by Rich Taylor, March 29, 2017
Where the ground is stable, typical change appears to be a rise of 1- to 2-mm/y. Rates above 3 mm/y seem to have a substantial component of natural and/or anthropogenic subsidence. Rates above 10 mm/y appear to be a primarily a consequence of human activity, which implies they should be manageable to some degree.
All records in this review are from the website www.psmsl.org of the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.
by DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, March 28, 2017
Using advanced modeling and simulation, seismic data generated by earthquakes, and one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a team of scientists is creating a detailed 3-D picture of Earth’s interior. Currently, the team is focused on imaging the entire globe from the surface to the core-mantle boundary, a depth of 1,800 miles.
by Timothy Haïdar, EIC, March 27, 2017
Hurricane’s prospects are located West of Shetland, an area that has promised much in terms of the 12 to 24 billion remaining barrels of oil equivalent (boe) said to be lurking on the UKCS. The GLA announcement represents a rare chink of light glistening in the murky waters of an industry at its lowest ebb since production began in the 1960s.
by The Hockey Schtick, November 19, 2014
An updated list of at least 29 32 36 38 39 41 51 52 63 64 65 66 excuses for the 18-26 year statistically significant ‘pause’ in global warming, including recent scientific papers, media quotes, blogs, and related debunkings.
by University of Queensland, March 27, 2007
An unprecedented 21 different types of dinosaur tracks have been identified on a 25-kilometer stretch of the Dampier Peninsula coastline dubbed ‘Australia’s Jurassic Park.’ A team of paleontologists has unveiled the most diverse assemblage of dinosaur tracks in the world in 127 to 140 million-year-old rocks in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Prof. André Strasser, January 11, 2016
On shallow carbonate platforms, the sedimentary record is highly fragmentary because low accommodation commonly leads to non-deposition, erosion, reworking and condensation. Consequently, it is difficult to quantify the time that is actually recorded and to estimate sedimentation rates.
by Anna Shiryaevskaya, March 24, 2017
The heart of Europe’s gas market may finally get a helping hand from the American shale revolution as fuel is poised to cross the Atlantic to replenish depleted inventories after the coldest January in seven years.
by Laterite, June 20, 2015
The climate sensitivity due to CO2 is expressed as the temperature change in °C associated with a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface air temperature that would result from a sustained doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. The transient climate response (TCR) is defined as the average temperature response over a twenty-year period centered at CO2 doubling in a transient simulation with CO2 increasing at 1% per year. The transient response is lower than the equilibrium sensitivity, due to the “inertia” of ocean heat uptake.
Also, this post
“[T]here is growing evidence of much smaller climate sensitivity to CO2; and even if these drastic emissions reductions occurred, we see little impact on the climate in the 21st century (even if you believe the climate models).”
by Eric Worrall, March 27, 2017
A paper published in Paleoworld worries that a repeat of the greatest mass extinction event in Earth’s history could be triggered by Anthropogenic CO2. But Cambridge Professor Peter Wadhams, our favourite sea ice alarmist, thinks the attempt to link the Permian extinction to modern events is a bit wild.
by Don Healy, March24, 2017
During the past 100,000 years, human societies have witnessed the vast change in climate that has occurred as we have transitioned from a glacial period that ended about 20,000 years ago, into the current interglacial period.
Geological critics of a formalised Anthropocene have alleged that the idea did not arise from geology; that there is simply not enough physical evidence for it as strata; that it is based more on the future than on the past; that it is more a part of human history than the immensely long history of the Earth; and that it is a political statement, rather than a scientific one.
by Ken Gregory, July 2005
Energy Balance Climate Sensitivity
The most important parameter in determining the economic impact of climate change is the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. Climatologist Nicholas Lewis used an energy balance method to calculate the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) best estimate at 1.45 °C. ECS is the global temperature change resulting from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere after allowing the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium, which takes about 3000 years in the models.
A more policy-relevant parameter is the Transient Climate Response (TCR) which is the global temperature change at the time of the CO2 doubling. A doubling of CO2 at the current growth rate would take 126 years. The analysis gives the TCR best estimate at 1.21 °C with a likely range [17 – 83% confidence] of 1.05 to 1.45 °C.
par Prof. Samuel Furfari, 23 Mars 2017
Expert européen auprès de la DG Énergie de la Commission européenne
Maître de conférences à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles
2050, c’est dans 33 ans. Il y a 33 ans, nous étions en 1984, en plein contre-choc pétrolier. Après le tremblement du monde suite aux deux chocs pétroliers consécutifs provoqués par l’OPEP, le prix du pétrole était tombé si bas qu’aujourd’hui encore, tout nouveau contre-choc pétrolier constitue un épouvantail pour l’Arabie saoudite. Qu’est-ce qui avait permis cette contre-révolution et mis en échec la stratégie de l’OPEP ? Tout d’abord, l’abandon de la consommation de produits pétroliers dans les centrales électriques (à l’époque, le prix du brut était si bas que l’on pouvait se permettre le luxe de l’utiliser pour produire de l’électricité). La maturation de la technologie nucléaire et le développement de technologies modernes de combustion de charbon ont changé la donne. Ensuite, la mise en œuvre de technologies plus efficientes, notamment dans le secteur de l’automobile, avait donné lieu à des économies d’énergie qui ont permis de réduire la consommation de pétrole. Cela se résumait à l’époque par un slogan lancé par la Commission européenne : COCONUC pour « COal, COnservation and NUClear ». Les résultats ont été au rendez-vous et ont suscité un retour à la sérénité énergétique.
by David Middleton, March 22, 2017
Really?
