Study shows a decrease in Indian Ocean cyclones, due to natural climate cycle (PDO)

Indian ocean

Natural climate variation is there to be observed (see title of paper), if anyone wants to. No dependency on CO2 levels required, despite the vague assertions made here.
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While the threat of tropical cyclones increases around the world – [Talkshop comment – which study said that?], a new study published in Nature Communications shows one area experienced a significant decline in cyclone activity, says Phys.org.

The paper, “Pacific Decadal Oscillation Causes Fewer Near-Equatorial Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean,” is co-authored by Pallav Ray, associate professor in meteorology at Florida Tech, along with researchers from [various universities] and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (India).

But, with recent changes in climatic patterns in the Pacific, the number of cyclones is expected to increase in the coming decades.
. . .
The findings showed a 43% decline in the number of low latitude (originating between 5–11 degrees) cyclone formations from 1981–2010 in the north Indian Ocean compared to the number of formations between 1951–1980.

The decline is primarily due to the weakened low-level vorticity modulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the increased vertical wind shear. The PDO is a long-term fluctuation in sea surface temperature of the north Pacific Ocean.

The PDO waxes and wanes approximately every 20 to 30 years, going through “cool” and “warm” phases.

Tropical cyclones do not form easily near the equator but can intensify rapidly. The wind pattern in the Indian Ocean helps initiate the cyclone spin near the equator. Without the storm-weakening wind shear, storms can move and strengthen more easily.

This research can help communities in the path of these rapidly intensifying storms better understand how to be prepared for them.

“I hope that this paper will bring a lot more interest in these types of storms,” Ray said. “One of the reasons why these types of storms have not received much attention is because most cyclone researchers work on the Atlantic and such storms are very rare there.”
. . .
“There has been a decline close to the equator, but there has been an increase at the same time away from the equator, in the Indian Ocean,” Ray said. “Overall, there is a decline definitely, but the decline is not this high, because there was an increase away from the equator.”

Full article here.

‘Brace Yourself For An Onslaught Of Category 5 Climate Lies’ – hurricane season peak approaching

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Climate doom is about to go into overdrive yet again, as nature does what it does, wherever that may be. Hence the term: hurricane season, well-known in places like Florida.
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We’re about halfway through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet, says Issues & Insights (via CCD).
[NOAA updated its forecast to above-normal on Aug. 10. –CCD Ed.]

But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists, and the media, blaming the weather on human-caused climate change.

Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific.

Poland files lawsuit against key EU climate policies

European Commission HQ, Brussels [image credit: Em_Dee @ Wikipedia]

Poland objects to being bounced into net-zero style policies against its will, so the EU’s climate dogma will get tested in court. Of course arguing with the EU is usually a waste of time, as the UK found out, but there is an obvious alternative (hint).
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The EU’s recently adopted climate legislation was not properly assessed, exceeded Brussels’ authority and now threatens Poland’s economy as well as energy security, legal arguments published by Warsaw on Monday (28 August) contend, reports Euractiv.

The EU has approved a raft of climate laws over the past months, aiming to reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to 55% below 1990 levels by 2030 and help the bloc of 27 countries comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

But Warsaw is contesting those laws, now aiming to overthrow some of them in court – including the hard-won agreement on banning the sale of new combustion engine cars by 2035.

“We don’t agree with this and other documents from the ‘Fit for 55’ package and we’re bringing this to the European Court of Justice. I hope other countries will join,” Polish climate and environment minister Anna Moskwa said back in June.

Dramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather, say alarmed (or alarmist?) scientists

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Where’s the list of ‘the world’s leading climate scientists’ as they’re described below? We should be told. The hysteria bug seems to have got them all, after just one warmer than normal month in some parts of the world. Even climate models are wilting under the strain it seems, as we accelerate to oblivion or something. More drama needed? Or just more self-serving headlines? Reminder: the carbon dioxide they obsess about is a minor but essential trace gas currently occupying around 0.04% of the atmosphere.
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The “crazy” extreme weather rampaging around the globe in 2023 will become the norm within a decade without dramatic climate action, the world’s leading climate scientists have said. – From The Guardian (via Yahoo News).

The heatwaves, wildfires and floods experienced today were just the “tip of the iceberg” compared with even worse effects to come, they said, with limitations in climate models leaving the world “flying partially blind” into the future.

