climate-debate

Natural Oceanic Cycles Behind Heavy East Australia Rains, New Study Finds

by P. Gosselin, Sep 21, 2022 in WUWT/NTZ

East Australia got hit by lots of rain in February earlier this year, and the media of course blamed it all on manmade climate change.

Now a new study by Holgate et al (2022) titled “The Impact of Interacting Climate Modes on East Australian Precipitation Moisture Sources” shows East Australia’s rains are directly tied to natural oceanic patterns.

Hat-tip: EIKE.

The paper’s abstract summarizes that east Australia precipitation is driven by multiple interacting climate modes and that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modifies the supply of evaporative moisture for precipitation and that this is modulated by the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) and southern annular mode (SAM).

Sources of moisture in eastern Australia. Source: Holgate et al, 2020…
better to know...?

Environmentalism Is A Fundamentalist Religion Steeped In Green Dogma

by J. Kotkin, Sep 21, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn.

The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world.

And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened. [bold, links added]

This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers.

And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run. This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little.

Today’s biggest emitters come from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world’s third-largest emitter.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Ronald Stein on the Huge Advantages of Fossil Fuels Over Wind/Solar Power, Tom Nelson Podcast

by C. Rotter, Sep 20, 2022 in WUWT

Ronald Stein, P.E. is an engineer and Founder of PTS Advance, drawing upon decades of project management and business development experiences. He is an internationally published columnist, energy expert, and Pulitzer Prize nominated author who writes frequently about all aspects of energy and economics and is a Policy Advisor for The Heartland Institute.

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More about Stein: https://www.heartland.org/about-us/wh…
Stein’s website: https://energyliteracy.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PTSFounder
—
Tom Nelson’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tan123
Substack: https://tomn.substack.com/
About Tom: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2022/0…
Notes for climate skeptics:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2019/0…
ClimateGate emails:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/p/clim…

unclassified

Does this explode the great global warming myth?

by P. Homewood, Sep 21, 20022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

THE ‘greenhouse effect’ has been with us for so long that it is taken as ‘settled’ science in most quarters. However, as a new paper shows, there is much still to debate.

The author, William Kininmonth, is no bedroom blogger. As a former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, he deserves careful and respectful attention.

Kininmonth’s suggestion is that the approach of the UN’s  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on a concept of radiation forcing at the top of the atmosphere, is logically unsound and ignores important details about what happens at the Earth’s surface. In particular, he notes that there are huge flows of energy – vastly bigger than the effect of greenhouse gases – from the warm tropical oceans to the atmosphere, whence it is transported poleward by the winds, warming the northern latitudes.

Read the full story here.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Press Release: Important new paper challenges IPCC’s claims about climate sensitivity

by P. Homewood, Sep 20, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

London, 20 September – A new paper reduces the estimate of climate sensitivity – the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations – by one third. The results therefore suggest that future global warming will be much less than expected.
The paper, by independent scientist Nic Lewis, has just appeared in the journal Climate Dynamics. It is an important challenge to the official view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Lewis has critiqued a 2020 assessment of climate sensitivity by Sherwood et al., which strongly influenced the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, in 2021. Lewis commented:
“It is unfortunate that Sherwood et al.’s assessment of climate sensitivity, which underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, contained such serious errors, inconsistencies and deficiencies in its methods”.
After correcting the Sherwood et al. methods and revising key input data to reflect, primarily, more recent evidence, the central estimate for climate sensitivity comes down from 3.1°C per doubling of CO2 concentration in the original study to 2.16°C in the new paper.
This large reduction shows how sensitive climate sensitivity estimates still are to input assumptions, and that values between 1.5°C and 2°C remain quite plausible.

  • Climate sensitivity represents the long-term global temperature increase caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. There are different measures of climate sensitivity. Both the Sherwood and Lewis papers estimate the so-called ‘effective’ climate sensitivity, which reflects a new equilibrium state projected from centennial changes after a doubling of the CO2 concentration. This measure is considered the most relevant one for predicting climate change in the coming two centuries.
  • Climate sensitivity has always been a very important, but also highly uncertain, parameter in the climate change discourse. Earlier IPCC reports assessed its value as likely to be somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of 3°C. However, prompted by the Sherwood paper, the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report moved that range upwards, to 2.5 to 4°C. Although for outsiders this might sound boring, for insiders it was a revolutionary change.
  • Lewis’s corrections and revisions lead to a likely range of 1.75 to 2.7°C, which is not only lower but is also much less uncertain than either the 2021 official IPCC assessment or the very similar Sherwood et al. estimate (2.6 to 3.9°C).
  • Nic Lewis is the lead or sole author of ten peer-reviewed papers on climate sensitivity. He was a participant in the 2015 workshop that kicked off the World Climate Research Programme project that led to the Sherwood et al. 2020 paper, but he was not a co-author of that paper.

Lewis commented:
“The substantial reduction in assessed climate sensitivity upon updating key input data suggests that the increase in the bottom of the climate sensitivity range in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report was unjustified”.
Lewis’s paper is entitled ‘Objectively combining climate sensitivity evidence’. It can be freely downloaded here. A detailed explanatory article about the paper is available here.

Australia

Emissions from Australia’s oil and gas industry rose 20% in first five years of safeguard mechanism

by A. Norton, Sep 20, 2022 in The Guardian

 

 

unclassified

Report: The Earth Has A Changing Climate, Not A Climate Crisis

by W. Manheimer, Sep 19, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The following excerpt is taken from:

Journal of Sustainable Development; Vol. 15, No. 5; 2022
ISSN 1913-9063 E-ISSN 1913-9071
Published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education

Abstract
The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on reliable, economic, and environmentally viable energy. [bold, links added]

The windmills, solar panels, and backup batteries have none of these qualities. This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators.

It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis.

Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcing is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate.

Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today.

During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide levels have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

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unclassified

Good News: 2022 Hurricane Season Mild. Bad News: Pressure Pattern Threatens Europe with Hell Winter

by P. Gosselin, Sep 19, 2022 in WUWT

This year’s hurricane season has been unusually quiet. The USA has gotten off easy so far in terms of landfalls and damage, thus once again contradicting all the doomsday scenarios from the climate alarmists.

Mid September is usually the peak of hurricane activity. But right now it’s quiet and there are no threats to the US mainland – for the time being. Here’s the latest update from the National Hurricane Center (NHC):

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Potential killer winter on top of acute energy crisis

On another subject, some forecasters have been projecting a milder than normal winter for Europe, which would be welcome with a red carpet due to the continent’s acute energy crisis.

However, Joe notes there are signs this may not be the case. That would mean the coming winter could become – in the current dire energy situation – the Mother of Nightmares: a bitter cold winter with energy outages. In the event of blackouts, which many experts warn have a high chance of occurring, Europe would then be facing a humanitarian and economic crisis on a scale not seen in a very long time.

“Look at what the surface maps are showing,” Bastardi says. “When you have high pressure over Greenland and Iceland, and low pressure over Spain like that, folks, that is an ugly looking situation for the winter. That is similar to 2010/11.”

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unclassified

CMIP6 GCM ensemble members versus global surface temperatures

by N. Scafetta, Sep 18, 2022 in Springer

Abstract

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (phase 6) (CMIP6) global circulation models (GCMs) predict equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) values ranging between 1.8 and 5.7 ∘∘C. To narrow this range, we group 38 GCMs into low, medium and high ECS subgroups and test their accuracy and precision in hindcasting the mean global surface warming observed from 1980–1990 to 2011–2021 in the ERA5-T2m, HadCRUT5, GISTEMP v4, and NOAAGlobTemp v5 global surface temperature records. We also compare the GCM hindcasts to the satellite-based UAH-MSU v6 lower troposphere global temperature record. We use 143 GCM ensemble averaged simulations under four slightly different forcing conditions, 688 GCM member simulations, and Monte Carlo modeling of the internal variability of the GCMs under three different model accuracy requirements. We found that the medium and high-ECS GCMs run too hot up to over 95% and 97% of cases, respectively. The low ECS GCM group agrees best with the warming values obtained from the surface temperature records, ranging between 0.52 and 0.58 ∘∘C. However, when comparing the observed and GCM hindcasted warming on land and ocean regions, the surface-based temperature records appear to exhibit a significant warming bias. Furthermore, if the satellite-based UAH-MSU-lt record is accurate, actual surface warming from 1980 to 2021 may have been around 0.40 ∘∘C (or less), that is up to about 30% less than what is reported by the surface-based temperature records. The latter situation implies that even the low-ECS models would have produced excessive warming from 1980 to 2021. These results suggest that the actual ECS may be relatively low, i.e. lower than 3 ∘∘C or even less than 2 ∘∘C if the 1980–2021 global surface temperature records contain spurious warming, as some alternative studies have already suggested. Therefore, the projected global climate warming over the next few decades could be moderate and probably not particularly alarming.

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unclassified

Cost Of the Green Energy Transition: Who You Gonna Believe, Some Research Assistants from Oxford or Your Lyin’ Eyes?

by F. Menton, Sep 19, 2022 in WUWT

Over in Europe, and particularly in those countries in the vanguard of the green energy transition, the enormous costs of this folly have begun to hit home. In the UK, average annual consumer energy bills were scheduled to rise as of October 1 to £3549/year, from only £1138/year just a year ago. (The figure may now get reduced somewhat by means of massive government subsidies, which only conceal, but do not obviate, the disastrous cost increases.) Germany’s regulated consumer gas bills are scheduled for an average annual increase on October 1 of about 480 euros, about 13%, from an already high 3568 euros.

Anyone with a pair of eyes can see what has happened. They thought they could get rid of fossil fuels just by building lots of wind turbines and solar panels, which don’t work most of the time. Then they suppressed fossil fuel production, because that is the virtuous thing to do. Somehow they lost track of the fact that they needed full backup for the wind and sun, and have no alternative to the suppressed fossil fuels. With supply of fossil fuels intentionally and artificially constrained, prices spiked.

And they have not even yet gotten to 50% of electricity, or 15% of final energy consumption, from wind/sun on an annualized basis.

Is anybody learning a lesson here? Doubtful.

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climate-debate

Climate Emergency Not Supported by Data, Say Four Leading Italian Scientists

by C. Morrison, Sep 14, 2022 in DailySkeptic

Four leading Italian scientists have undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the data. Reviewing data from a wide range of weather phenomena, they say a ‘climate crisis’ of the kind people are becoming alarmed about “is not evident yet”. The scientists suggest that rather than burdening our children with anxiety about climate change, we should encourage them to think about issues like energy, food and health, and the challenges in each area, with a more “objective and constructive spirit” and not waste limited resources on “costly and ineffective solutions”.

During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency is stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones show little change over the long term, and the same is true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity show no “clear positive trend of extreme events”. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists note a considerable “greening” of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show “greening” trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back deserts.

The four scientists are all highly qualified and include physics adjunct professor Gianluca Alimonti, agrometeorologist Luigi Mariani and physics professors Franco Prodi and Renato Angelo Ricci. The last two are signatories to the rapidly growing ‘World Climate Declaration’. This petition states that there is no climate emergency and calls for climate science to be more scientific. It also calls for liberation from the “naïve belief in immature climate models”. In future, it says, “climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science”.

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better to know...?

Air conditioning has a climate problem. New technology could help.

by S. Osaka, Sep 12, 2022 in TheWashingtonPost

Last week, Californians got a reminder of one of the most vexing paradoxes of global warming. With temperatures well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions on Tuesday night, hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents received beeping text alerts to notify them that the power grid, straining under the weight of millions of air-conditioning units, was about to collapse. Save power now, the text warned, or face rolling blackouts.

Consumers conserved, and the state’s electricity grid made it out of a record-breaking hot day relatively unscathed. Still, as temperatures rise worldwide, more people are going to need to install air conditioners. Butas currently sold, AC units can actually make global warming worse: On hot days, they suck tons of electricity from the grid, and their chemical refrigerants can accelerate global warming.

This is why researchers and start-ups are hoping to create new, cutting-edge AC units. AC technology has seen only “incremental improvements over the past 100 years,” said Ankit Kalanki, a manager at Third Derivative, a climate tech accelerator co-founded by the energy think tank RMI. “There has not been a step change in innovation.”

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better to know...?

Rethinking The Greenhouse Effect

by P. Homewood, Sep 16, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

London, 16 September – A former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre is arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted an overly simplistic approach to global warming and has ended up exaggerating the human contribution to recent climate change.
William Kininmonth argues that the warming of the planet is fastest in winter and in high latitudes near the poles. He argues that this is mostly due to increased heat transport from the tropical oceans.
However, the recent warming of the tropical oceans can’t be explained by the greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide, because that effect is small in the humid tropical atmosphere. The most probable explanation is natural changes in ocean currents.
William Kininmonth says:
“The IPCC’s radiation balance approach is very simplistic, ignoring the fact that nowhere on the Earth’s surface is in radiation balance. Mainstream climate science may have led us all up a blind alley”.
GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.


William Kininmonth: Rethinking the Greenhouse Effect (pdf)

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better to know...?

Exposing The ‘97% Of Scientists Agree With Man-made Global Warming’ Lie

by D. Craig, Sep 15, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

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The main author of the paper who came up with the figure was John Cook, an Australian former web programmer and blogger who later gained a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Western Australia and founded what could be seen as a climate alarmist website.

He assembled a group of volunteers recruited via the website as part of a ‘citizen science’ project and tasked them with examining the abstracts of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

Note that the volunteers didn’t speak to any scientists and didn’t read the scientific papers. They just looked at the abstracts – a summary paragraph or two.

The volunteers classified the abstracts into one of seven categories according to their opinions of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):

  1. Explicit endorsement of AGW with quantification
  2. Explicit endorsement of AGW without quantification
  3. Implicit endorsement of AGW
  4. No position or Uncertain
  5. Implicit rejection of AGW
  6. Explicit rejection of AGW without quantification
  7. Explicit rejection of AGW with quantification

The reviewers then ‘simplified’ results into four main categories as follows:

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climate-debate

Climate Hysteria: A Mass Delusion To Demonize Carbon Dioxide

by J. Corsi, Sep 14 , 2022 in ClimateChangeDispartch

Climate hysterics like to throw around the world “denier” to castigate those who don’t get with the green agenda.

The term is deliberately intended to echo the phrase “Holocaust denier” to those anti-Semites who like to insist that the Holocaust never happened. [bold, links added]

While the comparison is obscene, it’s certainly true that the Holocaust, like the climate agenda, have something in common: They both reflect a blind fanaticism untethered to actual facts.

Climate hysterics demonize carbon dioxide (CO2) much as Hitler stereotyped Jews. They then demonize their critics as “Holocaust deniers” because the psychological link is to demonize critics of the anthropogenic theory as if they were Jew-haters.

However, the term “climate deniers” outside the context of Holocaust denial makes no sense. No rational person would deny that this planet has an atmosphere, weather, and climate.

But honestly, it is climate hysterics who hate their critics, seeing them as “evil,” greedy, hydrocarbon-burning capitalists willing to make Earth’s climate unbearably hot and dangerous for all living things.

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energy and fields

China’s Coal-Fired Power Boom Is Soaring To New Levels

by WJS Editorial Board, Sep 13, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

An unspoken truth of the climate-change crusade is this: Anything the U.S. does to reduce emissions won’t matter much to global temperatures.

U.S. cuts will be swamped by the increases in India, Africa, and especially China. Look no further than China’s boom in new coal-fired electricity.

Under the nonbinding 2015 Paris climate agreement, China can increase its emissions until 2030. And is it ever. [bold, links added]

Between 2015 and 2021, China’s emissions increased by some 11%, according to the Climate Action Tracker, which evaluates nationally determined contributions under the Paris agreement.

The U.S. has reduced its emissions by some 6% between 2015 and 2021. Beijing made minimal new commitments at last year’s Glasgow confab on climate, despite world pressure.

S&P Global Commodity Insights recently estimated that China is planning or building coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of at least 100 gigawatts. Those are merely the projects whose development status is confirmed, so the real number is almost certainly higher.

The total U.S. power capacity is some 1,147 gigawatts. One gigawatt is enough energy to power as many as 770,000 homes.

The nonprofit Global Energy Monitor tracks coal-fired power projects worldwide of 30 megawatts or more, including those planned for the long-term.

It estimates that, as of July 2022, China had some 258 coal-fired power stations—or some 515 individual units—proposed, permitted, or under construction. If completed, they would generate some 290 gigawatts, more than 60% of the world’s total coal capacity under development.

Global Energy Monitor also reports that as of July China had 174 new coal mines or coal-mine expansions proposed, permitted, or under construction that when complete would produce 596 million metric tonnes per year.

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unclassified

Attenborough’s Arctic Sea-Ice Fearmongering Bordering On Misinformation

by C. Morrison, Sep 13, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Arctic has been a happy hunting ground for the climate scaremonger Sir David Attenborough. Two years ago he made the fanciful claim that polar bears could die out in the 2030s.

It is now generally accepted that polar bears have been thriving and increasing in numbers, and in his latest BBC documentary Frozen Planet II, Attenborough makes no mention of his previous claim. [bold, links added]

But he does make the astonishing suggestion that all the summer sea ice in the Arctic could be gone within 12 years.

Unfortunately, such predictions are now out of date. Summer sea ice hit a low in 2012 and has been steadily recovering ever since.

According to the latest data from the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for the end of August, “Sea ice extent is likely to remain higher than in recent years.”

The evidence is shown in the graph below.

….

As can be clearly seen, the 2022 blue line is well above the 2012 low point. According to the NSIDC, the average sea ice extent for August ranked 13th lowest in the recent satellite record.

The growth of Arctic sea ice has been confirmed by a number of sources. The EU weather service Copernicus reported that the coverage of Arctic sea ice is now very close to the 1991-2020 average.

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better to know...?

Climate Scaremongers Take Note: It Was Hotter In 1976!

by P. Homewood, Sep 13, 022 in ClimateChange Dispatch

For weeks we have been told that this year’s warm summer is due to climate change.

The BBC’s Justin Rowlatt was quite clear: ‘We know what is behind this – greenhouse gas emissions caused by our burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas,’ a message amplified across the media and stoked by the Met Office, who delighted in their red warnings and public health alerts. [bold, links added]

It was not only the heat. The Met Office claimed that this summer’s drought is a harbinger of the future we could expect, ably assisted by fraudulently misleading images of ‘dried up reservoirs’ on BBC News.

As many of us suspected all along, the summer of 2022 was not a record breaker at all, as it was much hotter in 1976, as the Central England Temperature Series makes clear:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_seasonal_totals.txt

 

Indeed it was hotter in 1826 and 2018, and this summer was no hotter than in 1995 and 2006.

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better to know...?

A breakthrough discovery in carbon capture conversion for ethylene production

by University of Illinois Chicago, Sep 9, 2022 in ScienceDaily

A team of researchers led by Meenesh Singh at University of Illinois Chicago has discovered a way to convert 100% of carbon dioxide captured from industrial exhaust into ethylene, a key building block for plastic products.

Their findings are published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

While researchers have been exploring the possibility of converting carbon dioxide to ethylene for more than a decade, the UIC team’s approach is the first to achieve nearly 100% utilization of carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbons. Their system uses electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide gas into high purity ethylene, with other carbon-based fuels and oxygen as byproducts.

The process can convert up to 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 1 metric ton of ethylene, recycling almost all carbon dioxide captured. Because the system runs on electricity, the use of renewable energy can make the process carbon negative.

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unclassified

Claim: The World is On the Brink of Five Climate Tipping Points

by E. Worrall, Sep 12, 2022 in WUWT

Is anyone else fed up with us approaching but never actually crossing all those dangerous tipping points?

World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds

Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change

Damian CarringtonEnvironment editor
@dpcarringtonFri 9 Sep 2022 04.00 AEST

The climate crisis has driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, according to a major study.

It shows five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.

These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.

At 1.5C of heating, the minimum rise now expected, four of the five tipping points move from being possible to likely, the analysis said. Also at 1.5C, an additional five tipping points become possible, including changes to vast northern forests and the loss of almost all mountain glaciers.

