USGS: California wildfires emitted as much CO2 as an entire year’s worth of electricity for the state

California wildfire [image credit: NASA]

Buying electric cars, solar panels and the like isn’t going to make much of a dent in the ’emissions’ California likes to fret about, as long as current forestry practices – or lack of them – are allowed to continue.

According to data analyzed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), the 2018 wildfire season in California is estimated to have released emissions equivalent to roughly 68 million tons of carbon dioxide, reports Green Car Congress.

This number equates to about 15% of all California emissions, and it is on par with the annual emissions produced by generating enough electricity to power the entire state for a year.

New Study on sea level rise find ‘no compelling evidence that recent rates of sea level rise are abnormal’

H/T Climate Depot
Allowing for limitations of global sea level data, it seems the endless cries of alarm and scary scenarios are not justifiable at this time.

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: Mean global sea level has risen at a slow creep for more than 150 years; since 1900, global mean sea level has risen about 7-8 inches.

The implications of the highest values of projected sea-level rise under future climate change scenarios are profound, with far-reaching socioeconomic and environmental implications.

However, these projections are regarded as deeply uncertain and the highest of these projections strain credulity…

Scientific error upends major ocean warming study

Apparently you’re a ‘climate contrarian’ if you dare to check the claimed results of climate-related studies. The researchers ‘calculated heat based on the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the ocean, filling round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe’. But now they admit this ‘novel method’ didn’t work out the way they first thought, having had the error pointed out to them.

Researchers with the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University recently walked back scientific findings published last month that showed oceans have been heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change, reports Phys.org.

Greenland ice sheet hides huge ‘impact crater’

Topographic map of Greenland

Something creating a 19-mile wide dent in the Earth’s surface would clearly have been a major strike. If confirmed it would be the most northerly impact crater on Earth.

What looks to be a large impact crater has been identified beneath the Greenland ice sheet, reports BBC News.

The 31km-wide depression came to light when scientists examined radar images of the island’s bedrock.

Investigations suggest the feature was probably dug out by a 1.5km-wide iron asteroid sometime between about 12,000 and three million years ago.

Gravesend-Broadness weather station closes

No-one is quite sure why this weather station – which the late Tim Channon featured several times here at the Talkshop – so often came top of UK temperature lists, apart from being close to London. But KentLive News offered this believe-it-or-not clue: ‘The soil at Broadness is also said to heat up rather quickly under direct sunlight, which is part of the reason why it records some record breaking temperatures.’ Having only opened in 1995, its short-lived fame – or was it notoriety? – will now have to pass to somewhere else.
H/T PM

A weather station that has recorded some of the hottest temperatures in the UK is no more, reports KentOnline.

It’s been revealed a weather station renowned for recording some of the UK’s hottest temperatures has closed.

The Met Office has decided to shut the Gravesend-Broadness weather station on the Swanscombe peninsula after “significant changes to the site.”

The Retreat of the Gangotri Glacier

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This glacier is one of the largest in the Himalayas and has been retreating since well before the Industrial Revolution, suggesting purely natural causes must be at work.

MalagaBay

If you’ve come to recognise that the future projections of modern climate science are alarmist pseudo-science then it should come as no surprise that the historical hindcasts conjured up by climate science are also pitiful pseudo-science.

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Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method

The Met-Office has issued a ‘decadal’ climate forecast which runs from 2018 to 2023. Maybe it should be called a ‘semi-decadal forecast’ instead, but we’ll let it pass, as that’s not the most amusing aspect of it by a long chalk.

For starters, there’s the baseline period chosen. 1850-1900. They’ve gone for this so they can scare us with the upper end of the blue prediction envelope exceeding the Dangerous! Global! Warming! politically chosen figure of 1.5C above “pre-industrial”.

Here’s the global measuring station coverage between 1891 and 1920. There was a lot less in 1850.

I thought it would be fun to see how the Met-O forecast is doing after 10 months, so I plotted the latest annually averaged HadCRUt 4 global data using Wood For Trees in red and overlaid it on the Met-O prediction plot:

A conversation with Ken Rice on the causes of the ‘Greenhouse effect’

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Yes, adiabatic compression heating is an ongoing process, due to the convection cycle. I’ve tried to illustrate it by modifying NASA’s energy budget diagram. Calcs on right show PV/nR=T gives correct values regardless of radiative transfer.

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 3h3 hours ago

This has probably been explained before, but if adiabatic heating is to be an ongoing process then that would suggest the atmosphere is contracting. Since it clearly isn’t, this can’t be the source of the enhanced surface temperature.

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Ken. Air convecting upwards every day displaces cold high altitude air downwards through the pressure gradient which compresses and heats it. If it didn’t, that air would be colder at the surface, and would allow much more rapid conduction of heat from surface to the air. Agree?

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 2h2 hours ago

Roger, if you want to enhance the temperature on the surface via compression then the atmosphere would need to continually contract.

Now at least 10 years with sea ice at 2050-like levels yet polar bears are still abundant

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With about the same minimum Arctic sea ice extent this season as 2008 and 2010, persistent claims of ‘rapid decline’ are looking more than threadbare, and polar bears don’t seem too bothered either, judging by the numbers. Climate scare merchants may have to look elsewhere to try and generate a headline.

polarbearscience

We’ve hit the seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum for this year, called this morning by US NSIDC for 19th and 23rd of Septmeber: 4.59 mkm2, the same extent as 2008 and 2010. This is not a “ho-hum” year for polar bears: it means that since 2007, they have triumphed through 10 or 11 years¹ with summer ice coverage below 5.0 mkm2 —  levels that in 2007were expected to cause catastrophic declines in numbers.

Summer sea ice below 5.0 mkm2 were not expected to occur until about 2050, according to 2005/2006 sea ice models and polar bear specialists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Polar bear survival models predicted 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would disappear when ice levels reached this threshold for 8 out of 10 years (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Hunter 2007) but polar bears have been more resilientthan expected (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford…

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Cambridge University scientists create ancient tree ring diary

Did the BBC just say in this report: ‘if the recent warming is unusual’? Whether tree ring analysis can improve predictions, as suggested, is an interesting question but open to debate.

The “longest, continuous tree ring-based diary” is being created by scientists at the University of Cambridge to help map climate change, reports BBC News.

The diary documents climatic conditions going back centuries, using trees from across the world.

Hurricane Florence–The Myths and The Facts

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The blog post title speaks for itself. Alarmists can’t accept natural variation, so use false logic to try and claim that any weather characteristic which wasn’t exactly like the last few hurricanes must be somehow man-made.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://abcnews.go.com/US/million-people-evacuated-coast-hurricane-florence-bears/story?id=57740845

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-florence/mass-evacuations-ordered-as-hurricane-florence-heads-toward-carolinas-idUSKCN1LR0J6

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45517260

http://time.com/5397241/florence-breaks-rainfall-records-in-north-carolina/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-real-welcome-to-the-new-normal/2018/09/17/2ded61e4-bab3-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html?utm_term=.21f11175fc15

True to form, the media have been whipping up a state of hysteria about Hurricane Florence. Unlike some of their more irresponsible members, I have waited until all of the data is in, instead of rushing to judgment.

So, to the facts:

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Hurricane Florence: climate dynamics context

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A sort of post-mortem look at various issues surrounding Hurricane Florence. If pressed for time, ‘the take home point is that convincingly attributing any of this to human caused global warming is very challenging’ – see the summary.

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

“Impending massive hurricanes bring the best out of weather twitter and the worst out of climate twitter” – Joseph Maykut

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How constant is the “solar constant?”

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Well…it’s complicated. The available data is less than perfect, but the ‘natural variation option’ (so to speak) is still on the table.

Andy May Petrophysicist

The IPCC lowered their estimate of the impact of solar variability on the Earth’s climate from the already low value of 0.12 W/m² (Watts per square-meter) given in their fourth report (AR4), to a still lower value of 0.05 W/m² in the 2013 fifth report (AR5), the new value is illustrated in Figure 1. These are long term values, estimated for the 261-year period 1750-2011 and they apply to the “baseline” of the Schwabe ~11-year solar (or sunspot) cycle, which we will simply call the “solar cycle” in this post. The baseline of the solar cycle is the issue since the peaks are known to vary. The Sun’s output (total solar irradiance or “TSI”) is known to vary at all time scales (Kopp 2016), the question is by how much. The magnitude of short-term changes, less than 11 years, in solar output are known relatively accurately, to better…

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Computer climate simulations just crashed

Not the actual simulations, but the already fading credibility thereof. What scientific reason is there to rely on their results?

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science, writes Andrew Montford for The GWPF.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

David Eyles: The Quiet Revolution

A rarely spotted phenomenon, sometimes acknowledged by one or two of the more astute political pundits, is that the Labour Party has moved away from its core of working-class voters. The leadership has now fully embraced the demands of its middle and upper-middle class hierarchy and has gone full-on Quinoa Marxist.

However, the Labour Party is not alone, because the Conservative Party has also moved in the same direction, albeit not quite so far. The leadership indulges in wholesale political correctness. It then signals its virtue by casual obeisance to whichever favoured minority group is flavour of the week. Accordingly, the Tories have also stepped away from their voters – most of whom are utterly bored with this infantile nonsense.

There has been some floundering recognition that the sheer nastiness of the Labour Left is causing some Labour MPs to panic and talk of forming a new centrist party. But that will only occupy the same ground that the Tories already occupy, by virtue of their own leftward manoeuvrings. Talk of a Tony Blair led centre-left party, perhaps embracing the Liberal Democrats, would be a move into an already overcrowded marketplace with decreasing numbers of voters to whom this will appeal. Tony Blair is the most toxic brand in British politics.

Media extrapolating a trend from a single data point: 2018 Heatwave Edition

Image credit: BBC

Warren Meyer writes: ‘The implicit plea in this post goes beyond climate — if you are claiming a trend, show me the trend data. I can be convinced […] but so often the actual data never matches the arm-waving in these media sources.’

This article in something called Inside Climate News seems to be typical of many I have seen this year.

Because we have had much attention in the media on heat waves this year, there must be an upward trend in heat waves and that is a warning signal that man-made global warming is destroying the planet.

Typical of these articles are a couple of features

Tim Ball: Canada Must Get Out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Tim Ball, head of CLEXIT Canada writes:

 I am proud to be the Canadian representative for the climate exit (CLEXIT) movement. Canada has more culpability than any other nation in creating and perpetuating the deception. It is not hyperbole to say that Canada was central to creating and mobilizing the false claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The idea that humans were causing runaway global warming originated with the Club of Rome. Formed in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it expanded on the Malthusian idea that the population would outgrow the food supply. The expansion was that world population would outgrow all resources. They made three major assumptions.

• The demand for resources would increase every year because the population is increasing every year.
• Developed nations increase the demand by using resources at a much greater rate than developing nations.
• More nations are changing from developing to developed and accelerating demand.

They produced a few books and reports to substantiate the claims about population and demand. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb garnered enormous attention. Less well read but still influential was the 1972 book Limits to Growth by Meadows et al. It used a very primitive computer program that started with two components. The known volume of a resource and the current rate of use. Then, using a simple linear trend, it projected the point at which the resource would run out. It also projected the point at which the volume of the resource use peaked. Another book published in 1977, Ecoscience, Population, Resources, and Environment, influenced policy for a long time because of Paul Ehrlich’s co-author John Holdren. He later became Science Advisor in the Obama White House.

Volcano eruptions at different latitudes impact sea surface temperature differently

Volcanic eruption

Interesting results from this research into where and how volcanoes might fit into the oceans/climate picture.

Volcanic eruptions are among the most important natural causes of climate change, playing a leading role over the past millennium, says Phys.org.

Injections of sulfate aerosols into the lower stratosphere reduce the incoming solar radiation, in turn cooling the surface.

As a natural external forcing to the Earth’s climate system, the impact of volcanic aerosols on the climate has been of great concern to the scientific society and the public.

In recent years, scientists have found that there is a relationship between volcanic eruptions and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) based on reconstructions and model simulations, which is manifested in increased/decreased sea surface temperature (SST) gradient over the equatorial Pacific.

Ed Hoskins: GLOBAL MAN-MADE CO2 EMISSIONS 1965 – 2017: BP DATA

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on worldwide CO2 emission levels published by BP in June 2018 for the period from 1965 up until the end of 2017.

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

The data can be summarised as follows:

Some initial points arising from the BP data:

• Having been relatively stable for the last 7 years global CO2 emissions grew by ~1.3% in 2017.  This growth was in spite of all the international “commitments” arising from the Paris Climate Agreement.
• The contrast between the developed and developing worlds remains stark:
  • developing world emissions overtook Developed world CO2 emissions in 2005 and they have been escalating since.
  • in terms of their history and the likely prognosis of their CO2 emissions.
• Since 1990 CO2 emissions from the developed world have decreased, whereas the developing world has shown a fourfold increase since 1980.  CO2 emissions in the developing world are accelerating as the quality of the lives for people in the underdeveloped and developing world improves.  At least 1.12 billion people in the developing world still have no access to reliable mains electricity.
• As a result CO2 emissions / head for India and the rest of the world’s Underdeveloped nations (~53% of the world population) remains very low at ~1.7 tonnes / head, (~40% of the Global average) meaning that the state of serious human deprivation and underdevelopment is continuing.
• By 2017 CO2 emissions from the developing world were some 65% of the global emissions.
• India and the underdeveloped world will certainly be continuing to promote their own development to attain comparable development levels to their other peer group developing nations.
• India’s growth in CO2 emissions 2016 – 2017 was by a further 4.1%
• China, (considered here as a “Developing Nation”),  showed CO2 emission growth of 1.4% in 2017.
• China’s CO2 emissions / head for its population of some 1.4 billion has now approached the average emissions / head in Europe.
• China’s CO2 emissions / head was already higher than most of the EU Nations other than Germany.

Even as long ago as October 2010 Professor Richard Muller made the dilemma for all those who hope to control global warming by reducing CO2 emissions, particularly by means of CO2 reductions from Western Nations, clear:  in essence he said:

“the Developing World is not joining-in with CO2 emission reductions nor does it have any intention of doing so.  The failure of worldwide action negates the unilateral action of any individual Western Nation”.

Leif Svalgaard reveals his Solar Cycle 25 prediction “at last”

Solar scientist and part-time NSA operative Leif Svalgaard has produced a prediction for solar cycle 25, four years after Rick Salvador published his 86 year prediction in the swiftly censored “Pattern Recognition in Physics”.

It appears at the end of a 30 page pdf document he has published on his website. This is an interesting document, with a wealth of gayly coloured butterfly diagrams, polar field reconstructions and more. Leif self deprecatingly follows his Prediction title with (At last) not only because it comes at the end of 30 pages of preamble, but because he’s acutely aware of his method’s limitations.