With fears that humanity’s relentless carbon emissions have finally pushed the climate crisis into a new and accelerating phase of destruction, the Guardian sought the expert assessments of more than 40 scientists from around the world.

Do not heat your homes in the evenings, net zero quango tells public

Domestic radiator

Hairshirts all round to ‘save the climate’? Not likely. It’s just another admission that current energy policies are no good, due to endlessly obsessing about harmless trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Millions of families will be urged by a green quango not to heat their homes in the evening to help the Government hit its net zero target, says The Telegraph.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) said people should turn off their radiators at peak times as part of a wider drive to deliver “emissions savings”.

In a document on “behaviour change” the body recommended Britons “pre-heat” their houses in the afternoon when electricity usage is lower.

Walker Circulation study is a damp squib for climate worriers, contradicts models

Walker Circulation – El Niño conditions [image credit: NOAA]

The paper this article is based on informs us that ‘The Pacific Walker circulation (PWC) has an outsized influence on weather and climate worldwide. Yet the PWC response to external forcings is unclear’. Under a headline saying: ‘Greenhouse gases are changing air flow over the Pacific Ocean, raising Australia’s risks of extreme weather’, the article here offers almost nothing to support an argument for any human-caused climate effects ‘in the industrial era’. The paper is somewhat embarrassing for climate models: ‘Most climate models predict that the PWC will ultimately weaken in response to global warming. However, the PWC strengthened from 1992 to 2011, suggesting a significant role for anthropogenic and/or volcanic aerosol forcing, or internal variability’. So that role could be anything or nothing, but the models trended the wrong way anyway. The search for ‘anthropogenic fingerprints’ continues.
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After a rare three-year La Niña event brought heavy rain and flooding to eastern Australia in 2020-22, we’re now bracing for the heat and drought of El Niño at the opposite end of the spectrum, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

But while the World Meteorological Organization has declared an El Niño event is underway, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is yet to make a similar declaration. Instead, the Bureau remains on “El Niño alert.”

The reason for this discrepancy is what’s called the Pacific Walker Circulation. The pattern and strength of air flows over the Pacific Ocean, combined with sea surface temperatures, determines whether Australia experiences El Niño or La Niña events.

Biden’s crazy electric car plan means grid collapse, probably this decade – Telegraph

EV charging station [image credit: InsideEVs]

The numbers just don’t add up. Net zero-style mandates from climate obsessives don’t take reality seriously. Firstly, the ageing electricity grid can’t take the strain. Secondly, new transmission lines take many years to approve, let alone build. Thirdly, a shortage of transformers – which take a long time to make and can’t be mass-produced – also precludes rapid progress. That’s without even discussing the unpredictable intermittency of renewables.
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Policies enacted by the Biden administration and the previous, Democrat-controlled Congress are set to plunge the USA into a serious energy crisis in the coming years, says The Telegraph.

It all has to do with the Biden government’s decision to try to force mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) before either the market or the power grid can adjust to meet the whopping new demand for power generation or to supply the critical minerals needed to make the batteries that power the cars.

Democrat members of Congress and Biden’s appointed officials are coordinating an effort to force EV adoption on reluctant consumers via a classic carrot and stick approach.

Germany’s cheap public transport ticket an ‘ineffective climate tool’

German hydrogen train [image credit: Euractiv]

No surprise there. What are these delusional climate worriers even talking about? If ‘the climate’ was human it wouldn’t give a hoot how Germans get around, but might be bemused to find itself corroding the minds of their leaders with their irrational obsession over ‘carbon emissions’ to the exclusion of all else.
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Germany’s new monthly €49 offer for all regional public transport will have little impact on the transport sector’s carbon emissions so the country will continue to fail its climate targets for transport and beyond, according to an expert council advising the government.

As the German transport sector has so far failed to meet its emissions targets, in June the government presented a bundle of measures that should help to put the country on track to reduce overall emissions by 65% by 2030, compared to 1990, says Euractiv.

One of the key measures touted by Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP/Renew Europe), is the new “Deutschlandticket” introduced in May, a subscription offer that enables users to use regional trains and buses, trams, metros, as well as some ferries across the country for €49 per month.

SITYS: Climate models do not conserve mass or energy – Roy Spencer, PhD.

‘Potentially serious problems’. Advisable to view the linked blog post before commenting, it’s quite short.
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See, I told you so — says Roy Spencer.

One of the most fundamental requirements of any physics-based model of climate change is that it must conserve mass and energy.

This is partly why I (along with Danny Braswell and John Christy) have been using simple 1-dimensional climate models that have simplified calculations and where conservation is not a problem.
. . .
Now, I just stumbled upon a paper from 2021 (Irving et al., A Mass and Energy Conservation Analysis of Drift in the CMIP6 Ensemble) which describes significant problems in the latest (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models regarding not only energy conservation in the ocean but also at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA, thus affecting global warming rates) and even the water vapor budget of the atmosphere (which represents the largest component of the global greenhouse effect).

These represent potentially serious problems when it comes to our reliance on climate models to guide energy policy. [Talkshop note – author’s emphasis]

It boggles my mind that conservation of mass and energy were not requirements of all models before their results were released decades ago.

Full post here.

Pacific coral reef shows historic increase in thermal tolerance

Coral reef [image credit: Toby Hudson / Wikipedia]

Corals can adapt to changing conditions, once again confounding the serial climate doom-mongers. The full article tries to link in references to ‘carbon emissions’, ‘climate change’ etc. which have no definable reference to the actual findings. The point is, nature can be adaptable, contrary to some alarmist expectations.
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Coral reefs in one part of the Pacific Ocean have likely adjusted to higher ocean temperatures which could reduce future bleaching impacts of climate change, new research reveals.

A Newcastle University-led study focused on the Pacific Island nation of Palau and has shown that historic increases in the thermal tolerance of coral reefs are possible, says Eurekalert.

The results demonstrate how this capacity could reduce future bleaching impacts if global carbon emissions are cut down. [Talkshop comment – corals are in the sea, not the air].

Drawing on decades of field observations, the scientists modelled many possible future coral bleaching trajectories for Palauan reefs, each with a different simulated rate of thermal tolerance enhancement.

Wavelet footprints – The Climate Clock

Gas giants of the solar system [image credit: Wikipedia]

Wavelet transforms reveal solar system footprints in climate time series, says Prof. Harald Yndestad. He explains how TSI (total solar irradiance) has a mean growth from 1700 to 2014. We believe the ideas here have links with this recent Talkshop post. (For the full technical discussion and wavelet examples see the linked article. Some extracts here.).
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In the mid-1980s, the mathematician Yves Mayer from the University of Marseille and the petroleum engineer Jaean Morlet worked with the analysis of data from petroleum surveys at Elf-Aquitaine, writes
Harald Yndestad @ The Climate Clock.

In their efforts to find better methods for frequency analysis, they rediscovered a set of a new type of transformations which they called Wavelets.

The wavelet transform solved some of the weaknesses of the Fourier transform. It required less computing power; it was possible to identify period and phase relations in time-series, and non-stationary periodic variations in nature.

Giant Alaskan dust storms impact the world’s climate, say scientists

Alaskan dust storm [image credit: NASA]

Although this was already a known effect to some extent, the new research suggests the effect is ‘bigger than previously thought’. Anything linked to cloud formation is significant, including for climate modellers.
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Giant dust storms in the Gulf of Alaska can last for many days and send tons of fine sediment or silt into the atmosphere, and it is having an impact on the global climate system, say scientists.

The storms are so extensive they can be seen by satellites orbiting the Earth, reports Phys.org. An image captured by the Landsat satellite in 2020 shows dust blowing out of the valley and over Alaska’s south coast.

Exactly how the dust may be influencing the global climate system is not yet clear, although new research from the University of Leeds and the National Center for Atmospheric Science suggests the effect is bigger than previously thought.

The clouds on Neptune perform a surprise disappearing act, linked to the solar cycle

Neptune

As the senior author of the study noted: “These remarkable data give us the strongest evidence yet that Neptune’s cloud cover correlates with the sun’s cycle”. The planet receives only 1/900th of the sunlight we get on Earth.
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For the first time in nearly three decades of observations, clouds seen on Neptune have all but vanished, says Phys.org.

Images from 1994 to 2022 of the big blue planet captured from Maunakea on Hawaiʻi Island through the lens of W. M. Keck Observatory, along with views from space via NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show clouds are nearly gone with the exception of the south pole.

The observations, which are published in the journal Icarus, further reveal a connection between Neptune’s disappearing clouds and the solar cycle—a surprising find given that Neptune is the farthest major planet from the sun and receives only 1/900th of the sunlight we get on Earth.

I’m a climate scientist. Here’s how I’m handling ‘climate grief’

Not meaning to sound harsh here, but why not try this Talkshop remedy – pull yourself together. Climate has always varied naturally, and always will. That’s it.
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Researchers must find personal ways to cope with impending losses — one way is by taking small solutions-oriented actions, says Kimberley R. Miner in Nature’s Career Column.

Last September, before the rains came, my field team learnt that it was probably too late for half the blue oaks affected by California’s drought in the region in which we were working.

Because of years of ongoing drought, many of the trees would not recover from the long-term water loss and would die. The next morning, I sat outside our science team meeting and cried.

Alarmists trumpet 0.01C increase (since 2016) in ocean surface temperature ‘record’

Credit: sciencedaily.com

One hundredth of one degree in seven years, all due to supposedly naughty humans? Hilarious. An ex-boss of mine used to call such tiny variations ‘spurious accuracy’. What’s the margin of error?
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The world’s oceans set a new temperature record this week, raising concerns about knock-on effects on the planet’s climate, marine life and coastal communities, says AFP (via Euractiv).

The temperature of the oceans’ surface rose to 20.96 degrees Celsius on 30 July, according to European Union climate observatory data.

The previous record was 20.95C in March 2016, a spokeswoman for the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service told AFP on Friday.

The samples tested excluded polar regions.

Hexagons on Mars: New Evidence of an Environment Conducive to the Emergence of Life

Self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover [image credit: NASA/JPL @ Wikipedia]

Remote control geology at work.
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Using data from NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have discovered patterns on Mars that provide evidence of a cyclical climate similar to that of Earth.

This major discovery opens up new prospects for research into the origin of life, says SciTechDaily.

The results of the study, which was conducted by scientists at the CNRS, Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, with the participation of CNES, were published on August 9, 2023, in the journal Nature.

Climate change is messing with photosynthesis, say ‘carbon neutrality’ seekers

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

The study abstract claims ‘Their results illustrate one more way in which the adverse effects of climate warming make it more difficult to achieve carbon neutrality.’ Even good news can turn into bad news in glass-half-empty climate modelling land.
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Increases in CO2 in the atmosphere brought about by anthropogenic activity was expected to increase the rate of photosynthesis in plants and perhaps increase plant yield and growth, says Cosmos magazine.

New science has showed the rate of photosynthesis around the globe has been increasing, but now there is evidence the rate has slowed and might soon plateau.

During photosynthesis plants take water and CO2 and convert it into oxygen and carbohydrates – storing carbon inside the plant and soil. A higher availability of CO2 increases the rate of this process, acting as a sort of brake on global warming by sequestering more CO2.

However, a new modelling study, published in the journal Science, has found that the increase in photosynthesis has slowed since 2001 due to an adverse effect of climate change.

Road to nowhere: San Francisco driverless cars cause street blockage chaos ‘due to nearby music festival’

Image credit: Chris Wensel / BBC

H/T LBC’s World of Woke

This wasn’t an isolated incident. The city’s fire department is not amused by errant no-go electric cars: ‘not ready for prime time’.
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A controversial driverless car firm was blasted after around 10 of its autonomous vehicles broke down and blocked a San Francisco street, reports the Daily Mail.

Just a day after securing the green light to flood the streets of the crime-ridden city with even more of its Chevy Bolts, ten of Cruise’s cars suffered WiFi failures which brought a street in the North Beach district to a stand-still.

The firm thinks a nearby music festival may have overloaded telecommunications networks.

A woman who filmed the drama could be heard claiming 10 of the hatchbacks had stopped.

Transition Tension: Greenlash Wave Jeopardizes Energy Reform

Climate hype

Globetrotting peddlers of climate doom and drastic so-called net-zero remedies may be getting nervous about their public credibility and/or democratic futures.
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When Sweden’s new government took office, they abandoned the country’s previous goal of “100% renewable” electricity in favor of a “100% fossil-free” target, says OilPrice.com.

In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outraged environmentalists by saying his cabinet will issue hundreds of new oil and gas licenses for the North Sea if re-elected.

A wave is rising across Europe and the United States, and it’s a wave that should concern transition advocates, including those in government. Because that wave threatens to carry away their seats.

Scientists wrestle with ‘unknown force’ acting on particles

Muon g-2 building (white and orange) at Fermilab [image credit: Z22 @ Wikipedia]

A clash of observation and basic science theory looms. The BBC tries to sound positive about it.
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Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature, says BBC News.

They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics.

Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics.