Drax shares fall after its project misses out on UK carbon cash

Biomass on the move [image credit: Drax]

Latest from the strange world of so-called climate finance. Champion biomass burner’s share price drops when massive government handout not forthcoming.
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(Reuters) -Shares of British power generator Drax fell on Thursday after the government turned down its carbon-capture project for the country’s latest funding round for the technology, reports Reuters (via Yahoo News).

Drax hopes to build a 2 billion pound ($2.47 billion) CCS project alongside its 2.6 gigawatt biomass power plant in Yorkshire, northern England.

But to do this the company has said it would need clarity from the government on a funding model and has paused development of the project.

Surprise effect: Methane cools even as it heats, say researchers

Credit: airbus.com

If the headline seems puzzling, try the article that follows it. We’re taken back to the imaginary world of atmospheric ‘blankets’, forgetting to mention that the methane content of our air is less than 2000 parts per *billion* (= 2 per million).
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Most climate models do not yet account for a new UC Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat, says Phys.org.

Greenhouse gases like methane create a kind of blanket in the atmosphere, trapping heat from Earth’s surface, called longwave energy, and preventing it from radiating out into space. This makes the planet hotter. [Talkshop comment – according to what empirical evidence?]

“A blanket doesn’t create heat, unless it’s electric. You feel warm because the blanket inhibits your body’s ability to send its heat into the air. This is the same concept,” explained Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences.

In addition to absorbing longwave energy, it turns out methane also absorbs incoming energy from the sun, known as shortwave energy. “This should warm the planet,” said Allen, who led the research project. “But counterintuitively, the shortwave absorption encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect.”

Opposing wind farms morally unacceptable – ‘expert’

Well, the alleged expert Lord Deben – shortly to quit as chair of the pompously named Climate Change Committee – would say that, wouldn’t he?
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Communities opposed to wind turbines in their local area do not have an “acceptable moral position” according to a climate change expert.

Dozens of large-scale wind farm applications are being considered as Wales tries to reach net zero, says BBC News.

Campaigners say the ambition is putting the Welsh countryside at risk and south Wales already has several wind farms.

Catastrophism update: UN to deliver diagnosis, prescription for its ‘climate crisis’

The world only has one temperature, which must somehow be restrained by human efforts — and lots of money. Or so the endless IPCC reports would have us believe. Keep paying up so the self-styled weather controllers can ‘save the planet’.
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The United Nations was poised to release a capstone report Monday distilling nearly a decade of published science on the impacts and trajectory of global warming, and the tools available to prevent climate catastrophe, says Phys.org.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 30-odd page “summary for policymakers”—compressing 10,500 pages authored by more than 1,000 scientists—is as dense as a black hole and will deliver a stark warning.

“We are nearing a point of no return,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said last week as diplomats from 195 nations gathered in Interlaken, Switzerland, to hammer out the final wording, finalized on Sunday night by exhausted and sleep-deprived delegates two days behind schedule.

“For decades, the IPCC has put forward evidence on how people and planet are being rocked by climate destruction.”

Multiple Choice Question re Green Energy

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As the climate alarm farce rumbles on, take a simple test…

Science Matters

Jack Hellner poses the issue in his American Thinker article. A single multiple choice question for the ‘green’ energy pushers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Here is one burning question for scientists, entertainers, journalists, politicians,
bureaucrats, and others who claim they can control the climate:

Which of the following has caused the reservoirs to fill up rapidly in California and elsewhere in the West?

A. The Paris Climate accord.

B. The misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” in which the Democrats claimed they can control the climate by handing out huge amounts of money to “green” pushers.

C. All the United Nations gabfests where people fly in private jets to stump about the need to cut emissions.

D. Shuttering coal and natural gas utility plants.

E. Transitioning the peasants to cricket and mealworms as “food” to control cow flatulence.

F. Making people buy inefficient, expensive, impractical electric…

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Switching to hydrogen fuel could prolong ‘the methane problem’, say researchers

The imagined methane problem derived from the ‘greenhouse’ obsession, that is. Hydrogen already has a nitrogen problem, according to IPCC climate theories at least. Now it seems there’s a leaky infrastructure issue.
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Hydrogen is often heralded as the clean fuel of the future, but new research suggests that leaky hydrogen infrastructure could end up increasing atmospheric methane levels, which would cause decades-long climate consequences, says Science Daily.

Hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel could be limited by a chemical reaction in the lower atmosphere, according to research from Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

This is because hydrogen gas easily reacts in the atmosphere with the same molecule primarily responsible for breaking down methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The BBC used to cover both sides of the climate debate. What happened?

THE CHILLING STARS

Svensmark’s research at the Danish National Space Center suggests cosmic rays play a role in making clouds in our atmosphere. A reduction in cosmic rays in the last 100 years – due to the activity of our Sun – has meant fewer clouds and a warmer Earth.The following extract is from the book’s opening chapter. The Chilling Stars is published by Icon Books THE CHILLING STARS: A NEW THEORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE By Henrik Svensmark & Nigel Calder1 A lazy Sun launches iceberg armadas Our ancestors endured shocking variations in climate – Events often matched changes in the Sun’s behaviour – Rare atoms made by cosmic rays signal those changes – When their production increased, the world was chilled – But are the cosmic rays the agent, or merely a symptom? A less public-spirited finder might have put the oddity up for sale on eBay, so the archaeologists of Bern Canton were grateful when Ursula Leuenberger presented them with an archer’s quiver made of birch bark. They were amazed when radiocarbon dating showed the quiver to be 4,700 years old. Frau Leuenberger had picked it up while walking with her husband in the mountains above Thun. There, the perennial ice in the Schnidejoch had retreated in the unusually hot summer of 2003, revealing the relic hidden beneath it. The hiking couple had unwittingly rediscovered a long forgotten short-cut for travellers and traders across the barrier of the Swiss Alps. To keep treasure-hunters away, the find remained a secret for two years while archaeologists scoured the area of the melt-back and analysed the finds. By the end of 2005 they had some 300 items – from the Neolithic Era, the Bronze Age, the Roman period and medieval times. The various ages of the items clustered in intervals when the pass of Schnidejoch was open, offering a quick route to and from the Rhone valley south of the mountains. There were no substantial human remains to compare with the murdered Ötztal ‘ice man’, found with a similar quiver high in the Italian Tyrol in 1991 and dated to 3300 BC. But the emergent history of repeated openings and closures of Schnidejoch gave a far more interesting picture of climate change.The Ötztal man is a prize exhibit for those who assert that the climate at the start of the 21st century is alarmingly warm. The ice that preserved his mummified corpse lay unmelted, 3,250 metres above sea level, for more than 5,000 years – since the world was in its warmest phase following the most recent ice age. Then, so the story goes, the manmade global warming of the industrial era outstripped all natural variations and released the body as a warning to us all.Quite different is the impression given by the relics found in the pass of Schnidejoch, at an altitude 500 metres lower than the Ötztal man’s ice-tomb. They tell of repeated alternations between warm periods when the pass was useable and cold periods when it was shut by the ice. The discoveries also cleared up a long-standing mystery about a Roman lodging house found on the slopes above the present-day town of Thun, where there was a Roman temple and settlement. The head of the cantonal archaeological service, Peter Suter, explained his satisfaction at the outcome: ‘We always asked ourselves why the lodging house was there. Now we know that it was on the route leading across the Schnidejoch.’ The youngest item found by the archaeologists was part of a shoe dating from the 14th or 15th century AD. It corresponds with the end of an interval known as the Medieval Warm Period. Thereafter the Schnidejoch was blocked by the glaciers of the Little Ice Age, the most recent period of intense cold. Nominally the Little Ice Age ended around 1850, but the gradual retreat of the ice took a century and a half to clear the pass, until its rediscovery early in the 21st century.Here is a tale of natural variations in climate having a practical influence on the lives and travels of Europeans over 5,000 years. The climate was particularly cold in two periods around 800 BC and 1700 AD. Effects of the latter episode, the Little Ice Age, persisted in the Schnidejoch for so long that even the locals forgot that a useful pass was ever there. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were an embarrassment for those who, in recent years, wished to play down the natural variations in climate that occurred before the Industrial Revolution. A widely publicised but now discredited graph of temperatures, produced in 1998 by Michael Mann of the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues, tried to iron out the variations. Lampooned as the hockey stick, Mann’s graph showed the world remaining almost uniformly cool through most of the past 1,000 years until 1800. Then temperatures began to climb towards unprecedented highs in the late 20th century – so making the toe of the hockey stick and the supposed onset of an unprecedented episode of man-made global warming. The relics from the Schnidejoch mock this Orwellian effort to make real-life events that were not politically correct disappear from climate history. They show that warming spells very like that of the past 100 years occurred repeatedly, long before the large-scale use of fossil fuels and the associated emissions of carbon dioxide gas were a possible factor. Attempts to argue that such events were not global are contradicted by abundant evidence for the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from East Asia, Australasia, South America and South Africa, as well as from North America and Europe. Probing the errors that generated the hockey stick can be safely left to the statistical pathologists, while we explore the character and rhythms of climate change over centuries and millennia. Sunspots missing in the Little Ice Age Atomic bullets raining down from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, leave behind them business cards that record their split-second visits to the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of unusual atoms created by nuclear reactions in the upper air. Especially valued by archaeologists as an aid to dating objects is radiocarbon, or carbon-14, made from nitrogen in the air.Taken up into carbon dioxide, the gas of life by which plants grow, the carbon-14 finds its way via the plants and animals into wood, charcoal, bones, leather and other relics. The initial carbon-14 content corresponds to the amount prevailing in the air at the time of death. Then, over thousands of years, the atoms gradually decay back into nitrogen. If you see how much carbon-14 is left in an old piece of wood or fibre or bone, you can tell how many centuries or millennia have elapsed since the plant or animal was alive. There’s a snag about this gift from the stars, as archaeologists soon discovered. Some of their early radiocarbon dates seemed nonsensical, even contradictory – for example, a pharaoh of Egypt dated as being younger than his known successors. Hessel de Vries of Gronigen found the explanation in 1958. The rate of production of carbon-14 varies. Measurements in well-dated annual rings of growth in ancient trees sorted out the problem, and the archaeologists had more reliable, though often ambiguous dates. And physicists could see changes over thousands of years in the performance of the Sun, as the chief gatekeeper of the cosmic rays. Its magnetic field protects us by repelling many of the cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy, before they can reach the Earth’s vicinity. The variations that confused the archaeologists followed changes in the Sun’s mood. Low production rates of carbon-14 meant that the Sun was very active, magnetically speaking. When it was lazy, more cosmic rays reached the Earth and the production of carbon-14 shot up.The discovery opened the way to modern interpretations of the link between the Sun and the Earth’s everchanging climate, beginning in the 1960s. Roger Bray of New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research traced the variations in the Sun’s activity since 527 BC. He was able to connect increased production of radio carbon by cosmic rays to other symptoms of feeble solar magnetic activity. A scarcity of dark spots on the face of the Sun, which are made by pools of intense magnetism, was one such sign. Reports of auroras, which light the northern skies when the Sun is restless, were also scanty when the cosmic rays were making lots of radiocarbon. And most significantly, Bray linked solar laziness and high cosmic rays with historically recorded advances of glaciers, pushing their cold snouts down many valleys. The advances were most numerous in the 17th and 18th centuries, which straddled the coldest period of the Little Ice Age.

Click to access newsnight-_-the-chilling-stars.pdf

Catastrophism update: Governments to vet ‘crucial’ UN climate science report

The ‘Pakistan one third underwater’ lie gets yet another airing here, while Arctic summer sea ice keeps confounding the doomsters. Pretending to know the future of global climate via modelling has only led to the failure of numerous over-the-top predictions so far.
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Diplomats from nearly 200 nations and top climate scientists begin a week-long huddle in Switzerland Monday to distill nearly a decade of published science into a 20-odd-page warning about the existential danger of global warming, and what to do about it, says Phys.org.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report—to be released on March 20—will detail observed and projected changes in Earth’s climate system; past and future impacts such as devastating heatwaves, flooding and rising seas; and ways to halt the carbon pollution [sic] pushing Earth toward an unlivable state. [Talkshop comment – unverified claim].

“It’s a massive moment, seven years since the Paris Agreement and nine years since the last IPCC assessment report,” Greenpeace Nordic senior policy advisor Kaisa Kosonen, an official observer at IPCC meetings, told AFP.

Wikipedia’s Climate Change Bias: A Response

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More climate-sceptic links than you can shake a stick at here.

PA Pundits International

By Dr. John Happs ~

According to Wikipedia the scientific method involves careful observation, rigorous scepticism about what is observed … formulating hypothesis … testing and refinement etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

A number of entries in Wikipedia appear to display an absence of the above principles when it comes to reporting about climate change, with little criticism of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) narrative. Thus, we have excellent examples of why this online source should be closely examined for possible bias when providing information about climate change and influencing factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_conspiracy_theory

Close inspection suggests that Wikipedia has deleted a list of the many well-qualified scientists who have rejected the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming meme:

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/wikipedia-deletes-the-list-of-scientists-who-are-skeptics-of-the-sacred-consensus/print/

William Connolley was noted for promoting Wikipedia’s climate alarmist views whilst suppressing any rational, skeptical information that he didn’t like. Lawrence Solomon noted how:

“He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect…

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Claim: Global food system emissions imperil Paris climate goals

Meat under attack [image credit: farminguk.com]

Phys.org pounces on another supposed climate alarm. Once again magical powers are assigned to trace gases with no evidence offered.
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The global food system’s greenhouse gas emissions will add nearly one degree Celsius to Earth’s surface temperatures by 2100 on current trends, obliterating Paris Agreement climate goals, scientists warned Monday.

A major overhaul of the sector—from production to distribution to consumption—could reduce those emissions by more than half even as global population increases, they reported in Nature Climate Change.

Earth’s surface has warmed 1.2 C since the late 1800s, leaving only a narrow margin for staying under the 2015 treaty’s core goal of capping warming at “well under” 2 C.

Bill Gates’ Climate Change Deceptions Are Taking Us For A Billion-Dollar Ride

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Carbon dioxide is a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere. When was the last time any of these tedious climate alarmists mentioned that?

PA Pundits International

By Paul Driessen ~

Bill Gates donates hundreds of millions of dollars to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. He’s not used to being asked tough questions.

BBC journalist Amol Rajan recently braved going off the mainstream media script, asking the Microsoft co-founder how he responds to charges that he’s a hypocrite for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his private jets, even to confabs where global elites tell poor and middle-class families to live simpler lives and stop using fossil fuels.

One of his jets is a $40 million Bombardier BD-700.

Mr. Gates also spends his riches (estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth: $107 billion) telling people what they should eat, what cars they should drive, what their children should learn in school, and more.

Clearly annoyed and caught flat-footed, Mr. Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing aircraft by claiming he purchases…

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Battle simmers in Illinois over plans to pipe in and store millions of tons of carbon dioxide

This article (extracts below) is littered with climate propaganda and evidence-free claims about weather and warming. But then a Stanford University professor is quoted saying carbon capture is “not going to help the climate”. The story of the Satartia CO2 pipeline rupture is disturbing.
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The opportunity to compete for billions of dollars in federal funding is on the line as Illinois considers the future of carbon capture, according to the Prairie Research Institute report, as well as the chance to create jobs and boost local economies, says Phys.org.

And at a time when the state and federal government and nations worldwide are trying to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst effects of global warming—including catastrophic floods and droughts—carbon capture also holds out the promise of making the job easier.

Carbon capture and storage “could play an important role in achieving the state’s decarbonization goals,” according to the report, which was commissioned by the state legislature.

According to Navigator CO2, the Heartland Greenway pipeline would have the ability to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 15 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking 3.2 million cars off the road.

But as the fight over Navigator CO2’s pipeline illustrates, battle lines are being drawn, with opponents questioning carbon capture’s very reason for being—its real-world effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gases.

There are also safety concerns. Landowners fear a pipeline could rupture, releasing a potentially suffocating gas not far from bedroom windows.

“Right now, to move forward with a carbon dioxide pipeline is unconscionable,” said Pam Richart, lead organizer of the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines, which includes citizens and environmental groups. “It just brings too much risk.”
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‘A boondoggle’

Carbon dioxide, which traps heat close to the earth, plays a vital role in maintaining the planet’s temperature [Talkshop comment – a mere assertion].

But now, scientists say, we have too much of a good thing. Due largely to carbon emissions [Talkshop comment – another assertion] from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, global temperatures have risen in the last century.

As a result, there’s been an increase in extreme weather events [Talkshop comment – another one] such as droughts, heat waves and floods; trees and corals have died off in large numbers; and millions of people have been exposed to acute food and water insecurity, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Scientists say urgent action is needed and effective solutions are available, including replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar energy, switching homes and businesses from gas to electricity, and turning to electric cars.

Carbon capture is more controversial, especially when it comes to keeping coal or gas-burning power plants open for business.

Among the critics is climate scientist Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

“If you don’t care about climate or air pollution or energy security, go for it,” he said when asked whether Illinois should pursue leadership in carbon capture. “You can pump a lot of money into carbon capture and create some jobs, but it’s not going to help the climate.”

Jacobson, author of a 2019 study in the journal Energy & Environmental Science that raised doubts about the real-world effectiveness of carbon capture, said that the widely quoted figure that the technology can capture 90% of carbon dioxide emissions is actually an assumption based on idealized measurements.

When Jacobson looked at the real-world performance of the $1 billion Petra Nova project in Texas, at the time the biggest coal-plant carbon capture project in the United States, only about 55% of carbon dioxide emissions were being captured.

And that figure didn’t take into account emissions from the natural gas turbine that had to be built to power carbon capture. Also excluded: emissions from mining and processing the coal and natural gas used at the Petra Nova.

When those factors were taken into account, Jacobson found that carbon capture only reduced average annual emissions by 11% to 20%.

“There’s just no evidence this stuff is useful,” Jacobson said of carbon capture. “And all the evidence suggests it’s just a boondoggle and we could have spent all that money on actual emissions reduction.”

Asked for studies that show carbon capture’s effectiveness in reducing emissions, the authors of the Prairie Research Institute study responded via a spokesperson, who offered a written list of studies, none of which appeared to look at real-world emissions before and after carbon capture.
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Unanswered questions

Among the questions that Illinois still hasn’t answered clearly: Who will bear the long-term responsibility for underground carbon storage sites? Who owns the potentially valuable underground space where carbon dioxide can be stored?

And what will happen if some landowners want to offer up their property for carbon dioxide storage, and other, adjacent, owners do not?

The Prairie Research Institute report includes a range of recommendations addressing such issues, including that the state should create legal and regulatory frameworks for the long-term stewardship and oversight of carbon dioxide storage sites.

The report also recommends the establishment of an interagency planning and oversight committee to consider carbon capture and storage activities in Illinois.

Carbon capture, utilization and storage “should be both enabled and appropriately regulated to ensure long-term storage of CO2 in full consultation with impacted communities,” the report says.

In the wake of a 2020 carbon dioxide pipeline rupture near Satartia, Mississippi, the federal government is also considering more regulation.

At the Satartia pipeline rupture, which followed heavy rains and a landslide, the escaping carbon dioxide roared like a jet engine and carved a crater an estimated 40 feet deep in the ground. A potentially suffocating green fog rose from the pipeline and started moving downhill toward Satartia, according to rescue workers who testified before the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Gas-powered vehicles stalled out on the road due to lack of oxygen, according to testimony. People passed out. In one car, rescue workers found three people unconscious, two with froth coming out of their mouths.

“It looked like the Zombie apocalypse,” testified Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency Director Jack Willingham, who arrived in Satartia about five hours after the rupture. “It was hazy. … There were abandoned vehicles everywhere, many with doors ajar, many with their windows smashed from the rescue efforts.”

No deaths were reported, but 45 people sought medical attention at local hospitals, according to a government report, and federal regulators took notice.

In May, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced that it would start a new rule-making process to update standards for carbon dioxide pipelines, including new requirements related to emergency preparedness and response.

Meanwhile, some counties in Illinois have taken matters into their own hands, declaring moratoriums on permits for pipeline construction.

Full article here.
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Huffpost: The Gassing Of Satartia (2021)

A CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured last year, sickening dozens of people. What does it forecast for the massive proposed buildout of pipelines across the U.S.?
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This story is the result of a 19-month HuffPost/Climate Investigations Center investigation into the Satartia pipeline rupture, and the safety of CO2 pipelines.

One in Five Germans Fear Green Agenda Will Destroy Their Jobs

Image credit: autocarbrands.com

Needless to say, high energy prices and job insecurity isn’t what workers wanted in exchange for obscure future benefits. But the country’s Green Party says in effect ‘like it or lump it’. Welcome to the effects of manic climate obsessions.
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A survey done by the German Trade Union Confederation has reportedly found that one in five employees now fear for the future of their jobs as a result of the country’s push for green agenda measures aimed at curbing climate change, says Breitbart.

It is the latest piece of evidence showing how the European Union’s leading economy is struggling with its own carbon emission goals, with the price of energy soaring over last year as renewable energy sources are unable to fill the hole left by missing Russian gas and deliberately scrapped nuclear energy.

The surging price of electricity and home heating is not all that Germans are worrying about, though, with a report by Die Welt claiming that around 20 per cent of the German workforce now feel the country’s green push could endanger their employment.

Kill dates of black mosses are archives of Antarctic glacier history

Credit: coolantarctica.com

Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
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Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.

When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.

The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.

Climate signals from ancient ice and wood

Hunger stone at Decin on the River Elbe, with dates back to 1616 or earlier [image credit: Norbert Kaiser @ Wikipedia]

We looked at some of this recently, here and here. Of course the problem nowadays is that weather news is liable to be subjected to the melodrama treatment by climate obsessives. Re. the European droughts, there’s also the evidence of the ‘hunger stones’, for example.
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The Holocene – the time since the end of the last glaciation – which has witnessed all of humanity’s recorded history and the rise and fall of civilisations – began only 11,700 years ago, says Dr David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

It is a relatively warm period, but how warm was it at its warmest?

What happened in the past informs current climate models placing the current global warming into perspective.

Study finds sinking tundra surface unlikely to trigger runaway permafrost thaw

Alaskan permafrost: [image credit: insideclimatenews.org]

Nature has its own adaptations. Eventually the process, should it occur, becomes self-limiting.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists set out to address one of the biggest uncertainties about how carbon-rich permafrost will respond to gradual sinking of the land surface as temperatures rise.

Using a high-performance computer simulation, the research team found that soil subsidence is unlikely to cause rampant thawing in the future, says EurekAlert.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified the possibility of soil subsidence leading to a feedback loop that could trigger a rapid thaw as a major concern in the decades ahead.

Accelerated thawing caused by uneven land subsidence has been observed on smaller scales over shorter time frames, but the IPCC’s assessments were uncertain as to what may happen over the long term.

Elephant seal remains show Antarctic sea was warmer in the mid-to-late Holocene

Antarctica

Once again, evidence of times in the past long before the industrial era when warming similar to or in excess of the present ‘crisis’ conditions occurred in a polar region. Natural climate variation is the norm.
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Studying the response of Antarctic ice sheets to past warming episodes is essential to understand how they may respond to the present warming climate, as their melting and collapse can contribute to global sea level rise, says Phys.org.

Detailed records of past ocean temperatures close to the continent are rare, but clues to how ice sheets and sea ice responded to global conditions in the past can be found in funny places—even in the remains of animals that once lived there.

A study led by the University of Maine used the presence (and eventual lack thereof) of elephant seals to illustrate how the area transformed in a warm period in the recent past.

European summer droughts since 2015 ‘most severe in centuries’, but multi-year droughts also happened in the past

Freighter passing a sandbank on the Rhine river [image credit: worldcargonews.com]

Mixed messages from climate research here. In between evidence-free waffle about ‘potential’ human influence, they report that severe drought spells are nothing new in Europe, implying climate cycles of some sort. This means attribution of such drought to human causes is debatable, as the article admits.
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The 2015–2018 summer droughts have been exceptional in large parts of Western and Central Europe over the last 400 years, in terms of the magnitude of drought conditions.

This indicates an influence of man-made global warming, claims Phys.org.

However, multi-year droughts have occurred frequently in the 17th and 18th century, although not as severe.

This is the result of a new study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Climate models and the Holocene global temperature conundrum

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Here we learn “our review revealed how surprisingly little we know about slow-moving climate variability”. In between unsupported assertions about human-caused modern warming, the authors of the review article ponder the realities of natural climate variability, including a warmer-than-today period in the Holocene, under the headings ‘What we know’, ‘What we don’t know’, and ‘Why it matters’. The closing line: “Our review suggests that climate models are underestimating important climate feedbacks that can amplify global warming.” Is this another way of saying long-term natural variation is being underestimated by the models?
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Accurate climate models play a critical role in climate science and policy, helping to inform policy- and decision-makers throughout the world as they consider ways to slow the deadly effects of a warming planet and to adapt to changes already in progress, says Eurekalert.

To test their accuracy, models are programmed to simulate past climate to see if they agree with the geologic evidence.

The model simulations can conflict with the evidence. How can we know which is correct?

A review article published today in Nature addresses this conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum.

Climate obsessives target Tony Abbott for joining ‘climate sceptic group’ (the GWPF)

More evidence that petulant climate obsessives are a drag on society and the UK economy.
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The UK government is being urged to sack one of its trade advisers after he joined a thinktank that has denied the scale of the climate crisis and campaigned against net zero, says The Guardian.

Tony Abbott, a former Australian prime minister, announced this week that he had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Abbott has been a member of the UK government’s Board of Trade since 2020, advising on post-Brexit deals, with Australia now a key trading partner since the UK left the EU.