Climate projections don’t include volcanic eruptions.

In today’s climate models, volcanic eruptions are thought to be a major negative forcing (they have to be, to counteract the over-egged positive forcing attributed to CO2), but the ‘projections’, ‘forecasts’, ‘scenarios’ (anything but predictions!) don’t include any volcanic eruptions.

That being the case, why would we take any notice of model output which ‘projects’ large warming in the future?

Judith Curry:
Under the RCP8.5 scenario, the CMIP5 climate models project continued warming through the 21^st century that is expected to surpass the ‘dangerous’ threshold of 2°C warming as early as 2040. It is important to note that the CMIP5 simulations only consider scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions – they do not include consideration of scenarios of future volcanic eruptions…

Researchers uncover a natural cause for early 20th century Arctic warming

Arctic Ocean

Scientists have surprised themselves by noticing multi-decadal natural variability in the Arctic, and discovering some of its effects, as Phys.org reports. More than a hint of cyclical warming and cooling is implied, although they try to downplay it.

Is a warmer Arctic a canary of global warming? Since the 1970s the northern polar region has warmed faster than global averages by a factor or two or more, in a process of ‘Arctic amplification’ which is linked to a drastic reduction in sea ice.

But then how to explain a similar rapid warming that occurred during the early 20th century, when the effects of greenhouse gases were considerably weaker than today? And what can we prove about the period, given the scarcity of usable data and observations prior to the 1950s?

Now scientists from Kyoto University and UC San Diego have discovered that this phenomenon occurred when the warming phase—’interdecadal variability mode’—of both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans coincided.

Clexit is Winning: East European states fight back against Paris Accord

H/T to GWPF for the heads-up on this story from Climate Change News by Arthur Neslen in Brussels

East European EU states are mounting a behind-the-scenes revolt against the Paris Agreement, blocking key measures needed to deliver the pledge that they signed up to 18 months ago.

Under the climate accord, Europe promised to shave 40% off its emissions by 2030, mostly by revising existing climate laws on renewables, energy efficiency and its flagship Emissions Trading System (ETS).

But documents seen by Climate Home show that Visegrad countries are trying to gut, block or water down all of these efforts, in a rearguard manoeuvre that mirrors president Donald Trump’s rollback of climate policy in Washington.

Energy efficiency is supposed to make up around half of Europe’s emissions reductions by 2030, but a Czech proposal could cut energy saving obligations from a headline 1.5% a year figure to just 0.35% in practice.

British Airways blames ‘power surge’ for IT meltdown & travel chaos

Airport chaos for BA passengers

BA moves in mysterious ways, its blunders to perform – but with dire results for a lot of unlucky customers.

BA chief executive Alex Cruz says the airline’s flight disruptions had nothing to do with cutting costs but were caused by a power surge that “only lasted a few minutes”, reports BBC News via the GWPF.

BA chief executive Alex Cruz says he will not resign and that flight disruption had nothing to do with cutting costs.

He told the BBC a power surge, had “only lasted a few minutes”, but the back-up system had not worked properly.

Sea Level Sophistry; Junk Science Masquerading as the Basis for UnSound Public Policy

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CO2 theory says warming should be increasing at an increasing rate, but everyone knows – or ought to know – it isn’t, and that’s been the case for around 20 years now. Yet still the alarm bells are sounded by the usual sources, as if the failed forecasts of the climate models had been true.

Paris climate commitment ‘crippling’ to US growth: White House

Decision time looks to be nearing on this issue, as Phys.org reports. Place your bets.

US compliance with its commitments under the Paris Agreement on climate change would be “crippling” to growth, the White House said Friday.

During his election campaign, avowed climate sceptic Donald Trump promised to exit the 2015 UN pact on limiting global warming.

But Trump has now said he will make a decision after returning to Washington following the G7 summit in Sicily which starts Friday, at the end of his international tour.

UK’s Northern Powergrid signs electric vehicle pact with Nissan

Credit: sciencedaily.com

This is about using the batteries of electric cars, vans etc. as a resource to support the national electricity network. Why it should need to be considered at all is an interesting question. They talk of “improving network capacity and helping to make renewable energy sources more affordable and more widely available”.

UK electricity distribution company Northern Powergrid has signed “a ground-breaking industry partnership” with electric vehicle manufacturer Nissan, reports Power Engineering International. 

The two organisations will work together over the next six years on examining how electric vehicles, batteries and other technologies can support energy networks.

They will also explore how new technologies can enhance the capacity, capability and resilience of the region’s power network to make it more active and responsive to the growing and changing demands of both domestic and commercial customers. 

Tony Heller: Is the global temperature record credible?

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has this new video up on youtube. It raises important questions about the way the global temperature record has changed over time.

Opec ‘not concerned’ by Trump’s proposal to sell US strategic petroleum reserves

Credit: ktuu.com

Holding vast stockpiles does seem outdated when you can produce your own at an increasingly rapid rate, thanks to new discoveries and modern techniques like fracking.

US President Donald Trump’s 2018 budgetary proposals, currently before Congress, have irked many and tucked in the fine print is an outrageous (says the IB Times) plan to sell over 50% or 687m barrels of the country’s government-owned strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), stockpiled in the states of Texas and Louisiana as an emergency measure.

The SPR was created by the US government following the 1973 oil crisis, which saw several Middle Eastern Opec members impose an oil embargo following Washington’s backing of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

Unconcerned by current geopolitics, the Trump administration says the sale could generate $16bn for US taxpayers over the next 10 years.

Trappist-1: seven-planet resonance chain confirmed

Much media attention on this new paper this week. Is there a surprise lurking in the details now that the orbit period of the seventh planet has been confirmed?.

What the numbers in the diagram show is the orbits per planet in a fixed period (top row), the conjunctions per planet pair in the same period (second row), and the ratios that represents (third row).

The number of conjunctions of any two planets is the difference between the two orbit numbers in a given period, which in this case is equivalent to just under 1446 Earth days (see data below).

Apart from the obvious symmetry of the ratios, something else arose from the science paper.

Roy Spencer on ‘Santer takes on Pruitt’

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt

As Dr Roy Spencer points out: ‘You can’t build a case for human-caused warming by relying on natural warming! (But, they did anyway.)’

A new paper in Nature: Scientific Reports by Santer et al entitled Tropospheric Warming Over the Past Two Decades begins with this:

After a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Scott Pruitt the new Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received a written question regarding observed warming estimates. In response, Mr. Pruitt claimed that over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming. We test this claim here.

Now, exactly how does one scientifically test a claim of “leveling off of warming”?

Landslide on California highway part of $1 billion in damage

California’s Big Sur coast – ‘considered one of the finest images’ by Wikipedia

The end of the California drought hasn’t been all good news for everyone, due partly to what may be ‘the largest mudslide in the state’s history’.

A massive landslide that went into the Pacific Ocean is the latest natural disaster to hit a California community that relies heavily on an iconic coastal highway and tourism to survive, and it adds to a record $1 billion in highway damage from one of the state’s wettest winters in decades, reports SFGate.

The weekend slide in Big Sur buried a portion of Highway 1 under a 40-foot layer of rock and dirt and changed the coastline below to include what now looks like a rounded skirt hem, Susana Cruz, a spokeswoman with the California Department of Transportation, said Tuesday.

More than 1 million tons of rock and dirt tumbled down a saturated slope in an area called Mud Creek. The slide is covering up about a one-quarter-of-a-mile (0.40-kilometer) stretch of Highway 1, and authorities have no estimate on when it might re-open. The area remains unstable.

“We haven’t been able to go up there and assess. It’s still moving,” Cruz said. “We have geologists and engineers who are going to check it out this week to see how do we pick up the pieces.”

EU nations set to wipe out forests and not account for emissions

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Yes folks, they’re going to burn wood on an industrial scale and call it ‘climate-friendly’. You couldn’t make it up.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

By Fred Pearce

It looks like greenwash. European nations publicly keen to boost their climate credentials by switching to “green” biomass are accused of working behind the scenes to expunge their carbon emissions from burning wood in power stations from national emissions statistics.

“If we don’t measure emissions when trees are cut, we won’t measure them at all,” says Hannah Mowat of FERN, a European NGO working to save the continent’s forests, who has followed the EU negotiations on the issue.

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Huge reserves of natural gas under East Texas will fuel the future economy, experts say

Credit: tylertexasonline.com

Some experts call it ‘unprecedented’. But as the Tyler Morning Telegraph reports: ‘there’s a caveat. Technically recoverable doesn’t mean profitable – yet.’

As far back as 1911, geologists predicted that significant mineral wealth lay below East Texas, in what was then called the Woodbine Stratum – a formation above the Haynesville Shale.

And Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner proved them right in 1930, when the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well struck oil just outside Henderson in western Rusk County.

It was really just a drill stem test – they weren’t expecting to hit anything. But at 3,592 feet, Joiner tapped into what was for years thought to be the largest oil and gas reserves in the world. But no-one predicted the vastness of the energy wealth available here.

First magnetic field detected “outside” of a galaxy

Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the largest astronomical project in the world –
Magellanic Clouds near top of image [credit: NASA / Ames]

It’s unimaginably vast: astronomers say ‘this structure is a 75,000 light-year long filament of gas and dust’. Trying to separate out the effects of gravity and magnetism here should be an interesting challenge.

A magnetic field appears to span the space between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two dwarf galaxies being consumed by our Milky Way Galaxy, reports Sky & Telescope via Sott.net.

For stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s easy to forget that the Milky Way is actively consuming two dwarf galaxies. Those in the Southern Hemisphere have a front row seat to watch our galaxy wreak havoc on the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC).

But there’s more to the story — the dwarfs are not only gravitationally interacting with the Milky Way but with each other as well.

Alan Carlin: A particularly lunatic week for climate alarmism

The Climate Industrial Complex (CIC) cannot be accused of thinking small, as Carlin Economics and Science explains.

At the state level, the approval of California bill SB52 by both houses of the state legislature means carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be lowered to levels 40% below levels measured in 1990.

This is expected to necessitate the development of massive numbers of new regulations and policies that will allow the state government to control and dictate virtually every aspect of Californians’ lives in the opinion of one observer, including:

Mysterious Tabby’s Star dims again: observations needed

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Fascinating stuff – here we go again…

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/mystery-of-alien-megastructure-star-testing-astronomers-creativity/

Dr Ángel R. López-Sánchez

Let’s face it: KIC 8462852 (also Tabby’s Star or Boyajian’s Star) is a weird star. Since its unusual light variations were discovered by citizen scientists using data of NASA’s Kepler space telescope in September 2015 many, many things have been written by professional and amateur astronomers, science communicators and “searchers of mysteries”, as an interesting hypothesis about its behavior was that it could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm. Of course, this just run wild in general media, and many astronomers since them have been asked by journalist to talk about “Mysterious Tabby’s Star”.

In particular, this theme soon captured the attention of some of my friends at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Spain), as they weekly produce an amazing ~2h science communication podcast Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido (Signal to noise). I’m proud to participate in this podcast from…

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China, Japan extract combustible ice from seafloor

Credit: phys.org

Methane hydrates have been known about for years, but cost and technical difficulties have so far been barriers to exploiting them on any kind of scale. Claims that they could ‘flood the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases’ are the usual over-the-top propaganda.

Commercial development of the globe’s huge reserves of a frozen fossil fuel known as “combustible ice” has moved closer to reality after Japan and China successfully extracted the material from the seafloor off their coastlines, says Phys.org.

But experts said Friday that large-scale production remains many years away—and if not done properly could flood the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases.

Combustible ice is a frozen mixture of water and concentrated natural gas. Technically known as methane hydrate, it can be lit on fire in its frozen state and is believed to comprise one of the world’s most abundant fossil fuels.

Shale Wars: The most expensive energy battle of all time

Credit: fuelfix.com

Thanks to ever-improving technology, one shale CEO said earlier this year about U.S. oil production: “We’ve doubled it. We can double it again.”

So far it has cost Saudi Arabia something like $200 billion to undertake one of the most expensive experiments of all time, says the GWPF.

The Saudi government has been draining its massive $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund to cover revenues lost from the petroleum price collapse over the past couple of years.

What we’re witnessing is a two-part test. The first question is how much damage have low oil prices caused America’s shale industry. Then the second and far more critical part of the test: As oil prices rise, will the shale industry limp or roar back? If it roars back, high oil prices are history.

Viv Forbes: Kill the Paris Climate Treaty and rip out its roots

By Viv Forbes,
Secretary of the Clexit Coalition

The Clexit Coalition today called on President Trump to keep his election promise to withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty and stop US payments to all UN global warming programs.

The Clexit (ClimateExit) Coalition, comprising over 175 representatives from 25 countries, aims to prevent ratification or local enforcement of the UN Paris climate treaty.
See: http://clexit.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/clexit-members.pdf

The Secretary of Clexit, Mr Viv Forbes of Australia, said that all nations will suffer from the destructive energy policies being promoted in the UN’s war on cheap, reliable hydro-carbon fuels and the backbone industries that rely on them – mining and smelting, farming, fishing, forestry, processing and manufacturing.

He was supported by Professor Will Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University who said today:
“Americans never felt compelled to sign up to international folly in the past. I hope the United States once again shows the common sense of its people and walks away from the Paris Agreement.”