Is a new Interactive Climate Atlas ‘a game changer for policymakers’ – or just a game?

Delving into the technical section (see below), this puzzling statement appeared:
‘One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of [a named] dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty.’ — Another section is headed ‘Quality assured data’ but surely models with a wide range of uncertainty must include some which are more uncertain, aka inaccurate, than others. What purpose does that serve for policymakers?
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The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas, launched by the Copernicus Climate Change Service on 20 February, is set to be an important new resource for policymakers looking to formulate effective climate policy and for other users needing to visualise and analyse climate change information, says the European Commission.
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Let’s get technical
So, how does the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas work? The gridded monthly dataset used for the Atlas integrates information from several climatic observational, reanalysis and projection datasets. The data is harmonised across the different datasets and catalogues to ensure standard common definitions and units for each of the variables.

One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of the CORDEX-CORE dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty. Due to its global continental coverage and higher resolution, this is a strategic dataset for the C3S Atlas, making it possible to analyse climate change in even higher resolution, such as for megacities around the world, for example.

Full article — Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas: a game changer for policymakers.

Government climate techno-fixes raise ‘grave doubts’ among UK’s civil servants

Net zero policies and plans of climate-obsessed politicians looking threadbare and unrealistic yet again, this time in court. They can never admit that their goals are unachievable at any price, even supposing their methods had some merit.
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British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably, says Climate Home News.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

CO2 goes quantum in new research paper

CO2 is not pollution

Extracts from an article on this, below. This is just a heads-up that the paper is about to be published. Pre-print version here, title: Fermi Resonance and the Quantum Mechanical Basis of Global Warming.
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The reason why CO2 is so good at trapping heat [Talkshop comment – according to some theorists] essentially boils down to the way the three-atom molecule vibrates as it absorbs infrared radiation from the Sun, asserts The Conversation (via Science Alert).

“It is remarkable,” Harvard University planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth and colleagues write in their new preprint, “that an apparently accidental quantum resonance in an otherwise ordinary three-atom molecule has had such a large impact on our planet’s climate over geologic time, and will also help determine its future warming due to human activity.”

When hit with incoming rays of light at certain wavelengths, CO2 molecules don’t just jiggle about as one fixed unit as you might expect. Rather, CO2 molecules – which are made up of one carbon atom flanked by two oxygens – bend and stretch in certain ways.

World’s first year-long breach of ‘key’ 1.5C warming limit alarms the BBC

Alarmists mark an artificial deadline, still pretending government-driven limits can be put on long-term climate variations and attempting to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which hasn’t happened anyway. Cue the usual well-worn phrases about tackling climate change, emissions etc.
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For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts, says BBC News.

This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark “Paris agreement”, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Face It: The Energy Transition Ain’t Happening — Manhattan Contrarian

Wind power and EV sales stalling or in retreat, while coal, oil and gas advance. Things are not going according to the climate alarm script, despite assorted government interventions.
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If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition, says the Manhattan Contrarian.

A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that.

Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces.

Climate Scientists Want Space Umbrellas The Size Of Argentina To Blot Out The Sun

Mr. Burns blocks the sun

Bad luck for solar panel owners and users, and anything relying on photosynthesis. But as such umbrellas would be far too heavy to move even if they could be made, probably nothing to worry about. Just another climate alarm concoction in search of funding.
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A team of climate scientists wants to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported.

To block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding.

UN bidding starts in the $trillions for COP 29 climate finance

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

A UN official claims there’s a ‘need to collectively raise and direct $2.4 trillion annually for climate mitigation’. Billions are too small to mention any more, when trying to ‘avoid devastating impacts of climate change’ (says this article). Since climate models aren’t even much good at replicating reality, and various dire predictions to date have failed, what basis is there for this proposed level of spending?
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The UN’s next climate summit will be an “enabling COP,” focused on drastically scaling up climate finance and making bold emissions reduction commitments, says Axios.

Why it matters: Top UN climate official Simon Stiell delivered a speech this morning in Baku, Azerbaijan, envisioning what will happen if the world meets the climate challenge and avoids devastating impacts of climate change.

Zoom in: The speech, delivered at ADA University, counters perceptions in some parts of the climate community that Baku will involve lower stakes and more technical work than COP28 did in Dubai.

EU’s new fiscal rules too strict for ‘fight’ against climate change? Churchill analogy invoked

The Greens claimed the new rules are ‘suicidal’ (which could also be said of the proposed spending plans), and imagined bean counters telling Churchill to give up because his World War costs were unaffordable. Climate hysteria rumbles on in its own world.
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The new EU rules for national debts and deficit would hamper member states’ ability to make the public investments needed to effectively combat climate change, a new study commissioned by the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament found.

Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday (30 January), Philippe Lamberts, co-president of the Greens/EFA group, stressed that the fiscal rules currently being negotiated in ‘trilogue’ discussions between the European Commission, Parliament, and Council would render it “legally impossible” for the bloc to achieve its goal of full decarbonisation by 2050, reports Euractiv.

Echoing earlier comments, he accused the EU of being run by “religious fundamentalists” following “suicidal” policies.

New study reports that Greenland is a methane sink rather than a source

Greenland settlement [image credit: climatechangepost.com]

A large dent goes in to thawing permafrost scares, as another ‘ticking time bomb’ based on greenhouse gas theories turns out to be a dud. As for carbon dioxide, the professor leading the study commented: “…the ice-free parts of Greenland have only been without ice since the last ice age, meaning that they never stored much carbon”. Climate models will have to be revised.
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Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have concluded that the methane uptake in dry landscapes exceeds methane emissions from wet areas across the ice-free part of Greenland.

The results of the new study contribute important knowledge to climate models, says Phys.org.

The researchers are now investigating whether the same finding applies to other polar regions.

Two global temperature graphs – spot the difference

We’ve done it already. The sloping green line in each graph, or ‘Manhattan’, has been added by the Talkshop. Of course it’s the same data, but the presentation is noticeably different. In the first one from The Conversation the green slope line is at 45° to the horizontal, and in the second one from NOAA (the creator of the graph) the same line is a more modest, although still quite steep, 35°. Is someone trying too hard to impress?
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Graph 1

Source: The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/ice-storms-january-downpours-heavy-snow-no-snow-diagnosing-warming-winter-syndrome-221956

Graph 2

Source: NOAA
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202313

More climate squabbling: Governments fail to set a timeline for the IPCC reports

Yet another climate conference

Another round of climate obsessives versus energy realists, as ‘Saudi, India and China led opposition against a proposal to link the IPCC’s assessment cycle with the global stocktake’. Supposed climate issues continue to be a drain on government time and resources, with attendees racking up loads of the dreaded ’emissions’ between them just to get to the latest of the endless series of venues.
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Governments have failed to agree on a timeline for the delivery of highly influential scientific reports assessing the state of climate change by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says Climate Home News.

That is after Saudi Arabia, India and China opposed attempts to ensure the scientific body would provide its assessment in time for the next global stocktake, the UN’s scorecard of collective climate action, due in 2028, according to sources present at the IPCC talks in Istanbul, Turkiye, last week.

Following “fraught” discussions that ran all night Friday, governments postponed a final decision on the timeline until the next meeting scheduled in the summer.

Researchers probe a conundrum: If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Gulf Stream flows

Some recent cold weather events are puzzling to global warming researchers, in terms of climate model expectations. Especially so for the ‘Center for Irreversible Climate Change’ in South Korea. Temporary natural variation seems to be the conclusion. What else could they say without casting doubt on human-caused warming theories?
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If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Indeed, East Asia and North America have experienced frequent extreme weather events since the 2000s that defy average climate change projections, says Phys.org.

Many experts have blamed Arctic warming and a weakening jet stream due to declining Arctic sea ice, but climate model experiments have not adequately demonstrated their validity.

The massive power outage in Texas in February 2021 was caused by an unusual cold snap, and climate models are needed to accurately predict the risk of extreme weather events in order to prevent massive socioeconomic damage.

Oldie but Goldie: Climategate: how the conspirators gagged on their deceptions

Andrew Bolt Herald Sun Dec 6 2009

I’ve wondered whether Climategate scientist Tom Wigley, an Australian, finally choked on all the fraud, fiddling and coverups he was witnessing from fellow members of his Climategate cabal. Steven Hayward points out that many other Climategate scientists privately had trouble swallowing the practices of their colleagues:

In 1998 three scientists from American universities–Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes–unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology–the now notorious “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction (picture a flat “handle” extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping “blade” from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin–far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period (MWP) and the little ice (LIA) age both disappeared.

Send more funds: Earth system models are missing key piece of future climate puzzle, researchers say

Alaskan permafrost: [image credit: insideclimatenews.org]

The ’emissions’ obsessives of climate research seek greater financing for the endless quest for evidence that might support their theories. The subject here is permafrost, but it also reads like an admission that climate is more complicated than current models can cope with, for a number of reasons.
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The way science is funded is hampering Earth system models, and may be skewing important climate predictions, according to a new comment published in Nature Climate Change by Woodwell Climate Research Center and an international team of model experts, says Phys.org.

Emissions from thawing permafrost, frozen ground in the North that contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does and is thawing due to human-caused climate warming [Talkshop comment – the usual empty assertion], are one of the largest uncertainties in future climate projections.

But accurate representation of permafrost dynamics is missing from the major models that project future carbon emissions.

2023’s record heat partly driven by ‘mystery’ process: NASA scientist

It’s warming, but not as they thought they knew it. ‘Everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn’t quite add up.’ Aerosols, undersea volcano, El Niño, ‘new processes’ – the list of suspects goes on, but nothing convincing so far. Settled science has been unsettled, but persists with its usual assertions blaming humans anyway.
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It’s no secret human activity is warming the planet, driving more frequent and intense extreme weather events and transforming ecosystems at an extraordinary rate, claims Phys.org.

But the record-shattering temperatures of 2023 have nonetheless alarmed scientists, and hint at some “mysterious” new processes that may be under way, NASA’s top climatologist Gavin Schmidt tells AFP.

Mind the Gaps: How the UN Climate Plan Fails to Follow the Science

Image credit: livescience.com

That old nebulous concept is invoked again: ‘the science’. It aims to sound like infallible authority, but that’s not what real science is. Talk of “uncharted territory” reminds us that most of Earth’s climate history also falls into that category. Made-up temperature limits based on the use of global averaging have little meaning in reality, as some politicians appear to have noticed.
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Climate negotiators meeting in Dubai last month pledged to chart a course for stabilizing the climate system using good science, says Fred Pearce at Yale Environment360.

But many scientists say these promises are at best ill-defined and at worst a travesty of good science — vague and full of loopholes.

The U.N. climate conference in Dubai agreed on an action plan for two key objectives: to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), and to stay below this threshold by achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Negotiators pledged that both objectives would be pursued “in keeping with the science.”

But neither of the objectives have agreed definitions that would allow a judgment on whether they have been achieved.

Sky News called out on air for arguing ‘both sides’ on climate change

Sceptic of human-caused climate disturbance theories painted as a right-wing pantomime villain by ‘how dare they’ activist type. Seeking as usual to avoid true debate, e.g. on the repeated failure of alarmist predictions, by resorting to irrelevant caricatures. The fact Sky News invited a sceptic at all suggests awareness that ignoring them has not worked, and the public is by no means all on board with media propaganda.
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SKY News has been criticised for arguing “both sides” on climate change after the Met Office said 2023 had been the second warmest year for the UK since records began in 1884, reports The National (Scotland).

In a segment on the news, presenter Kay Burley spoke to writer James Woudhuysen and activist Zoe Cohen from Just Stop Oil about the issue.

Cohen used her time on air to rip into bosses at Sky for platforming Woudhuysen, who questioned whether the statistics from the Met Office were accurate, claiming they were “very difficult to believe”.

Trillions being wasted on climate emergency – reader’s letter to local paper

Commonsense from a citizen objecting to the vast sums being frittered away on futile and unachievable dogma-driven objectives in the name of somehow ‘correcting’ the global climate.
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With reference to your article Sit For Climate Protests At Station, I would like to point out an alternative view.

So begins a reader’s letter in the Newark Advertiser.
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The reader concludes:
By focusing on C02 we are spending trillions on inefficient renewables and EV vehicles rather than using the money for real environmental issues and adapting to changing climatic conditions.

Source: Reader’s letter [pdf].

Researchers use new 3D global climate model to test runaway greenhouse theory, with odd results

We quote the last part of this Phys.org article, headed: ‘A planet Earth in a fragile equilibrium.’ Somehow the model finds that once the oceans have eventually evaporated ‘we would even reach 273 bars of surface pressure and over 1,500°C’. This seems a bit unlikely on the face of it as it’s three times the surface pressure, and temperature [note the link between those two] of Venus despite being nearly 40% further away from the Sun. We note that it’s not unheard of for climate models to over-predict temperature effects.
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Talkshop note – the article earlier states:
One of the key points of the study describes the appearance of a very peculiar cloud pattern, increasing the runaway effect, and making the process irreversible. “From the start of the transition, we can observe some very dense clouds developing in the high atmosphere. Actually, the latter does not display anymore the temperature inversion characteristic of the Earth atmosphere and separating its two main layers: the troposphere and the stratosphere. The structure of the atmosphere is deeply altered,” says Chaverot.
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A planet Earth in a fragile equilibrium.

With their new climate models, the scientists have calculated that a very small increase of the solar irradiation—leading to an increase of the global Earth temperature, of only a few tens of degrees—would be enough to trigger this irreversible runaway process on Earth and make our planet as inhospitable as Venus.

More records tumble as China cold snap persists

Climate alarmists resort to the *extreme weather* excuse whenever it suits them, for example when unusually cold weather arrives somewhere. In this case a vast area of China has ‘all-time December lows’. What empirical evidence is there that supports the idea of trace gases in the atmosphere being capable of having such effects?
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More low temperature records tumbled across China on Thursday, as the country endures a persistent cold snap that has crowned a year of extreme weather, says Phys.org.

The national weather office said in a social media post that more than 20 stations posted all-time December lows in the early hours of Thursday.

They included Hohhot, capital of the northern Inner Mongolia region, where a reading of -29.1 degrees Celsius (-20.4 Fahrenheit) broke a nearly 70-year record.