Here’s a brief taste of what’s on offer from the alarm-loving media today as they wallow in the latest dire prophecies.
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Climate change: IPCC report warns of ‘irreversible’ impacts of global warming, cries BBC News.
Many of the impacts of global warming are now simply “irreversible” according to the UN’s latest assessment.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that humans and nature are being pushed beyond their abilities to adapt.
Scales of Justice
[image credit: Wikipedia]
Nature of the complaint
In this latest challenge, the Claimants called for a declaration that the Government’s alleged failures to take effective measures to meet their climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Climate Change Act 2008 were in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998.
They also sought a mandatory order that the Government urgently implements a framework to meet its commitments going forward.
Credit: nationalreview.com
The assessment is the second in a series of three reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the latest review of climate science, which take place every six or seven years for governments.
It is being published on Monday, a little over 100 days after the Cop26 summit agreed to increase action to try and limit global warming to 1.5C (2.7F) to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Europe in 1328 [image credit: Wikipedia]
The Arctic has experienced a steady increase in temperature since the 1980s, causing meteorological patterns that resemble 14th century Europe, research shows.
Scientists from the Leibniz Institutes for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) and Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) [studied] weather transitions in ancient Europe in the early 1300s and discovered droughts similar to the conditions in Europe in 2018.
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According to a new theory of solar cycles, that is.
Feb. 25, 2022: Something big just happened on the sun. Solar physicists Scott McIntosh (NCAR) and Bob Leamon (U. Maryland-Baltimore) call it “The Termination Event.”
“Old Solar Cycle 24 has finally died–it was terminated!” says McIntosh. “Now the new solar cycle, Solar Cycle 25, can really take off.”
The “Termination Event” is a new idea in solar physics, outlined by McIntosh and Leamon in a December 2020 paper in the journal Solar Physics. Not everyone accepts it–yet. If Solar Cycle 25 unfolds as McIntosh and Leamon predict, the Termination Event will have to be taken seriously.
The basic idea is this: Solar Cycle 25 (SC25) started in Dec. 2019. However, old Solar Cycle 24 (SC24) refused to go away. It…
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The era of silly but damaging climate games is over, or should be. The world has far more serious matters to attend to.
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London, 25 February – Net Zero Watch has called on Boris Johnson to stop all Russian gas imports and follow through on his statement to Parliament yesterday that the UK should use domestic hydrocarbons “rather than pointlessly importing them from abroad.”
According to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy the UK has imported 73,770 Gwh of Russian LNG in the last 4 years. At 4 pence per kwh – that gas has a value of £2.95bn.
In other words, Britain has been funding Putin’s war machine to the tune of £14 million per week.
Germany’s main gas supplier: Russia
No. Energy resources are not the focus of this threatened conflict.
Vladimir Putin has a long history of territorial ambitions in former Soviet nations, which he made explicit this week, and of attempts to exert political control over Ukraine.
Putin is said by supporters to be concerned over the possibility of Nato expansion, although many analysts say this is a pretext.
Forecaster highlights the jetstream over the UK [image credit: BBC]
The jet stream, which this week brought storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin to the UK, has also has moved northwards by up to 330 kilometers.
The findings relate to the 141-year period from 1871–2011.
Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]
The expedition to find the Endurance’s wreck came close to the same fate late on Sunday.
But where Shackleton’s men could rely only on patience, the Agulhas II has 16,000 horsepower of propulsion, movable ballast, and a container full of aviation fuel.
Who is this supposedly green all-renewable energy virtue signalling mega-project actually for, some are asking. The BBC attempts to look behind the curtain, while the Saudis confirm they want to keep selling oil until there either isn’t any more to sell or there are no buyers.
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Glow-in-the dark beaches. Billions of trees planted in a country dominated by the desert. Levitating trains. A fake moon. A car-free, carbon-free city built in a straight line over 100 miles long in the desert.
These are some of the plans for Neom – a futuristic eco-city that is part of Saudi Arabia’s pivot to go green. But is it all too good to be true?
Neom claims to be a “blueprint for tomorrow in which humanity progresses without compromise to the health of the planet”.
Erie, Pennsylvania [image credit: UK Met Office]
Researchers from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Lanzhou University evaluated the simulated snow depth from 22 CMIP6 models across high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere over the period 1955–2014 by using a high-quality in situ observational dataset.
Related results were published in the Journal of Climate.
Credit: Wikipedia
These are the highest threat levels meteorologists can announce, and are the first wind-only red warnings to be issued since 2016’s Storm Gertrude.
So what’s behind the UK’s recent spate of dangerous wind storms? And are these events likely to become more common in future?
Storm Arwen in late November 2021 caused devastation across Scotland, northern England and parts of Wales. Winds of 100mph killed three people, ripped up trees, and left 9,000 people without power for over a week in freezing temperatures.
The destruction caused by Arwen is still apparent in some areas, and the clean-up from Storm Dudley—which battered eastern England on Wednesday February 16—is underway at the time of writing.
Now the UK faces Storm Eunice, and its gusts of up to 122 miles per hour. Eunice bears a striking similarity to the “Great Storm” of 1987, which unleashed hurricane-force winds and claimed 22 lives across Britain and France in October of that year. Both are predicted to contain a “sting jet”: a small, narrow airstream that can form inside a storm and produce intense winds over an area smaller than 100 km.
Sting jets, which were first discovered in 2003, and likely occurred during the Great Storm and Storm Arwen, can last anywhere between one and 12 hours. They are difficult to forecast and relatively rare, but make storms more dangerous.
Sting jets occur in a certain type of extratropical cyclone—a rotating wind system that forms outside of the tropics. These airstreams form around 5km above the Earth’s surface then descend on the southwest side of a cyclone, close to its center, accelerating as they do and bringing fast-moving air from high in the atmosphere with them.
When they form, they can produce much higher wind speeds on the ground than might otherwise be forecast by studying pressure gradients in the storm’s core alone.
Meteorologists are still working to understand sting jets, but they are likely to have a significant influence on the UK’s weather in a warming climate. [Talkshop comment: Isn’t everything, in Met Office model world?]
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Our research team’s new high-resolution climate models predict bigger increases in winter rainfall than standard global climate models due to a large increase in rainfall from thunderstorms during winter.
We are less certain about how the pattern of extreme wind storms, like Eunice, will change, as the relevant processes are much more complicated.
The UK’s recent cluster of winter wind storms is related to a particularly strong polar vortex creating low pressure in the Arctic, and a faster jet stream—a core of very strong wind high in the atmosphere that can extend across the Atlantic—bringing stormier and very wet weather to the UK.
A stronger jet stream makes storms more powerful and its orientation roughly determines the track of the storm and where it affects.
Some aspects of climate change strengthen the jet stream, leading to more UK wind storms. Other aspects, like the higher rate of warming over the poles compared with the equator, may weaken it and the westerly flow of wind towards the UK.
Our high-resolution models predict more intense wind storms over the UK as climate change accelerates, with much of this increase coming from storms that develop sting jets.
Projections from global climate models are uncertain and suggest only small increases in the number of extreme cyclones. But these models fail to represent sting jets and poorly simulate the processes that cause storms to build. As a result, these models probably underestimate future changes in storm intensity.
We think that using high-resolution climate models, which can represent important processes like sting jets, alongside information from global models on how large-scale conditions might change, could give a more accurate picture. But the UK isn’t doing enough to prepare for the increasingly severe extreme weather already predicted.
Humanity has a choice in how much warmer the world gets based on the rate at which we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [Talkshop comment: evidence-free assertion].
While more research will confirm if more extreme wind storms will hit the UK in the future, we are certain that winter storms will produce stronger downpours and more rain and flooding when they do occur.
Full article here.
Image credit: NASA
Once they melted, it was a spectacle to behold as tremendous floods gouged channels into the face of the planet.
The remnants of one of the largest of these ancient deluges are still visible in eastern Washington, in an area now known as the Channeled Scablands.
For a long time, geologists have been struggling to understand the dynamic properties of these floods, until a recent key insight was made.
These ancient glaciers were so large and heavy, they actually tilted Earth’s crust beneath them – when weight was released due to melting, the land would have moved too, changing the course of the megaflood.
Using modeling of ancient megafloods, researchers decided to test whether glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) – deflections in the crust as heavy chunks of ice form and melt – would affect the routing flow and erosion in two prominent Scabland tracks.
“We used relatively simple, yet plausible, numerical experiments to test whether GIA could have had a substantial impact on flood routing and erosion for two major scabland tracts, Cheney-Palouse and Telford-Crab Creek,” write the authors of the study.
“To this end, we modeled GIA to reconstruct the topography of the Channeled Scabland at different times during the period of Ice Age flooding.”
Up until now, reconstructions of ancient megaflood routing had investigated how other variables would affect them – things like erosion and the movement of sediment, the three-dimensional mechanics of the environment, or how ice dams break, for example.
But they would also base these reconstructions on present-day topography, approximating how past landscapes may have looked.
“People have been looking at high water marks and trying to reconstruct the size of these floods, but all of the estimates are based on looking at the present-day topography,” said lead author Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Geologists realized that the effects melting glaciers were having on Earth’s crust were also likely playing a role in the routing and behavior of these megafloods.
“GIA caused crustal deformation in the Channeled Scabland with rates up to 10 millimeters per year, orders of magnitude above regional tectonic uplift rates and, therefore, may have influenced flood routing,” note the authors.
“The course of ancient, glacial outburst floods was likely influenced by glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), and reconstructing these events informs our understanding of how floods shape landscapes on Earth and Mars,” they added.
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The researchers believe the deformation of Earth’s crust due to the expanding and contacting of the ice sheets would have altered the elevation of the landscape by hundreds of meters over this period.
Moving forward, the researchers want to simulate past megaflood events which incorporate the multiple factors that determine their routing.
However, understanding the important role that ice age crustal deformation plays during flood routing and erosion in these ancient megafloods is a step in the right direction.
Full article here.
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The culprit could be coming into view in the next day or so.
Feb. 17, 2022: New images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) are giving us a better look at yesterday’s farside explosion. SOHO coronagraphs recorded the most dramatic CME in years:
No, there won’t be a geomagnetic storm. The explosion happened on the farside of the sun, so the CME is heading away from Earth. We dodged a bullet.
Some readers have asked “How strong was the underlying solar flare?” We don’t know. Solar flares are classified by their X-ray output, but there are no spacecraft on the farside of the sun with X-ray sensors. Best guess: It was an X-flare.
You might suppose that the farside of the sun is hidden from view. However, researchers using a technique called “helioseismology” can make crude maps of the sun’s hidden hemisphere. Their latest map reveals a huge farside active region:
The black blob is a sunspot group–a big one–and…
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The carbon cycle [credit: laurencenet.net]
This finding suggests that CCU projects, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment, won’t do much to achieve the Paris Agreement‘s emissions targets to prevent warming by more than 1.5°C.
CCU technologies take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, either capturing it directly from the air or absorbing it at polluting sources, and puts it to use in processes such as making fuel, plastics and concrete.
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Not punishing one of their main sources of energy, i.e. gas, with financial and other climate policy burdens would be a good start.
From the team at CFACT ~
By Sam Buchan:
Amidst the backdrop of a frenzied world tour to secure contingencies in the event of a catastrophic energy crisis, EU representatives attended the 9th U.S.-EU Energy Council. Still, throughout all the statements and optimistic tweets pointing to vague targets like greater “cooperation,” the solution seemed elusive.
Political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must acknowledge that the status quo got Europe into the crisis today. They would be wise to change course both through their action and their words immediately.
The oddity is that both U.S. and EU leaders continue to overlook the not-so-subtle cries from energy markets resulting from aggressive climate policies forcing would-be project financiers to seek shelter and marginal returns in renewables. Investment stagnated, critical projects were abandoned, and Russia pressed for a more significant market share.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when…
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Having recently advanced the idea that climate change was pushing UK storms further south, from Scotland to northern England, the BBC now features someone saying that the jet streams will move further north – for the same reason, i.e. climate change. Of course their chosen weather predicter is a net-zero enthusiast spouting the usual alarmist propaganda.
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Heavy rainfall, flooding and storm surges will become more common in the UK if global temperatures continue to increase, say scientists.
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Some scientists have suggested that the impact of storm Eunice – and future storms – has been exacerbated by the climate crisis, says BBC Science Focus.
But how exactly do rising temperatures affect the UK weather?
BMW i3 electric car plus battery pack [image credit: carmagazine.co.uk]
Lithium has earned the ‘white petroleum’ label due to its dramatic need for supplies from the rise of battery giga-factories, electric vehicles, powerwalls and energy storage businesses.
Battery makers including Tesla, Panasonic and LG Chem, have to budget for the rising cost of lithium. Batteries that go into electric cars require lithium. More battery makers will need to expand production to keep up with demand from electric cars.
Storm Arwen damage 2021 [image credit: Cwmcafit @ Wikipedia]
More than eight million trees have been brought down and many are now threatened by another two named storms bearing down on Britain.
Forest managers warn that already “catastrophic” damage will be made worse by Storms Dudley and Eunice.
There are warnings that the heating climate is making our weather more severe and unpredictable, and that management and planting strategies must adapt more quickly.
Wyoming coal trains [image credit: energycatalyzer3.com/
It turns out that the world was right to be skeptical, says the Taipei Times / Bloomberg.
Three months later, political intransigence, an energy crisis and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic have cast doubt on the progress made in Glasgow, Scotland.
If last year was marked by optimism that the biggest polluters were finally willing to set ambitious net-zero targets, this year threatens to be the year of global backsliding.
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