderstanding in the current theory of climate.

This is the mistaken idea that changes in global temperature are a linear function of changes in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation balance (usually called “forcing”).

Media gets high on Antarctic Crack

by Anthony Watts, July 13, 2017 in WUWT


I thought I’d take a moment from my R&R to write about all the hullabaloo surrounding the calving of the large iceberg off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. First, a few of the headlines:

LA Times: After Antarctica sheds a trillion-ton block of ice, the world asks: Now what?

The Grauniad: Iceberg twice size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf

NYT: Warnings from Antarctica

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse