Above-average temperatures despite La Niña, predicts UN

The prediction can be reviewed in about mid-2022. The UN of course invariably expects more warming, which it likes to attribute to human activities and then demand ‘action’.
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Temperatures in many parts of the world are expected to be above average in coming months despite the cooling effect of a La Niña weather phenomenon, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said La Niña, which last held the globe in its clutches between August 2020 and May this year, had reappeared and is expected to last into early 2022, reports Phys.org.

This, it said, would influence temperatures and precipitation, but despite the phenomenon’s usual cooling effect, temperatures were likely to remain above average in many places.

Strong winds power electric fields in the upper atmosphere, NASA’s ICON finds

Caption: This data visualization shows the ICON spacecraft in orbit around Earth. The green arrows show the strong, high-altitude winds—known as atmospheric tides—detected by ICON’s MIGHTI wind imager. These winds are not uniform and can be altered by changes in the lower-altitude atmosphere. This, in turn, changes the particle motion high in the ionosphere. Changes in plasma at 370 miles above Earth’s surface was also detected by ICON as shown in red. Magnetic field lines are shown in magenta and turn yellow as measurements of winds detected by MIGHTI (green arrows) influence the direction of plasma (red arrows). Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/William T. Bridgman
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One researcher said: “We found half of what causes the ionosphere to behave as it does right there in the data”. The hunt is on for the other half. Link includes animations.
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What happens on Earth doesn’t stay on Earth, says Phys.org.

Using observations from NASA’s ICON mission, scientists presented the first direct measurements of Earth’s long-theorized dynamo on the edge of space: a wind-driven electrical generator that spans the globe 60-plus miles above our heads.

The dynamo churns in the ionosphere, the electrically charged boundary between Earth and space.

It’s powered by tidal winds in the upper atmosphere that are faster than most hurricanes and rise from the lower atmosphere, creating an electrical environment that can affect satellites and technology on Earth.

Energy Islands: Orkney’s radical marine power experiment

Mocean Energy’s Blue X wave energy converter at Forth Ports’ Rosyth Docks [image credit: Mocean Energy]

The article title says the experiment ‘is a blueprint for the future’, but tidal power devices have a long record of not exactly becoming a roaring success. When might this future arrive? Talk of being a ‘global leader’ sounds upbeat and optimistic, press-release style, but will there be enough – or any – followers? After the intro, we come to the prototype wave converter.
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We’re standing, it seems, on the deck of a stocky, barge-like boat with yellow trim, going full steam, says the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Water whips past, flicking up foam. But the ‘boat’ is stationary – tethered to the sea floor, it is in fact a 1.5MW tidal energy generator.

Developed by Spanish firm Magallanes Renovables, the ATIR platform has two turbines submerged in the fast-flowing waters of the Fall of Warness, south of the island of Eday in the Orkneys.

A Seasonal Emerald in the Sahel

Credit: geopoliticalfutures.com

A striking example of seasonal climate variation, with detailed images.
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The Inland Delta of the Niger River is one of the world’s most productive wetlands says NASA, even though it is mostly dry for nearly half of each year.

Depending on the abundance and timing of rainfall upstream, the inland delta of the Niger River in Mali typically floods with water from roughly August to December.

The result is a seasonal burst of green vegetation at the intersection of the Sahara Desert and the Sahel.

Revellers snowed in at Britain’s highest pub – BBC News

Tan Hill Inn [image credit: North Yorkshire Weather]

The BBC says ‘Customers and an Oasis cover band are trapped at the Tan Hill Inn, near Keld, after heavy snowfall.’ It’s still only November, and the Met Office has forecast a mild winter. In fact parts of Scotland and the English North East also had wintry conditions with all kinds of damage going on.
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A number of people had to sleep on the floor of Britain’s highest pub after Storm Arwen battered Yorkshire.

Twenty people, including an Oasis tribute band, were unable to leave the Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales after being snowed in on Friday.

Elsewhere in the region, strong winds and snow have caused power cuts, fallen tress and travel disruption.

Britons face record bill as wind farms perform poorly again – Net Zero Watch

The higher the dependence on renewables, the worse problems such as ‘the vagaries of wind speed’ become.
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London, 25 November – The daily cost of balancing the electricity grid rocketed to £63 million yesterday, smashing the old record of £45 million, set just three weeks ago, reports Net Zero Watch.

