Scientists scour past for future climate clues

Ice core sample [image credit: Discovering Antarctica]

Of course they are pushing the usual doom and gloom messages based on dubious greenhouse gas theories, but a glimmer of light perhaps is that they accept the Earth has warmed and cooled in the past due to unknown factors. They in effect admit the obvious, namely that attribution of climate change to humans in some, or any, degree cannot be quantified at present. But the bluffing goes on.

As the pace of global warming outstrips our ability to adapt to it [Talkshop comment – allegedly], scientists are delving deep into the distant past, hoping that eons-old Antarctic ice, sediments and trees chart a path to navigate our climate future, says Phys.org.

“What interests us is to understand how the climate works,” says Didier Roche of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

At the Laboratory for Climate and Environment Sciences (LSCE), just outside Paris, the aim is to establish a comprehensive record of climate change dating back hundreds of thousands of years, to chart the repeated warming and cooling cycles the Earth has gone through and to try to understand what drives them.

Opinion – Carbon capture and storage: Hasn’t Alberta learned its lesson?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) [credit: cnet.com]

The author points to a recent report on CCS in a science journal which found “that it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution.” Or in layman’s terms, it’s a waste of time and money even for greenhouse gas theory devotees.

Politicians tend to use CCS as a distraction when they don’t have a workable plan, says Graham Thomson @ CBC News.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

An Alberta cabinet minister walks into a news conference and praises the merits of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a way to significantly reduce the province’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

Not much of a joke, I know.

It wasn’t funny when on October 8, 2009 Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight declared of CCS, “This, ladies and gentlemen, is action, action that will have immediate results locally as it markedly reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”

Indo-Pacific Ocean warming is changing global rainfall patterns, say researchers

It’s ‘according to a new study’ time again, as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) goes under the microscope. Another causes and effects puzzle.

New research by NOAA and a visiting scientist from India shows that warming of the Indo-Pacific Ocean is altering rainfall patterns from the tropics to the United States, contributing to declines in rainfall on the United States west and east coasts, reports Phys.org.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers report a doubling in the size of a warm pool of water spanning the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean in recent years.

This Indo-Pacific warm pool in what is already the warmest part of the global ocean is expanding each year by an area the size of California.

No Plan B for Planet A

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Reality check for wide-eyed climate obsessives: the logistics of their so-called plan can never work.

PA Pundits International

By Paul Driessen ~

Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.

Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.

Their Plan B is more complex: Replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, biofuel and battery power – their supposedly renewable, sustainable alternatives to oil, gas and coal. Apparently by waving a magic wand.

We don’t have a Planet B. And they don’t really have a Plan B. They just assume and expect that this monumental transformation will simply

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‘Stay put,’ officials warn: Winter storms slam US as 50 million people travel for Thanksgiving

Credit: BBC News

One minor problem with that Yahoo News headline – it isn’t even winter yet.

Two powerful winter storms hammered the West Coast and Midwest on Wednesday, shutting down highways and snarling travel plans on one of the nation’s busiest travel days.

Weather watches, warnings and alerts were posted across much of the western half of the nation after a storm that had been a “bomb cyclone” marched westward from the California coast, AccuWeather reported.

Hundreds of stranded cars were removed from Interstate 5 headed north from California into Oregon in the aftermath of the storm that dumped snow and created whiteout conditions on both sides of the California-Oregon border.

In US, climate anxiety churns up psychological storm

This is fun if you’re not one of the climate botherers claiming we’re all doomed. If so you’re probably in the “well-educated conservative white men” group, says Phys.org.

In the melting Arctic, communities are racing to maintain their way of life. In the rising Pacific, residents are sounding alarm bells.

And in Rhode Island, Kate Schapira and her husband are not having a baby.

Fears about climate change are prompting worldwide action, but one knock-on effect in the United States is mounting anxiety about everything from plastics to class-based environmental disparities.

Claim: fossil fuel divestment will increase CO2 emissions, not lower them

So what, you may say. But it shows up some of the woolly thinking of so-called climate activists. Lacking viable alternatives, the major role of fossil fuels in the global economy is bound to continue so suppliers will have their market. Believing that trace gases can somehow disturb the climate in a negative way isn’t going to change that.

A global campaign encouraging individuals, organizations and institutional investors to sell off investments in fossil fuel companies is gathering pace. According to 350.org, US$11 trillion has already been divested worldwide.

But, while it may seem a logical strategy, divestment will not lower demand for fossil fuels, which is the key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, it may even cause emissions to rise, argues The Conversation @ Phys.org.

Resonances of the first (pulsar) exoplanetary system ever found

Poster from the NASA Exoplanets Exploration Program’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau [credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech]

Before we start – ‘Pulsar planets are planets that are found orbiting pulsars, or rapidly rotating neutron stars.’

Wikipedia tells us:
‘PSR B1257+12, previously designated PSR 1257+12, […] is a pulsar located 2,300 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Virgo. It is also named Lich, after a powerful, fictional undead creature of the same name.

The pulsar has a planetary system with three known planets, named “Draugr” (PSR B1257+12 b or PSR B1257+12 A), “Poltergeist” (PSR B1257+12 c, or PSR B1257+12 B) and “Phobetor” (PSR B1257+12 d, or PSR B1257+12 C), respectively.

They were both the first extrasolar planets and the first pulsar planets to be discovered; B and C in 1992 and A in 1994.

A is the lowest-mass planet yet discovered by any observational technique, with somewhat less than twice the mass of Earth’s moon.’

Absurd EU to declare climate emergency while forcing MEPs to travel to France every month

Gone to Strasbourg for a few days

H/T The GWPF

It’s ‘do as we say, not as we do’ time again for the climate-obsessing fake virtue signallers in Brussels – or is it Strasbourg just now?

Members of the European Parliament will this week vote on whether to declare a “climate emergency” – after moving thousands of staff and their whole operation from Brussels to Strasbourg, reports the Daily Express. 

In a monthly act of environmental damage, the EU Parliament ups sticks and moves from its regular home in Belgium to the French town for a week of debate.

Pielke Jr.: Just the facts on hurricanes

Hurricane Katrina [image credit: NASA]

In his own style the author tries to point out some of the excesses of climate hotheads who often prefer cries of alarm to observations based on reality. [Below are a few extracts from the full Forbes article].

Summary: Hurricanes have come to occupy a starring role in the political theater that is climate change. As a result, sorting fact from fiction can be difficult.
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The 2019 North Atlantic hurricane season ends officially later this week. Here I am going to give you the straight scoop on hurricanes.

Everything that follows is fully consistent with recent scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.S. National Climate Assessment and World Meteorological Organization.

In fact, the information below comes straight out of these authoritative assessment reports.

Summer Blackouts Beckon: Australia’s Renewable Energy Debacle Won’t Be Fixed with Batteries

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The greenblob will have to conjure up some other magic solution to their chronic power intermittency problems, if they hope to keep their ‘zero carbon’ myth going for a bit longer.

STOP THESE THINGS

Almost as soon as Joe Public worked out that wind and solar can never work, RE rent seekers started babbling about giant batteries saving the day.

STT will keep smashing the line about giant batteries overcoming the chaotic delivery of wind and solar, while RE zealots keep pushing it.

The pitch from RE zealots is that the solution to the chaos delivered by wind and solar is giant lithium-ion batteries, of the kind peddled by Elon Musk.

The reefer-smoking, Californian carpetbagger managed to offload one unit in wind power obsessed, South Australia, collecting $150 million for a battery that would power SA for all of 4 minutes.

Bill Gates has called the idea complete and utter nonsense: Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’

Apply a little maths, physics and economics and it’s pretty clear that the mega-battery myth is just…

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European Parliament told: There is no climate emergency

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

But groupthink and the fog of constant alarmist propaganda makes it hard for many people to see through to the mundane truth, that their emotions are being exploited in ways that have little or nothing to do with the climate.

At a press conference on Wednesday (20th November), the European Parliament was told: ‘there is no climate emergency’.

One MEP became emotional and accused the organisers of ‘collective manslaughter’ on future generations, reports The GWPF.

El Niños stronger in the industrial age, say researchers

More than a hint of assuming what they would like to prove here, by implying El Niños are now influenced by ‘the industrial age’. But at the end of the report a researcher says: “Maybe El Niño can just enter a mode and get stuck in it for a millennium.” Who gets to define what is or isn’t ‘natural variation’?

El Niños have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Niño years, reports Phys.org.

A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Niños are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Niños, La Niñas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

“What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

“There were three extremely strong El Niño-La Niña events in the 50-year period, but it wasn’t just these events. The entire pattern stuck out.”

Before Caledonia presents: Torhouse Stone Circle

[4mins.25 secs. video]

This is considered to be one of the best preserved ancient stone monuments in Britain, although research into it seems to have been minimal. It can be found near Wigtown in the far south-west of Scotland.

Note the specific solar alignments of the three central stones, and the lunar significance of its circle of nineteen megaliths – thought to represent the lunar nodal cycle of 18.6 years, according to the commentary (or possibly the 19 year Metonic cycle – or both?).

The Metonic cycle is described as ‘a period of almost exactly 19 years that is nearly a common multiple of the solar year and the synodic (lunar) month.’

Freshwater lakes already emit a quarter of global CO2, say researchers

The carbon cycle [credit: laurencenet.net]

This seems to be underlining the futility of pretending that humans could somehow control or manage nature’s carbon cycle, to satisfy a strange ‘greenhouse gas’ obsession.

Lakes and ponds are the final resting place for many of the Earth’s plants. Rivers collect much of the planet’s dead organic matter, transporting it to rest in calmer waters, says Phys.org.

But on a microscopic scale, lakes are anything but calm. An invisible metropolis of microbes feeds on these logs and leaves, producing greenhouse gases as a byproduct.

As a result, lakes may be responsible for as much as a quarter of the carbon in the atmosphere—and rising.

Paris accord pie-in-the-sky ‘climate targets’ undermined by reality

Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]

Hard to say which is the greater fantasy: the belief in human-caused climate change due to trace gases, or the prescribed attempts to ‘tackle’ the imagined problem. Demand for energy is rising worldwide, meaning attempts to restrict its supply look doomed. One analyst says: “Despite more than two decades of climate policy making, fossil fuel production levels are higher than ever.”

There’s a huge gulf between ambition and reality, reports DW.com.

The world is on track to produce far more fossil fuels than permissible to meet its target of limiting global warming to at most 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally 1.5 degrees C.

That’s the conclusion of the Production Gap Report, created from leading research institutions together with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

A question from Ned Nikolov

This looks self-explanatory, so here’s the graphic…

[click on image to enlarge]

Crafty climate cultists in co-ordinated conference conspiracy

Well, that wasn’t quite the original GWPF headline – but close enough 😎
We’re about to receive yet another media tsunami of alarmist babble, it seems. All that and a ‘Brexit election’ too for our long-suffering UK readers.

* More than 200 media outlets and journalists partnered together with activists to coordinate and hype climate change news before the 2019 U.N. climate summit.

* Two of the largest media outlets — BuzzFeed News and HuffPo — did not disclose their role in the project to their readers, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.

* The project raises questions about whether journalists should work side-by-side with activists to hype climate change.

Over 250 news outlets and journalists partnered with Columbia University School of Journalism’s flagship magazine to shape control of “climate crisis” coverage in the lead up to the United Nations climate conference.

Global winds reverse decades of slowing and pick up speed

Could this point to an increasing difference between polar and equatorial average temperatures? Researchers cite ‘ocean-atmosphere oscillations’.

In a boon to wind farms, average daily wind speeds are picking up across much of the globe after about 30 years of gradual slowing, reports Phys.org.

Research led by a team at Princeton University shows that wind speeds in northern mid-latitude regions have increased by roughly 7% since 2010.

The findings mark a reversal of the pattern of declining winds in these regions since the 1980s—a phenomenon known as global terrestrial stilling.

Corals That Don’t Exist Thriving In Real World

Peer-reviewed science, this time about coral reef health, is again being contradicted by real-world evidence.
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In December 2015 Peter Ridd, then a physics professor at Australia’s James Cook University, contacted a journalist, writes Donna Laframboise (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Researchers affiliated with his own institution, he said, were misleading the public about the Great Barrier Reef.

As an example, Ridd cited photos taken approximately 100 years apart near Bowen, a community of 10,000 on the Australian coast in the vicinity of the Reef. These photos tell a stark story: previously vibrant coral expanses are now desolate wastelands.

Ridd complained that this pair of photos was spreading across the Internet. They were appearing in official reports and news stories.