Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category

Kepler-47 system [Image Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech/T. Pyle]


Astronomers have discovered a third planet in the Kepler-47 system, securing the system’s title as the most interesting of the binary-star worlds, says NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration team.

Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a team of researchers, led by astronomers at San Diego State University, detected the new Neptune-to-Saturn-size planet orbiting between two previously known planets.

With its three planets orbiting two suns, Kepler-47 is the only known multi-planet circumbinary system. Circumbinary planets are those that orbit two stars.

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Now at the Talkshop let’s take a quick look at the data.

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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.

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Even assuming CO2 reduction to be a worthwhile policy, which is far from certain, electric vehicles may be far from an ideal option despite vast investments in the technology by many car firms, as Green Car Congress reports. Part of the supposed problem of course is that much electricity still comes from fuel-burning power stations.

According to a new study published by the ifo Institute Center for Economic Studies (CESifo) in Germany, EVs will barely help cut CO2 emissions in the country over the coming years, as the introduction of electric vehicles does not necessarily lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions from road traffic given the current power generation mix.

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Credit: PAR @ Wikipedia


If you think you saw something about this a few days ago, you’re right. This article is a sort of follow-up that has appeared in Nature Climate Change on 1st April [sic] – abstract here. The ‘recent human-induced Walker circulation trends’ in the headline seem to be an artefact of some of the climate models, judging by the report. The authors make a telling point: ‘In contrast to the observed strengthening, the majority of climate computer models simulate a gradual weakening of the Walker Circulation when forced by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations’. So they got it exactly backwards? How unfortunate.

A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that the recent intensification of the equatorial Pacific wind system, known as Walker Circulation, is unrelated to human influences and can be explained by natural processes, reports Phys.org.

This result ends a longstanding debate on the drivers of an unprecedented atmospheric trend, which contributed to a three-fold acceleration of sea level rise in the western tropical Pacific, as well as to the global warming hiatus.

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The author writes in his 40-page document: ‘This report is not meant to be an exhaustive representation of all the published papers related to a solar influence on Earth’s climate, but aims to give a clear presentation of the current knowledge on the link between solar activity and climate.’

Where does cosmic ray variation fit into the ‘big picture’ of solar influences on the Earth?

The Next Grand Minimum

I am still studying this paper but wanted to share and get your feedback

Executive Summary

Over the last twenty years there has been good progress in understanding the solar influ- ence on climate. In particular, many scientific studies have shown that changes in solar activ- ity have impacted climate over the whole Holocene period (approximately the last 10,000 years). A well-known example is the existence of high solar activity during the Medieval Warm Period, around the year 1000 AD, and the subsequent low levels of solar activity during the cold period, now called The Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD). An important scientific task has been to quantify the solar impact on climate, and it has been found that over the eleven- year solar cycle the energy that enters the Earth’s system is of the order of 1.0–1.5 W/m2. This is nearly an order of magnitude larger than what would be…

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Credit: nationalreview.com


Dr Roy Spencer tries to strike a note of sanity amidst the latest bout of doom-laden climate hysteria doing the rounds via cynical manipulation of the minds of school kids. What is accelerating is the bluster of alarmists, who lack credible empirical evidence of ‘human-caused’ as opposed to natural climate variation.

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims.

Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled”, writes Roy Spencer in The Washington Times.

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?

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Help Ned by emailing the White House to recommend his inclusion on the panel.

About time too!

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Queensland, Australia


The cause(s) of the Little Ice Age is (are) uncertain, but Wikipedia puts forward some ideas with varying degrees of plausibility, including ‘inherent variability in global climate’ (indeed), and ‘decreases in the human population’ (what?). Now some interesting evidence of it has been found in Australia.

A study by University of Adelaide researchers and Queensland Government scientists has revealed what south-east Queensland’s rainfall was like over the last 7000 years – including several severe droughts worse and longer lasting than the 12-year Millennium Drought, reports Phys.org.

The study – published in Scientific Reports—used preserved paper-bark tea tree leaves from North Stradbroke Island’s Swallow Lagoon that have been collecting in the sediment for the past 7700 years.

