climate-debate

Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies

by B. Lomborg, July 2020 in TechForecSocChange

Abstract

Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today’s welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.

Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.

Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.

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better to know...?

Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think

by Bjorn Lomborg, Sept16, 2021 in WSJ

Global warming does cause more heat deaths, but the editors’ statistic is deceptive. They say global heat deaths have gone up by 54% among old people in the past 20 years, but they fail to mention that the number of old people has risen by almost as much. Demographics drove most of the rise, not climate change.

They also leave out that climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

U.S. Petroleum Reserves Hit Lowest Level In Decades Ahead Of Winter Months

by B. Ziesloft, Aug 19, 2022 in DailyWire

Strategic Petroleum Reserve levels have reached their lowest levels in four decades as autumn and winter weather conditions approach, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

President Joe Biden has responded to rising gas prices by releasing one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves — a stock of emergency crude oil created to “reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products.” Though reserves in January 2021 were as high as 638 million barrels, reserves have fallen to 461 million barrels as of August 2022 — a level not seen since March.

The national average price of gasoline was $2.38 per gallon when President Joe Biden assumed office, according to the Energy Information Administration, and increased to $3.53 per gallon by the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prices surpassed $5.00 per gallon in early June before subsiding to $3.92 per gallon as of Friday, according to AAA.

Biden nixed an expansion of the Keystone XL Pipeline upon his entrance into office. Yet the commander-in-chief has repeatedly cast the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin as the main factor behind soaring energy costs.

“Putin’s Price Hike hit hard in May here and around the world: high gas prices at the pump, energy, and food prices accounted for around half of the monthly price increases, and gas pump prices are up by $2 a gallon in many places since Russian troops began to threaten Ukraine,” Biden said in a June statement. “Even as we continue our work to defend freedom in Ukraine, we must do more — and quickly — to get prices down here in the United States.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

1,200 Scientists, Scholars Declare: ‘There Is No Climate Emergency’

by F. Bergman, Aug 19, 2022 in Slay

A group of almost 1200 of the world’s leading scientists and scholars has signed a document to declare that “there is no climate emergency.”

The group, led by a Nobel Prize laureate, signed the declaration that states climate science is based more on personal beliefs and political agendas than rigorous scientific facts.

The World Climate Declaration warns that climate science “should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures,” the declaration reads.

According to a report by WND, the declaration was organized by Climate Intelligence.

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climate-debate

DEBUNKED: Europe’s claimed ‘worst drought in 500 years’

by P. Homewood,  Aug 20, 2022  , in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Roger Pielke Jr debunks Europe’s “Worst Drought in 500 Years Claim”:

 

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Conclusion

In Western and Central Europe — basically Atlantic France all the way to Moscow, north of the Mediterranean region and south of the North Sea region — the IPCC and the underlying peer reviewed research on which it assesses has concluded that drought has not increased and, logically, that increased drought cannot be attributed to human-caused climate change. The only exception here is that the IPCC has medium confidence in an increasing trend of soil moisture deficits in some subregions, however the IPCC has low confidence that this trend can be attributed to human-caused climate change. Looking to future, at temperature changes of 2C and more, at present the IPCC does not expect the current state of scientific understandings to change. But stay tuned — that’s why we do science.

The full post is here.

See also : DEBUNKED: Europe’s claimed ‘worst drought in 500 years’ – Peer-reviewed studies, data & IPCC reveal ‘drought has not increased’ & ‘cannot be attributed to human-caused climate change’

climate-debate

Is Global Warming The Greatest Scientific Fraud In History?

by G.K. Mitchell, Aug 19, 202 in ClimateChangeDispatch

…

In its seminal report in 1990, the U.N. IPCC stated that “at the then current rate of world emissions of CO2, the global mean temperature would likely increase by 1°C by 2025.”

This statement formed the basis for the hypothesis that anthropogenic (man-made) global warmingresulted from the increased concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s lower atmosphere resulting from man-made activities.

Central to the hypothesis was that the temperature of the lower troposphere would increase as the concentration of CO2 in the troposphere increased.

Therefore, in its 1990 report, the U.N. IPCC established a direct linkage between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature of the lower troposphere.

The scientific method of inquiry has guided scientific research and investigation for over 400 years. In summary, the scientific method requires that a researcher observe a phenomenon, postulate a hypothesis for the cause of the phenomenon, and then conduct experiments or scientific investigations to falsify the hypothesis.

In adherence to the scientific method, a climate scientist who thinks that man has caused global warming should develop a complex hypothesis as follows:

  1. Global warming has occurred; that is, the temperature of the world’s oceans, landmass, and relevant atmosphere has risen during the period under investigation by a statistically significant amount.

  2. Man’s activities are responsible for the global warming that has occurred.

  3. The extent to which global warming has occurred, or is reasonably projected to occur in the future, will adversely affect life on Earth.

If any of the conjectures in the complex hypothesis above are found to be invalid, the complex hypothesis is determined to be falsified and either discarded or modified.

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climate and geology

Successive climate crises in the deep past drove the early evolution and radiation of reptiles

by T. Simoes et al., Aug 19, 2022 in ScienceAdvance

Abstract

Climate change–induced mass extinctions provide unique opportunities to explore the impacts of global environmental disturbances on organismal evolution. However, their influence on terrestrial ecosystems remains poorly understood. Here, we provide a new time tree for the early evolution of reptiles and their closest relatives to reconstruct how the Permian-Triassic climatic crises shaped their long-term evolutionary trajectory. By combining rates of phenotypic evolution, mode of selection, body size, and global temperature data, we reveal an intimate association between reptile evolutionary dynamics and climate change in the deep past. We show that the origin and phenotypic radiation of reptiles was not solely driven by ecological opportunity following the end-Permian extinction as previously thought but also the result of multiple adaptive responses to climatic shifts spanning 57 million years.
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better to know...?, Cooling

New Studies Claim The More CO2 In The Venus Atmosphere The Colder It Gets

by K. Richard, Aug 19, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Early Venus is suggested to have been much colder – and thus habitable – due to higher concentrations of CO2…because CO2 drives cooling in most of the Venus atmosphere (stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere).

Scientists have for decades agreed it is “well recognized” that CO2 molecules radiatively cool the atmospheres of planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus (Sharma and Wintersteiner, 1990) in the 15 μm band starting from 12 km above the surface on up.

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only geology

Continental configuration controls ocean oxygenation during the Phanerozoic

by Pohl A. et al. , Aug 17, 2022 in Nature

Abstract

The early evolutionary and much of the extinction history of marine animals is thought to be driven by changes in dissolved oxygen concentrations ([O2]) in the ocean1,2,3. In turn, [O2] is widely assumed to be dominated by the geological history of atmospheric oxygen (pO2)4,5. Here, by contrast, we show by means of a series of Earth system model experiments how continental rearrangement during the Phanerozoic Eon drives profound variations in ocean oxygenation and induces a fundamental decoupling in time between upper-ocean and benthic [O2]. We further identify the presence of state transitions in the global ocean circulation, which lead to extensive deep-ocean anoxia developing in the early Phanerozoic even under modern pO2. Our finding that ocean oxygenation oscillates over stable thousand-year (kyr) periods also provides a causal mechanism that might explain elevated rates of metazoan radiation and extinction during the early Palaeozoic Era6. The absence, in our modelling, of any simple correlation between global climate and ocean ventilation, and the occurrence of profound variations in ocean oxygenation independent of atmospheric pO2, presents a challenge to the interpretation of marine redox proxies, but also points to a hitherto unrecognized role for continental configuration in the evolution of the biosphere.

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unclassified

Climate Expert: What The Media Won’t Tell You About Droughts

by R. Pileke Jr, Aug 16, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Europe is in the midst of what has been called the worst drought in 500 years. According to a drought expert with the European Commission in comments last week [bold, links added]:

“We haven’t analysed fully the event (this year’s drought), because it is still ongoing, but based on my experience I think that this is perhaps even more extreme than 2018. Just to give you an idea the 2018 drought was so extreme that, looking back at least the last 500 years, there were no other events similar to the drought of 2018, but this year I think it is really worse than 2018.”

While a full analysis of the ongoing 2022 European drought remains to be completed, so too the drought itself, which is clearly exceptional if not unprecedented. In this post, I take a close look at the state of understanding of the possible role of climate change in this year’s drought.

Specifically, I report on what the most recent assessment report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and underlying literature and data say about the detection of trends in Western and Central European drought and the attribution of those trends to greenhouse gas emissions.

The figure below shows the specific region that is the focus of this post, which includes all of Germany, most of France, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia among other nations. …

better to know...?

The Science Was Just as “Settled” 110 Years Ago as It Is Today… Except for the Bits in the Middle

by D. Middleton, Aug 18, 2022 in WUWT

Nothing funnier than smarmy academics…

For 110 years, climate change has been in the news. Are we finally ready to listen?
Published: August 15, 2022 2.47am EDT

On August 14 1912, a small New Zealand newspaper published a short article announcing global coal usage was affecting our planet’s temperature.

This piece from 110 years ago is now famous, shared across the internet this time every year as one of the first pieces of climate science in the media (even though it was actually a reprint of a piece published in a New South Wales mining journal a month earlier).

So how did it come about? And why has it taken so long for the warnings in the article to be heard – and acted on?

[…]

 

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Europe wildfires: Are they linked to climate change?–NO!!!

by P. Homewood, Aug 15, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

The BBC would like you to think so, with statements like these:

So far this year, the amount of land burnt by fires across the European Union is more than three times greater than what you would expect by the middle of July.

Almost 346,000 hectares (1,370 sq miles) of land have been recorded as burnt (as of 16 July), according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Much of Western Europe has been hit by a record-breaking heatwave, which substantially increases the risk of fires….

“Heatwaves and droughts are exacerbated by climate change and are absolutely the defining factor in years with massive wildfire outbreaks, like the present one,” Dr Jones says….

“But we definitely see trends in fire weather risk because of climate change.

“The risk is higher in the Mediterranean region than the rest of Europe.”

Studies show increasing fire risk for central and southern regions of Europe over the past couple of decades.

Yet tucked away in the same article is this graph which proves all of these have no basis in fact:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Activist Scientists Have Now Officially Changed A -0.5°C Global Cooling Trend Into A Warming Trend

by K. Richard, Aug 15, 2022 in NotricksZone

Back in the days when data manipulation was still strictly forbidden, scientists reported the globe cooled significantly for decades even as CO₂ concentrations increased.

The global cooling amplitude was -0.5°C from 1960-1965, and 1976 was reported to be the coldest year of any year measured since 1958 (Angell and Korshover, 1978).

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Today these recorded 1960-1965 and 1958-1963 cooling trends have been fully erased and replaced with a slight warming or pause.

better to know...?

ENSO Impact on the Declining CO2 Sink Rate

by Roy Spencer, Aug 15, 2022 in WUWT

From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

SUMMARY: A simple time-dependent CO2 budget model shows that yearly anthropogenic emissions compared to Mauna Loa CO2 measurements gives a declining CO2 sink rate, which if continued would increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations and presumably anthropogenic climate change. But accounting for ENSO (El Nino/La Nina) activity during 1959-2021 removes the decline. This is contrary to multiple previous studies that claimed to account for ENSO. A preprint of my paper (not yet peer reviewed) describing the details is at ENSO Impact on the Declining CO2 Sink Rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archive (essoar.org).

UPDATE: The CO2 model, with inputs and outputs, is in an Excel spreadsheet here: CO2-budget-model-with-EIA-growth-cases.

I decided that the CO2 model I developed a few years ago, and recently reported on here, was worthy of publication, so I started going through the published literature on the subject. This is a necessary first step if you want to publish a paper and not be embarrassed by reinventing the wheel or claiming something others have already “disproved”.

The first thing I found was that my idea that Nature each year removes a set fraction of the difference between the observed CO2 concentration and some baseline value is not new. That idea was first published in 2013 (see my preprint link above for details), and it’s called the “CO2 sink rate”.

The second thing I found was that the sink rate has (reportedly) been declining, by as much as 0.54% (relative) per year, even after accounting for ENSO activity. But I only get -0.33% per year (1959-2021) before accounting for ENSO activity, and — importantly — 0.0% per year after accounting for ENSO.

This last finding will surely be controversial, because it could mean CO2 in the atmosphere will not rise as much as global carbon cycle modelers say it will. So, I am posting the model and the datasets used along with the paper preprint at ENSO Impact on the Declining CO2 Sink Rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archive (essoar.org). The analysis is quite simple and I believe defensible. The 2019 paper that got -0.54% per year decline in the sink rate uses complex statistical gymnastics, with a professional statistician as a primary author. My analysis is much simpler, easier to understand, and (I believe) at least as defensible.

The paper will be submitted to Geophysical Research Letters for peer review in the next couple days. In the meantime, I will be inviting the researchers who live and breathe this stuff to poke holes in my analysis.

better to know...?

11 SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS FOR THE UPCOMING GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM (SPOILER: WRAP UP, IT’S GETTING COLD)

by Cap Allon, Aug 13, 2022 in Electroverse

There is ever-mounting evidence warning the next epoch will be one of sharp terrestrial cooling due to a relative flat-lining of solar output.

The exact time-frame and depth of this next chill of solar minimum is still anyone’s guess, and the parameters involved (i.e., galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetic activity, solar wind flux etc.) remain poorly understood.

However, there are some great minds on the job, and below I’ve collated 11 best-guesses based on published scientific papers from respected researchers in the field. The list begins with eminent Russian astrophysicist K. Abdussamatov–though it is in no particular order.

ABDUSSAMATOV, 2016:

“The quasi-centennial epoch of the new Little Ice Age has started at the end 2015 after the maximum phase of solar cycle 24. The start of a solar grand minimum is anticipated in solar cycle 27 ± 1 in 2043 ± 11 and the beginning of phase of deep cooling in the new Little Ice Age in 2060 ± 11.

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unclassified

Tim Ball: The Evidence Proves That CO2 is Not a Greenhouse Gas

by T. Ball, Sept 13, 2018 in Technocracy

 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim of human-caused global warming (AGW) is built on the assumption that an increase in atmospheric CO2 causes an increase in global temperature. The IPCC claim is what science calls a theory, a hypothesis, or in simple English, a speculation.  Every theory is based on a set of assumptions. The standard scientific method is to challenge the theory by trying to disprove it. Karl Popper wrote about this approach in a 1963 article, Science as Falsification. Douglas Yates said,

“No scientific theory achieves public acceptance until it has been thoroughly discredited.”

Thomas Huxley made a similar observation.

“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

In other words, all scientists must be skeptics, which makes a mockery out of the charge that those who questioned AGW, were global warming skeptics. Michael Shermer provides a likely explanation for the effectiveness of the charge.

“Scientists are skeptics. It’s unfortunate that the word ‘skeptic’ has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it’s just thoughtful inquiry.”

The scientific method was not used with the AGW theory. In fact, the exact opposite occurred, they tried to prove the theory. It is a treadmill guaranteed to make you misread, misrepresent, misuse and selectively choose data and evidence. This is precisely what the IPCC did and continued to do.

A theory is used to produce results. The results are not wrong, they are only as right as the assumptions on which they are based. For example, Einstein used his theory of relativity to produce the most famous formula in the world; e = mc2. You cannot prove it wrong mathematically because it is the end product of the assumptions he made. To test it and disprove it, you challenge one or all of the assumptions. One of these is represented by the letter “c” in the formula, which assumes nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists challenging the theory are looking for something moving faster than the speed of light.

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unclassified

Doomsday Climate Predictions Meltdown: Arctic Sea Ice Extent Reaches 12-Year Mid-August High

by P. Gosselin, Aug 12, 2022 in NoTricksZone

According to Al Gore, based on statements and “science” from “leading climate experts”, the Arctic was supposed to be ice-free in the summer already years ago.

Now that the summer ice melt season in the Arctic will end soon, by the middle of next month, it’s a good time to see how Al Gore’s prediction is faring. To do this we look at the latest from data the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC):

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better to know...?, biology+acidification

Friday Funny – Clownfish Climate Science

by A. Watts, Aug 12, 2022 in WUWT

Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says

Finding against Danielle Dixson vindicates whistleblowers who questioned high-profile work on ocean acidification [due to rising atmospheric CO₂ levels]

A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.

Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.

The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.

Dixson did not respond to requests for comment. She “adamantly denies any and all allegations of wrongdoing, and will vigorously appeal any finding of research misconduct,” Dixson’s lawyer, Kristina Larsen, wrote in an email to Science. Larsen describes Dixson as a “brilliant, hardworking female scientist” who was “targeted” by a group of scientists who “chose to ‘convict’ Dr. Dixson in the court of public opinion” by sharing their accusations with a Science reporter last year.

Complete Story:

https://www.science.org/content/article/star-marine-ecologist-committed-misconduct-university-says#.YvKM57NC73Y.twitter

unclassified

The Great Barrier Reef Is Doing Great; People Should Know

by P. Ridd, Aug 11, 2022 in CO2Coalition

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is, well, great. But the popular media won’t report this good news, so I will.

The GBR is made up of approximately 3,000 reefs covering an area nearly the size of California off Australia’s eastern coast. The condition of its coral is frequently referenced as an indicator of the reef’s health, regularly in the context of the supposed damage global warming is doing to the planet.

The reef now has more coral than any time since records began in 1986, according to  the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). There is roughly 20 percent more coral on the GBR than last year, which itself equaled a previous record year. All three major regions of the reef now have excellent coral cover and AIMS states that two regions are at record breaking high levels.

As of the latest 2022 survey of the GBR, coral covered 34 percent of the seabed, double the lowest coverage recorded in 2012. There are many types of ecosystem on reefs other than coral – 34% is a remarkably high number.

This coral health exists despite four supposedly massively destructive and unprecedented bleaching events striking parts of the reef since 2016 – all allegedly due to climate change and one as recently as this year. Coral reefs typically take five to 10 years to recover from major damage, so how can GBR be enjoying such good health this soon? Is it possible that reef-science institutions exaggerated the damage in the first place to advance the global warming narrative? Perhaps.

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unclassified

Biden falsely links Kentucky floods to ‘climate change’ – Reality Check: Floods ‘have not increased in frequency or intensity’ – White House ignores peer-reviewed studies & IPCC & data

by M. Morano, Aug 11, 2022 in WUWT

Study in the Journal of Hydrology finds no increase in floods – ‘Compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global’ scale is lacking’

Extreme Weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. comments on new study: ‘New empirical study: Are floods increasing in North America and Europe? No (and consistent with IPCC.)’

Study published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717. The study found:

‘The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone.’

‘Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.’

‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded (Hartmann et al., 2013) that globally there is no clear and widespread evidence of changes in flood magnitude or frequency in observed flood records.’

‘The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC (Hartmann et al., 2013) that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.’

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Apocalyptic Versus Post-Apocalyptic Climate Politics

by J. Curry, Aug 11, 2022 in WUWT

From Climate Etc.

The Inflation Reduction Act that has passed in the US Senate contains a healthy dose of funding for energy and climate initiatives.  There is much discussion as to why this bill looks like it will pass, when previous climate bills (carbon tax, carbon cap and trade) failed.

The Senate bill includes billions of dollars in tax credits and subsidies for clean energy and electric vehicles. In addition to renewable-energy funding, there is also commitment to federal oil and gas expansion, albeit with fines for excessive methane leakage. The bill includes climate resiliency funding for tribal governments and Native Hawaiians and other disadvantaged areas disproportionately impacted by pollution and climate warming. Funds are also allocated to tackle drought remediation in the West.

I’ve received requests to write on this topic, here are some bits and pieces that I’ve pulled together.  My main points:

  • Post-apocalyptic climate politics have a much better chance of succeeding than fear-driven apocalyptic climate politics
  • Energy policy should be detached from climate policy to make a robust transition to a 21st century energy system that emphasizes abundant, cheap, reliable and secure power with minimal impact on the environment (including land use).

Apocalyptic climate politics

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Australia, biology+acidification

Latest Survey of ‘Coral Cover’ Fundamentally Unscientific

by J. Marohasy, Aug 11, 2022 in WUWT

According to the latest Australian Institute of Marine Science report, there is record coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef. Yet this is less than 30 percent at about half of the reefs surveyed.

The relatively low percentage cover is because only the reef perimeter is surveyed by AIMS, which is the equivalent of reporting on the population of Sydney after skirting around the outer suburbs.

