Some Antarctic ice shelves grew in area over the last 20 years – study

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

Much ado about sea ice in recent times, but usually in terms of promoting climate alarm. On closer inspection East Antarctica (2/3rds of the continent) tells a somewhat different story.
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Some ice shelves in the eastern Antarctic have grown in the last 20 years despite global warming, a study suggests.

Researchers say that sea ice, pushed against the ice shelves by a change in regional wind patterns, may have helped to protect the ice shelves from losses, reports Yahoo News.

Ice shelves are floating sections of ice attached to land-based ice sheets and they help guard against the uncontrolled release of inland ice into the ocean.

How UK’s wind and solar expansion could lead to wasted electricity

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

By lurching from feast to famine and back, surplus to deficit — depending on weather, time of day and variations in demand. Cue calls for yet more expense to fix this entirely predictable but looming problem.
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The huge growth of the UK’s solar and wind could lead to an excess amount of electricity by 2030, says Energy Live News.

That’s according to a new study that suggests a huge amount of energy could go to waste if this expansion of renewable energy sources is not paired with a similar rise in the installation of energy storage technologies.

Consultancy LCP justified its forecast on the basis that Britain’s grid operates on a supply and demand process.

Researchers find biases in warming patterns in climate models of monsoons

Are ‘corrections’ the answer? Avoiding the need for them might be better. The researchers observe that ‘the projected warming in response to greenhouse gases is too great’. This has been known for years but the penny of reliance on a certain climate theory has yet to drop, it seems.
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Climate projections are crucial for adaptation and mitigation planning says Eurekalert.

The output of the latest round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6) has been widely used in climate projections.

However, a subset of CMIP6 models is “too hot” and the projected warming in response to greenhouse gases is too great.

How to tackle the “hot model” problem at the regional scale had previously been unclear.

Exploding e-scooters kill four as heatwave damages batteries

Ballistic battery time again. Insurers and fire fighters must be nervous as mass battery-powered travel is supposed to be the future in many countries.
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There have been near daily reports of electric scooters catching fire across India amid record-breaking temperatures, says The Telegraph.

At least four Indians have died since March after their electric scooters caught fire, with record-breaking temperatures caused by climate change now feared to be behind the deadly blazes.

A father and daughter died in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in March, while two men died in two separate incidents in April in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

European Hypocrites Return To Fossil Fuels

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Politics: Putin effect overtakes greenhouse effect.

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

At the beginning of March, Frans Timmermans, the European Union’s Executive Vice President for the European Green New Deal and European Commissioner for Climate Action, announced that EU nations planning to burn coal as an alternative to Russian natural gas are not out of line with the EU’s climate goals.

The news came just a week ago that United Kingdom housing secretary Michael Gove would likely approve the nation’s first new coal mine in three decades. The new plant, if approved, would produce coking coal for steelmaking. The reason? Russian coal is toxic now.

In Germany, whose leaders have been busy decommissioning nuclear plants, RWE, Vattenfall, and Steagare now preparing to run their coal-fired power plants perhaps long beyond yesterday’s 2030 death date. Today, German coal companies are preparing power plants to operate at full speed, arming themselves in the event Russia cuts off…

View original post 1,147 more words

EU climate chief talks up hypothetical ‘green’ hydrogen

Credit: wheels.ca

Good luck with the costs and the leakage losses from shipping. Only last month the same source reported a study saying Germany’s global hydrogen plans could accelerate climate change. The study said ‘In the worst-case scenario, hydrogen could even prove 16 times more harmful than the widespread greenhouse gas.’ The EU obviously isn’t bothered by that study, or one by the British government warning of 13% leakage losses from tanker transport of hydrogen. ‘The 75-page report, Atmospheric Implications of Increased Hydrogen Use, explains that H2 is an indirect greenhouse gas, which reacts with other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to increase their global warming potential (GWP)’. What real world problem do they think they’re trying to solve? Looks like yet another trip to cloud cuckoo land.
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Hydrogen will be essential for Europe’s future economy, particularly to store and transport green energy, EU climate chief Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament on Thursday (28 April) — Euractiv reporting.

“I strongly believe in green hydrogen as the driving force of our energy system of the future,” said Timmermans in a meeting with the environment committee.

“Hydrogen is going to be a pivotal element in our economy of the future,” he added in a discussion that covered the impact of the war in Ukraine, the state of play with Europe’s new climate legislation and food security.

Use of ‘too hot’ climate models exaggerates impacts of global warming

Too much hot air

We’ve been hearing this for years, but here it is again. It seems hard to get climate science to follow best practice and discard models that perform poorly against observational data, or at least the worst ones. Time’s up now as it’s getting too embarrassing, with the climate clearly failing to comply with ultra-warmist predictions. But over-optimistic belief that the models are nearly on course is still rife.
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U.N. report authors say researchers should avoid suspect models – from Science.org.

One study suggests Arctic rainfall will become dominant in the 2060s, decades earlier than expected. Another claims air pollution from forest fires in the western United States could triple by 2100. A third says a mass ocean extinction could arrive in just a few centuries.