Firstly, how can reopening the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea OCS areas to leasing be disrespectful to “market forces”? Opening up an area to leasing doesn’t somehow impose an obligation on oil companies to bid on leases in those areas.
by Prof. Dr. Ole Humlum, March 22, 2017
A report on the State of the Climate in 2016 which is based exclusively on observations rather than climate models is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).
Contents (37 pages)
1. General overview 2016/2. Spatial pattern of global surface air temperatures in 2016/3. Global monthly lower troposphere air temperatures since 1979/4. Global mean annual lower troposphere air temperatures since 1979 ……………………/17. Ocean temperature net change 2004-2016 in two north-south sectors/18. Pacific Decadal Oscillation…………../23. Global, Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extent/24. Northern hemisphere snow-cover extent and /25 Links to data sources.
by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, March 21, 2017
Dead zones affect dozens of coral reefs around the world and threaten hundreds more according to a new study. Watching a massive coral reef die-off on the Caribbean coast of Panama, they suspected it was caused by a dead zone — a low-oxygen area that snuffs out marine life — rather than by ocean warming or acidification.
by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, March 21, 2017
Arsia Mons produced one new lava flow at its summit every 1 to 3 million years during the final peak of activity, about 50 million years ago. The last volcanic activity there ceased about 50 million years ago — around the time of Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, when large numbers of our planet’s plant and animal species (including dinosaurs) went extinct.
Journal Reference:Jacob A. Richardson, James A. Wilson, Charles B. Connor, Jacob E. Bleacher, Koji Kiyosugi. Recurrence rate and magma effusion rate for the latest volcanism on Arsia Mons, Mars. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2017; 458: 170 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2016.10.040
by VENCORE WEATHER, March 20, 2017
Third weakest solar cycle since 1755
A recent publication has analyzed the current solar cycle and has found that when sunspot anomalies are compared to the mean for the number of months after cycle start, there have been only two weaker cycles since observations began in 1755. Solar cycle 24 began in 2008 after a historically long and deep solar minimum which puts us more than eight years into the current cycle.
by David Archibald, March 8, 2010
The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions.
But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration
by David Middleton, March 20, 2017
Firstly, the prime minister is exactly correct: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Particularly if those 173 billion barrels were proved reserves. At $50/bbl, 173 billion barrels is worth a lot of dollars… both US and Canadian.
Secondly, the prime minister is exactly correct here too: “The prime minister has long maintained that developing fossil-fuel resources can go ‘hand in hand’ with fighting climate change.” Since fighting climate change is about as possible as fighting plate tectonics or entropy, it absolutely “can go ‘hand in hand’ with” developing fossil fuel resources.
par Ifri, 20 mars 2017
Après cinq ans de baisse continue, les prix du charbon « vapeur » (type de charbon principalement utilisé dans les centrales thermiques et dans certaines industries, notamment pour fabriquer du ciment) ont doublé entre le début et la fin de l’année 2016, tant en Europe qu’en Asie. La demande mondiale de charbon, qui provient toujours pour moitié de la Chine, a pourtant baissé en 2016.
by Kenneth Richard, March 20, 2017
According to an estimate of global sea surface temperature (SST) changes during the last 2,000 years (“Robust global ocean cooling trend for the pre-industrial Common Era“), the addition of the last 2 centuries (1800 to 2000 C.E.) of relatively modest SST warming only changes the overall per-millennium global cooling trend (~0.4°C) by one tenth of one degree. In other words, using a long-term perspective, the Holocene cooling trend has continued largely uninterrupted during the last two centuries.
International Energy Agency, March 17, 2017
The biggest drop came from the United States, where carbon dioxide emissions fell 3%, or 160 million tonnes, while the economy grew by 1.6%. The decline was driven by a surge in shale gas supplies and more attractive renewable power that displaced coal. Emissions in the United States last year were at their lowest level since 1992, a period during which the economy grew by 80%.
World Energy Outlook 2016 IEA, March 16, 2017
Executive summary
In our main scenario, a 30% rise in global energy demand to 2040 means an increase in consump on for all modern fuels, but the global aggregates mask a mul tude of diverse trends and signi cant switching between fuels. Moreover, hundreds of millions of people are s ll le in 2040 without basic energy services. Globally, renewable energy – the subject of an in-depth focus in WEO-2016 – sees by far the fastest growth. Natural gas fares best among the fossil fuels, with consump on rising by 50%. Growth in oil demand slows over the projec on period, but tops 103 million barrels per day (mb/d) by 2040. Coal use is hit hard by environmental concerns and, a er the rapid expansion of recent years, growth essen ally grinds to a halt. The increase in nuclear output is spurred mainly by deployment in China.
by Columbia University, Earth Observatory, February 5, 2015
Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years …