Latest insights into Saturn’s weird magnetic field only make things weirder

Saturn from the Cassini orbiter [image credit: NASA]

Weird compared to some theories, perhaps – but observations can trump theories, of course. Is it too weird to ask if the planet’s rings, extending outwards from the equator, and its axis-aligned magnetic field could be related phenomena?

Some of the last data from the Cassini mission reveals more structure in Saturn’s magnetic field, but still no answer as to how it formed, says Phys.org.

NASA’s Cassini mission—with Imperial kit on board—took a series of daring dives between the planet and its inmost ring in September 2017 before burning up in the planet’s atmosphere.

Saudis push back as IPCC talks head into overtime

Another climate meeting, another heavyweight clash of opinions as committing national economic self-harm struggles to catch on. Ho-hum.

International talks on how to present the science around 1.5C of global warming just ran into overtime in Incheon, South Korea, reports Climate Weekly.

National delegates are expected to argue well into Saturday about the feasibility of holding temperature rise to 1.5C – the stretch goal of the Paris Agreement – and its implications for sustainable development.

What is a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW)?

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The Met Office explains the compression-warming of the stratosphere and how it can bring cold snaps to the UK.

Official blog of the Met Office news team

You may have heard talk of the UK possibly seeing some colder weather next week and that ‘things going on’ in the upper atmosphere may be playing a part.

The ‘thing’ happening in the atmosphere is known as Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW). When it does happen, it attracts a lot of interest in the UK because it is sometimes linked to the onset of cold weather in winter.

Here we shed a little bit more light on the phenomenon.

What is an SSW?

The term SSW refers to what we observe – rapid warming (up to about 50 ­°C in just a couple of days) in the stratosphere, between 10 km and 50 km up.

You may have heard of the jet stream which helps to steer Atlantic weather systems towards the UK. Well there are other jet streams high up in our atmosphere in both the northern and southern…

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EU lawmakers want to cut car emissions by 40 percent by 2030

The war on the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide is in full swing at the EU. The diesel scandal, which was about nitrogen oxides, seems strangely to have been used as an excuse to press for a more punishing policy towards CO2. But they appear to ignore the fact that even if electric car sales go up, this mainly transfers the supposed problem to fuel-burning power stations.

The European Parliament wants to cut CO2 emissions from new cars and vans by 40 percent by 2030 and will try to convince the European Union’s 28 nations to back the idea despite objections from the powerful car industry, reports Phys.org.

The proposed cut agreed on by the legislators Wednesday was a compromise between environmentalists who wanted tougher commitments and those who wanted to avoid too much damage to the auto industry.

The EU nations will discuss the measures further this month. Car producers in the EU are warning that tough cuts would cost manufacturing jobs.

A conversation with Ken Rice on the causes of the ‘Greenhouse effect’

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Yes, adiabatic compression heating is an ongoing process, due to the convection cycle. I’ve tried to illustrate it by modifying NASA’s energy budget diagram. Calcs on right show PV/nR=T gives correct values regardless of radiative transfer.

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 3h3 hours ago

This has probably been explained before, but if adiabatic heating is to be an ongoing process then that would suggest the atmosphere is contracting. Since it clearly isn’t, this can’t be the source of the enhanced surface temperature.

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Ken. Air convecting upwards every day displaces cold high altitude air downwards through the pressure gradient which compresses and heats it. If it didn’t, that air would be colder at the surface, and would allow much more rapid conduction of heat from surface to the air. Agree?

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 2h2 hours ago

Roger, if you want to enhance the temperature on the surface via compression then the atmosphere would need to continually contract.

Nothing Unprecedented about The Sea Surface Temperatures for Tropical Storm-Hurricane Florence’s Full Storm Track

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The title speaks for itself. Bob Tisdale dismantles the extravagant climate claims…

Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations

It’s been a couple of weeks since Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm. The weakening from a Category 4 storm must’ve really tweaked alarmists.

NOAA just updated their much-adjusted ERSST.v5 sea surface temperature dataset to include September 2018 data. So let’s take a look at the September sea surface temperature anomalies for Florence’s full storm track. 

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State-sized object beyond Pluto hints at hidden Planet X

Credit: NASA

Meet ‘The Goblin’. This body’s maximum distance from the Sun is a massive 2300 times further out than Earth’s.

A newly spotted dwarf planet, 2015 TG387, adds to the mounting evidence that an unseen super-Earth prowls the edge of the solar system, reports Cnet.

Astronomers have found a small object far beyond Pluto that orbits the sun in a lonely, oblong loop, a discovery that supports the notion of a larger, more distant planet — often referred to as Planet X — wandering the edge of our solar system.

UK: ‘Near normal’ September follows record-breaking hot summer

Forecaster highlights the jetstream over the UK [image credit: BBC]

‘Record-breaking’ turns out to mean ‘as warm as three other UK summers’, but now things have calmed down. Probably just a temporary return to sanity until the next weather event, however unexceptional for the UK, gets the usual suspects agitated again.

The UK’s record-breaking hot summer was followed by a return to more typical weather in September, the Met Office has said.

Provisional figures show last month’s mean temperature across the country was 12.4C – safely below the all-time record for September of 15.2C, set in 2006, says BT News.

The average maximum temperature last month is estimated to have been 16.3C.
This was also well below the 2006 record of 19.2C.

Media hype IPCC ‘climate catastrophe’ by 2040 prediction

Yet another climate conference?

They’re still playing the same broken record after nearly ten years. These fake dramas wore very thin a long time ago, but the tedium carries on seemingly ad nauseam.
H/T The GWPF

Hundreds of diplomats from around the world are set to scrutinize the IPCC’s latest Summary for Policy Makers, which contains predictions and benchmark findings on staving off a climate catastrophe by 2040, reports AFP.

The world’s nations will gather at a United Nations conference in South Korea on Monday, October 1 to review and approve a 20-page bombshell – distilled from more than 6,000 scientific studies – laying out narrowing options for staving off climate catastrophe.

Meet Antipholus and Antipholus, a very odd Kuiper Belt couple

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More twins than couple, as this 2008 blog post explains. It takes them 25-30 years to orbit each other and 290 years for the binary system to orbit the Sun.

astroengine.com

2001 QW322 is a highly split Kuiper Belt pair, orbiting eachother at a distance of 125,000 km

The Kuiper Belt is an eerie, mysterious and cold region of the Solar System. In it, there are billions of small pieces of rocks with lots of fancy names. As a general designation, all objects in the Kuiper belt are called “Kuiper-belt objects” (KBO’s for short). As the Kuiper belt is located in a region just beyond Neptune, they may also be known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNO’s). Inside the Kuiper belt, we have Pluto-like objects known as “Plutoids”, classical KBO’s called “Cubewanos” (the largest being the recently discovered Makemake) and a whole host of other objects such as icy objects soon to become the next generation of periodic comets.

We are only scraping the surface, finding only a small portion of KBOs. We know of a thousand, but astronomers believe there may…

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Saudi Arabia puts world’s biggest solar power project on hold

Image credit: BBC

One Saudi energy official commented: “Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die”. Looks like it has run into the sand.
H/T DW.com.

Citing Saudi government officials, the US business daily Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Monday that Saudi plans to build the world’s biggest solar power generation facility had been shelved, as the desert kingdom was working on a “broader, more practical strategy to boost renewable energy.”

The solar project was expected to generate about 200 gigawatts of energy by 2030 — more than three times the country’s daily needs.