D-day’s secret weapon: How wetland science stopped Normandy landings from getting bogged down

Beneath the roar of gunfire and the chaos of D-day, an unlikely hero played a vital role—wetland science, says Christian Dunn (via Phys.org).

Often overlooked amid military strategies and troop movements, the study of mud proved critical to the success of the largest amphibious invasion in history.

Much has been written about the events of June 6, 1944, and the extensive planning that led up to Operation Overlord on that pivotal day. The success of the Normandy landings involved expertise from a vast array of military, espionage, engineering and communication groups.

My new report explains how scientists with knowledge of sediments and substrate formation, such as peat found in bogs and fens, were also instrumental in the planning and execution of D-day.
. . .
A daring mission
After training and a test mission, COPP [Combined Operations Pilotage Parties] swung into action. On December 31, two commandos—24-year-old Major Logan “Scottie” Scott-Bowden and 25-year-old Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith—were chosen to land covertly on the Normandy landing beach codenamed Gold Beach. Their task was to collect sediment samples.

On New Year’s Eve 1943, Scott-Bowden and Ogden-Smith swam ashore under the cover of darkness, having been dropped off by a small boat 300 meters from the French coast.

Alongside their swimming suits, rather like modern-day dry-suits, they were equipped with a torch, compass, watch, a fighting knife and a .45 Colt revolver. They also took a soil corer, or auger, for taking soil samples and ten tubes for storing the samples.
. . .
The bravery of the COPP commandos and the application of wetland science were instrumental in ensuring the success of D-day. Without their efforts the allies could literally have been bogged down, making them easy targets for German defenses.

Full article here.
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Image: Normandy landings beach

Report: The Importance of Wetland Science for the Success of the D-Day Landings (June 2024)

Lunar-driven Barents Sea climate — The Climate Clock

Professor Harald Yndestad writes (here): ‘The Kola-section data analysis revealed, for the first time, that Arctic climate variations are controlled by the earth’s rotation and the moon’. He refers to ‘the riddle of a 6-year cycle in the cod population’ and comments: ‘My estimates reveal we are at a turning point and moving into a colder period and more ice extent.’ The 6-year cycle reminded me of a Talkshop post featuring a paper by astronomer Willy de Rop, in which he wrote, with illustrations: ‘We will now consider how often such a situation of maximum tides will occur. The perigee moves 0.164 358 002 0 a day relative to the node, corresponding to 360° in a period p 2 190.340565 days. If at the same time this moment of maximum influence coincides with the moment at which the Earth is in the perihelion of its orbit, the tides will reach an absolute maximum. So, when the perigee of the Moon’s orbit coincides with the ascending node, then this situation repeats after 2190.340565 days. This period p corresponds to 5.996 667 350 anomalistic years, thus nearly an entire number of anomalistic years.’ In other words, almost six years. It’s the beat period of the (lunar) anomalistic and tropical months, also of the full moon cycle and draconic year. Whether this plays a part in the cod discussion is an open question.
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In nature, nothing acts alone, writes Prof. Harald Yndestad. Therefore, something outside the cod stock, causes recruitment in periods of 6 years.

The source may be a 6-year temperature cycle in the Barents Sea. If the temperature in the Barents Sea has a period of 6 years, it must also have a source outside the Barents Sea. This means that there must be a first cause. A cause of causes, for temperature variations in the Barents Sea.

So, what is periodic in nature? Could the source be the tides or in the earth’s rotation? I contacted an astrophysicist.

Is a new Interactive Climate Atlas ‘a game changer for policymakers’ – or just a game?

Delving into the technical section (see below), this puzzling statement appeared:
‘One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of [a named] dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty.’ — Another section is headed ‘Quality assured data’ but surely models with a wide range of uncertainty must include some which are more uncertain, aka inaccurate, than others. What purpose does that serve for policymakers?
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The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas, launched by the Copernicus Climate Change Service on 20 February, is set to be an important new resource for policymakers looking to formulate effective climate policy and for other users needing to visualise and analyse climate change information, says the European Commission.
. . .
Let’s get technical
So, how does the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas work? The gridded monthly dataset used for the Atlas integrates information from several climatic observational, reanalysis and projection datasets. The data is harmonised across the different datasets and catalogues to ensure standard common definitions and units for each of the variables.

One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of the CORDEX-CORE dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty. Due to its global continental coverage and higher resolution, this is a strategic dataset for the C3S Atlas, making it possible to analyse climate change in even higher resolution, such as for megacities around the world, for example.

Full article — Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas: a game changer for policymakers.

Gwythian Prins: National security concerns must take precedence over the climate

There is a respectable peacetime economic case for closing the Port Talbot blast furnaces and ceasing production of basic oxygen steel (BOS) in the United Kingdom and it is set out by the leading trade economist Catherine McBride. She shows how much British steel-making of any type has declined by volume, and how chronically dependant what remains is upon imported raw materials. She also explains how much EAF – electric arc furnace – steel production from recycled scrap has increased worldwide: for example, 70% of American steel in 2022 came from that source. Finally, she shows how globally dominant China and India have become in BOS, as witness 90% of China’s 1 billion ton steel production in 2022. China and India have massive economies of scale, and also access to domestically controlled raw materials, giving end-to-end control: in the Chinese case, both coking coal and iron ore, and in the Indian case, iron ore but with need to import coking coal. In contrast, the UK currently has to import both ore and coking coal at scale to feed the condemned blast furnaces.

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.

Latest energy policy announcements show that the UK Government has gone Insane

By David Turver at his ‘Eigen Values’ substack blog

Introduction

Back in the summer, there were signs that the consensus around Net Zero policy was starting to crack. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak then made his speech that watered down some Net Zero commitments and promised “a more pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic approach that eases the burdens on families.” However, in the run up to Christmas, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) made several announcements about various aspects of energy policy that can only add to consumer costs. These included various announcements about their hydrogen policy, a statement on carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) and an update on the business models for greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and power from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

This article explains that unfortunately, the announcements mark the end of any serious fightback against the Net Zero insanity and demonstrate that the Government has no idea about economics, thermodynamics or energy and has gone completely insane.

The Sun’s Rampant Activity Is Likely to Peak Really, Really Soon: Study

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

So soon there’s barely time to read the study, if the prediction is anywhere near correct. Solar cycle 25 has already defeated the majority of pundits anyway, by being considerably more active prior to its peak than the last one. However, at least one group of researchers has already forecast a peak around now (see this April 2023 Talkshop post). The latest (i.e. just revised) Hathaway/Upton forecast graphic is here. What the value is of SC predictions of such short duration, even if they turn out to be close to correct, is not entirely clear. It seems like placing a bet when the jockeys can already see the finish line.
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A new study has found that the impending peak in the Sun’s activity cycle will likely arrive significantly sooner than previously predicted, says Science Alert.

According to an analysis by astrophysicists Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha, and Dibyendu Nandy at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, solar maximum is likely to hit in January 2024.

This is much, much sooner than the initial official prediction, which found solar maximum would take place in July 2025.

Scientists discover rare six-planet system that moves in synchrony

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) [image credit: NASA]

This system looks like a prize winner for resonance. For no obvious reason Phys.org calls it ‘strange’ synchrony. Planets orbiting near their star (orbit periods from 9 to 55 days in this example) are bound to be strongly influenced by it, in the same way moons close to planets can be.
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Scientists have discovered a rare sight in a nearby star system: Six planets orbiting their central star in a rhythmic beat, says Phys.org.

The planets move in an orbital waltz that repeats itself so precisely that it can be readily set to music.

A rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep, the system could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution.

Hanson et al paper claims ‘climate is more sensitive than usually assumed’

Here we go again. Sound the alarm – louder! So far most climate models have consistently over-estimated temperature rises, compared to observations. The paper goes online shortly (see below for full details).
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According to a new paper in Oxford Open Climate Change, the strategies humanity must pursue to reduce climate change will have to include more than reducing greenhouse gases.

This comes from an analysis of climate data led by researcher James Hansen, says the press release (@ EurekAlert!).

Scientists have known since the 1800s that infrared-absorbing (greenhouse) gases warm the Earth’s surface and that the abundance of greenhouse gases changes naturally as well as from human actions. [Talkshop comment – the human actions part at least is still a theory].

Roger Revelle, who was one of the early scientists to study global warming, wrote in 1965 that industrialization meant that human beings were conducting a “vast geophysical experiment” by burning fossil fuels, which adds carbon dioxide (CO2) to the air.

Beer faces unbitter future due to climate change, study claims

Another day, another manufactured climate scare! This time it features a popular (in the UK and Ireland at least) style of beer, but before crying bitter tears, note the last sentence of the article: ‘Brewers can also try to modify their methods to adapt to the reduced bitterness in hops’.
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Climate change threatens the cultivation in Europe of aromatic hops which gives beer its bitterness, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

European varieties of hops are prized and used by brewers around the world, but rising temperatures and less rain are reducing yields and the concentration of the compounds that provide beer its refreshing tartness, says Phys.org.

The researchers observed this trend by analyzing data from five sites in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Slovakia, which along with Poland are the primary hops growers in Europe, study co-author Miroslav Trnka said.

To study atmosphere, NASA rockets will fly into October eclipse’s shadow

Annular eclipse [image credit: Smrgeog @ Wikipedia]

This is part 1 – part 2 is next April.
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A NASA sounding rocket mission will launch three rockets during the 2023 annular eclipse in October to study how the sudden drop in sunlight affects our upper atmosphere, says Phys.org.

On Oct. 14, 2023, viewers of an annular solar eclipse in the Americas will experience the sun dimming to 10% its normal brightness, leaving only a bright “ring of fire” of sunlight as the moon eclipses the sun.

Those in the vicinity of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, however, might also notice sudden bright streaks across the sky: trails of scientific rockets, hurtling toward the eclipse’s shadow.

A NASA sounding rocket mission will launch three rockets to study how the sudden drop in sunlight affects our upper atmosphere.

New study confirms Gulf Stream weakening, but cause unknown – or is it?

Gulf Stream map [image credit: RedAndr @ Wikipedia]

The lead and co-author have clearly different views on this:
Lead author: “While we can definitively say this weakening is happening, we are unable to say to what extent it is related to climate change or whether it is a natural variation.”
Co-author: “It saddens me to acknowledge, from our study and so many others, and from recent record-breaking headlines, that even the remotest parts of the ocean are now in the grip of our addiction to fossil fuels.”
What have headlines got to do with science research?
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The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Strait has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with a 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study.

The Gulf Stream — which is a major ocean current off the U.S. East Coast and a part of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation — plays an important role in weather and climate, and a weakening could have significant implications, says Science Daily.

“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The world needs to cut ‘carbon intensity’ seven times faster to limit warming to 1.5°C – say net-zero obsessed analysts

CO2 is not pollution

It’s dangerous, *we must* do this that and the other, ambition, fight, requirements etc. When will the tedious climate ranting ever stop? Endless stats come and go, announcing the latest failures of policies supposedly intended to arrange global temperatures to some fraction of a degree. The more they complain, the faster total energy consumption rises, defeating all attempts at control by (as Bill Gates put it) ‘jerking around with renewables’.
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The world is falling dangerously short of the ambition that is needed to secure a safe future climate, according to new analysis by PwC, and as a result we need to fight to prevent every fraction of a degree of warming. [Talkshop comment – fight with what?]

PwC’s latest Net Zero Economy Index shows that a year-on-year decarbonisation rate of 17.2% (up from 15.2% last year) is now required to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – seven times greater than what was achieved over the last year (2.5%) and 12 times faster than the global average (1.4%) over the past two decades.

To put this into perspective, since 2000, no G20 country has achieved a decarbonisation rate of more than 11% in a single year – the highest level was achieved by the UK in 2014 (-10.9%).

The Index provides a stark illustration of the growing divergence between the global ambition to tackle climate change and the reality of current progress.

Ben Pile: Rishi’s Net Zero delay has outed the Green Blob’s threadbare theory

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Rishi Sunak’s ‘watering down’ of certain Net Zero targets is the first time that the green policy agenda has had ANY scrutiny of any consequence, despite many failures, starting with the ruinously expensive Renewable Obligation, extending into the totally failed CfDs that allowed wind farm developers to lie to achieve planning consent over rival generators and technologies. Not one part of the green policy agenda has lived up to any promise to deliver good to the British public.

It was the mildest possible reversal. It is in fact an attempt to SAVE Net Zero, not roll it back. Complaints that it has left Britain without an ‘industrial policy’ or has left ‘investors’ without ‘confidence’ are for the birds. It has put the UK in the same policy position as the EU (more on which in a bit), and there is no evidence of green policies having delivered any significant industrial development to these shores. No green jobs. No green growth. No green industrial revolution. Not even a BritishVolt. It is a farce.

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.

Earlier and earlier high-Arctic spring replaced by ‘extreme year-to-year variation’, say researchers

Still waiting

This observation doesn’t correlate with monotonic CO2 rise data. Apparently we’re left looking at ‘tremendous natural climate variability’, which doesn’t sound much like the claims and expectations of prevalent IPCC-type theories. The researchers say ‘temperature increases have stalled’, and ‘the previously observed trend has disappeared completely’. Little wonder then that some Arctic alarmists have been less shrill in recent years — their trend melted away.
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About 15 years ago, researchers reported that the timing of spring in high-Arctic Greenland had advanced at some of the fastest rates of change ever seen anywhere in the world.

But, according to new evidence, that earlier pattern has since been completely erased.

Instead of coming earlier and earlier, it seems the timing of Arctic spring is now driven by tremendous climate variability with drastic differences from one year to the next.

“As scientists we are obliged to revisit previous work to see whether the knowledge obtained at that time still holds,” says Niels Martin Schmidt of Aarhus University in Denmark.

The Pacific slope of Peru is greening, say Cambridge researchers – but they don’t like it?

Andes mountain range

We’re told ‘the exact cause or resulting consequences of this greening are not known’, but the media spin says ‘it’s not good news’. The unhealthy obsession with climate gloom and doom in certain quarters has spilled over here. The massive and ongoing greening trend is decribed as ‘a warning sign, like the canary in the mine’ (which of course expires). Really?
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Research led by physicists and geographers at the University of Cambridge has unveiled some large-scale changes in the vegetation in the South American Andes which may have dramatic impact on the environment and ecosystems of the region, says Phys.org.

Analyzing satellite data spanning the past 20 years, the research team based at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge examined how vegetation has been changing along the Pacific coast of Peru and northern Chile.

This area is known for its unique and delicate arid and semi-arid environments.

Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of petrol, Telegraph data show

Electric SUV [image credit: electrichunter.com]

Britain’s residential roads are not designed to cope with large numbers of such heavy vehicles. But they’re coming anyway.
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Electric cars damage roads twice as much as their petrol equivalents, analysis has shown, as the pothole crisis grows on Britain’s roads, says the Daily Telegraph.

Analysis by The Telegraph has found that the average electric car more than doubles the wear on road surfaces, which in turn could increase the number of potholes.

The country is suffering from a pothole crisis, with half as many filled last year compared to a decade ago amid an estimated £12 billion price tag to fill them all.

Arctic sea ice volume anomaly May ’23 update: A tale of two paradigms.

A polar bear inspects a US submarine near the North Pole [credit: Wikipedia]

Talkshop readers will remember the post last month looking at PIOMAS ice volume data in relation to two alternate futures. One is the future predicted by IPCC scientists that says we’re heading for an ice-free Arctic in summer 2035 on a fairly linear trend all the way down from when the satellite record begins (well, the section they show us anyway). The other is the sceptical null hypothesis, that Arctic ice variation is natural, cyclic, and probably following the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

These two alternatives appear on our plot below, along with the updated PIOMAS volume data. Up until now, both possible futures have been plausible, within two-sigma envelopes (not shown this time), with a few outliers for either scenario. This month’s updated current datapoint lies very close to the 65 year sinusoidal oscillation model’s median line, and just within the two-sigma envelope of the linear model. Click through to see the plot below the break.

It’s worse than we thought: there are only five years left

Old monkeyface emailed me to say: No, not five years of planetary existence! We have only five years left before the climate emergency unravels entirely.

How do I get to that prediction? We all know how hard predictions are, especially about the future. Well, I base it all on the fundamental observation that the planet has cycles and whether we understand them or not those cycles are going to carry on cycling, and we really should just get used to it.

Now radiative physics is pretty straightforward, but the whole climate emergency is based on a substantial amplification of the modest (and probably beneficial) warming that the recent increase in carbon dioxide concentrations has allegedly contributed to. And the climate klaxons are blaring full blast because people seem to believe that the earth (which has been around a while) is teetering on the edge of countless precipices. Should we cross this threshold, or that limit, they tell us, we will plunge over the edge into a hothouse world.

Personally, I’m a tad more concerned that we slip into another ice age, mini or major; that would be much more damaging to the human race and more difficult to adapt to than a warmer world. But let’s examine one of those precipices in a bit more detail.