The UK’s Climate Change Act ‘faces a stress test’

So says an ardent fan of the idea of human-caused weather variations, who thinks UK climate laws were ‘once the envy of the world’. But unwelcome reality strikes in due course, because those in charge ‘underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are’. The article tries to make out that a bit more belt tightening will do the trick, which almost certainly underplays the pain ahead if the current over-the-top net zero policies are persisted with.
– – –
The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily.

There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works.

El Niño ends with uncertainty over cooler future, says BBC

The BBC likes to lace articles like this with ‘climate change’ as though it’s a brand, without ever defining it. As usual an obvious case of a natural cycle is infected by some preconceived ideas and assertions of alarmists. But their high hopes and predictions of a lengthy El Niño have faded on this occasion, as potential La Niña conditions start to appear. There’s talk of uncharted territory ahead due to last year’s unexpected ‘heat spike’.
– – –
The powerful El Niño weather event which along with climate change has helped push global temperatures to new highs, has ended, say scientists.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says the Pacific Ocean has “cooled substantially” in the past week.

This naturally occurring episode that began last June brought warmer waters to the surface of the Pacific, adding extra heat to the atmosphere, says BBC News.

But what happens next is uncertain, say researchers.

Carbon dioxide, methane levels in the atmosphere hit ‘record highs’ last year – but only since 1959!

We’ll ignore any climate-related assertions in this article and try to look at actual information. How much of the variation of the trace gases mentioned would have occurred anyway, regardless of human activities? As the article says: ‘Carbon dioxide and methane levels have been higher in the far ancient past’. The world obviously didn’t self-destruct back then, so maybe a bit of context there for these latest ‘records’. It’s also known that warmer oceans absorb less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – an entirely natural process.
– – –
The 2.8 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide airborne levels from January 2023 to December, wasn’t as high as the jumps were in 2014 and 2015, but they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise records started, says PBS Online.

Carbon dioxide’s average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.

Last year’s methane’s jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year.

Climate the Movie is here.

Eight years ago, talkshop readers helped film maker Martin Durkin finance ‘Brexit the Movie‘, raising over £8000 towards the total cost of production. Now, Martin has made the long awaited sequel to ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle‘ with help from long time fellow sceptic Tom Nelson. It’s called ‘Climate the Movie: the Cold Truth’ and you can watch it for free here, right now. Enjoy!

Available at Vimeo vimeo.com/924719370
On X at twitter.com/TomANelson/status/1771682333738848477
On Youtube at youtube.com/watch?v=zmfRG8-RHEI
On Rumble at rumble.com/v4kl0dn-climate-the-movie-the-cold-truth-martin-durkin.html

UN weather agency cranks up the climate alarm as global temperatures rise by a small fraction of a degree

Everything about climate, other than some mythical past optimum, is branded as an actual or potential disaster by carbon dioxide demonisers like the WMO. Try not to yawn.
– – –
GENEVA (AP, via PBS Online.) — The U.N. weather agency is sounding a “red alert” about global warming, citing record-smashing increases last year in greenhouse gases, land and water temperatures and melting of glaciers and sea ice, and is warning that the world’s efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate.

The World Meteorological Organization said there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year.

The Geneva-based agency, in a “State of the Global Climate” report released Tuesday, ratcheted up concerns that a much-vaunted climate goal is increasingly in jeopardy: That the world can unite to limit planetary warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels. [Talkshop comment – meaning Little Ice Age levels].

Scientists divided over ‘record heat’

Is ‘speed of change’ a problem? Climate models make predictions, but the reality is quite often something else. Solar activity including flares has been high in the last year or so, but this is often ignored. CO2 theory struggles with anomalies.
– – –
Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown, says The Guardian.

Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño, which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year.

Scientists are divided about the extraordinary temperatures of marine air.

We must end the Net Zero delusion before it’s too late – Telegraph

Enough of the pretence, says the paper. It’s only arguing about methods of implementation e.g. targets, but better than nothing. The central plan is a drag on the whole country in the name of a climate theory that can’t be shown to be valid, using climate models that can’t even model the past or present with the necessary accuracy.
– – –
Political obituaries will not be kind to Theresa May, says The Telegraph.

But there is one unwritten law of modern British politics the former prime minister understood: you can be wrong on climate change, provided you are wrong in the right way.

Whisper that net zero by 2050 will have deleterious social and economic costs, and accusations of “denialism” will swiftly follow.

Yet warn that the “house is on fire” and the end time is at hand, and you’ll probably be given a book deal.

Sound the alarm? EU climate agency says the globe is a fraction of a degree warmer than the last ‘record’

Note the adjectives: ‘Obliterated…record-breaking…hot streak…soaring…climate change-fueled’ …leading to… ‘breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree’. The big build-up followed by the damp squib.
– – –
For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records—with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.

The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month, says Phys.org.

And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

‘Very Bizarre’: Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

“Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century – heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” says astrophysicist Willie Soon. But data manipulation, or tampering, is rife. Most climate models over-predict warming, while natural variations continue.
– – –
Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times. — Zerohedge reporting.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back.

The regular ‘Atlantic Circulation Collapse’ story

Risking making AMOCkery of climate science with unrealistic scenarios in global models is nothing new, but this one keeps coming back like a bad penny, as NZW explains. Returning to the same faulty predictions time and again gets the headlines but is easily debunked. In this case, the researchers intend to re-run their model with ‘global warming included’, but if everything else is the same, including ‘adding unrealistically large quantities of fresh water all at once’, many of the criticisms will still apply.
– – –
One of the many regular climate scare stories you can rely on is the one about failing currents in the Atlantic Ocean bringing cold climate chaos to Europe, says Net Zero Watch.

It’s one of the most favourite doomsday speculations, based on computer models pushed to the edge – but who cares, it’s a good shock-horror story and it pops up regularly.

Actually we should care because it’s well known that most people only register the top line of any news story — especially a climate disaster prediction – while they don’t take-in or even read up on the context and the qualifications.

World’s first year-long breach of ‘key’ 1.5C warming limit alarms the BBC

Alarmists mark an artificial deadline, still pretending government-driven limits can be put on long-term climate variations and attempting to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which hasn’t happened anyway. Cue the usual well-worn phrases about tackling climate change, emissions etc.
– – –
For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts, says BBC News.

This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark “Paris agreement”, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Climate Scientists Want Space Umbrellas The Size Of Argentina To Blot Out The Sun

Mr. Burns blocks the sun

Bad luck for solar panel owners and users, and anything relying on photosynthesis. But as such umbrellas would be far too heavy to move even if they could be made, probably nothing to worry about. Just another climate alarm concoction in search of funding.
– – –
A team of climate scientists wants to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported.

To block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding.

UN bidding starts in the $trillions for COP 29 climate finance

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

A UN official claims there’s a ‘need to collectively raise and direct $2.4 trillion annually for climate mitigation’. Billions are too small to mention any more, when trying to ‘avoid devastating impacts of climate change’ (says this article). Since climate models aren’t even much good at replicating reality, and various dire predictions to date have failed, what basis is there for this proposed level of spending?
– – –
The UN’s next climate summit will be an “enabling COP,” focused on drastically scaling up climate finance and making bold emissions reduction commitments, says Axios.

Why it matters: Top UN climate official Simon Stiell delivered a speech this morning in Baku, Azerbaijan, envisioning what will happen if the world meets the climate challenge and avoids devastating impacts of climate change.

Zoom in: The speech, delivered at ADA University, counters perceptions in some parts of the climate community that Baku will involve lower stakes and more technical work than COP28 did in Dubai.

New study reports that Greenland is a methane sink rather than a source

Greenland settlement [image credit: climatechangepost.com]

A large dent goes in to thawing permafrost scares, as another ‘ticking time bomb’ based on greenhouse gas theories turns out to be a dud. As for carbon dioxide, the professor leading the study commented: “…the ice-free parts of Greenland have only been without ice since the last ice age, meaning that they never stored much carbon”. Climate models will have to be revised.
– – –
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have concluded that the methane uptake in dry landscapes exceeds methane emissions from wet areas across the ice-free part of Greenland.

The results of the new study contribute important knowledge to climate models, says Phys.org.

The researchers are now investigating whether the same finding applies to other polar regions.

Two global temperature graphs – spot the difference

We’ve done it already. The sloping green line in each graph, or ‘Manhattan’, has been added by the Talkshop. Of course it’s the same data, but the presentation is noticeably different. In the first one from The Conversation the green slope line is at 45° to the horizontal, and in the second one from NOAA (the creator of the graph) the same line is a more modest, although still quite steep, 35°. Is someone trying too hard to impress?
– – –
Graph 1

Source: The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/ice-storms-january-downpours-heavy-snow-no-snow-diagnosing-warming-winter-syndrome-221956

Graph 2

Source: NOAA
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202313

Oldie but Goldie: Climategate: how the conspirators gagged on their deceptions

Andrew Bolt Herald Sun Dec 6 2009

I’ve wondered whether Climategate scientist Tom Wigley, an Australian, finally choked on all the fraud, fiddling and coverups he was witnessing from fellow members of his Climategate cabal. Steven Hayward points out that many other Climategate scientists privately had trouble swallowing the practices of their colleagues:

In 1998 three scientists from American universities–Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes–unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology–the now notorious “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction (picture a flat “handle” extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping “blade” from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin–far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period (MWP) and the little ice (LIA) age both disappeared.

Sky News called out on air for arguing ‘both sides’ on climate change

Sceptic of human-caused climate disturbance theories painted as a right-wing pantomime villain by ‘how dare they’ activist type. Seeking as usual to avoid true debate, e.g. on the repeated failure of alarmist predictions, by resorting to irrelevant caricatures. The fact Sky News invited a sceptic at all suggests awareness that ignoring them has not worked, and the public is by no means all on board with media propaganda.
– – –
SKY News has been criticised for arguing “both sides” on climate change after the Met Office said 2023 had been the second warmest year for the UK since records began in 1884, reports The National (Scotland).

In a segment on the news, presenter Kay Burley spoke to writer James Woudhuysen and activist Zoe Cohen from Just Stop Oil about the issue.

Cohen used her time on air to rip into bosses at Sky for platforming Woudhuysen, who questioned whether the statistics from the Met Office were accurate, claiming they were “very difficult to believe”.

More records tumble as China cold snap persists

Climate alarmists resort to the *extreme weather* excuse whenever it suits them, for example when unusually cold weather arrives somewhere. In this case a vast area of China has ‘all-time December lows’. What empirical evidence is there that supports the idea of trace gases in the atmosphere being capable of having such effects?
– – –
More low temperature records tumbled across China on Thursday, as the country endures a persistent cold snap that has crowned a year of extreme weather, says Phys.org.

The national weather office said in a social media post that more than 20 stations posted all-time December lows in the early hours of Thursday.

They included Hohhot, capital of the northern Inner Mongolia region, where a reading of -29.1 degrees Celsius (-20.4 Fahrenheit) broke a nearly 70-year record.

WMO’s missing CO2-climate correlation?

The alarmist WMO has put out a graphic on X/Twitter (Talkshop copy here) showing hardly any global warming increase (in blue) between 1940 and the 1970s, followed by a clear transition (to red) since then. This doesn’t correlate with the monotonic CO2 rise during that period. Weather expert Joe Bastardi is delighted: ‘Merry Christmas from the World Meteorological Organization’.

Another one from the WMO – “off the charts” – showing September-November temperature anomalies right back to 1850, agrees:

Where does that leave greenhouse gas theories? Joe Bastardi has a few ideas.
– – –
Update: Net Zero Watch wades in to the debate —
2023: Global temperature, statistics and hot air

‘Weak tea’: dismayed climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer

No ‘meaningful progress’. Needless to say, climate alarmists wanted more alarm than was delivered. One wailed: “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.” Shouldn’t that already have happened according to previous COP, and other, forecasts of doom? If not, the next claim is that ‘the window is closing’. The melodrama limps on.
– – –
A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism.

But many climate scientists said the joyful sentiments of world leaders did not accurately reflect the limited ambition of the agreement.

‘Weak tea at best’
Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized the vagueness of the fossil fuel statement, which has no firm, accountable boundaries for how much countries should do by when.

“The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP.