Possible mechanism of abrupt jump in winter surface air temperature in the late 1980s over the Northern Hemisphere

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Then there was the ‘climate shift’ of 76/77 which seems to be about one solar cycle’s worth of years earlier than the one featured in Paul Homewood’s post (below).

LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY – The 76/77 climate shift
http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/climate_shift.shtml

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JD023864/pdf

I have often alluded to an apparent shift change in UK temperatures in the late 1980s, something which also seems to have happened in other parts of NW Europe.

It was with interest then that my attention was drawn to the above paper, which found the same phenomena in winter temperatures, not only in the UK, but also all over the Northern Hemisphere and attempted to explain it.

Here is the Abstract:

The authors point out that many other studies have found the same abrupt winter climate change, and have all offered various theories.

The study uses examples at Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing to highlight the size of this shift:

And comments:

We can do the same analysis for the UK, where the shift seems to have occurred around 1988. The mean for 1988 to 2016 is almost a full degree higher than the 1955 to…

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Recent Italian earthquakes may be showing a ‘domino effect’, seismologist warns

Italian earthquake series continues [image credit: Fox News]

The latest Italian earthquake fortunately seems to have killed no-one but at magnitude 6.6 was a strong one. In Rome ‘The metro was halted for hours and the Colosseum was being checked for damage.’

What next? The Daily Telegraph consults an expert.

The earthquakes that have buffeted central Italy over the last two months could continue in a devastating domino effect with one large quake leading to another along the central Apennine fault system, a leading seismologist has warned.

The latest earthquake on Sunday morning caused no known casualties but was the strongest to hit Italy, one of the world’s most seismically active countries, since 1980.

Super-efficient Israeli engine bids to power car revolution

Gal Fridman, co-founder of Aquarius Engines, with the firm’s single-piston car engine [image credit: phys.org / Aquarius]

Too good to be true? If not, what might the future hold for this innovation? Phys.org takes a look.

An Israeli firm says a super-efficient engine it has created could drastically reduce fuel consumption and help power an auto industry revolution as manufacturers search for environmentally sound alternatives.

Industry analysts, however, question the reinvented internal combustion engine’s chances of success at a time when purely electric car technology is advancing and attracting investors.

The invention from Israeli-based Aquarius Engines is currently being discussed by France’s Peugeot, the firm said.

Young stellar system caught in act of forming close multiples

The three star system, with two young stars closer together and one further out.
[credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)]

ScienceDaily reports an unusual (to date) set-up involving three stars with a clear relationship in their average distances from each other. Quote: ‘The most central of the young stars is separated from the other two by 61 and 183 times the Earth-Sun distance’. The ratio of 61:183 is 1:3

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system.

Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the process in action.

Litigators Set to Recover $Millions in Blackout Losses Caused by SA’s Wind Power Shutdown

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Stopthesethings provides the lawyers chasing wind operators in South Australia for blackout compensation with plenty of ideas on how to press their arguments.

STOP THESE THINGS

South Australia’s ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes hit a ‘black spot’ on 28 September this year, when – yet another – totally unpredictable collapse in wind power output plunged the entire state into Stone Age darkness: ‘GUILTY’: South Australia’s Statewide Blackout Caused by Deliberate Wind Farm Shutdown

Many parts of the State remained without power for days and thousands of businesses together suffered multi-$million losses. The biggest of those losses were suffered by Nyrstar’s lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie, BHP Billiton’s gold, copper and uranium mine at Olympic Dam, Oz Mineral’s Prominent Hill copper and goldmine and Arrium’s steel works at Whyalla: collectively, the losses suffered by SA’s miners and mineral processors are in the tens of $millions.

With litigators breathing down their necks, nervous wind power outfits are running confused and desperate interference over the (now, well-known) cause.

The latest wheeze is that the…

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Conflicts Of Interest At The Committee On Climate Change

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How obvious does it have to be before people realize they’re being taken for a massively expensive ride by the Greenblob, hiding behind their figleaf of ‘climate change’?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dennis Ambler

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2523726/Web-green-politicians-tycoons-power-brokers-help-benefit-billions-raised-bills.html

The Mail’s story, about how the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy cheated to claim govt grants, recalls another investigation by David Rose three years ago:

Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…

The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.

Vested interest: Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer) is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change

Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:

• Four of the nine-person Committee on Climate Change, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until…

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Heathrow or Gatwick: Runway decision tomorrow

Heathrow expects… [credit: your.heathrow.com]

One thing’s for sure – they won’t be adopting the Guardian’s solution of no more runways ever. When one battle ends another will start, as ITV News reports.

The Government will tomorrow make a decision on where a new runway for the south should be built and Heathrow is expected to be the winner.

But it is expected that Gatwick could also be allowed to expand at a later date. The decision will then be subject to consultation ahead of a vote by MP’s in early 2018.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)

. . . my work, which I’ve done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Letter of June 12, 1716

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Antony van Leeuwenhoek was an unlikely scientist. A tradesman of Delft, Holland, he came from a family of tradesmen, had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch. This would have been enough to exclude him from the scientific community of his time completely. Yet with skill, diligence, an endless curiosity, and an open mind free of the scientific dogma of his day, Leeuwenhoek succeeded in making some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology. It was he who discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells, microscopic nematodes and rotifers, and much more. His researches, which were widely circulated, opened up an entire world of microscopic life to the awareness of scientists.

US energy prices would skyrocket under EU-style regime, says report

US energy sources in 2015 [credit: EIA]

A ‘$676 billion drag on the economy’ by going down the EU path, or ‘nearly half a trillion dollars’ from fracking? The U.S. chose fracking, as The Daily Caller points out.

The U.S. would lose more than 7 million jobs if it adopted the kind of energy policies popular in many European countries, according to a report published Friday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The European energy policies would impose a $676 billion drag on the U.S. economy, the report states, and result in Americans paying an extra $4,800 per year to heat their homes.

More evidence for ninth planet roaming solar system’s outer fringes

Kuiper Belt [credit: amazingspace.org]

The latest research claims to have detected resonant patterns in some of ‘these most distant Kuiper Belt objects’, perhaps suggesting the presence of a major ‘shepherding’ planetary body, as Phys.org reports.

As the search for a hypothetical, unseen planet far, far beyond Neptune’s orbit continues, research by a team of the University of Arizona provides additional support for the possible existence of such a world and narrows the range of its parameters and location.

Led by Renu Malhotra, a Regents’ Professor of Planetary Sciences in the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Lab, the team found that the four Kuiper Belt Objects with the longest known orbital periods revolve around the Sun in patterns most readily explained by the presence of a hypothetical “Planet Nine” approximately ten times the mass of Earth.

Matt Ridley’s 2016 Annual GWPF Lecture

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Matt Ridley runs through some of climate science’s main weaknesses, to put it politely.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Matt Ridley has given the 2016 Annual GWPF lecture at the Royal Society. I strongly suggest you bookmark it, as it is a comprehensive condemnation of current climate policies:

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X-rays detected from the dark side of Venus

2012 Venus transit [credit: JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin]

Venus is certainly an oddball in various ways. Is that the ghost of Velikovsky lurking in the background to this story?

Venus and Mercury have been observed transiting the Sun many times over the past few centuries. When these planets are seen passing between the Sun and the Earth, opportunities exist for some great viewing, not to mention serious research.

And whereas Mercury makes transits with greater frequency (three times since 2000), a transit of Venus is something of a rare treat. In June of 2012, Venus made its most recent transit – an event which will not happen again until 2117.

Luckily, during this latest event, scientists made some very interesting observations which revealed X-ray and ultraviolet emissions coming from the dark side of Venus.

Gerry Pease: Long Term Sunspot Cycle Phase Coherence with Periodic Phase Disruptions

Tim writes,

Gerry Pease has just sent us this link to his arXiv astro-ph.SR paper, co-authored with Greg Glenn, entitled Long Term Sunspot Cycle Phase Coherence with Periodic Phase Disruptions. It details previously unrecognized sunspot cycle phase coherence data, sunspot cycle magnitude correlations, and planetary resonances that could have been very useful in the past to  astrophysicists attempting to predict sunspot cycles, if only they had not ignored the possibility of planetary causation:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1610/1610.03553.pdf

-Gerry Pease

Proxima Centauri has Sun-like cycle

Where to find Proxima Centauri [credit: Wikipedia]

Co-author Jeremy Drake said: “The existence of a cycle in Proxima Centauri shows that we don’t understand how stars’ magnetic fields are generated as well as we thought we did.” Let the head-scratching begin.
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Observations confirm that the closest star to our solar system has a regular magnetic cycle similar to our Sun, reports Sky & Telescope.

With the recent discovery of a potentially habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, astronomers have been studying this star with renewed fervor. Part of their attention focuses on the star’s behavior. M dwarfs are notorious for their flares, and such stellar tantrums could be deadly for budding life on nearby planets.

Small modular reactors could be operating in the UK by 2030 – report

Small modular reactor [credit: ANS Nuclear Cafe]

With enough government backing SMRs could be a competitive alternative to unreliable renewables in the long term. PoliticsHome reporting.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) could be operating in the UK by 2030 and the Government has a crucial role to play in encouraging early investor confidence, according to a new report by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI). 

Per Strandberg: The physical forces driving UAH global temperature

I presented here a while back my research using an Artificial Neural Network analyzing ENSO.

Learn more here http://www.coolingnews.com/the-cause-of-enso

I’m going to write here how it all started, but first I like to show my updated recent ENSO data and forecast which I presented at the recent climate conference in London.

Fig 1: ENSO result from my ANN. Training period is from 1979 and up to 2005. The testing period is from 2005 and up to the end of 2015. From 2015 and up to the end of 2022 it is a forecast. The red line is the real ENSO value and dark line is the result I got from the ANN. As you can see the dark line is from the average values from ensemble.

The Sun’s coronal tail wags its photospheric dog

Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]

Researchers have unearthed a cause-and-effect conundrum for solar physicists, involving solar flares. Phys.org reports.

Solar physicists have long viewed the rotation of sunspots as a primary generator of solar flares – the sudden, powerful blasts of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles that burst into space during explosions on the sun’s surface. Their turning motion causes energy to build up that is released in the form of flares.

But a team of NJIT scientists now claims that flares in turn have a powerful impact on sunspots, the visible concentrations of magnetic fields on the sun’s surface, or photosphere. In a paper published in Nature Communications this week, the researchers argue that flares cause sunspots to rotate at much faster speeds than are usually observed before they erupt.

UK government ‘short’ on climate target

UK Houses of Parliament [image credit: Climate Change News]

The BBC reports from the cloud-cuckoo land that is the UK’s Committee on Climate Change. Their delusions would be laughable but for the fact the government is supposed to follow their advice. When will the nonsense ever stop?

The UK’s official advisers have issued a sombre assessment of government plans to hold climate change at a safe level.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says the government is not on track to meet its pledge of cutting emissions 80% by 2050. And they controversially warn ministers to park their recent ambition to tighten carbon reduction targets to protect vulnerable nations.

New dwarf planet found in our solar system

The Kuiper Belt region [credit: theplanets.org]

Details are sketchy but the object is said to be ‘beyond the pull of Neptune’s gravity’, so we can only speculate what and where its planetary master(s) might be.

A team of space scientists at the University of Michigan has discovered a dwarf planet that is approximately half the size of Pluto and twice as far from the sun, reports Phys.org.

The sighting was reported by NPR, which interviewed team lead physicist David Gerdes. He told them credit goes to a group of students who were challenged to find some new objects to add to the ongoing construction of a galaxy map.

Germany votes to ban internal combustion engine cars by 2030

Daimler-Benz production lines [image credit: BBC]

Hard to see Germany’s mighty motor industry taking this lying down, even if it’s not law just yet. A bad case of ‘greenhouse gas disease’ in the minds of legislators?

Germany invented the gasoline engine and diesel engine. Now, Germany’s Bundesrat wants the internal combustion engine banned starting in 2030, says ExtremeTech. The resolution by one of Germany’s two legislative bodies (analogous to the US Senate or British House of Lords) isn’t binding, but it had bipartisan support.

It suggests the days of the internal combustion engine car are finite. Other code phrases in the resolution, once deciphered, suggest Germany wants to roll back tax credits favoring diesel engine cars, and push for further incentives to ramp up the sales of electric vehicles.