UN climate chief claims “the entire carbon budget will be busted before 2030”!

All this soaring, shattering, whirlwind-reaping and climate crunching of hundredths of degrees of manipulated temperature data is not making the impression the UN-led climate alarmist desire. Their endless attempt to hang the whole climate system on the peg of the trace gas CO2 is never going to work. History shows temperature leading CO2 changes, not following, making CO2 variation an effect not a cause. Human activity is a minor sideshow.
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From the LA Times (via Phys.org). Humanity is ignoring major planetary vital signs as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar to all-time highs and Earth records its 12th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, international climate officials warned this week.

At 60.63 degrees Fahrenheit, the global mean temperature in May was a record 2.73 degrees hotter than the preindustrial average against which warming is measured—marking an astonishing yearlong streak of heat that shows little signs of slowing down, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“For the past year, every turn of the calendar has turned up the heat,” António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said during a speech in New York on June 5. “Our planet is trying to tell us something. But we don’t seem to be listening. We’re shattering global temperature records and reaping the whirlwind. It’s climate crunch time. Now is the time to mobilize, act and deliver.”

Serious floods in southern Germany – Chancellor beats his climate drum, ignoring history

Flooding like this has been recorded for centuries, e.g. on the Danube at Passau, Bavaria. Politicians are doing the usual bandwagon-jumping trick by trying to invoke human causes as the problem.
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Floods caused by heavy rain in southern Germany have claimed at least four lives, reports BBC News.

The victims include three people found in flooded basements on Monday. On Sunday a firefighter died while trying to rescue trapped residents.

Thousands of people in the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have fled their homes since torrential rains began on Friday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who visited affected areas, said the flooding was a reminder of critical environmental challenges.

Climate extremes in Svalbard over the last two millennia are linked to atmospheric blocking, say researchers

Article: ‘Since observational measurements started, blocking in the Arctic has increased, as has Arctic warming.’ When researchers investigated ‘they found a stunning correlation’. No mention of greenhouse gases in the study.
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A team of scientists led by François Lapointe, a research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has combined paleoclimatic data from the last 2,000 years with powerful computer modeling and in-the-field research on lake sediments and tree rings to show that an understudied phenomenon, known as atmospheric blocking, has long influenced temperature swings in the Arctic.

As temperatures warm due to climate change, claims EurekAlert, atmospheric blocking will help drive ever-wilder weather events. [Talkshop comment – routine alarmist hype].

The study focused on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago, Svalbard, at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and was published in Nature Communications.

Study: Reduced sulphur content in shipping fuel caused ‘nearly 80%’ of recent atmospheric warming

Due to a 2020 shipping regulation…’The net planetary heat uptake has increased by 0.25 Wm−2 since 2020, making the 0.2 Wm−2 due to IMO2020 nearly 80% of the total increase.’ The study also says: ‘The 2023 record warmth is within the ranges of our expected trajectory. The magnitude of IMO2020 induced warming means that the observed strong warming in 2023 will be a new norm in the 2020 s.’ — Two general comments to make here: (1) cloud physics is admitted to be not well understood, and (2) could night-time clear(er) skies mean (more) cooling, in theory at least?
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An 80% reduction in sulphur dioxide shipping emissions observed in early 2020 could be associated with substantial atmospheric warming over some ocean regions, according to a modelling study published in Communications Earth & Environment.

The sudden decline in emissions was a result of the introduction of the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 regulation (IMO 2020), which reduced the maximum sulphur content allowed in shipping fuel from 3.5% to 0.5% to help reduce air pollution, says EurekAlert.

Fuel oil used for large ships has a significantly higher percentage content of sulphur than fuels used in other vehicles. Burning this fuel produces sulphur dioxide, which reacts with water vapour in the atmosphere to produce sulphate aerosols.

These aerosols cool the Earth’s surface in two ways: by directly reflecting sunlight back to space [Talkshop comment – daytime effect only]; and by affecting cloud cover.

Europe’s missing climate marches – replaced by tractor convoys?

Climate alarmists complain their manufactured hysteria pot is cooling down, as protest focus has switched to other issues and/or boredom set in as the novelty wore off. Instead the victims of dogmatic net zero diktats, such as farmers, drive onto the streets of EU capitals to air their grievances. Is a return to political reality anywhere in sight?
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Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections, Europe was rocked by massive climate marches, says Euractiv.

But as the 2024 elections approach, the streets remain silent.

As a series of climate marches swept across Europe in spring 2019, Brussels was no exception. At the movement’s peak, 70,000 people massed in the EU quarter to loudly demand greater climate action.

Millions more trees isn’t the climate fix New Zealand thought

Expert view: as the CO2 absorption efficiency of trees declines over time “you’re going to have to keep planting more and more forests. That isn’t actually solving the problem.” Nature’s own carbon cycle isn’t easily manipulated.
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Of all the solutions for a warming world, “plant more trees” seems pretty obvious, says Bloomberg News (via Phys.org).

But in New Zealand, which tested that premise by linking incentives for forestry development with its emissions trading scheme, the results have been more controversial and less effective than climate advocates hoped.

Now, after four years of frenetic planting, a prominent government watchdog has joined international agencies, industry groups and environmental advocates in calling for a radical overhaul, one that threatens a reversal of fortunes for investors in the recent forestry boom.

NASA’s Cutting-Edge Missions To Crack Earth’s Climate Code – ‘prioritizing greenhouse gases’

What happened to the settled science? Of course the spin will be that only refinements are needed, which call for more data, but that suggests a measure of uncertainty that isn’t supposed to exist. Climate theory can be something of a shapeshifter when results aren’t as per alarmist forecast.
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NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program selected four proposals to study greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean currents, and ice changes, says NASA/JPL (via SciTechDaily).

Each will get $5 million for a one-year study before NASA picks two for future launches.

Four proposals have been selected by NASA for concept studies of missions to help us better understand Earth science key focus areas for the benefit of all, including greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents, and changes in ice and glaciers around the world.

Landmark case crumbles: Swiss parliamentary committee rejects European climate ruling

Back to the drawing board for the climate miserablists and their litigious Swiss grannies, who had claimed a so-called ‘landmark’ victory after arguing their country wasn’t cold enough for their liking due to lack of government action, or something. The report notes that ‘the government had proposed stronger measures…but Swiss voters rejected them in a 2021 referendum’.
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GENEVA, May 21 (Reuters) – A Swiss parliamentary committee on Tuesday rejected a ruling by a top European court that said Switzerland had violated the human rights of its citizens by not doing enough to prevent climate change.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found in favor of a group of elderly Swiss women who took their government to court over its record on tackling global warming.

The decision, which was expected to embolden more people to bring climate cases against governments, indicated Switzerland had a legal duty to take greater action on reducing emissions.

Global AI Data Centers Will Consume Huge Amounts of Fresh Water — JPMorgan report

Modern technology is once again in the dock as a resource monster, going totally against the grain for net-zero obsessed climate worriers who look to choke off energy demand at every turn. Data centre issues over local water and power supplies have been widely reported e.g. here at the Talkshop, and here.
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Summary:
— While energy consumption of data centers steal the headlines, the water-intensive nature of their operations is overlooked.

— Bluefield research: water consumption by global data centers (including on-site cooling and off-site power generation) has grown 6% annually from 2017 to 2022.

— Immense water demand from data centers in areas where water resources are scarce could spark “increased competition can strain water availability, even causing data center closures.”
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Wall Street banks are in a frenzy over “The Next AI Trade,” piling into the ‘Powering up America’ investment themes, whether that’s power grid companies, commodities, such as copper, gold, silver, and uranium, and artificial intelligence chipmakers, to accommodate the explosion of generative artificial intelligence data centers anticipated nationwide through the end of the decade and beyond, says ZeroHedge (via OilPrice.com).

Lunar-driven Barents Sea climate — The Climate Clock

Professor Harald Yndestad writes (here): ‘The Kola-section data analysis revealed, for the first time, that Arctic climate variations are controlled by the earth’s rotation and the moon’. He refers to ‘the riddle of a 6-year cycle in the cod population’ and comments: ‘My estimates reveal we are at a turning point and moving into a colder period and more ice extent.’ The 6-year cycle reminded me of a Talkshop post featuring a paper by astronomer Willy de Rop, in which he wrote, with illustrations: ‘We will now consider how often such a situation of maximum tides will occur. The perigee moves 0.164 358 002 0 a day relative to the node, corresponding to 360° in a period p 2 190.340565 days. If at the same time this moment of maximum influence coincides with the moment at which the Earth is in the perihelion of its orbit, the tides will reach an absolute maximum. So, when the perigee of the Moon’s orbit coincides with the ascending node, then this situation repeats after 2190.340565 days. This period p corresponds to 5.996 667 350 anomalistic years, thus nearly an entire number of anomalistic years.’ In other words, almost six years. It’s the beat period of the (lunar) anomalistic and tropical months, also of the full moon cycle and draconic year. Whether this plays a part in the cod discussion is an open question.
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In nature, nothing acts alone, writes Prof. Harald Yndestad. Therefore, something outside the cod stock, causes recruitment in periods of 6 years.

The source may be a 6-year temperature cycle in the Barents Sea. If the temperature in the Barents Sea has a period of 6 years, it must also have a source outside the Barents Sea. This means that there must be a first cause. A cause of causes, for temperature variations in the Barents Sea.

So, what is periodic in nature? Could the source be the tides or in the earth’s rotation? I contacted an astrophysicist.

Satellite mission to ‘unravel’ how clouds impact future climate change?

Let’s hope this is not going to be used as another excuse to pretend alarmist predictions from climate models have improved, just because some extra data is being fed in.
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A brand new satellite that will revolutionize our understanding of the role clouds and aerosol particles play in climate change is set to launch after more than 30 years of planning, says the University of Reading (via Phys.org).

The EarthCARE satellite is the brainchild of the University of Reading’s Professor Anthony Illingworth. Conceived in 1993, the project was adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2004.

The satellite is set to blast off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on board one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets, scheduled for launch no earlier than Tuesday 28 May 2024.

The mission is a testament to the power of U.K. and international collaboration and the importance of long-term, dedicated research. The satellite, equipped with four cutting-edge instruments, will provide unprecedented insights into the complex interactions between clouds, aerosols, and Earth’s climate.

This data will be invaluable in shaping our understanding of climate change and informing future climate adaptation and mitigation policies.

Professor Anthony Illingworth, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Reading, said, “When we first started dreaming up this project, I never imagined I would be flying out to the United States to watch our satellite launch 30 years later.

“It’s been a long and challenging journey with an amazing team of dedicated scientists and engineers from the U.K. and abroad. Together, we’ve created something truly remarkable that will change the way we understand our planet.

“The data we gather from EarthCARE will be invaluable in helping us observe the precise mechanisms involved in how clouds and dust reflect and absorb heat. This will make our predictions for the future of our climate even more precise, meaning we can make more informed decisions about how to mitigate and adapt to the challenges posed by a warming world.

“The extraordinary data we receive will help us create a more sustainable future for our planet. It’s a humbling and thrilling experience to be part of something so significant.”
. . .
Currently, climate models do not agree on how effective clouds and aerosols are at influencing the impact of global warming. For example, if there were fewer cloudy days in the future, less energy from the sun would be reflected back into space, which would increase the rate of climate warming.

EarthCARE’s new observations will help scientists to develop more precise climate models, which will significantly improve climate predictions and lead to more informed policy decisions.

Full article here.

UK wind power constraint payments cost £920 million in 2023 – and rising

Analysts from an energy storage specialist say £920 million annual cost of ‘curtailment’ could be cut 80% by using existing technologies like battery storage more effectively. But that would obviously require a lot of expensive batteries, and gas power stations could easily do the job on a much more extensive scale. Such is the state of the UK electricity grid thanks to net zero climate obsessions and intermittent wind power dotted all over the place, especially in areas remote from population centres – i.e. the opposite of where that power is most needed.
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Grid capacity constraints added nearly £1 billion of ‘curtailment’ costs to electricity bills for homes and businesses in 2023 as abundant energy from wind farms was unable to be transmitted to areas of demand, says Field Energy.

The majority of this cost was down to a single pinch point in the UK’s electricity grid on the Scottish/English border called the B6 boundary.

Analysis by energy storage developer and operator Field estimates this boundary alone could cause up to £2.2 billion of curtailment costs by 2030 as the UK’s curtailment problem escalates. Overall UK curtailment costs could reach £3.5 billion by that date.

Is Net Zero a poisoned chalice for governments?

The American title of the article here is ‘Europeans Ditch Net Zero, While Biden Clings To It’. Maybe an exaggeration as nobody has tried to ditch it entirely, even if some policy targets have been watered down, re-scheduled or even dropped (possibly). But the unreality of it all is at least beginning to make itself felt, as governments try desperately to pretend it’s all a great idea that just needs a few tweaks here and there, while ever more of their citizens feel the pain of it all.
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You know you’ve stumbled through the looking glass when European politicians start sounding saner on climate policy than Americans do, says the Wall Street Journal (via Climate Change Dispatch.

Well here we are, Alice: Europeans are admitting the folly of net zero quicker than their American peers.

The latest example—perhaps “victim” is more apt—is Humza Yousaf, who resigned this week as Scotland’s first minister.

That region within the U.K. enjoys substantial devolved powers over its own affairs, including on climate policy.

UK Government defeated in High Court over climate plans – as usual

Time for yet another revised ‘net zero emissions’ plan. Whether any country that used to depend largely on fuel-burning power stations for electricity can meet the demands of its own time-limited climate plans/targets is open to question. The BBC report once again wheels out the old climate propaganda con trick of pretending that sunset shadow effects are scary pollution clouds in its report image.
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The government has been defeated in court – for a second time – for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News.

Environmental campaigners argued that the energy minister signed off the government’s climate plan without evidence it could be achieved.

The High Court ruled on Friday that the government will now be required to redraft the plan again.

In response the government defended its record on climate action.

Research quantifies ‘gap’ in CO2 removal – a climate target with no viable plans?

Having been told by the UN-IPCC that nature’s own carbon cycle isn’t up to the job any more, the manufactured problem for climate-obsessed governments seems to be the lack of any ‘carbon removal’ method that is (a) affordable and (b) effective, in terms of the scale of the supposed need. Such is the strange world of climate policy today.
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New research involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that countries’ current plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will not be enough to comply with the 1.5ºC warming limit set out under the Paris Agreement, says Phys.org.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organization UNEP has taken an annual measurement of the emissions gap—the difference between countries’ climate protection pledges and what is necessary to limit global heating to 1.5ºC, or at least below 2ºC [Talkshop comment – according to unproven IPCC climate theories].

The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports are clear: climate policy needs more ambition. This new study now explicitly applies this analytical concept to carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—the removal of the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, from the atmosphere.

New climate study: Size matters to sensitive clouds

Henrik Svensmark’s research group has been busy again. This article says clouds are ‘the largest source of uncertainty in predicting future climate change’. Climate models may need another revision.
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Cloud cover, one of the biggest regulators of Earth’s climate, is easier to affect than previously thought, says Eurekalert.

A new analysis of cloud measurements from outside the coast of California, combined with global satellite measurements, reveals that even aerosol particles as small as 25-30 nanometers may contribute to cloud formation.

Hence, the climate impact of small aerosols may be underestimated.

Clouds are among the least understood entities in the climate system and the largest source of uncertainty in predicting future climate change.

Data Refutes Media’s ‘Attribution’ Con That Climate Change Boosted Dubai’s Rainfall

Time to put the great(?) climate attribution con game to bed permanently. By assuming what it’s trying to prove it becomes seriously unconvincing. Talk of ‘fingerprints of climate change’ is more like waffle than science.
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A few media outlets, including CNN and BBC, have run recent articles talking about flooding in Dubai, claiming that climate change made the storms worse. This is false, says Climate Realism (via Climate Change Dispatch).

There is no evidence that climate change made the rain more extreme, instead, evidence indicates that El Niño and even cloud-seeding may have contributed.

Both the BBC’s article, “Deadly Dubai floods made worse by climate change,” and the one posted by CNN, “Scientists find the fingerprints of climate change on Dubai’s deadly floods,” reference a study done by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, which claimed that climate change made the rain events 10 to 40 percent more intense than if global warming was not occurring.

Drought study raises tricky questions for UN’s climate loss and damage fund

What defines a ‘climate victim’? The impossible conundrum for the UN, facing claims for any climate-related disaster, is: would/could it have happened (to the same magnitude) anyway, for example due to natural factors or mistakes of some kind, regardless of unproven theories about possible human causes behind weather events? Eligibility for compensation depends on the answer, but funds obviously aren’t unlimited and nobody will readily accept a refusal.
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Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger.

But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses, says Climate Home News.

Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food.

“Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside his church last month.

The government and some humanitarian agencies were quick to blame the lack of rain on climate change.

How light can vaporize water without the need for heat – MIT research

The researchers say the effect can be substantial and call it ‘a major part of the picture’. Under the optimum conditions of color, angle, and polarization “the evaporation rate is four times the thermal limit.” It was reported last year but this paper was only accepted last month. That report said: ‘The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say.’ The best incident angle for the light is 45°, according to the pre-print.
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It’s the most fundamental of processes—the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, via Phys.org).

Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed.

And yet, it turns out, we’ve been missing a major part of the picture all along.

In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate.

Climate policy fiasco: Scot Nats mocked for replacing flagship green target with ‘accelerated’ plan

Humza Yousaf is just another in a long list of politicians in various countries forced to backtrack on extravagant and disruptive so-called climate change plans. Attempts to reinvent their national electricity systems, along with numerous other energy-related interventions like mandatory electric car target dates, are proving a lot tougher to achieve than imagined when breezily announced. They all ignore the fact that nature relies on carbon dioxide to survive and grow. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “If you don’t like our climate targets, we have others.”
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Humza Yousaf and his Green coalition partners have been mocked after insisting they were pursuing an “accelerated response to the climate emergency” by abandoning a flagship greenhouse gas target, says The Telegraph.

The First Minister admitted that his government was scrapping Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 after experts warned it was unachievable.

He said it would be replaced by “an accelerated climate change proposal and plan”, including a controversial measure to impose a new carbon tax on large country estates.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said during First Minister’s Questions: “Only Humza Yousaf could believe that slamming on the brakes – because that is exactly what the SNP is doing this afternoon – is an acceleration.”