Solar linked 2C downturn in Canadian prairie temperatures affecting grain yields.

Quiet sun [image credit: NASA]

H/t to Electroverse for the heads up on this paper detailing the effect of reduced solar activity and cyclic oceanic oscillations on Canadian agriculture. Let’s hope the policymakers see through the warming dogma in time.

Is Diminishing Solar Activity Detrimental to Canadian Prairie Agriculture?

Ray Garnett¹*, Madhav Khandekar² and Rupinder Kaur³

Abstract: During the grain growing months of May-July, the mean temperature on the Canadian prairies has cooled down by 2ºC in the last 30 years. The cooling appears to be most certainly linked to diminishing solar activity as the Sun approaches a Grand Solar Minimum in the next decade or so. This cooling has led to a reduction in Growing Degree Days (GDDs) and has also impacted the precipitation pattern. The GDDs in conjunction with mean temperature and precipitation are important parameters for the growth of various grains (wheat, barley, canola etc.) on the prairies.

Climate change: Technology no silver bullet, experts tell PM

Ever tighter control of human lifestyles seems to be the latest battle cry of climate propagandists. Meanwhile, wind and solar power always seem to need vast subsidies despite supposedly ‘plummeting costs’. Where’s the affordability, even if any of the advocated ideas made sense in terms of the climate, which they don’t? Millions of tons of toxic and other industrial waste will be produced in vain attempts to change the weather.
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Boris Johnson’s techno-optimism ignores the need for big societal changes, experts warn.

Can we fix climate change with the “silver bullet” of technology? asks BBC News.

The prime minister seems to think so.

Why lockdown had little to no effect on global temperatures

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

The article asks: ‘So what really happened?’ They often try to play the aerosol card when changes to CO2 levels fail to deliver their supposed effects. But could the answer simply be that climate obsessives discovered the atmosphere is a minor player in the climate compared to the oceans?
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Countries across the world took unprecedented action in the first few months of 2020 to control the spread of COVID-19, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

At its peak, one-third of the world’s population was in lockdown.

Around the world, car travel fell by 50%, the number of flights plummeted by 75% and industrial activity fell by around 35%.

With so many cars parked, airplanes grounded and factories closed, global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions fell by around 17% compared with the same period in 2019.

EU to pass law to change the weather, they hope

Money to burn?

EU leaders may flatter themselves that they’re doing something that matters, but it’s wildly optimistic to think the climate could be changed – at vast expense – by passing laws based on unproven shaky theories. What planet are they on?
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European Union environment ministers meet in Luxembourg on Friday to seek a deal on a landmark climate change law, but they will leave a decision on a 2030 emissions-cutting target for leaders to discuss in December, reports Yahoo News.

The climate law will form the basis for Europe’s plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, which will reshape all sectors, from transport to heavy industry, and require hundreds of billions of euros in annual investments.

It will fix in law the EU target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and define the rules for how future EU climate targets are decided, if new scientific evidence requires more ambitious aims.

Ministers, who take decisions by majority, will seek a deal on these parts of the law on Friday.

Crisis Looms In Alarmist Climate Science

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How will they react if or when it turns out that ECS only exists in their imaginations anyway?

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

Climate science is dominated by alarmists addicted to the idea that increasing carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming. How much warming is thus the central scientific question.

This question has been surprisingly difficult to answer despite 40 years of research, costing tens of billions of dollars. Now the issue is exploding because two different answers are emerging, one harmlessly low and the other dangerously high. This divergence is a crisis for the alarmist community. How they handle it remains to be seen.

What follows is a slightly technical explanation of the situation.

The issue centers on a benchmark estimate of the impact of increasing CO2 on global temperature. This is called the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” or ECS. The basic question is what will the global average temperature be when the CO2 level is double the supposedly original level of 280 ppm? That is, what…

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Climate scientists fly more than other researchers, first global study suggests

Climate conference transport

It takes more than a ‘climate emergency’ to keep climatologists on the ground. It’s almost like they don’t take their own theories seriously, although professors not travelling isn’t going to make any difference anyway. Do as they say, not as they do.
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Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

The large, international survey of more than 1,400 university researchers was carried out by the UK Centre for Climate and Social Transformation (CAST), which is coordinated by Cardiff University, reports Phys.org.

A follow-up experiment with more than 350 researchers found that providing information about the impacts of aviation and support for workplace policies increases intentions to fly less.

The large-scale study—the first of its kind to survey climate academics about their travel for conferences, fieldwork and meetings—is published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Director of CAST Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who led the study, said the findings were “unexpected” but said it also suggested “knowledge alone is not enough” to tackle global warming.

Cooling: the latest climate hobgoblin?

Another day, another scare. The claim this time is that the increasing demand for electrically driven cooling — air con, powered fans etc. — will drive up the dreaded ’emissions’, leading to untold future discomfort one way or another.
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Past research suggests growing international demand for cooling has the potential to drive one of the most substantial increases in greenhouse gas emissions in recent history, says Phys.org.

A new study, led by the University of Oxford and published today in Nature Sustainability, sets out a framework for delivering sustainable cooling.

It also examines cooling needs in the context of sustainable development, and finds that this is a global blind spot.

“Cooling is essential to human well-being and health, from the food we eat, to the storage of medicine, to how comfortable and productive we are at home, school or the office,” says Dr. Radhika Khosla, senior researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and principal investigator of the Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Cooling.

But, Dr. Khosla says, “The global community must commit to sustainable cooling, or risk locking the world into a deadly feedback loop, where demand for cooling energy drives further greenhouse gas emissions and results in even more global warming.”

Niklas Mörner: 1938-2020

Our friend Niklas Mörner has passed away. We must raise our game and work to honour the memory of this bright, brave and brilliant man. The energy and clarity of purpose he brought to science is an inspiration to us all. The humour and kind hearted cameraderie he exuded bound all the events we organised together. His enthusiasm was infectious, his expertise unparalleled in his field. His ability to engage audiences and communicate complex topics in a way that left participants with new insight is legendary.

He swung the sword of truth with grace.

Eco-Anxiety: A Dangerous And Unscientific Doomsday Construct

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Angstrom showed in a repeatable experiment, described in his peer-reviewed paper in 1900, that the absorption bands of CO2 in the atmosphere were already saturated, therefore further increases would have no additional effect.

PA Pundits - International

By Vijay Raj Jayaraj~

“Eco-anxiety” is now a popular term. It is being increasingly used in the media to describe an anxiety condition resulting from the fears about the coming environmental destruction.

Climate Xchange for example, defines Eco-anxiety as a “feeling of stress, grief, helplessness, and fear of uncertainty associated with the grim outlook for our climatic and ecological systems if business continues as usual.” The American Psychological Association defines Eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

In essence, it is a psychological condition wherein people are anxious about earth’s future and the changes in climate due to burning of fossil fuels. The mainstream media has been harping around the idea of eco-anxiety for quite sometime now. Interestingly, it has been associated more with the climate fears of the school-going generation.

The coverage of the student climate strike movement and dramatic speeches by celebrity child activists like Greta…

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Study: Green-Energy Sources Not The ‘Panacea’ Climate Alarmists Claim

The mythology of human-caused climate change is leading the world up the garden path, and renewables are at the forefront of the visible evidence of that. The hardware itself is expensive, resource-hungry, obviously not renewable, and difficult or impossible to recycle.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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A study done by Irish and U.S.-based researchers is calling into question the efficacy of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar in dealing with the so-called climate crisis, says the New American.

In fact, the study found that such energy sources are extremely costly and may be causing as much climate change as they purport to mitigate.

Entitled Energy and Climate Policy — An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011-2018, the study raises grave questions about the feasibility and cost of switching to an energy grid powered mainly by wind and solar farms.

The study also points out several of the flaws of wind and solar energy, including the negative impacts on local environments they present.

Despite spending jaw-dropping amounts of money on wind and solar power globally since 2011, the study shows that climate alarmists and the nations that defer to them have definitely not gotten their money’s worth.

“Since 2010, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has been publishing the annual Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports.

According to these reports, US$3660 billion has been spent on global climate change projects over the period 2011-2018.

Fifty-five percent of this expenditure has gone to wind and solar energy. According to world energy reports, the contribution of wind and solar to world energy consumption has increased from 0.5% to 3% over this period.

Meanwhile coal, oil, and gas continue to supply 85% of the world’s energy consumption with hydroelectricity and nuclear providing most of the remainder.”

The study’s lead author Coilin OhAiseadha points out: “It cost the world $2 trillion to increase the share of energy generated by solar and wind from half a percent to three percent, and it took eight years to do it. What would it cost to increase that to 100 percent? And how long would it take?”

At the same time, the world was spending these ghastly amounts of money on green projects that have proven to be about as useful as a scuba diving suit in the desert, only five percent of global climate spending was used for adapting to extreme weather events and other alleged results of anthropogenic climate change.

Moreover, the study also found that wind and solar farms and other green energy schemes are contributing to the problem they were meant to solve or otherwise damaging the environment.

Continued here.

Another conversation with Roger Pielke Senior : What causes Earth’s Greenhouse Effect?

It’s always good to chat with Roger Pielke Senior. He’s informative, and more open minded than most climate scientists. Here’s a transcript of the conversation we just had on twitter.

 

Rog Tallbloke 

@RogTallbloke

 

Roger. Mt Everest summit winter avg -30C. Base camp -17C. Air pressure difference 20kPa. What really causes Earth’s ‘greenhouse effect’, 1% of water vapour + 0.04% CO2 or 100% of atmospheric MASS. Think man, think! CC @RogerAPielkeSr

 

Roger A. Pielke Sr

@RogerAPielkeSr

 

The LW radiative effect of CO2 and water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere is succinctly summarized in https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/co2h2o/… and https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/further-analysis-of-radiatve-forcing-by-norm-woods/…

 

 

Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing

In the second edition of our book “Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp”, we present a new analysis completed for…

pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com

 

 

Climate models: the limits in the sky

The debate about the role of clouds in climate — whether in isolation, or relative to other possible factors — rumbles on, and on, and adequate data is just not available. A rather large hole in the IPCC-claimed ‘settled science’, it seems.
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Climate modellers hope machine learning can overcome persistent problems that still cloud their results, says E&T Magazine.

The discipline of climate modelling has entered its sixth decade. Large-scale analyses of Earth’s behaviour have evolved considerably but there remain significant gaps, some persistent.

One in particular helps illustrate challenges that are now being tackled by, almost inevitably, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

China requires $5trn to reach 2060 carbon-neutrality pathway

Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]

Doesn’t sound very likely, somehow. How much are 40-year policy announcements worth anyway? The report speaks of ‘the lack of scalable low-carbon alternatives’, and requires sales of EVs well over 300 million to help meet the so-called carbon neutrality target.
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China requires over $5 trillion of investments to reach its pathway for carbon-neutrality by 2060, according to a new study released by Wood Mackenzie, reports PEI.

China needs to expand its solar, wind and storage capacities by 11 times to 5,040GW by 2050 compared to 2020 levels, to be able to meet its 2060 goal.

Coal-fired power capacity will need to be halved while gas ends at the same level as in 2019. Total power output will need to expand by nearly 2.5 times to 18,835TWh by 2050 compared to current levels.

One challenge restricting China to reach its carbon-neutral goal is the lack of scalable low-carbon alternatives in the transport and industrial sectors.

Scientists return from Arctic with wealth of climate data

Arctic sea ice [image credit: BBC/Getty Images]

Arctic sea ice doesn’t undergo natural seasonal melting any more — it ‘dies’, according to the latest climate alarm propaganda. But researchers still need an icebreaker to ‘kill’ a bit more of it in order to study its supposed demise.
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An icebreaker carrying scientists on a year-long international effort to study the high Arctic has returned to its home port in Germany carrying a wealth of data that will help researchers better predict climate change in the decades to come, reports AP News.

The RV Polarstern arrived Monday in the North Sea port of Bremerhaven, from where she set off more than a year ago prepared for bitter cold and polar bear encounters — but not for the pandemic lockdowns that almost scuttled the mission half-way through.

“We basically achieved everything we set out to do,” the expedition’s leader, Markus Rex, told The Associated Press by satellite phone as it left the polar circle last week. “We conducted measurements for a whole year with just a short break.”

Delingpole: Doom Pixie Greta Thunberg spurned AGAIN by Nobel Prize

The world has something far more pressing to be miserable about, this time for good reasons, and attention-hungry climate doomsters hate that.
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For a second year running Greta Thunberg has failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, notes James Delingpole @ Breitbart.

This year she was beaten by the UN World Food Program.

In 2019 she was beaten by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as his reward for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea.

Perhaps the Nobel prize committee has noticed something increasingly apparent to the rest of us: that the world has long since reached Peak Greta; the Doom Pixie has delighted us all quite enough.

Part of Thunberg’s problem may be that her cause has been superseded by that of Chinese coronavirus.

Earlier in the pandemic, Thunberg made a bid for ongoing relevance by co-authoring an angry letter to European Union leaders, demanding that climate be taken seriously as coronavirus.

It screeched:

The last few months the world has watched with horror how the COVID-19 pandemic has hit people all over the globe. During this tragedy, we are seeing how many – not all – world leaders and people around the world stepped up and acted for the greater good of society.

It is now clearer than ever that the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, neither from the politicians, media, business, nor finance.

The letter’s petulant tone is an indication of the growing frustration among climate activists that their thunder has been stolen by COVID-19.

Full article here.

Large-scale changes in Earth’s climate may originate in the Pacific

Some interesting theorising arises from this research, but as one expert commented: “These new data may raise more questions than they answer.” At least one existing belief about long-term climate change finds itself challenged.
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The retreat of North America’s ice sheets in the latter years of the last ice age may have begun with “catastrophic” losses of ice into the North Pacific Ocean along the coast of modern-day British Columbia and Alaska, scientists say.
[Science News reporting].

In a new study published October 1 in Science, researchers find that these pulses of rapid ice loss from what’s known as the western Cordilleran ice sheet contributed to, and perhaps triggered, the massive calving of the Laurentide ice sheet into the North Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago.

That collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet, which at one point covered large swaths of Canada and parts of the United States, ultimately led to major disturbances in the global climate (SN: 11/5/12).

The new findings cast doubt on the long-held assumption that hemispheric-scale changes in Earth’s climate originate in the North Atlantic (SN: 1/31/19).

Russell Cook: BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”

Guest post by Russell Cook, who for a long time has been setting the record straight on the lies propagated by climate alarmists about the oil and gas industry. Check out his website at http://gelbspanfiles.com/

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And in doing so, they inadvertently dug a deeper hole for themselves.

The longer backstory to this situation is in my July 31, 2020 “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh” blog post, and in my August 5 followup, concerning unsupportable claims in a BBC podcast report about Limbaugh’s alleged involvement with a fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaign that supposedly targeted a specific ethnic group, and Limbaugh’s outrage over the false accusation and the silliness of the ‘targeted people’ line.

Reducing the root problem to one paragraph: back in the late 1990s, the otherwise long-forgotten environmentalist group Ozone Action gained fame for its ‘bombshell report’ about a so-called leaked memo set which were alleged guidelines for an industry conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” through an informational campaign targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.” Kert Davies, formerly at Ozone Action and Greenpeace who’s currently heading Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files, has been telling and retelling the narrative of how that memo set proves the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. He did so in an obscure podcast back in late 2018, and he did so again in this two month-old BBC podcast report.

Film ‘Climate Hustle 2’ Targets Hollywood’s Green Hypocrisy, Double Standards

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How much longer will the climate alarm circus get away with its dodgy propaganda and assertions?

PA Pundits - International

By Kevin Mooney ~

Politicians, media figures, and Hollywood elites who maintain lavish lifestyles while advocating restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions are on full display in a new documentary.

In a scene from the documentary “Climate Hustle 2,” Marc Morano, left, interviews Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” on a beach in Southern California. (Photo courtesy of CFACT)

“Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy” is a sequel to the 2016 documentary film “Climate Hustle,” which questioned the premise of theories linking human activity with potentially catastrophic climate change.

“Climate Hustle 2” is not in theaters because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but was scheduled to be streamed as of  8 p.m. Thursday and available for replay through Sunday.

The new film builds on the findings of the first one while taking a deeper dive into motivations behind climate change initiatives such as the

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Is Al Gore downsizing?

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Countdown to another big climate yawnfest 🥱

PA Pundits - International

By Peter Murphy~

Former Vice President turned nine-figure millionaire, Al Gore, long a global warming celebrity, will be among several speakers next month for a series of “TED Talks” to launch “Countdown,” which is a global initiative to deal with the “climate crisis.” The Countdown is pushing to reduce global carbon emissions in half by 2030 “in the race to a zero carbon world …that is safer, cleaner and fairer for everyone” (emphasis mine).

No one is against “safer, cleaner and fairer” in the abstract, which is why such terms are used incessantly in commercials, and by interest groups, politicians, salespeople and hucksters alike. I’m especially curious about that word “fairer” when it comes to climate activism. “Fairness” also is a subjective term; one person’s definition of fair is not necessarily another person’s.

From a political or policy standpoint, fairness is about who gets and who pays. The various…

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Research reveals “climate-change complacency” across Europe

It seems most people rightly have little faith or interest in the alarmist output of climate models, and are unimpressed by claims that governments can somehow influence the climate by changing their energy policies.
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Most European citizens do not particularly care about climate change, complains Warwick University.

That’s the striking finding from new research on the views of 70,000 randomly sampled European men and women. Only 5% described themselves as “extremely worried” about climate change.

The climate and the environment ranked only fifth in people’s overall views about priorities. There was also scepticism that co-ordinated action, for example to cut personal energy use, would make much difference.