Wind farms were performing poorly yet again, delivering only 20% of their theoretical capacity.

The Balancing Mechanism, which ensures that supply and demand are in balance hour by hour, was forced to pay up to £4000/MWh to get the coal-fired Drax 5 unit to switch on, at the same time as paying wind farms to switch off.

Flawed Climate Models? Arctic Ocean Started Getting Warmer Decades Earlier Than Thought

Fram Strait is the only deep passage between the Arctic and World Oceans [credit: Bdushaw @ Wikipedia]

Twenty six ‘COP’s and much of the world still claims to believe in, and frames its energy and various other policies according to, flawed climate models? If ‘rapid’ Arctic warming was already happening 120 years ago at an early stage of industrialisation what was, or were, the cause(s)?
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The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.

An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard, says SciTech Daily.

Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean began warming rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed in from the Atlantic – a phenomenon called Atlantification – and that this change likely preceded the warming documented by modern instrumental measurements.

Met Office promotes its climate projections for heat in UK cities

Warm day in London

Much talk of ‘extreme’ temperatures in UK cities in this Met Office blog post, although there aren’t any examples. There was a significant heatwave in 1976 and a few warmer than usual spells in the early 2000s, but talk of ‘frequency’ of such events seems premature to say the least. But the Met Office feels sure its computer modelling will prove to be accurate, and that weather trends are now largely determined by human activities.
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With the recent COP26 focussing heavily on the chances of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C, it might be easy to forget that we are still committed to further climate change and a resulting increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves.

The impact of this will be felt increasingly in cities, where the majority of the world’s population now live, where much of our businesses, industry and infrastructure are concentrated, and where extreme temperatures are exacerbated by the urban heat island effect.

With many cities across the UK declaring climate emergencies, city councils and other decision-makers are asking how they can use increasingly refined and detailed climate projections to better understand the impact of extreme heat on urban communities.

Surprise: Some Red Auroras are *not* Auroras

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Observing a recurring feature of the Earth’s ring current system.

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 22, 2021: The biggest geomagnetic storm in years erupted this month when a Cannibal CME slammed into Earth’s magnetic field. Auroras spread as far south as California and New Mexico. Upon closer inspection, however, not all of those lights were auroras. Some were “SARs.”

SARs are pure red arcs of light that ripple across the sky during strong geomagnetic storms. Here’s an example from Finland in 2018:

“The SAR was visible to the naked eye for nearly 30 minutes and, after fading a bit, remained visible to my camera for another hour and a half,” recalls photographer Matti Helin.

On Nov 4, 2021, Earth experienced a veritable SAR storm. “We photographed SARs as far south as the McDonald Observatory in Texas,” reports Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics. “The bands of light swept over our cameras near Boston, then headed south. We knew something special was…

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Dozens of ships stuck in Arctic as ice freezes early in reverse of recent warming winters

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Where are the ‘rapidly warming winters’ this time round? It seems global warming is behaving badly, in parts of the Arctic at least.
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Shipping firms blame the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, says the Telegraph.

More than two dozen cargo vessels are stuck in Russia’s Arctic ice, waiting for ice-breakers to come to their rescue, after an inaccurate forecast from the country’s Met Office.

Maritime traffic in the Northern Sea Route has been on the rise in recent years as rapidly warming winters reduce ice cover, and Russia invests in its Arctic ports in preparation for a further boom.

But this year several segments of the Northern Sea Route froze up about a fortnight earlier than usual, catching many ships unawares.

Alexei Likhachyov – director general of Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom, which manages the country’s nuclear-power fleet of ice-breakers – said on Monday that the ships included vessels sailing under the flags of Hong Kong and Marshall Islands.

He blamed the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, in comments to local media.

Continued here.

UK’s largest electrolyser to supply hydrogen storage facility at Scottish windfarm

Whitelee wind farm, Scotland [image credit: Bjmullan / Wikipedia]

Here’s the UK government’s latest shot at ‘net zero’ climate virtue signalling. Subsidised wind farms will help produce subsidised hydrogen to fuel subsidised hydrogen vehicles such as buses and bin lorries. This is obviously even more costly than just using the wind-sourced electricity itself to run vehicles, but gets round the battery weight problem for larger vehicles like buses and goods vehicles. But to scale up, the number of wind turbines needed is going to have to be far higher than now, to provide fuel as well as nationwide electricity. Is that even feasible, let alone affordable?
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A hydrogen storage plant will be built at the UK’s largest onshore windfarm near Glasgow, after the UK government approved a £9.4m grant, reports E&T News.

The Whitelee green hydrogen project will become the UK’s largest electrolyser, a system which converts water into hydrogen gas as a way to store energy.

Hydrogen is seen as a key replacement for fossil fuels in certain applications as the world moves towards decarbonisation.

It produces just heat and water as by-products when burned or used in fuel cells, making it a highly attractive alternative to fossil fuels in industry, power, shipping and transport.

It’s weather wars as the Met Office forecasts mild winter while the BBC predicts a big freeze

Place bets now! Of course there could well be bits of both. The Met Office says its offering is ‘consistent with a warming climate’, but there was a very cold winter spell only 11 years ago, around the time of the last solar minimum.
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Most know from bitter experience that meteorology is far from an exact science, but Britain’s two leading weather forecasting services have given completely contradictory predictions on what we can expect this winter, reports the Daily Mail.

The Government-run Met Office has forecast a mild winter, but the BBC’s service predicts it is likely to be cold and harsh.

Experts last night described the opposing long-range forecasts as unparalleled and they risk causing havoc for businesses such as energy suppliers, transport firms, supermarkets and airlines which rely on forecasts to plan ahead.

Climate-friendly farming: Greenland’s melting glaciers offer an answer

Greenland drink break [image credit: leisurelylifestyle.com]

As a bonus in today’s climate obsessed times, carbon credits could come into play for farmers to sell with this discovery. Even Danish brewers can benefit. Why fear glacier melt if it makes life better?
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On a shore near Greenland’s capital Nuuk, a local scientist points to a paradox emerging as the island’s glaciers retreat: one of the most alarming consequences of global warming could deliver a way to limit its effects, says Reuters (via Yahoo News).

“It’s a kind of wonder material,” says Minik Rosing, a native Greenlander, referring to the ultra-fine silt deposited as the glaciers melt.

Known as glacial rock flour, the silt is crushed to nano-particles by the weight of the retreating ice sheet, which deposits roughly one billion tonnes of it on the world’s largest island per year.

Professor Minik Rosing and his team at the University of Copenhagen have established the nutrient-rich mud boosts agricultural output when applied to farmland and absorbs carbon dioxide from the air in the process.

IPCC Climate Models Keep Failing Because They Don’t Respect Physics – The Daily Sceptic

Credit: NASA

H/T Tallbloke
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By Dr. Rudolph Kalveks — As the media, politicians and climate activists continue to circulate hysterical hot air from the Cop26 conference, the topic of climate change or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has become an emotional one, increasingly detached from the thoughtful and meticulous process of theory development, calculation and observation that is supposed to characterise scientific endeavour.

It may come as a surprise to some that “The Science”, as expounded in the IPCC Summaries for Policymakers that inform conference participants, is not uncritically accepted by all scientists in the field, and that widely different views are held by a substantial cadre of experienced and eminent researchers.

Moreover, a multitude of peer-reviewed papers contradict many aspects of the IPCC’s alarmist narrative.

Furthermore, a coherent theory about the impact of changes in greenhouse gases (GHGs) is starting to emerge, one that is built up from the underlying physics, rather than extracted from fanciful computer simulations.

My aim here is to highlight some of the relevant papers and to inform any motivated layman who wishes to explore outside the dogmatic strictures of the mainstream narrative.

Let us start with an irrefutable example of the inability of climate models (general circulation models, GCMs) to provide meaningful projections.

Continued here.

The Palaeoclimate Problem – Net Zero Watch

The author notes, with examples, that ‘it is difficult to reconcile this latest research with many other lines of inquiry to determine past temperatures.’ Using a single computer model to ‘fill in gaps’ in data has its own drawbacks, as mentioned below.
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Modern warming differs from the gradual rise in temperature seen in the past 10,000 years. That’s the conclusion of a paper just published in the journal Nature, says David Whitehouse.

Reconstructing the temperature timeline back to 24,000 years ago – the so-called Last Glacial Maximum – a team of researchers show that recent warming is unusual.

Knowledge of past climate is important to put our present climate into context, allowing us to see what climatic variations can take place in the absence of contemporary amounts of greenhouse gasses.

The longest lunar eclipse in centuries will happen tonight

November 19, 2021 lunar eclipse [credit: NASA]

For UK observers the best time to look will be about 7-8:00 am Friday morning (19th Nov.) depending on location, e.g. Manchester. [Click on image to enlarge the eclipse map]
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You can see the longest partial lunar eclipse in hundreds of years this week.

The “nearly total” lunar eclipse is expected overnight Thursday, Nov. 18, to Friday, Nov. 19, NASA said.

“The Moon will be so close to opposite the Sun on Nov 19 that it will pass through the southern part of the shadow of the Earth for a nearly total lunar eclipse,” NASA said on its website.

The eclipse will last 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, making it the longest in centuries, Space.com reported.

Only a small sliver of the moon will be visible during the eclipse. About 97% of the moon will disappear into Earth’s shadow as the sun and moon pass opposite sides of the planet, EarthSky reported.

The moon should appear to be a reddish-brown color as it slips into the shadow, NASA reported.

Full article here.
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More from Phys.org — Moon lighting: partial lunar eclipse to be longest since 1440

The real reasons COP26 flopped – Climate Change Dispatch

Only alarmists could be impressed by an alarmist echo chamber, and even that didn’t work on the street protesters. As CCD puts it: ‘what kind of conference is it that invites only people with one viewpoint?’
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King coal is dead, long live king coal! That might be a fitting epitaph for COP26, which mercifully ended last Friday, says Climate Change Dispatch.

It culminated with an agreement, which had not so much been watered down as to have virtually evaporated. Fossil fuels, it seems, are here for the foreseeable.

What went wrong? That’s a question the ‘deeply frustrated’ COP26 president Alok Sharma might well be asking himself.

He appeared to be close to tears at the denouement of the negotiations, pushed to emotional extremis by the last-minute wrangling over a single word: should we commit ourselves to phase out our use of coal, or phase- down our use of coal.

Early freeze: Arctic shippers eye release from Russian ice captivity

Russian icebreaker Novorossisk [image credit: Okras @ Wikipedia]

Good news for ever-fearful climate obsessives leaving COP26, but not for stranded sea captains.
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The 15 ships that for the last two weeks have been ice-locked in Russian Arctic waters see release coming as a second icebreaker makes its way into the East Siberian Sea, says the Barents Observer.

Diesel-powered icebreaker Novorossisk early this week made its way into the Chukchi Sea with course for the ships that are battling to make it out of the sea-ice in the East Siberian Sea.

The vessels, among them an oil tanker and several fully loaded bulk carriers, have been captured in thick sea-ice in the far eastern Arctic waters since early November as an early freeze took captains and shipping companies by surprise.

Over the last weeks, only one icebreaker, the nuclear-powered Vaigach, has been available for escorts through the increasingly icy waters. That has been insufficient to aid the many vessels that have been on their way across the Northern Sea Route.

Over the past years, ice conditions in late October and early November have allowed extensive shipping along the vast Russian Arctic coast. This year, however, large parts of the remote Arctic waters were already in late October covered by sea-ice.

There is now an ice layer more than 30 cm thick cross most of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea. And in the strait separating the mainland with the Island of Wrangel is an area with more than a meter thick multi-year old ice.

Full article here.

The 800 million barrel oilfield getting Boris Johnson in trouble

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Politics versus climate dogma. Oil products are still in high demand, so blocking one project to make some sort of point wouldn’t make any difference to UK consumption levels. Recent events showed the chaos that can easily happen when fuel isn’t readily available at filling stations. But climate obsessives will drone on endlessly about such things anyway.
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The planned Cambo oilfield in the U.K.’s North Sea, thought to hold 800 million barrels of oil, faced significant pressure in the lead up to COP26, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared hypocritical in his promise for a clean energy transition while giving the go-ahead on a new oil exploration project.

Following the global climate summit, will Cambo go ahead? — asks OilPrice.com.

The proposed exploration would take place in the Cambo oil field, located around 125km west of the Shetland Islands, at a depth of between 1,050m to 1,100m underwater.

Johnson continues to back the project, stating that as licensing approval took place in 2001, well before recent considerations for new exploration licensing restrictions, there is no reason to cancel a project that will support the U.K.’s energy security in the coming years.

Earth Tipped on Its Side 84 Million Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia]

The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of the mineral magnetite, offer some of the most convincing evidence yet of true polar wander in the Late Cretaceous – and it may help settle a scientific debate that’s been going on for decades.