In total, the researchers found evidence for 16 tipping points, with the final six requiring global heating of at least 2C to be triggered, according to the scientists’ estimations. The tipping points would take effect on timescales varying from a few years to centuries.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds

The abstract of the study;

Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points

David I. Armstrong McKay* https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0020-7461 d.mckay@exeter.ac.uk
Arie Staal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5409-1436
Jesse F. Abrams https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0411-8519
Ricarda Winkelmann https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1248-3217
Boris Sakschewski https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7230-9723
Sina Loriani https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6660-960X
Ingo Fetzer https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7335-5679
Sarah E. Cornell https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4367-1296
Johan Rockström
Timothy M. Lenton* https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-7498 d.mckay@exeter.ac.uk

9 Sep 2022

Vol 377, Issue 6611

DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Climate tipping points occur when change in a part of the climate system becomes self-perpetuating beyond a warming threshold, leading to substantial Earth system impacts. Synthesizing paleoclimate, observational, and model-based studies, we provide a revised shortlist of global “core” tipping elements and regional “impact” tipping elements and their temperature thresholds. Current global warming of ~1.1°C above preindustrial temperatures already lies within the lower end of some tipping point uncertainty ranges. Several tipping points may be triggered in the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C global warming, with many more likely at the 2 to 3°C of warming expected on current policy trajectories. This strengthens the evidence base for urgent action to mitigate climate change and to develop improved tipping point risk assessment, early warning capability, and adaptation strategies.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950

Unfortunately the study is paywalled, so I can’t tell you the timeframe of these alleged tipping points. Not that the predicted dates matter that much – in my experience, tipping point predictions are usually quietly ignored or deleted when the deadline expires.

climate-debate

Global models underestimate large decadal declining and rising water storage trends relative to GRACE satellite data

by B.R. Scanlon et al., Jan 22, 2018 in PNAS

Significance

We increasingly rely on global models to project impacts of humans and climate on water resources. How reliable are these models? While past model intercomparison projects focused on water fluxes, we provide here the first comprehensive comparison of land total water storage trends from seven global models to trends from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which have been likened to giant weighing scales in the sky. The models underestimate the large decadal (2002–2014) trends in water storage relative to GRACE satellites, both decreasing trends related to human intervention and climate and increasing trends related primarily to climate variations. The poor agreement between models and GRACE underscores the challenges remaining for global models to capture human or climate impacts on global water storage trends.

Abstract

Assessing reliability of global models is critical because of increasing reliance on these models to address past and projected future climate and human stresses on global water resources. Here, we evaluate model reliability based on a comprehensive comparison of decadal trends (2002–2014) in land water storage from seven global models (WGHM, PCR-GLOBWB, GLDAS NOAH, MOSAIC, VIC, CLM, and CLSM) to trends from three Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite solutions in 186 river basins (∼60% of global land area). Medians of modeled basin water storage trends greatly underestimate GRACE-derived large decreasing (≤−0.5 km3/y) and increasing (≥0.5 km3/y) trends. Decreasing trends from GRACE are mostly related to human use (irrigation) and climate variations, whereas increasing trends reflect climate variations. For example, in the Amazon, GRACE estimates a large increasing trend of ∼43 km3/y, whereas most models estimate decreasing trends (−71 to 11 km3/y). Land water storage trends, summed over all basins, are positive for GRACE (∼71–82 km3/y) but negative for models (−450 to −12 km3/y), contributing opposing trends to global mean sea level change. Impacts of climate forcing on decadal land water storage trends exceed those of modeled human intervention by about a factor of 2. The model-GRACE comparison highlights potential areas of future model development, particularly simulated water storage. The inability of models to capture large decadal water storage trends based on GRACE indicates that model projections of climate and human-induced water storage changes may be underestimated.
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better to know...?

Reasons to avoid false balance and fake debates

by W. Baerbel and J. Cook, Sep 9, 2022 in SkepticalScience

False balance media reporting

One of the most insidious, albeit often inadvertent forms of climate misinformation is false-balance media  coverage, where contrarian voices are given equal coverage with climatescientists. This stems from the journalistic norm assuming there are always two sides to an issue, thus giving mainstream and contrarian voices equal representation. As a result, a few dissenting scientists are given similar attention to the 97% of scientists who are convinced that humans are causing global warming.

debate

Analysis of media coverage from 1988 to 2002 showed that newspapers often presented false balance media coverage of climate change [18]. While the situation has improved in prestige-press coverage [19], the tabloid press has shown no signs of improvement [20]. Similarly, 70% of U.S. TV coverage of climate change presents a false balance [21]. In short, much of what people learn about climate change from the media involves well-established scientific truth presented alongside groundless assertions.

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To debate or not to debate

Debate is crucially important to climate science and in the case of human-caused climate change has already occurred over decades. The process of scientific debate is open to anyone—although it does require that participants subject their ideas to the scrutiny of the peer-review process, which is fundamental for the advancement of scientific knowledge [31]. However, contrarians refuse to participate in scientific debates: they do not present their views at scientific conferences, and have a negligible presence in the peer-reviewed literature. Instead, they demand special treatment by bypassing the usual scientific process and presenting unvetted ideas to the public.

How should one respond if invited to publicly debate mainstream climate science? Requests to “debate” climate science or the timing of climate impacts are for propaganda purposes and should be avoided.  Agreeing to participate in such debates run the risk of misinforming the public by conveying the false impression that the scientific community is undecided on basic facts like human-caused global warming.

In contrast, debates over solutions to climate change are worthwhile. One response to an invitation to debate is to inform the organisers of the danger of misinforming the public by debating established science, and that a more appropriate and constructive debate topic is climate solutions. If the organisers persist in hosting a problematic debate, a further option is to issue a public statement explaining that you had advised the organisers not to go ahead due to the problematic nature of the event, but they went ahead regardless.

unclassified

A Much Larger Greenhouse Effect – But Temperatures Dominated by Cooling

by W. Röst, Sep 9, 2022 in WUWT

Abstract

The Earth’s greenhouse effect is much larger than suggested so far. If surface radiation and the greenhouse effect set surface temperatures, our oceans would be boiling. Fortunately, they don’t. Water Earth has a strong water-vapor-based evaporative surface cooling mechanism that effectively sets and stabilizes surface temperatures at a much lower level than cooling by surface radiation emissions can do. Thanks to water vapor our temperature system is far more stable than admitted by the consensus, and thanks to water, water vapor, and clouds surface temperatures are favorable for present life.

Introduction

Early Earth consisted of hot molten lava covered by an extreme greenhouse atmosphere: hardly any surface radiation could reach space, if any. Nevertheless, its surface cooled. Upward convection brought sensible and latent heat from hot surfaces to elevations on the very edge of the atmosphere from where energy effectively could be radiated into space. Despite the near maximal greenhouse effect the surface of Early Earth cooled down and at a certain moment the first oceans developed. Those boiling oceans still resulted in a huge upward convective transport of energy, further cooling the surface. Until now, convective upward transport of energy plays the main role in surface cooling. Convection sets and regulates surface temperatures at actual level. Without evaporative-convective-cloud-cooling, our actual greenhouse atmosphere would theoretically result in a surface temperature of 202.3°C. On the real Earth the greenhouse effect warms the surface, but greenhouse warming does not set and control final surface temperatures. Earth’s H2O-based cooling system does.

Theoretical greenhouse effect

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Conclusions

The Earth’s greenhouse effect is huge, much higher than normally assumed. If cooled by ‘surface radiation only’ the surface of a theoretical planet would have had a surface temperature of 202.3°C. But the Earth’s surface temperatures are not set by the strength of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Additional H2O-based cooling systems keep the surface at a much lower temperature, balancing rising surface radiation uptake. At present, that balance is reached at a yearly average of 15 degrees Celsius.

Thanks to H2O-related surface cooling the Earth’s surface temperatures are bound to a narrow range, at a temperature level well suited for life on Earth. Due to its stability, life developed over many hundreds of millions of years.

Temperature regulates the cooling system; the cooling system regulates temperature.

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse