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.

Antarctic icebergs still exist today where 1700-era sailors spotted and tracked them

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

Probably not the result that was expected from this study. Captain Cook’s descriptions of iceberg sightings still seem valid. Is saying ‘large icebergs…are not as sensitive to climate change’ enough to avoid raising questions about modern global warming theories?
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A new study comparing observations of large Antarctic icebergs from the 1700s with modern satellite datasets shows the massive icebergs are found in the same areas where they were pinpointed three centuries ago, reports Phys.org.

The study shows that despite their rudimentary tools, the old explorers truly knew their craft, and it confirms that the icebergs have behaved consistently for more than 300 years.

Using primarily the journal records of Captain James Cook’s 1772–1775 Antarctic circumnavigation on the HMS Resolution (where he noted the positions of hundreds of icebergs), a trio of researchers from Brigham Young University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography made comparisons with the two largest modern datasets available today: the BYU/National Ice Center and Alfred Wegener Institute datasets.

They found that Cook’s description of the iceberg plume east of Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, along with iceberg distributions in the Weddell, Ross and Amundsen Seas, agree with modern data.

Gamblers update: Eli Rabett vs Tallbloke on Arctic Sea Ice extent

Six years ago this week, I agreed to a wager with Eli Rabett on the trend in Arctic sea ice extent from 2006-2026. Now we’re more than halfway to the finish line, it’s a good time to check on progress. Here’s how the Sea Ice Extent graph looks from mid 2006 to mid 2022. The trend is still towards less ice, but not by much. There’s no ‘climate emergency tipping point’ visible in the data.

The terms we agreed are detailed in the image of the twitter convo below.

Ned Nikolov: Does a Surface Solar Radiation Dataset Expose a Major Manipulation of Global Temperature Records?

Once again it’s my pleasure to publish a new paper by Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller at the Talkshop. In this study, we see the presentation of a climate conundrum, and recent surface solar radiation data which helps shed new light on the questions surrounding the ongoing adjustment of global temperature datasets. This new study applies theory developed in Ned and Karl’s previous paper to enable quantification of the global temperature drop during the “1970s ice-age scare”. This won’t be the last word on the topic, but it offers a solid grounding for further research.

A PDF version of this article can be downloaded here.

Implications of a New Gridded Dataset of Surface Solar Radiation
for the Evolution of Earth’s Global Surface Temperature Since 1960

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. and Karl Zeller, Ph.D.
July, 2022

Abstract

A new data set of measured Surface Solar Radiation (SSR) covering six continents (Yuan et al. 2021) reveals that the Earth surface received annually 6.6 W m^-2 less shortwave energy in 2019 than it did in the early 1960s, and that the average solar flux incident on land decreased by 8.2 W m^-2 between 1962 and 1985. Since the Sun is the primary source of energy to the climate system, this pattern of SSR change over the past 60 years (oftentimes referred to as global dimming) suggests that the early 1960s were much warmer than the present. However, all modern records of global surface air temperature show a net warming of about 1.0 K between 1962 and 2019. We investigate this conundrum with the help of an independently derived model (previously verified against CERES observations) that accurately converts observed SSR anomalies into changes of global surface temperature. Results from the SSR-based temperature reconstruction are compared to observed global surface temperatures provided by UAH 6.0 and HadCRUT5 datasets. We find that the SSR-based global temperature estimates match quite well the UAH satellite record from 1982 to the present in terms of overall trend and interannual variability suggesting that the observed warming of the past 40 years was the result of a decreased cloud albedo and an increased SSR rather than rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The HadCRUT5 record also shows a satisfactory agreement with the SSR-based temperatures over the same time period. However, between 1962 and 1983, the SSR-based temperature reconstruction depicts a steep global cooling reaching a rate of -1.3 K/decade during the 1970s. This is drastically different from the mild warming claimed by HadCRUT5 over this time period. The cooling episode indicated by the SSR data is corroborated by more than 115 magazine and newspaper articles published throughout the 1970s as well as a classified CIA Report from 1974 all quoting eminent climatologists of the day, who warned the public that the observed worldwide drop of temperatures threatened the global food supply and economic security. Based on this, we conclude that researchers in charge of the HadCRUT dataset have likely removed the 1962 – 1983 cooling episode from the records before the publication of HadCRUT1 in 1994 in an effort to hide evidence contradicting the UN Resolution 43/53 from 1988, which proclaimed a global warming caused by greenhouse gases as a major societal concern, and urged Governments to treat it as a priority issue in climate research and environmental protection initiatives.

1. Introduction

It is a matter of conventional wisdom now that the Earth was significantly cooler during 1960s compared to the 21^st Century. Similarly, no one disputes that the planet’s surface temperature was 1.2^oC lower in the beginning of the 20^th Century compared to the present. This paradigm of climate change is based on surface temperature records maintained by several research teams that show remarkable consistency with one another. Figure 1 portrays global temperature anomalies based on 6 datasets supposedly constructed using different approaches summarized by Morice et al. (2021). All global records depict a nearly continuous warming since 1920 with a brief pause of the temperature rise between 1940 and 1980. No record shows a drop of global temperature between 1960 and 1980, which is at odds with a well-documented, decade-long discussion in the media about an ongoing rapid cooling during the 1970s currently known as the “1970s ice-age scare”.

Figure 1. Global surface temperature anomaly from 1850 to 2021 according to 6 official data sets. Note the remarkable consistency among various time series (borrowed from Fig. 8 of Morice et al. 2021).

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).

Victorian rainfall data shows extreme UK weather events are nothing new

It’s better than we thought! Another setback for alarmists as modern UK rainfall isn’t living up to the climate hype after all. Will the ‘adjusters’ be called in?
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Newly transcribed data from the Victorian era has ‘smashed’ current rainfall records, report experts at the Met Office and the University of Reading.

Heavy rainfall may be associated with flash floods and the modern-day battle against climate change, says the Daily Mail.

But a new study led by the Met Office and the University of Reading shows it’s nothing new – in fact, newly recovered data from the Victorian era has ‘smashed’ current rainfall records.

Study says Earth is dimming due to ‘climate change’ – but may be natural?

Halfway through this article we see the study’s findings were made ‘where increases in sea surface temperatures have been recorded because of the reversal of a climatic condition called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with likely connections to global climate change’. So the PDO has changed, which it regularly will do as its name (‘decadal’) indicates, and they want to tie the consequences to humans? That seems to be implied, although left vague by the usual catch-all term ‘climate change’.
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WASHINGTON—Warming ocean waters have caused a drop in the brightness of the Earth, according to a new study, says Eurekalert.

Researchers used decades of measurements of earthshine — the light reflected from Earth that illuminates the surface of the Moon to find that there has been a significant drop in Earth’s reflectance over the past two decades.

The Earth is now reflecting about half a watt less light per square meter than it was 20 years ago, with most of the drop occurring in the last three years of earthshine data, according to the new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

That’s the equivalent of 0.5% decrease in the Earth’s reflectance. Earth reflects about 30% of the sunlight that shines on it.

MET Office global temperature prediction falls 0.35C in 5 years.

Back in 2016, the UK MET Office’s median projection to the start of 2021 forecast a global temperature temperature anomaly of 1.4C above their 1850-1900 “Pre-Industrial” baseline. Their recently published five year model projection (rightmost blue blob on graph), shows a 2021 median anomaly 0.35C lower, at 1.05C.

Their HADcruT 4GL temperature time series (data since 2016 added in red on graph) shows a linear trend of +0.09C/semi-decade for the last 50 years. CO2, by far the biggest forcing in their model, is still rising in lockstep with the 50 year temperature trend. What could have caused this remarkable downward step change in their model output?

MET-Office wants your money for a new supercomputer, but has given up decadal forecasting

Well this is a disappointment.

After the fiasco in 2018 when I revealed the data-shifting technique the MET-Office were using to never be wrong about their ‘decadal’ forecast, and the late update in 2019 , the MET-O have now disappeared the ‘decadal’ forecast altogether. This after they promised to update it in January 2020.

EDIT: The forecast has been found! See comments below.

Chinese UHI study finds 0.34C/century inflation effect on average temperature estimate.

New study published by Springer today makes interesting reading. Phil Jones’ ears will be burning brightly.

Abstract:
Historical temperature records are often partially biased by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. However, the exact magnitude of these biases is an ongoing, controversial scientific question, especially in regions like China where urbanization has greatly increased in recent decades. Previous studies have mainly used statistical information and selected static population targets, or urban areas in a particular year, to classify urban-rural stations and estimate the influence of urbanization on observed warming trends. However, there is a lack of consideration for the dynamic processes of urbanization. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and Pearl River Delta (PRD) are three major urban agglomerations in China which were selected to investigate the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of urban expansion effects on observed warming trends in this study. Based on remote sensing (RS) data, urban area expansion processes were taken into consideration and the relationship between urban expansion rates and warming trends was investigated using data from 975 meteorological stations throughout China.

MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.

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:

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”.

North Atlantic Oscillation synchronizes tree reproduction across Europe

The researchers back the idea that ‘a strong NAO synchronizes climate across large parts of Europe’, reports ScienceDaily. ‘Large scale changes in pressure’ are involved.

Research has found a strong correlation between the North Atlantic Oscillation and synchronized tree reproduction across Europe, supporting the idea that this phenomenon plays a greater role in large scale masting, the process whereby forest trees produce large numbers of seeds in the same year.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) refers to the large scale changes in pressure that occur naturally in the North Atlantic region. It has been shown to have a strong effect on atmospheric circulation and European climate.

It is known that tree reproduction tends to be strongly synchronised within local populations, so that if one tree is producing a very heavy seed or fruit crop, it is very likely that a neighbouring tree will also be heavily fruiting.

Study: satellites show no acceleration in global warming for 23 years

NOAA weather satellite [image credit: NASA]

‘Official’ climate science response: claim satellite data is not reliable, and play shoot-the-messenger. Predictable, as the results obviously don’t fit theories of man-made warming.
H/T The GWPF

Global warming has not accelerated temperature rise in the bulk atmosphere in more than two decades, according to a new study funded by the Department of Energy.

University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientists John Christy and Richard McNider found that by removing the climate effects of volcanic eruptions early on in the satellite temperature record showed virtually no change in the rate of warming since the early 1990s.

“We indicated 23 years ago — in our 1994 Nature article — that climate models had the atmosphere’s sensitivity to CO2 much too high,” Christy said in a statement. “This recent paper bolsters that conclusion.”

Two Decades of Temperature Data from Australia – Not Fit for Purpose – Jennifer Marohasy

Credit: aboutaustralia.com

What is going on with Australian temperature data? It doesn’t look good, as Jennifer Marohasy explains.

Australia is a large continent in the Southern Hemisphere. The temperatures measured and recorded by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology contribute to the calculation of global averages.

These values, of course, suggest catastrophic human-caused global warming. Two decades ago the Bureau replaced most of the manually-read mercury thermometers in its weather stations with electronic devices that could be read automatically – so since at least 1997 most of the temperature data has been collected by automatic weather stations (AWS).

Before this happened there was extensive testing of the devices – parallel studies at multiple site to ensure that measurements from the new weather stations tallied with measurements from the old liquid-in-glass thermometers.

MET Office ‘adjusts’ the data to bring us the hottest day since 1976

The BBC breathlessly reports a MET-office reported temperature of 34.5C at Heathrow yesterday, but what does the actual data say?

Major breakthrough in solar-planetary theory: Barycentre research vindicated

As long time regulars at the Talkshop know, our ongoing research into the links between planetary motion and solar variation has occasionally borne fruit in unexpected ways. The ‘shorthand’ for the sum of all planetary vectors is the Sun’s motion with respect to the barycentre of the solar system. This is the path the Sun is forced to follow by the ongoing evolution of the motion of all the planets. We have found various tantalising near-correlations between aspects of this motion and solar activity levels suggestive of some kind of mechanistic linkage.

We have been ridiculed for years by the WUWT wankers among others for working on this theory. Various other solar researchers have attempted ‘disproofs’ of a planetary effect on solar activity too. They all tell us the planets are “too small and too far away to affect the Sun”.

Last year, we featured a post concerning the work of Shepherd, Zharkov and Zharkova, who have been coming at the solar variation problem from another angle. They resolved the solar-hemispheric components of the solar polar fields into two separate curves, representing shallow and deep solar ‘dynamos’.

Combining the curves together produces a good representation of changing solar activity levels. Their prediction is, like ours from our planetary model, for a big solar slowdown extending through the middle decades of this century. The mainstream climate scientists tried to get the press release revoked…

Extending a new Lunar thermal model, Part III: Modelling the Moon at various rotation rates

Overview

More than a year after “Part II” of a guest post from Talkshop contributor ‘Galloping Camel’ on the Moon’s equatorial temperature here is “Part III”.  Peter actually sent this to Tim Channon last year, but Tim became to ill to deal with it and forgot to throw it my way. In current discussion of Ned and Karl’s new paper, the issue of planetary surface temperature variation due to speed of rotation arose. Ned thinks it makes no difference. Peter’s model says it does, so now is a good time for discussion, as this impacts theoretical estimates for the temperature of ‘Earth with no atmosphere’.

Modeling the Moon

It has been claimed that the GHE (Greenhouse Effect) is 33 Kelvin because the Earth’s average temperature is 288 K compared to a temperature of 255 K assumed for an “Airless Earth”.  The Diviner LRO showed that the Moon’s average temperature is 197.3 K which makes one wonder how an estimate based on impeccable mathematics could be so wrong?   Vasavada et al. published a paper in 2012 that mentioned a one-dimensional model of the Moon’s regolith.  As I was unable to obtain details of this model I attempted to replicate it using Quickfield, a powerful FEA (Finite Element Analysis) program.  Results obtained using my model were published here.

Tony Heller: Is the global temperature record credible?

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has this new video up on youtube. It raises important questions about the way the global temperature record has changed over time.