All three studies, published in the past year, rely on projections of the future produced by some of the world’s next-generation climate models.

But even the modelmakers acknowledge that many of these models have a glaring problem: predicting a future that gets too hot too fast.

EU officials being trained to meditate to help fight climate crisis

Money to burn?

Take a deep breath…Sometimes there’s not much difference between a satirical spoof and a climate ‘crisis’ article.
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Exclusive: Early results from ‘applied mindfulness’ courses suggests they have helped overcome despair that little can be done, says The Guardian.

Brussels officials are being trained to meditate to help them tackle the climate crisis as part of a new wave of “applied mindfulness” that seeks to take the Buddhism-inspired practice “off the cushion” and into hard politics.

Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller: Exact Calculations of Climate Sensitivities Reveal the True Cause of Recent Warming

I’m delighted Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have chosen the Talkshop as the venue for the publication of this new open peer review paper on climate sensitivity. Scientific advance at the cutting edge has always been the most important aim of this blog, and I think this paper truly is an advance in our understanding of the climate system and the factors which support and modulate surface temperature on Earth and other rocky planets. 

The paper is mathematically rigorous, but is also accessible to everyone, thanks to Ned and Karl’s exemplary effort to fully explain their concepts and definitions in terms which can be understood by any interested reader who has some familiarity with the climate debate. Building on the bedrock of their 2014 and 2017 papers, this new work extends the applicability and validates the postulates of those previous papers by examining the causes of variability in planetary surface temperature and incorporating the previous findings in quantifying and deriving equations to model them. They find that Earth is sensitive to changes in cloud cover, which affects the amount of solar shortwave radiation reaching the surface, but not very sensitive to changes in Total Solar Irradiance arriving at the top of the atmosphere. They also find that the sensitivity to changes in CO₂ levels has been heavily overestimated by current climate models. They show that a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm will cause an undetectable global warming of 0.004K.

A PDF of the paper can be downloaded here:  ECS_Universal_Equations.

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Exact Formulas for Estimating the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of Rocky Planets & Moons to Total Solar Irradiance, Absorbed Shortwave Radiation, Planetary Albedo and Surface Atmospheric Pressure.
Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. and Karl Zeller, Ph.D.
April, 2022

1. Introduction

The term “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” (ECS) has become a synonym for the steady-state response of global surface temperature to a modeled long-wave radiative forcing caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration with respect to an assumed pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. According to climate models based on the Greenhouse theory, an increase of atmospheric CO₂ from 280 ppm to 560 ppm would produce a net radiative forcing (i.e. an atmospheric radiant-heat trapping) of 3.74 W m^-2 (Gregory et al. 2004) resulting in a global surface warming between 2.5 K and 4.0 K with a central estimate of 3.0 K according to IPCC AR6 (see p. 11 in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers). This implies an average unit ECS of 3.0/3.74 = 0.8 K / (W m^-2) with a range of 0.67 ≤ ECS ≤ 1.07 K / (W m^-2). Contemporary climate science and IPCC Assessment Reports do not discuss global temperature sensitivities to changes in cloud albedo, absorbed solar radiation or total surface atmospheric pressure. Consequently, no equations have been derived/proposed thus far to calculate these sensitivities. Part of the reason is that variations of cloud albedo are typically viewed in modern climate science as internal feedback to a climatic change induced by external forcing such as increasing anthropogenic carbon emissions. This notion is based on the 19^th-Century Greenhouse theory (Arrhenius 1896) adopted by IPCC, which attributes most of the observed warming during the 20^th Century and especially over the past 40 years to rising atmospheric  CO₂ concentrations believed to trap outgoing long-wave radiation in the Earth’s troposphere and reduce the rate of surface infrared cooling to Space.

However, a plethora of studies published during the past 15 years have shown through both satellite and surface observations that the absorption of solar radiation by the Earth-atmosphere system has increased significantly since 1982 due to a decreased cloud cover/albedo, a phenomenon often referred to as “global brightening” (e.g. Goode & Pallé 2007; Wild 2009; Herman et al. 2013; Stanhill et al. 2014; Hofer et al. 2017; Pfeifroth et al. 2018; Pokrovsky 2019;  Delgado-Bonal et al. 2020; Dübal & Vahrenholt 2021;  Yuan et al. 2021).

EU in cloud cuckoo land: selects 100 cities for goal of ‘climate neutrality’ by 2030

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Climate neutrality is an imaginary goal. In reality it doesn’t exist but the phrase serves as a peg to hang an EU publicity gimmick on, as they try to imply it can make people healthier — among other dubious assertions.
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One hundred European cities have been selected to participate in an EU programme to rapidly cut emissions in urban areas, with the aim of reaching climate neutrality by 2030, says Euractiv.

Cities drawn from each member state will participate in the scheme, representing some 12% of the EU population.

A further 12 cities from outside of the bloc will take part.

The EU will invest €360 million to aid cities in their greening mission in 2022 and 2023, which it is hoped will spur further investments from the private sector.