unclassified

Surveys Show Vast Bulk of Antarctica Is Stable or Growing

by  H.S. Sterling, June. 16, 2024 in WUWT

We hear a lot in the mainstream media about massive ice loss in Antarctica and how it may radically increase sea level rise. The West Antarctic ice sheet and ice on the Antarctic peninsula are in decline, with some massive glaciers threatening to break off; however, conditions there are not the same as for the vast bulk of the continent. First, the subsurface geothermal/volcanic activity that is driving much of the melting in West Antarctica is not affecting the vast bulk of the continent. And the shifting ocean oscillations, which affect the continent’s climate as a whole, have a much greater, more direct impact on the Antarctic peninsula, the northern-most part of the continent, a relatively narrow spit of land surrounded by oceans and beset be clashing currents.

The conditions of the sea ice around Antarctica don’t matter in the sea level equation. Sea ice changes dramatically each season, waxing and waning with the seasons and the currents. For the limited period for which we have consistent measurements, Antarctica’s sea ice has set new records for extent and for low levels during the most recent period of climate change. Neither, however, impact sea levels since floating ice doesn’t displace water.

NASA reported in 2015 that because East Antarctica, which makes up the bulk of the continent, was adding ice and snow, Antarctica as whole may, in fact, be gaining ice on net, implying it could be modestly taking away from sea level rise rather than adding to it. At least from 1992 to 2015, when the report was published.

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climate-debate

IPCC Refuses Repeated Calls for Dialogue with Critical Scientists

by A. Blok, Apr 29, 2024 in Liberum

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ignores crucial peer-reviewed literature and cherry-picks evidence to promote doom scenarios on climate change. These are just some of the findings of Climate Intelligence (Clintel) founder emeritus professor Guus Berkhout (84) after critically analyzing IPCC’s scientific reports. “They refuse my request for an honest and open debate. The result is a very one-sided, fear-mongering story.”

By Arthur Blok
In 1925, a group of internationally renowned scientists gathered in Haarlem at the invitation of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences (KHMV), the Netherlands’ oldest scientific society. The scientists celebrated the golden doctorate of Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman.

Among its participants were Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, and Madame Curie, to name a few. Until today, the society holds annual meetings to promote science in its broadest sense, inviting the world’s most prominent to discuss, interpret, and share their findings. Since its inception in 1752, the KHMV has advocated that sharing knowledge is one of science’s core principles.

Berkhout and his Clintel—a global climate change and policy foundation—are loyal to that principle. Since 2019, they have taken the lead in speaking against the discourse of climate fear spread by politicians, movements, and the mainstream media. Berkhout even went as far as calling the so-called man-made climate emergency a hoax.

The Dutch emeritus professor has now targeted the IPCC and its members. The IPCC is a United Nations (UN) intergovernmental body that aims to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. Based on the research results, governmental policies should be designed and executed to stop climate change.

In the past year, Berkhout sent three personal letters expressing his worries to the IPCC chair, Professor Dr James Skea, but to no avail.

“I received only a small note from their secretariat saying they do not have the mandate to accept my proposal for cooperation. While the request in my first letter was strictly a request for debate and interaction, it was quite a remarkable reaction for a scientific panel”, he said.

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climate-debate

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

by G. Schmidt, Mar 19, 2024 in Nature

Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

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climate-debate, Cooling

Significant West Antarctic Cooling in the Past Two Decades Driven by Tropical Pacific Forcing

by X. Zhang et al., 2023, Apt 30, 2024  in BullAmerMeterologicalSoc

Abstract

During the second half of the twentieth century, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has undergone significant warming at more than twice the global mean and thus is regarded as one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth. However, a reversal of this trend was observed in the 1990s, resulting in regional cooling. In particular, during 1999–2018, the observed annual average surface air temperature had decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the strongest cooling in austral spring. The spring cooling correlates significantly with the second leading modes (EOF2) derived from empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis on the sea level pressure over Antarctica during 1999–2018, associated with the negative phase of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation with an average of cooling of central and eastern tropical Pacific surface sea temperature (SST) anomalies. The EOF2 results in the enhanced cold southerly winds on the continental WAIS through the cyclonic conditions over the Amundsen Sea region and a blocking high in the Drake Passage and northern Antarctic Peninsula, causing the WAIS cooling trend.

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better to know...?

The Earth Before Hydrocarbons

by B. Stewart, Apr 26, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

prehistoric earth life plants

The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. During the first four billion years, there were no hydrocarbons beneath the surface: no coal, no oil, no natural gas.

All the carbon atoms on Earth are in plants, animals, or the atmosphere. Yet the oceans did not boil. The Earth was not too hot for life. If it had been we would not be here.

The first lifeforms arose early in Earth’s existence.

The earliest fossils of microbes themselves, rather than just their byproducts, preserve the remains of what scientists think are sulfur-metabolizing bacteria. The fossils also come from Australia and date to about 3.4 billion years ago. (Wacey, D., Kilburn, M. R., Saunders, M., Cliff, J., and Brasier, M. D. (2011). Microfossils of sulfur-metabolizing cells in 3.4-billion-year-old rocks of Western Australia. Nature Geoscience, 4, 698-702. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1238.)

Bacteria are relatively complex, suggesting that life probably began a good deal earlier than 3.5 billion years ago.

However, the lack of earlier fossil evidence makes pinpointing the time of life’s origin difficult (if not impossible). (Hypotheses about the origins of life, Khan Academy.)

Organisms evolved that employ the process of photosynthesis. This plant life continues to consume carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce oxygen.

After a billion years or so, an atmosphere resembling that of the present day began to take shape. Earth’s present atmosphere is composed as follows:

It is important to note that in the above circle graphs, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon compose 99.964% of our atmosphere. The amount of CO2 is 0.04%.

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better to know...?

Australia’s Defence 1: Name Your Enemy

by D. Archibald, Apr 24, 2024 in PoliticalvsReality

The Defence Strategic Review released a year ago named global warming as a threat on page five but didn’t name China as a threat until page nine. There is only one threat we have to worry about and its name is China. China has been making plenty of threats for over 20 years now but these have been ignored because it would be inconvenient to take them seriously.

Actually, China’s threats started before WW2. They have been in abeyance until they had the resources to act on them. Figure 1 shows a map from a Nationalist primary school textbook in 1938, showing where they thought China’s borders should be:

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climate-debate

El Nino Fueled ‘Unprecedented’ West African Heatwave, Not Climate Change

by L. Lueken, Apr 19, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Multiple media outlets, including the BBC and Reuters, claim that a recent West African heatwave would be “impossible” without global warming. This claim is misleading and not supported by real-world data. [emphasis, links added]

The study cited in both articles is merely an attribution modeling study, which is not proof of the influence of climate change.

In their article on a recent heatwave in West Africa and the Sahel, Reuters reports“[t]emperatures soared so high in Mali and Burkina Faso they equated to a once in 200-year event, according to the report on the Sahel region by World Weather Attribution (WWA).”

Reuters continues: “The severity of the heatwave led WWA’s team of climate scientists to conduct a rapid analysis, which concluded the temperatures would not have been reached if industry had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels and other activities.”

One of World Weather Attribution’s statisticians even went so far as to say that heatwaves of that intensity wouldn’t happen at all in the region in a “preindustrial climate.”

This claim is utterly unfounded, as those parts of Africa are known for being at least semi-arid, subtropical, and prone to drought and heatwaves.

While temperature records are not very lengthy or complete for many parts of Africa, April is known to be the hottest month of the year for Burkina Faso in particular, and many parts of the Sahel region in general, where temperature maximums on average are above 40°C – which is what the recent heatwave brought, meaning there is no justification for claiming the recent heatwave is historically unprecedented.

Climate Realism has frequently noted that WWA’s “rapid attribution” studies are more in the realm of fantasy than fact, as they depend on virtual models of climate conditions that do not actually exist in real life.

The model of the climate that an event like the recent Sahel heatwave is compared to represents how scientists guess things would have been had it not been for the burning of fossil fuels.

During Burkina Faso’s dry season, fishermen abandon their canoes on site while waiting for the waters to arrive. Photo by YODA Adaman on Unsplash
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better to know...?

Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations (eCO2)

by CO2 Coalition, Apr 22, 2024

We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest research report Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations (eCO2).

Despite many years of claims that increasing concentrations of CO2 are an “existential threat” to life on Earth, one cannot identify any harm that has been done. In fact, the only clear result of increasing CO2 has been an overall greening of the Earth and increasing productivity of agricultural and forest crops.

The evidence for greening of the Earth from eCO2 is now too obvious to deny. In recent years, some researchers have claimed that that nutritional values are negatively affected by elevated CO2 concentrations. Media promoters of climate alarmism have seized on these results to further demonize CO2.

In this paper we explain why the nutritional value of our more abundant crops can and will remain high as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase toward values more representative of those existing throughout most of Earth’s history.

While this is a somewhat technical report, it is a valuable tool for you to put in your quiver to use the next time you see increased CO2 being linked to declining nutrition.

Read the full report here.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled

by F.B. Soepyan, Apr 22, 2024 in WUWT

NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?

“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”

In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.

For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.

Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.

In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Official Temperature Data Isn’t ‘Data’ At All

by H.S. Burnett, Apr 21, 2024 in WUWT

IN THIS ISSUE:

  • Official Temperature Data Isn’t ‘Data’ At All
  • Video of the Week: This is hilarious! Is there nothing that climate change can’t do?
  • Human Impact on the Carbon Cycle Is Minimal
  • Islands Still Growing in the Midst of Climate Change
  • Podcast of the Week: Save the Whales, Kill the Turbines – The Climate Realism Show #104
  • Climate Comedy
  • Recommended Sites
climate-debate

Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled

by F.B. Soepyan, Apr 19, 2024 in CO2Coalition

NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?

“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”

In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.

For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.

Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.

In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.

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climate-debate

Now You Sea Ice, Now You Don’t

by W. Eschenbach, Apr 20, 2024 in WUWT

I got to thinking about sea ice and the climate models. Here’s what we know about polar sea ice extent, showing data that starts with the satellite era when we began to have accurate observations of the poles.

Figure 1. Arctic, Antarctic, and global sea ice extent. Colored lines are CEEMD smooths of the underlying datasets.

Now, there are some rather large curiosities regarding the sea ice extent records.

  • The North Pole is a liquid ocean covered with sea ice, with most of the ice polewards of 70°N. The South Pole is a giant chunk of frozen rock surrounded by sea ice, with almost no ice polewards of 70°S. So why do both poles have about the same extent of sea ice?
  • From the start of the satellite era up until ~2015, Arctic sea ice extent was decreasing and Antarctic sea ice extent was increasing … and as a result, total global sea ice extent was relatively constant, with 2014 having about the same global sea ice extent as 1978. Why?
  • Around 2015, Antarctic sea ice extent started dropping rapidly … but Arctic sea ice stopped dropping and leveled off up to the present. Why?
  • After dropping precipitously for a couple of years, Antarctic sea ice extent leveled off again … and as a result, global ice extent also leveled off. Why?

Here’s the interesting part. Nobody knows the answers to any of those questions. And I suppose predictably, since they’re based on our (mis)understandings of the climate, none of the climate models either forecasts or hindcasts sea ice extent doing anything even remotely similar to the actual observations.

So I’ll leave this here as a testament to just how little we understand the magnificent global heat engine that we call the climate …

climate-debate

Net Zero CO2 Emissions: A Damaging and Totally Unnecessary Goal

by R. Spencer, Apr 18, 2024 in GlobalWarming

The goal of reaching “Net Zero” global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide sounds overwhelmingly difficult. While humanity continues producing CO2 at increasing rates (with a temporary pause during COVID), how can we ever reach the point where these emissions start to fall, let alone reach zero by 2050 or 2060?

What isn’t being discussed (as far as I can tell) is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels (which we will assume for the sake of discussion causes global warming) will start to fall even while humanity is producing lots of CO2.

Let me repeat that, in case you missed the point:

Atmospheric CO2 levels will start to fall even with modest reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Why is that? The reason is due to something called the CO2 “sink rate”. It has been observed that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more quickly nature removes the excess. The NASA studies showing “global greening” in satellite imagery since the 1980s is evidence of that.

Last year I published a paper showing that the record of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, HI suggests that each year nature removes an average of 2% of the atmospheric excess above 295 ppm (parts per million). The purpose of the paper was to not only show how well a simple CO2 budget model fits the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements, but also to demonstrate that the common assumption that nature is becoming less able to remove “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere appears to be an artifact of El Nino and La Nina activity since monitoring began in 1959. As a result, that 2% sink rate has remained remarkably constant over the last 60+ years. (By the way, the previously popular CO2 “airborne fraction” has huge problems as a meaningful statistic, and I wish it had never been invented. If you doubt this, just assume CO2 emissions are cut in half and see what the computed airborne fraction does. It’s meaningless.)

Here’s my latest model fit to the Mauna Loa record through 2023, where I have added a stratospheric aerosol term to account for the fact that major volcanic eruptions actually *reduce* atmospheric CO2 due to increased photosynthesis from diffuse sunlight penetrating deeper into vegetation canopies:

What Would a “Modest” 1% per Year Reduction in Global CO2 Emissions Do?

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climate-debate

They Never Used To Have Heatwaves in Mali!

by P. Homewood, Apr 18, 2024 in NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat

A deadly heatwave in West Africa and the Sahel was “impossible” without human-induced climate change, scientists say.

Temperatures soared above 48C in Mali last month with one hospital linking hundreds of deaths to the extreme heat.

Researchers say human activities like burning fossil fuels made temperatures up to 1.4C hotter than normal.

A number of countries in the Sahel region and across West Africa were hit by a strong heatwave that struck at the end of March and lasted into early April.

The heat was most strongly felt in the southern regions of Mali and Burkina Faso.

In Bamako, the capital of Mali, the Gabriel Toure Hospital said it recorded 102 deaths in the first days of April.

Around half the people who died were over 60 years of age, and the hospital said that heat played a role in many of these casualties.

Researchers believe that global climate change had a key role in this five-day heatwave.

A new analysis from scientists involved with the World Weather Attribution group suggests the high day time and night time temperatures would not have been possible without the world’s long term use of coal, oil and gas as well as other activities such as deforestation.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

L A Times Cherry Picks & Misrepresents NOAA Climate Data to Exaggerate March 2024 U.S. and Global Temperature Outcomes

by L. Hamlin, Apr 19, 2024 in WUWT

The L A Times article and headline shown below exaggerate the March 2024 U.S. and global temperature outcomes by cherry picking and misrepresenting data that mischaracterizes what the data actually shows.

 

The Times article makes the following claims regarding the U.S. for the period January through March 2024:

“In the United States, March was the 17th warmest in the 130-year data record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. was 45.1 degrees — 3.6 degrees above average.”

The Times article does not present readily available NOAA measured  Maximum Contiguous U.S Temperature for the month of March from 1895 through 2024 as shown below.

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climate-debate

Reliable Physics Demand Revision of the IPCC Global Warming Potentials

by D. Lightfoot and G. Ratzer, Apr 15, 2024 in J.BasicAppliedSciences

Abstract

The Global Warming Potentials (GWP) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Table 2.14 of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) show the increase in warming by methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) is 21 and 310 times respectively that of CO2. There has been wide acceptance of these values since publishing in 2007. Nevertheless, they are inaccurate. This study uses accurate methods to calculate the impacts of CO2, CH4, and N2O on the warming of the atmosphere. For example, this quantitative analysis from reliable physics shows the contribution of CO2 to warming at Amsterdam is 0.0083oC out of a difference of 26oC. The warming effect of CH4 on the Earth’s atmosphere is 0.408% of that of CO2, and the warming by N2O is 0.085% of that of CO2. Thus, the warming effects of CO2, CH4, and N2O are too small to measure. The invalidity of the methane and nitrous oxide values indicates the GWPs of the remaining approximately sixty chemicals in the Table 2.14 list are also invalid. A recommendation is that the IPCC consider revising or retracting the GWP values in Table 2.14.

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climate-debate

Meteorologist: Climate Change Not Increasing Hurricanes, Wildfires, Or Migration

by A. Watts, Apr 18, 2024 in WUWT

An article by the website ProPublica titled The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What” linked to Hurricane Katrina, storm refugees, and climate change, claiming that the storm was evidence of the beginning of a “climate migration” in America. [emphasis, links added]

The connection is false. Data refutes a climate connection to any particular hurricane or trend in migration.

The article does a lot of rambling coverage of a family that was displaced by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, saying:

Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.

The article goes on to follow the trials and tribulations of a single family who had their home destroyed during Hurricane Katrina.

ProPublica believes this case is evidence of climate change causing a “migration,” because the family has not moved back to the same location.

The article itself cites no data or study to support its claim about Hurricane Katrina. Rather, it simply states the author’s opinions as if they were established facts.

Later the article similarly describes families displaced by the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., as climate refugees, writing:

As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice.

First, it should be noted that weather events such as hurricanes are not proof of climate change, and ProPublica is falsely conflating short-term weather events with long-term climate change.

Further, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits to finding no increase in the long-term frequency or severity of hurricanes.

Also, after Katrina, the United States went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike and recently experienced its fewest total hurricanes in any eight-year period.

There has been no increase in the number or intensity of tropical cyclones since 1972 as the planet has modestly warmed. Indeed, for some basins, the data suggests tropical cyclone frequency has declined over the past century.

Data presented in more than 100 previous Climate Realism posts here, here, here, and here, for example, clearly show that hurricane trends have been relatively flat over the past 50 years of modest warming, and the trend in powerful Atlantic hurricanes is downward (see the figures below).

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better to know...?

New Report: Globally, Hurricanes Not Getting Worse Or More Frequent

by Dr. P. Peiser, Apr 17, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has today published its periodic review of global hurricane activity. [emphasis, links added]

The author, climate researcher Paul Homewood, says that official data is absolutely clear: hurricanes are neither increasing in number nor intensity.

Click to enlarge

Homewood says:

“The observational data published by meteorological agencies in 2023 has confirmed once again that there are no upward trends in global hurricane activity since reliable records began in the 1970s.”

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climate-debate

Net Isotopic Signature of Atmospheric CO2 Sources and Sinks: No Change since the Little Ice Age

by D. Koutsoyiannis, March 14, 2024 in MDPI – (Open Access)

Abstract

Recent studies have provided evidence, based on analyses of instrumental measurements of the last seven decades, for a unidirectional, potentially causal link between temperature as the cause and carbon dioxide concentration ([CO2]) as the effect. In the most recent study, this finding was supported by analysing the carbon cycle and showing that the natural [CO2] changes due to temperature rise are far larger (by a factor > 3) than human emissions, while the latter are no larger than 4% of the total. Here, we provide additional support for these findings by examining the signatures of the stable carbon isotopes, 12 and 13. Examining isotopic data in four important observation sites, we show that the standard metric δ13C is consistent with an input isotopic signature that is stable over the entire period of observations (>40 years), i.e., not affected by increases in human CO2 emissions. In addition, proxy data covering the period after 1500 AD also show stable behaviour. These findings confirm the major role of the biosphere in the carbon cycle and a non-discernible signature of humans.
Australia, better to know...?

BBC’s Coral Propaganda

by P. Homewood, Apr 16, 2024 in NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat

The BBC is corrupt, and this report is fraudulent:

It has triggered the fourth global mass coral bleaching event, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Bleaching happens when coral gets stressed and turns white because the water it lives in is too hot.

Coral sustains ocean life, fishing, and creates trillions of dollars of revenue annually.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68814016

For a start, there has been no “devastating toll”, as the BBC pretends, from the possibility that the world is slightly warmer than a few years ago. (Given margins of error, there is no certainty about this.)

But more importantly, Rannard grossly misrepresents the science. Coral does not “turn white” because the water is too hot. Nor is this is a rare occurrence, as the “fourth global mass coral bleaching event” implies.

On the contrary, bleaching is a common event, which can take place for all sorts of reasons, including when the water gets too cold.

As the leading coral reef expert Dr Peter Ridd has explained, “bleaching” is merely part of a natural process, when coral expels algae in order to switch to a different type which is more suitable adapted to new conditions.

According to Ridd, coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef last year reached record levels, despite four supposedly catastrophic bleaching events in the six years prior to 2022. Neither has there been any significant change in corals worldwide.

Rannard’s article has nothing to do with science; it is just more scaremongering propaganda.

This interview with Peter Ridd which followed his annual review on corals last year is worth watching:

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climate-debate

Antarctica Is Colder, Icier Now Than Any Time In 5000 Years. The Last Warm Period Was 1000 Years Ago.

by K. Richard, Apr 15, 2024 in NoTricksZone

More evidence emerges that Antarctica has undergone rapid glacier and sea ice expansion in recent centuries, in line with the long-term and recent Antarctic cooling trend.

West Antarctica’s mean annual surface temperatures cooled by more than -1.8°C (-0.93°C per decade) from 1999-2018 (Zhang et al., 2023).

Not just West Antarctica, but most of the continent also has cooled by more than 1°C in the 21st century. See, for example, the ~1°C per decade cooling trend for East Antarctica (2000 to 2018) shown in Fig. ES

…

 

According to a new study, about 6000 years ago Antarctica’s Collins Glacier’s frontline was a full 1 km southwest of its current extent. The frontline advanced to today’s extent ~5000 years ago.

“Previous studies proposed that 6000 yr BP, the frontline position of the Collins Glacier was located 1 km further south west than the present, and that the current frontline was first attained at approximately 5000 yr BP.”

The glacier then continuously retreated south of the modern extent for another 4000 years, with peak ice loss 1000 years ago (as shown in the 1000-year “Proglacial lake environment” image). In the last 1000 years this glacier has rapidly re-advanced back to the glaciated extent from 5000 years ago, which is in line with the sustained cooling trend ongoing since the Medieval Warm Period.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

What Heatwave?

by P. Homewood, Apr 14, 2024 in NotaLotOfPeopleKnowThat

I hope you did not blink, otherwise you may have missed it!

Brits are set to bask in a ’72 hour’ heatwave, according to some forecasters, but not everyone will be feeling the heat as two parts of England are expected to miss out on the sizzling temperatures.

Weather maps reveal that while many will enjoy a mini April heatwave, some will still face April showers. According to WX Charts, which uses Met Desk data for its predictions, temperatures could soar to a balmy 21C at times this month.

The charts indicate that Londoners can expect to enjoy highs of 20C from today until Saturday, with East Anglia and the East Midlands not far behind at 19C. Cities like Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, and Sheffield are also set to experience a warm 18C.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/72-hour-heatwave-hit-parts-28989573

Sure enough temperatures reached 21C in Essex, but I don’t know anyone who would actually describe this as a heatwave:

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unclassified

Man Made Global Warming

by P. Homewood, Apr 14, 2024 in NotaLotOfPeopleKnowThat

image

http://web.archive.org/web/20130927101652/https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/q/0/Paper2_recent_pause_in_global_warming.PDF

Once upon a time there was The Pause.

For a decade and a half, global temperatures stopped rising, an embarrassment for climate scientists. Even the Met Office published a long study in 2013 into the possible reasons.

But while one team at the Met Office were scratching their heads, another was busy at work eliminating the problem.

After all, if the data does not support the theory, you simply change the data.

The Met Office’s Hadley Centre, in conjunction with the disgraced Climate Research Unit at the UEA, had for years published their global temperature series known as HADCRUT3. They regarded it as the gold standard of datasets.

But just a year after the Met Office’s paper on the pause, a new version was rushed out, HADCRUT4, which conveniently removed that pause.

By 2014, when HADCRUT3 was formally replaced, the new version had added about a tenth of a degree to warming since 2000.

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unclassified

Professor Valentina Zharkova and the Little Ice Age Which Has Already Started

by V. Zharkova, Apr 11, 2024 in FreedomResearch

Astrophysicist Professor Valentina Zharkova explains that instead of CO2, it is the Sun that drives the climate change and because of its decreasing activity we should be ready for a colder period.

“CO2 is not a bad gas,” says Valentina Zharkova, a professor at the Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. On the contrary, she points out, every garden centre uses it in its greenhouses to make plants lush and green. “We actually have a CO2 deficit in the world, and it’s three to four times less than the plants would like,” she notes, adding that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has been at much higher levels throughout our planet’s history than it is now.

In fact, over the last 140 million years, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been steadily decreasing and only now slightly starting to rise. It is currently around 420 parts per million (ppm), or 0.042%. 140 million years ago, it was estimated at 2,500 ppm (0.25%), or about six times higher. And it also meant a greener and more biodiverse world. If CO2 were to fall below 150 ppm (0.015%), it would already mean the extinction of vegetation and all other life. We came close to that during the last glacial maximum when it was at 182 ppm (0.018%).

Zharkova says that the fact that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now increasing is a good thing. “We don’t need to remove CO2 because we would actually need more of it. It’s food for plants to produce oxygen for us. The people who say CO2 is bad are obviously not very well educated at university or wherever they studied. Only uneducated people can come up with such absurd talk that CO2 should be removed from the air,” says Zharkova.

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