How climatic changes toppled the ancient megacity of Angkor

Angkor Wat [image credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen @ Wikipedia]

What might the ‘abrupt climatic changes’ described here be due to?

The city may have been overstressed by climatic changes, leading to its rapid abandonment, says Discover magazine.

Angkor, one of the most significant archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, was a thriving metropolis at the center of the Khmer Empire in the 13th century. Then its inhabitants suddenly left town.

Now, researchers find abrupt climatic changes and vulnerable infrastructure led to the city’s demise.

Tracking the movement of the tropics 800 years into the past

Credit: USGS

It turns out the influence of natural drivers of tropical belt expansion and contraction is ‘poorly understood’. The authors say: ‘Our results warn of potential socio-economic consequences of future variations in tropical belt width driven by natural climate variability or stratospheric aerosol injections, whether volcanic or artificial.’
H/T Phys.org

For the first time, scientists have traced the north-south shifts of the northern-most edge of the tropics back 800 years, reports a University of Arizona-led international team.

The movement of the tropical boundary affects the locations of Northern Hemisphere deserts including the Sonoran, Mohave and Saharan. Those deserts sit just north of the tropical belt, which includes the subtropics.

Hurricanes Are Not Caused By “Climate Change.” Just Nature At Work.

.
.
Trying to impose pre-conceived dogmatic ideas about the climate onto random weather events is never going to work.

American Elephants

President Trump was asked by “60 Minutes” Leslie Stahl about Hurricane Florence: He said:

“I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this: I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs.” … “I’m not denying climate change,” he said in the interview. “But it could very well go back. You know, we’re talking about over a … millions of years.”

“They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael,” said Trump, who identified “they” as “people” after being pressed by “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl. She asked, “What about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?” the president replied, “You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda.

Well, you can imagine the outcry, Charles Schumer, distinguished Minority Leader of the United…

View original post 714 more words

Richard Lindzen: ‘Warming of any significance ceased 20 years ago’

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

H/T The GWPF

This will go down like a lead balloon with the usual climate-obsessed suspects and their followers. Full lecture here.

Professor Lindzen said the IPCC report this week had reduced the alleged tipping point from 2C to 1.5C because there had been no significant warming for 20 years, reports the Daily Mail.

‘Warming of any significance ceased about 20 years ago, and 2C warming was looking increasingly unlikely.’

Professor Richard Lindzen slammed conventional thinking on global warming as ‘nonsense’ in a lecture for skeptical think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method

The Met-Office has issued a ‘decadal’ climate forecast which runs from 2018 to 2023. Maybe it should be called a ‘semi-decadal forecast’ instead, but we’ll let it pass, as that’s not the most amusing aspect of it by a long chalk.

For starters, there’s the baseline period chosen. 1850-1900. They’ve gone for this so they can scare us with the upper end of the blue prediction envelope exceeding the Dangerous! Global! Warming! politically chosen figure of 1.5C above “pre-industrial”.

Here’s the global measuring station coverage between 1891 and 1920. There was a lot less in 1850.

I thought it would be fun to see how the Met-O forecast is doing after 10 months, so I plotted the latest annually averaged HadCRUt 4 global data using Wood For Trees in red and overlaid it on the Met-O prediction plot:

IPCC SR15 Report lacks cost/benefit analysis of ‘Goldilocks thinking’

The UN climate report known as SR15 calls for high carbon taxes from $135 to $5,500/ton while a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg of Oct. 9, 2018 says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts are not worth it, leading the Friends of Science Society to slam the UN report as Goldilocks thinking without any rational cost-benefit analysis or practical plan.

Friends of Science says the WSJ paragraph in which Lomborg describes the economic impact on Europe of cutting emissions 80% by 2050 should be front page news in every newspaper in Europe and North America. Lomborg notes that, with a well designed and coordinated climate policy (i.e. the opposite of what European and North American governments have now), the annual costs will reach U.S. $3.3 trillion, “more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined”.

“The policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.”

What Does the New IPCC Report Say About Trends in Extreme Events?

.
.
The IPCC seems to be long on speculation and short on evidence.

Roger Pielke Jr.

1⃣A short thread on what the new @IPCC_CH report says about trends in extreme events, specifically: heat waves, drought, floods, tropical cyclones, tornadoes. Let's go . . .

— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) October 8, 2018

View original post

A conversation with Brandon Gates on the causes of the ‘greenhouse’ effect

 

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke Oct 7

Hi Brandon, What is the best estimate of the ratio of radiation to space taking place from CO2 relative to H2O?

Brandon R. Gates‏ @brandonrgates Oct 7

Dunno Rog. MODTRAN could probably get you in the ballpark. This is CO2-only from 70 km looking down, more what I would expect an actual Nimbus retrieval to look like. http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/ 

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 24h24 hours ago

Although CO2 absorbs thermal radiation from the Earth, it emits more. Carbon dioxide is in thermal deficit in terms of radiative balance. Nitrogen and oxygen constantly feed CO2 with heat so that it maintains a temperature higher than its radiative equilibrium. CO2 is a coolant.

Most UK newspapers ignore IPCC report on their front pages

Clearly the main reason for not putting a news item on the front page is that it won’t help to sell the newspaper. UK weather variability is standard.

Today’s frontpages of most UK newspapers ignore the new IPCC report, reflecting the declining concern of most Brits about the climate agenda – despite the habitual alarm, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).  

UK Survey: Brits Are Chilled About Global Warming

Press Release, Global Warming Policy Forum, 11 July 2018

Saudis push back as IPCC talks head into overtime

Another climate meeting, another heavyweight clash of opinions as committing national economic self-harm struggles to catch on. Ho-hum.

International talks on how to present the science around 1.5C of global warming just ran into overtime in Incheon, South Korea, reports Climate Weekly.

National delegates are expected to argue well into Saturday about the feasibility of holding temperature rise to 1.5C – the stretch goal of the Paris Agreement – and its implications for sustainable development.

Media hype IPCC ‘climate catastrophe’ by 2040 prediction

Yet another climate conference?

They’re still playing the same broken record after nearly ten years. These fake dramas wore very thin a long time ago, but the tedium carries on seemingly ad nauseam.
H/T The GWPF

Hundreds of diplomats from around the world are set to scrutinize the IPCC’s latest Summary for Policy Makers, which contains predictions and benchmark findings on staving off a climate catastrophe by 2040, reports AFP.

The world’s nations will gather at a United Nations conference in South Korea on Monday, October 1 to review and approve a 20-page bombshell – distilled from more than 6,000 scientific studies – laying out narrowing options for staving off climate catastrophe.

Tony Thomas: Ex-BHP Chief “Scrap Paris Now”

Ex-chairman of BHP (1997-99), Jerry Ellis  (right) ex-chancellor of Monash University, and an ex-director of ANZ Bank, has called for Australia to dump the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Ellis’s intervention puts cat among climate pigeons. 

The alarmists like to lie that sceptics are a fringe group. Ellis is hardly fringe. His former BHP continues to promote the story about human-caused catastrophic CO2 warming, as does Monash University. Ellis is an awkwardness for both.

By coming out against climate alarmism, Ellis, 91 81,  is giving added respectability to scepticism, much as ex-PM Tony Abbott did with his London sceptic speech of last October.[i] The credibility of the sceptic case, of course, rests not on authority figures but data such as the  more than two-fold exaggeration of warming since 1980 by the climate models on which the CO2 scare is based.

Here is Ellis’s statement on Paris.

Growing pressure for Clexit and Brexit

Growing Pressure for Clexit – (even from France)
And it’s Time to Defund all UN Climate bodies
Viv Forbes 25 September 2018 

President Trump has extinguished all hopes that USA will join the Paris Climate Agreement. Since then, other countries are heading towards the Climate Exit. An increasing number of prominent people are joining the campaign to counter the falsehood that man-made CO2 emissions drive global climates, and to expose the threat that UN agencies will take control of every aspect of our lives. The list of dissidents includes:

BBC climate change ‘facts’ are fiction

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

Dust storms on Titan spotted for the first time

Saharan dust storm [image credit: BBC]

The researchers report that ‘Titan displays particularly energetic meteorology at equinox in equatorial regions’. Associated strong winds ‘are expected to occur in downbursts during rare equinoctial methane storms—consistent with the timing of the observed brightenings’. On Earth, auroral activity is strongest at the equinoxes, so solar wind strength could be a factor in both phenomena.

Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appear to be giant dust storms in equatorial regions of Saturn’s moon Titan, reports Phys.org.

The discovery, described in a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature Geoscience, makes Titan the third Solar System body, in addition to Earth and Mars, where dust storms have been observed.

Climate alarmists accuse IPCC of ‘watering down’ disaster predictions (again)

Credit: planetsave.com

Déjà vu – another amusing outbreak of paranoia from the ranks of overheating climate obsessives who think the weather depends on how much fuel is burnt, or something.

Climate alarmists are alarmed that a new IPCC report to be released on 8 October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will reject their apocalyptic rhetoric and disaster predictions, says The GWPF.

They blame IPCC scientists for deliberately downplaying the danger of global warming in order to placate the Trump Administration and some of its fossil fuel allies.

Dr. Willie Soon; The “Global Blue Sun” Solar Anomaly during the 1450s and 1460s

.
A rapid-fire lecture on solar-planetary links, sunspots, volcanoes, ice cores, climate and a whole lot more, including a closer look at the Spörer Minimum.

CO2 is Life

Please Like, Share, Subscribe and Comment

View original post

Computer climate simulations just crashed

Not the actual simulations, but the already fading credibility thereof. What scientific reason is there to rely on their results?

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science, writes Andrew Montford for The GWPF.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

Big Green Inc.: Inside the $4 billion U.S. foundations funding Green activists

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

California Dreaming: Push for 100% Wind & Solar Doomed to End in Costly Failure

.
Apart from a major question of practicality, where’s the money supposed to come from for these ideologically driven policies?

Some citizens are already resisting…
California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups

STOP THESE THINGS

Renewable energy zealots talk about the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future being ‘inevitable’. Except that the only thing inevitable about running on sunshine and breezes, is grid chaos and rocketing power prices. Ask a South Australian.

It is also what that crazy German Corporal with the funny moustache called a “big lie”: so helpful to the tyrant because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted and more readily fall victim to a colossal untruth, than the small lie.

The idea that a country can run itself entirely on wind and solar power is, of course, patent nonsense.

But, there are plenty profiting from that ideologically driven fiction, who have worked out that if you ramp up the claims to the height of ridiculousness, there are plenty of idiots ready to believe you.

California has done just that.

California cannot run on…

View original post 866 more words