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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.

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Confusing Diabatic and Adiabatic Processes within the Climate Theory:

A Reply to Dr. Roy Spencer’s Blog Article “Giving Credit to Willis Eschenbach

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D.
Physical Scientist

In a recent blog post, Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attempted to criticize and dismiss the importance of our recent discovery about the physical nature of the atmospheric “Greenhouse effect” (Nikolov & Zeller 2017). I normally do not reply to blog articles, but this one reflects a fundamental generic confusion in the current climate theory that is worthwhile addressing for readership clarification. In his blog, Dr. Spencer demonstrated several misconceptions about our work that could be due to either not having read/understood our papers or perhaps an incomplete grasp of thermodynamics. The fact that Dr. Spencer cites a newspaper article about our research instead of the actual published paper may indicate a lack of familiarity with the technical details of our study. These are some key misrepresentations that I spotted in his article:    

1. Dr. Spencer incorrectly referred to our main finding as a “theory” when, in fact, it is a discovery based on vetted NASA data extracted from numerous published studies. This empirical pressure-temperature (P-T) function emerged from reported NASA measurements in the process of Dimensional Analysis, which is an objective technique employed in classical physics to derive/extract physically meaningful relationships from observed data.

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Credit: NASA climatekids


The necessary ocean-atmosphere coupling needed for El Niño to develop has not been observed so far, despite earlier favourable predictions.

ENSO-neutral conditions are present, says NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center [pdf].

Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are above average across most of
the Pacific Ocean.

The patterns of convection and winds are mostly near average over the tropical Pacific.

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Not exactly shock news perhaps, but words like ‘extreme’ and ‘unrealistic’ ought to be embarrassing for those who summoned over 20,000 people from around the world to Poland to spend several days discussing it.

From The GWPF.

London, 20 December: One of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists has documented the main scientific reasons why the recent UN climate summit failed to welcome the IPCC’s report on global warming of 1.5°C.

In a paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation Professor Ray Bates of University College Dublin explains the main reasons for the significant controversy about the latest IPCC report within the international community.

The IPCC’s Special Report on a Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in advance of the recent COP24 meeting in Katowice, Poland, but was not adopted by the meeting due to objections by a number of governments.

Professor Bates examines some key aspects of the SR1.5 report. He assesses if the IPCC report exhibits a level of scientific rigour commensurate with the scale of its extremely costly and highly disruptive recommendation that carbon emissions be reduced to zero by mid-century.

The paper concludes that such a level of scientific rigour is not present in the report. Specifically, SR1.5 is deficient in scientific rigour in the following respects:

● It departs from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in conveying an increased sense of planetary emergency without giving rigorous scientific reasons for doing so.

● It fails to communicate to policymakers a considerable body of important observationally-based research evidence that has accumulated since the Fifth Assessment which reduces the sense of a looming emergency.

● It fails to communicate important information made public by climate modellers since the Fifth Assessment regarding the empirical tuning of models to achieve desired results.

The paper concludes that, in view of these deficiencies, the SR1.5 report does not merit being regarded by policymakers as a scientifically rigorous document.

“There is much recent observational and scientific evidence that the IPCC report has failed to include and which supports a more considered mitigation strategy than the extreme and unrealistic measures called for in the SR1.5 report,” said Prof Bates.

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About the author
Professor J. Ray Bates is Adjunct Professor of Meteorology in the Meteorology and Climate Centre at University College Dublin. He was formerly Professor of Meteorology at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and a Senior Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. In his early career he was Head of Research at the Irish Meteorological Service. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics at University College Dublin and a PhD in meteorology at MIT. His PhD supervisor at MIT was Jule G. Charney, chairman of the committee that wrote the 1979 ‘Charney Report’ on the effects of carbon dioxide on climate. Professor Bates has been the recipient of a number of awards for his scientific work, including the 2009 Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is a former President of the Irish Meteorological Society. He has served as an Expert Reviewer of the IPCC’s Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Royal Meteorological Society.

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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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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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.

station-counts-1891-1920-temp

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:

met-o-2018-2023

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