by K. Richard, July 8, 2021 in NoTricksZone
There has been no net warming in the Rocky Mountains in the last 500 years.
The southern Rocky Mountains were as warm or warmer than recent decades during the 1600s and 1700s and they have been cooling since the 1950s (Berkelhammer and Stott, 2012, Heeter et al., 2020).
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by P. Gosselin, July 10, 2021 in NoTricksZone
Good news: a warmer, likely tamer climate, is in the future recent science shows. A new study projects no future increase in tropical storm energy.
Lots of government-funded climate scientists like claiming tropical cyclones are getting worse and that in the future we need to expect one supercharged storm after another – due to man heating the climate with carbon dioxide emissions.
But as we noted yesterday here, Zoe Phin found that hurricanes have not gone along with this dubious doomsday science over the past 25 years. Now a new study confirms things will continue that way.
Today German site Die kalte Sonne (DkS) presents its 49th video on climate and energy, featuring tropical storm energy.
Present vs future scenario
In the segment, DkS cites a new study appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters, where a team of scientists led by Philip Kreussler used three different global climate models to investigate tropical cyclone integrated kinetic energy which is closely associated with their damage potential.
No notable changes
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by P. Gosselin & Kirye, July 6, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Before we begin, Dr. Roy Spencer just published that Version 6 of the University of Alabama-Huntsville satellite-based global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June 2021 was -0.01 deg. C, down from the May 2021 value of +0.08 deg. C.
As Dr. Spencer’s chart above shows, temperatures are back within the range seen 20 years ago. The hiatus in global temperature rise appears to have resumed.
June cooling in Tokyo
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Source: JMA
Read more at No Tricks Zone
by K. Taylor, July 6, 2021 in Euractiv
Little progress has been made to modernise a controversial agreement on energy investments that activists warn could derail decarbonisation efforts in Europe and across the globe, according to leaked documents.
The fifth round of negotiations on reforming the Energy Charter Treaty – an international agreement that allows energy companies to sue governments for decisions impacting their investments – took place in early June.
But attempts by the European Commission to bring the treaty in line with international climate goals have so far fallen flat, according to two leaked diplomatic cables.
“The atmosphere was constructive, but progress was limited, especially on energy issues,” reads one of the leaked diplomatic cables, which was written after a meeting the EU Council’s Working Party on Energy, where the European Commission recently gave EU countries an overview of progress made in the negotiations.
“No substantial progress was made on the definition of economic activity in the energy sector,” the cable says, referring to a section listing which types of energy infrastructure are protected under the treaty.
At the moment, that definition includes almost all energy sources, from coal to renewables. The European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of the 27 EU member states, has proposed gradually reducing protection for fossil fuel investments but has seen little support from other treaty signatories.
Unanimity is required to modify the treaty, whose 54 members include countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which are heavily reliant on fossil fuel export revenues and have little incentive to reform.
A sixth round of negotiations to reform the Energy Charter Treaty is opening on Tuesday (6 July) by which point the European Commission hopes to have rallied more support from non-EU states, like the UK and Balkan countries.
However, support for the EU’s reform plan was close to non-existent in the last negotiation round, where only six signatories even expressed views on the Commission’s proposal.
Kazakhstan was the only country to express an official position on the EU proposal and it “openly rejected” it, the documents show.
“After two hours of negotiations, it was clear that the EU proposal did not have enough support. None of the larger contracting parties was prepared to support the EU proposal in its current form. It would be necessary to examine where the EU’s flexibility could lie,” one of the leaked cables says.
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by A. May, July 8, 2021 in WUWT
In Part 1, we introduced the concepts of climate sensitivity to CO2, often called ECS or TCR. The IPCC prefers a TCR of about 1.8°C/2xCO2 (IPCC, 2013, p. 818). TCR is the short-term, century scale, response of surface temperature to a doubling of CO2, we abbreviate the units as “°C/2xCO2.” In these posts we review lower estimates of climate sensitivity, estimates below 1°C/2xCO2. In parallel, we also review estimates of the surface air temperature sensitivity (SATS) to radiative forcing (RF, the units are °C per W/m2 or Watts per square meter). The IPCC estimates this value to be ~0.49°C per W/m2.
The previous post discussed two modern climate sensitivity estimates, by Richard Lindzen and Willie Soon, that range below 1°C/2xCO2. Next, we review climate sensitivity estimates by Sherwood Idso, Reginald Newell and their colleagues.
Many comments to part 1 tried to discredit the “ECS” or “TCR” estimates made by Lindzen and Soon, completely missing their point and my point. ECS and TCR are artificial climate model constructs, with little meaning outside the confines of computer modeling. TCR is a little more realistic since we might be able to observe or measure something close to it over the next century. But ECS, or the “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” is a totally abstract and unworldly number that could never be measured. It means if CO2 doubled suddenly, and nothing else changed for several hundred years while the oceans came into equilibrium with the new surface air temperature, what would the final surface temperature be? Air temperature would never be close to equilibrium for several hundred years, even 70 to 100 years (TCR) is a stretch.
Climate models are not the real world and the numbers that come out of them, like ECS or TCR, can be useful for showing the likely direction of temperature movement in response to changes in parameters or different model scenarios, but the numbers themselves are meaningless unless the models have previously been validated against the real world. With the possible exception of the Russian INM-CM4 model, no other IPCC model has successfully predicted future global surface temperatures. Ron Clutz discusses INM-CM4 here.
E. Worrall, July 8, 2021 in WUWT
According to the big computer we are doomed to suffer ever more damaging weather extremes. But researchers can’t tell us exactly why, because their black box neural net won’t explain its prediction.
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As an IT expert who has built commercial AI systems, I find it incredible that the researchers seem so naive as to think their AI machine output has value, without corroborating evidence. They admit they are going to try to understand how their AI works – but in my opinion they have jumped the gun, making big claims on the basis of a black box result.
Consider the following;
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by R. Alexander, June 28, 2021 in ScienceUnderAttack
In the news recently have been two revelations about the sometimes controversial world of coral reef research. The first is fraud allegations against research claiming that ocean acidification from global warming impairs the behavior of coral reef fish. The second is an about-face on inflated estimates for the extinction risk of Pacific Ocean coral species due to climate change.
The alleged fraud involves 22 research papers authored by Philip Munday, a marine ecologist at JCU (James Cook University) in Townsville, Australia and Danielle Dixson, a U.S. biologist who completed her PhD under Munday’s supervision in 2012. The fraud charges were made in August 2020 by three of an international group of mostly biological and environmental scientists, plus the group leader, fish physiologist Timothy Clark of Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. The Clark group says it will publicize the alleged data problems shortly.
The research in question studied the behavior of coral reef fish in slightly acidified seawater, in order to simulate the effect of ocean acidification caused by the absorption of up to 30% of humanity’s CO2 emissions. The additional CO2 has so far lowered the average pH – a measure of acidity – of ocean surface water from about 8.2 to 8.1 since industrialization began in the 18th century.
Munday and Dixson claim that the extra CO2 causes reef fish to be attracted by chemical cues from predators, instead of avoiding them; to become hyperactive and disoriented; and to suffer loss of vision and hearing. But Clark and his fellow scientists, in their own paper published in January 2020, debunk all of these conclusions. Most damningly of all, the researchers find that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behavior of coral reef fish are not reproducible – the basis for their fraud allegations against the JCU work.
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by K. Richard , July 5, 2021 in NoTricksZone
China’s climate history includes multiple climate warming and cooling fluctuations of 4°C within centuries, with cold periods aligning with declines in solar irradiance.
According to a new study (Zhang et al., 2021), northern China’s coldest temperatures of the last 5000 years occurred 300 calibrated years before present (cal yr BP), coinciding with the Little Ice Age and a decrease in solar irradiance. This frigid period was was followed by a ~4°C warm-up (from about 3.5°C to 7.5°C) within the span of about 150 years during the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE), which was well before anthropogenic CO2 emissions began sharply rising.
The warmest temperatures of the last millennium occurred during the Medieval Warm Period (Song Dynasty, 960-1279 CE).
Rapid cooling periods of multiple degrees per century also coincided with the collapse of ancient civilizations, or dynasties, as wars and social unrest were often associated with competition for access to natural resources (such as water during droughts).
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by C. Rotter, July 6, 2021 in WUWT
Reposted from The Cliff Mass Weather Blog
During the past week, the Pacific Northwest experienced the most severe heat event of the past century.
All-time high-temperature records were broken throughout the region, often by large margins. Many in the media, several local and national politicians, and some activist environmental scientists have claimed that this event was “driven by” or predominantly forced by human-inspired global warming (usually referred to as “climate change”).But such global warming claims are not supported by the facts and our best scientific understanding.
Truth and Rigorous Science About Climate Change is Necessary for Wise Decisions
In this blog, I will use observations, modeling, climatological data, and the peer-reviewed scientific literature to demonstrate that human-caused global warming played a very small role in the extreme heat event that we just experienced here in the Pacific Northwest.I will describe the origins of a meteorological black swan eventand how the atmosphere is capable of attaining extreme, unusual conditions without any aid from our species.As you read this, consider that I have actively pursued research on Northwest heatwaves, published several papers in the peer-reviewed literature on this specific topic, and have run both weather prediction and climate models that simulate such events. This subject is in my wheelhouse.I also discuss the seriousness of misinformation. You and others can not make wise decisions when the information provided to you is not based on truth and science.
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Cap Allon, July 1, 2021 in Electroverse
NASA satellites have revealed that the mesosphere –the layer of the atmosphere some 30-50 miles above our heads– is COOLING and contracting.
Using decades of data and a number of satallites, a team at NASA have identified a cooling mesosphere.
“We had to put together three satellites’ worth of data,” said Scott Bailey, atmospheric scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, head of the new research, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.
“You need several decades to get a handle on these trends and isolate what’s happening,” continued Bailey, who goes on to blame the usual “greenhouse gas emissions” for the observed changes –well how else would they have obtained funding– however, Bailey also mentions “solar cycle changes, and other effects”.
Together, the satellites provided about 30 years of observations, indicating that the summer mesosphere over Earth’s poles is cooling four to five degrees Fahrenheit and contracting 500 to 650 feet per decade.
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by A. Flis, July 4, 2021 in SevereWeatherEurope
Winter in the Southern Hemisphere has brought an unusual cold weather outbreak from Antarctica into South America. Low-temperature records were broken, with snowfall returning to parts of south Brazil after decades.
The source of the cold air was Antarctica, which is quite colder than normal this season. As you will also see, the Southern Hemisphere is also colder than normal, bringing down the 2021 global temperatures to the lowest in the past 6 years. All that, while record heatwaves are raging across the United States and Canada.
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by Cap Allon, June 30, 2021 in Elecroverse
Record heat has been felt across the the Pacific Northwest this week, which has led the MSM and their placard-brandishing, sandal wearing EOTW groupies to draw the connection to ‘global warming’ aka ‘the climate crisis’ aka ‘terrifying terra firma broiling’.
However, AccuWeather Meteorologist Joe Lundberg is on the record as saying that AGW isn’t to blame here.
Risking a backlash from his bosses, and from those faceless elites on high, Lundberg very reasonably states: “I just think that right now we’re seeing a very unusual pattern across most of the northern hemisphere where there’s a lot of extremes.”
Lunberg sees erratic jet streams as the main culprit here, which, as Electroverse has been saying for years, are weakening due to historically low solar activity — and while Lunberg doesn’t touch on solar output, he does reference a “big upper level trough that’s in the Aleutians”.
Right now, weather patterns across the country are very unusual, explains Lundberg: “Downstream, there’s a massive upper level ridge that’s in the Northwest, that’s why they’re seeing the record heat there.
“And then downstream along the eastern seaboard, we’re also seeing another upper level ridge.
“But not everyone’s getting this heat,” adds Lundberg — far from it, “across the deep south, for example, it’s actually cooler than average and looks like its gonna stay that way for the foreseeable future.”
Latest GFS runs see temperature departures some 16-20C below the seasonal average across vast regions, particularly in New Mexico:
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by C. Monckton of Brenchley, July 3, 2021 in WUWT
The latest UAH temperature anomalies show that the New Pause has lengthened by another two months to 6 years 10 months. As usual, the Pause is defined as the longest period, up to the most recent month for which data are available, during which the linear-regression trend on the monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies shows no increase.
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Pauses have no predictive purpose. Just because there has been no global warming for more than seven years (HadCRUT4) or almost seven years (UAH), that does not mean there will be no global warming in future.
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by A. Watts, July 1, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The headline in E&E News, WOWT-TV, Scientific American, WorldNewsNetwork, and other media outlets this week, “Unprecedented Heat Wave in Pacific Northwest Driven by Climate Change” couldn’t possibly be more unscientific.
With absolutely no analysis, no historical context, and nothing but conjecture, author Anne. C. Mulkern eschewed science for advocacy in her reporting of the brief Pacific Northwest (PNW) heatwave this week.
Yes, the heatwave set all-time high-temperature records in Washington, Oregon, and Canada. But consider this: At best, we have about 150 years of reliable weather records for the PNW, so a “black swan” outlier eventlike this isn’t surprising.
It’s happened before, most certainly. We just weren’t around to observe it. After all, Native Americans did not keep written weather records.
High- (and low-) temperature records are nothing new. But it is important to look at the past because data shows us that more high-temperature records were set during the first half of the twentieth century than during the past 50 years.
Even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirms this.
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by Cap Allon, July 2, 2021 in Elecrroverse
Santa Catarina recorded snowfall in Urupema and Sao Joaquim on Wednesday — the third consecutive day of the rare phenomenon, which also included unusually chilly sub-zero temperatures.
Santa Catarina is the southernmost state of Brazil.
Temperatures across the state have plunged to a record-challenging -7.5C (18.5F), and beyond, this week, and heavy snow has been registered.
According to the Information Center of Environmental Resources and Hydrometeorology of Santa Catarina (Epagri / Ciram), this is the first year since 2000 that snow has been recorded on three consecutive days.
As reported by riotimesonline.com, plunging temperatures and favorable humidity levels have brought substantial accumulations of snow to the towns and cities located in and around the Santa Catarina Mountains
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by J. Ambrose, One 30, 2021 in TheGuradian
Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.
The investments in one of the most environmentally damaging sources of energy could generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy – enough to power the UK more than three times over – despite calls from climate experts at the UN for all new coal plants to be cancelled.
Catharina Hillenbrand von der Neyen, the author of the report, said: “These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets. Investors should steer clear of new coal projects, many of which are likely to generate negative returns from the outset.”
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by R. Hannon, July 2, 2021 in WUWT
Introduction
This post compares CO2 ice core measurements from Greenland to those from Antarctica over the last millennium. Paleoclimate studies typically use only Antarctic ice cores to evaluate past CO2 fluctuations. This is because the entire Greenland CO2 datasets were deemed unreliable due to chemical reactions with impurities in the ice and therefore have not been used in studies since the late 1990’s. This post will demonstrate that CO2 data from Greenland ice cores have scientific value and respond to key paleoclimate events such as the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period.Antarctic Ice Core CO2 Trends
Antarctic ice CO2 data is readily available and has been studied extensively (Bauska, 2015, Ahn, 2012, Siegenthaler, 2005 and Rubino, 2019). Most of the focus of recent studies has been on high snow accumulation sites which tend to have higher resolution and less smoothing of the trapped gas age in ice bubbles due to the firn to ice transition. Gas age width and resolution ranges from 10 years in Law Dome ice cores to 65 years in Dronning Maud Land DML. Figure 1 shows CO2 data from Antarctic high-resolution ice cores over the past millennium.Ahn et al, 2012, compiled CO2 records from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and compared them to other key datasets such as Dronning Maud Land (DML), and Law Dome. Their study recognizes and discusses elevated CO2 during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at 1000 AD, decrease of CO2 around 1600 AD during the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the subsequent rapid increase beginning around 1850 AD.
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by Roy Spencer, July 3, 2021 in WUWT
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June, 2021 was -0.01 deg. C, down from the May, 2021 value of +0.08 deg. C.
REMINDER: We have changed the 30-year averaging period from which we compute anomalies to 1991-2020, from the old period 1981-2010. This change does not affect the temperature trends.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
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by P. Homewood, June 13, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
It’s not new, but it’s worth going over it again.
We have seen how Greenland temperatures rose sharply in the 1920s, and remained at levels similar to the last decade until the 1960s, when they fell equally sharply. This change in climate is closely interlinked with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which switches from cold to warm phase, and back again, roughly every 50 to 60 years:
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by P. Gosselin, June 8, 2021 in NoTricksZone
The US government deletes more than 50 years of early data on forest fires in order to make it look like forest fires are more widespread, and linked to CO2. Should be Investigated under the RICO Act.
There’s a reason why Smokey the Bear has been around more than 75 years with his message. “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The US government had known for decades that forest fires were a serious problem – much more serious than today.
They have forest fire data going back over 100 years. But suddenly, since January of this year, the US government is acting like there had never been a Smokey the Bear before 1983 and that forest fires are just a recent problem caused by manmade climate change.
It’s all a fraud, explains data analyst and software expert Tony Heller in his latest video.
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by R. Spencer, June 1st, 2021 in GlobalWarming
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for May, 2021 was +0.08 deg. C, up from the April, 2021 value of -0.05 deg. C.
REMINDER: We have changed the 30-year averaging period from which we compute anomalies to 1991-2020, from the old period 1981-2010. This change does not affect the temperature trends.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
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by OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, June 6, 2021 in WUWT
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A study of two methods for reconstructing ancient temperatures has given climate researchers a better understanding of just how cold it was in Antarctica during the last ice age around 20,000 years ago.
Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth today, was even colder during the last ice age. For decades, the leading science suggested ice age temperatures in Antarctica were on average about 9 degrees Celsius cooler than at present.
An international team of scientists, led by Oregon State University’s Christo Buizert, has found that while parts of Antarctica were as cold as 10 degrees below current temperatures, temperatures over central East Antarctica were only 4 to 5 degrees cooler, about half of the previous estimates.
The findings were published this week in Science.
“This is the first conclusive and consistent answer we have for all of Antarctica,” said Buizert, an Oregon State University climate change specialist. “The surprising finding is that the amount of cooling is very different depending on where you are in Antarctica. This pattern of cooling is likely due to changes in the ice sheet elevation that happened between the ice age and today.”
Understanding the planet’s temperature during the last ice age is critical to understanding the transition from a cold to a warm climate and to modeling what might occur as the planet warms as a result of climate change today, said Ed Brook, a paleoclimatologist at OSU and one of the paper’s co-authors.
by Ians, June 5, 2021 in Energyworld
Coal producers are actively pursuing 2.2 billion tonnes per annum of new mine projects around the world, a growth of 30 per cent from current production levels, a new report from Global Energy Monitor said on Thursday.
The first-of-its-kind analysis surveyed 432 proposed coal projects globally and found a handful of provinces and states in China, Russia, India, and Australia are responsible for 77 per cent (1.7 billion tonnes per annum) of new mine activity. If developed, these proposed projects boost supply to over four times the 1.5 degrees Celsius-compliant pathway necessary to meet the goal of the Paris climate agreement.
While three-fourths (1.6 billion tonnes per annum) of proposed coal mine capacity is in the early stages of planning and thus vulnerable to cancellation, the report finds one quarter (0.6 billion tonnes per annum) of proposed mine capacity is already under construction. The prospect of a low-carbon transition and tighter emission policies put these projects at risk of becoming up to $91 billion in stranded assets.
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by C. Spencer, June 7, 2021 in WUWT
The increase in 12C in the atmosphere is, in my opinion, weak evidence that the annual increases are driven only by fossil fuel sources. The atmosphere can’t tell ‘anthropogenic’ carbon dioxide from natural carbon dioxide. It seems unlikely that a source that represents only about 4% of the total flux is going to drive the system. The oceans sequester the vast majority of the carbon. One would expect that warming oceans (from whatever forcing) would increase the rate of out-gassing in mid-latitudes, and decrease the rate of extraction at high-latitudes. It seems more reasonable to me that, in a world with warming oceans, there would be a shift in the relative amounts of carbon in the oceans and the atmosphere. That would be the case even in the absence of any anthropogenic carbon.
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by M. Hulme, June 2021 in IssuesinSci&Techn
Michael Mann has been in the climate wars for well over a decade now. As he reminds us frequently in this new book, he has been in the crosshairs of his enemies, has fought off the attack dogs, and carries the scars of battle. Even the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s promotional puff for the book valorizes Mann in terms of his “scars from the climate wars.” The military framing of climate change long predates Mann’s involvement, but it certainly is a framing he has done much to promote through his blogs, tweets, and general persona-at-large in public discourse.
And so it is not surprising that Mann’s new book continues his characterization of the politics of climate change through a series of complex military tropes and metaphors. Wars, battles, attacks, fights, and enemies litter its 260 pages. Much of what I said about Mann’s combative militancy in my review of his 2012 book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, can be equally applied to this new one. Now, his central argument is that there is a new war afoot. The old war—fought mostly around the claims of climate scientists—has been (largely) won. But a new war has been ignited; Mann and his allies are now having to fight against the forces of inaction.
Mann is half right in his diagnosis. The main axes of public dispute and argumentation about climate change have changed. The politics of climate change manifest differently now than they did a decade ago. More centrally in focus—and this is a good thing—are the substantive and pressing questions about the sorts of actions, policies, and interventions that are needed, appropriate, and effective to attenuate the risks of a changing climate. What are their respective costs and benefits? How do different options interact with diverse cultural values and collide with vested interests? How do they complicate international geopolitics?
So in this observation Mann is correct. The focus of the issue has moved from “is there a problem?” to “what should be done about it?”
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