Such a method (skirting around the outer suburbs) would give no indication of population trends in more densely populated inner-city areas. And so the latest AIMS report gives no indication of coral cover at reef crests, which for all we know given the methodology underpinning this latest survey, may have collapsed entirely across the Great Barrier Reef.

We cannot know.

Furthermore, despite advances in both underwater and aerial drone mapping, which could provide automated quantitative assessments by habitat with photographic and/or visual records, AIMS persists with a method that involves towing an observer who guestimates coral cover.

Their method is subjective and archaic. It is not scientific.

My early career was spent as a field biologist in Africa. If I had submitted the AIMS survey method as the intended survey method for any one of the many insect species that I monitored, my supervisors would have rejected it. Whether attempting to monitor changes in the population of an insect species, number of people in a city, or hard coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef, there are certain factors that need to be considered if the method is to be considered scientific and therefore reliable.

Key deficiencies in the current AIMS long-term monitoring program include:
1. Conclusions are drawn about overall coral cover at each reef without ever measuring coral cover at key habitats (E.g. at the reef crest).
2. Variability in coral cover is never quantified by habitat type (E.g. reef crest versus back lagoon).
3. The area surveyed at each reef (defined by AIMS as total ‘reef perimeter’ measured as sum of manta tows) incorporates results from different habitats, and as a consequence it is doubtful that the sample plan is adequate in terms of number of replications (manta tows) per treatment (habitat) at each reef perimeter.
4. Numerical values represent subjective guesses.
5. There is no photographic or video record enabling quantification of the accuracy of the guesses.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy–Dan Hannan

by P. Homewood, Aug 10, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

No, the energy crisis is not some unforeseeable consequence of the Ukrainian war. It is the result of years of wishful thinking, preening and short-termism. We sit on 300 years’ supply of coal. We have rich pockets of gas trapped in rocks beneath Central Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Sussex. We have as good a claim as any country to have invented civil nuclear power. Yet, incredibly, we face blackouts and energy rationing.

The calamity into which we are heading this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is barely in the boat at all, but is clinging by its fingertips to the gunwales – is no consolation.

Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now scrambling to make up for past errors. More nuclear power-stations are mooted. The ban on shale gas extraction is reviewed. Sudden attention is paid to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good stuff. All too late.

You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes around ten months to come online – and that assumes that you have first cleared all the planning hurdles. Hydrogen has vast potential, and what Britain is doing with fusion, not least at the Atomic Energy Authority’s facility in Culham, is mind-blowing. We may well be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of that will see us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000.

How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? It was hardly as if disruption in global energy markets was unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with nasty governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Irans; for every Norway, a dozen Nigerias. There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship.

We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions across petro-dollar economies. We knew that a break in supply was always a possibility. And it was hardly as if Vladimir Putin was disguising the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake.

No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Models, Climate Scientists Wrong Again…New Study Finds Jet Stream Strengthening, Not Weakening

by P. Gosselin,  Aug 9, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Alarmist climate research centers like the Potsdam Institute and the unquestioning media have been claiming for years that the Jet Stream is weakening, hence this would lead to greater weather extremes across the northern hemisphere due to blocking. Responsible for this of course is man-made global warming.

Hat-tip: The Klimaschau

But a recent paper by Samantha Hallam et al published in the journal Climate Dynamics looks at the seasonal to decadal variations in Northern Hemisphere jet stream latitude and speed over land for the period 1871–2011. The authors were unable to find any weakening of the sort climate alarmists have been warning about.

Quite to the contrary, the authors in fact found that the winter jet stream over the North Atlantic and Eurasia has increased in average speed by 8% to 132 mph. The authors found the 141-year trends in jet latitude and speed show differences on a regional basis and that jet speed shows significant increases evident in winter (up to 4.7 ms −1 ), spring and autumn over the North Atlantic, Eurasia and North America. Over the North Pacific, no increase was observed.

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Moreover, the Jet Stream was found to have shifted northward by some 330 kilometers. Overall, the paper’s findings contradict the claims of a weakening Jet Stream regularly made by the climate alarmists and their media minions.

Applying climate alarmist science, we’d have to conclude now, due to the strengthening Jet Stream, less weather extremes should be expected. This would be good news of course. But don’t expect the fear-porn media to look at this.

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse