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.

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.

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).

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.

Battle of the skies as airlines fight over impact of contrails on the climate

This report summary says ‘Vapour trails conundrum resurfaces’. Cloud formation plays an uncertain part in the debate, for example. An experiment using AI found that real time route selection could play a part in reducing the supposed ’emissions’ problem. Proposed financial penalties for airlines are inevitably resisted, but they’re up against net zero climate obsession.
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Airlines are usually rather good at presenting a united face to the world, particularly when it comes to lobbying global policymakers, says The Telegraph.

But a recent move by the EU to clampdown on so-called contrails, the vapour that spews from an aircraft’s jet engines in a thin cloud-like formation, has set carriers at each other’s throats.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata), which counts most of the world’s flag-carriers among its members, has lobbied Brussels to limit the mandatory monitoring of contrails to only flights within the bloc, in an effort to ease the burden of data collection.

But it has stoked the ire of low-cost operators including EasyJet and Ryanair.

World’s top cosmologists convene to question conventional view of the universe

A meeting at London’s Royal Society will scrutinise the basic model first formulated in 1922 that the universe is a vast, even expanse with no notable features and ask (after 100+ years): is it wrong, and if so, what next? Competing measurements of the Hubble ‘constant’ will come under yet more scrutiny.
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If you zoomed out on the universe, well beyond the level of planets, stars or galaxies, you would eventually see a vast, evenly speckled expanse with no notable features. At least, that has been the conventional view, says The Guardian.

The principle that everything looks the same everywhere is a fundamental pillar of the standard model of cosmology, which aims to explain the big bang and how the universe has evolved in the 13.7bn years since.

But this week a meeting of some of the world’s leading cosmologists will convene at London’s Royal Society to ask the question: what if this basic assumption is wrong?

The State of the Climate 2023 (GWPF) – evidence of crisis not observed

The summary remarks: ‘There is no visible effect of the global COVID-19 lockdown 2020–2021 in the atmospheric concentration. The increasing amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is enhancing photosynthesis and thereby global crop yields.’
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London, 28 March — In his annual review of the state of the global climate, Professor Ole Humlum reviews last year’s key data and observations in the context of long-term climate trends, says the GWPF.

The review covers a wide range of temperature measurements in both ocean and atmosphere, alongside reviews of oceanic oscillations, sea level, snow and ice measurements and storms.

Sound the alarm? EU climate agency says the globe is a fraction of a degree warmer than the last ‘record’

Note the adjectives: ‘Obliterated…record-breaking…hot streak…soaring…climate change-fueled’ …leading to… ‘breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree’. The big build-up followed by the damp squib.
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For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records—with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.

The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month, says Phys.org.

And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

‘Very Bizarre’: Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

“Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century – heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” says astrophysicist Willie Soon. But data manipulation, or tampering, is rife. Most climate models over-predict warming, while natural variations continue.
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Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times. — Zerohedge reporting.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back.

Weird dent in Earth’s magnetic field is messing with auroras in the Southern Hemisphere

The South Atlantic Anomaly is an interesting phenomenon, which varies over time and may be related to a zone of unusually dense rock.
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A bizarre dent in Earth’s magnetic field above the southern Atlantic Ocean weakens the southern lights, new research finds.

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a large, oval-shaped region over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean where Earth’s magnetic field is weakest, says Live Science.

The anomaly is already well known for allowing charged particles from the sun to dip close to Earth’s surface, exposing satellites orbiting above to high levels of ionizing radiation, according to NASA.

When the global climate has the hiccups – ‘repeated rapid increases in temperature’

Promoters of a current ‘climate crisis’ often call modern warming and/or events within it, ‘unprecedented’. However, compared to events like this: “A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life” [explains Prof.], not much is presently going on. Climate variability can happen in different ways, and repeat over long timescales.
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In recent geological history, the so-called Quaternary period, there have been repeated ice ages and warm periods, says Science Daily.

Researchers are able to determine past climate variability from the composition of climate records. In the case of the last glacial period 100,000 years ago, ice cores from Greenland in particular provide researchers with detailed data.

For example, Greenland ice cores show that there were repeated rapid increases in temperature.

“We are talking about increases of 5 to 10 degrees within 30 to 40 years on average in the case of Europe. A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life,” explains Prof. Dominik Fleitmann, Professor of Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel.

He calls the phenomena “climate hiccups.”

These Dansgaard-Oeschger events are well documented for the last glacial period, but the climate records from Greenland only cover the last 120,000 years.

It was therefore previously unknown whether these Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period 135,000 to 190,000 years ago.

Frederick Held, a PhD candidate in Fleitmann’s research group, was able to show that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period using isotopic measurements on stalagmites.

He is the lead author of the study which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The North Atlantic as the source of change

The stalagmites examined originate from the Sofular Cave in Turkey, which is located in a region that is very sensitive to climate change.

The researchers therefore refer to it as a key region, as it is influenced by the winds of the North Atlantic and the Black Sea is just a few kilometers away.

“We used the isotopic composition in the stalagmites to determine the moisture sources from which they are formed — the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic,” explains Frederick Held.

For the first time, the evaluations carried out on the stalagmites from the Sofular Cave have proven that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period.

“It was previously unknown whether these relatively brief temperature events actually happened in earlier glacial periods,” states Held.

However, they occurred less frequently in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one: “The temperature peaks are twice as far apart from one another, meaning there were longer cold phases between them.”

These temperature fluctuations originate in the North Atlantic, as the circulation of the ocean is a global conveyor belt for heat and can sometimes be stronger and sometimes weaker.

“For example, the circulation affects the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean, which, in turn, impacts the balance of heat in the Northern Hemisphere and air flows and rainfall,” explains Held.

He states that weakened circulation also reduces the quantity of CO2 which the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere.

These ocean currents were different in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one, which explains the different intervals between the Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

This shows that not all glacial periods are the same and not all warm periods are the same.
. . .
The geologist also hopes to clarify any outstanding questions by means of additional analyses. “For example, we do not yet know whether the increases in temperature were periodic or stochastic, in other words random.”

Full article here.

Image: Greenland ice core [credit: K. Makinson @ Wikipedia]

February Arctic ice ahead of recent comparisons

February Arctic Ice Jumps Over 15 Wadhams a Month Early

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Let’s see how this plays out over the full season.

Temperatures are rising, but soil is getting wetter, confounding climate theorists

One overlooked factor was the CO2 fertilization effect in plant photosynthesis. The researchers found that “it’s virtually impossible to predict soil moisture in the coming decades”, contrary to some alarmist notions about future droughts.
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Soil moisture can determine how quickly a wildfire spreads, how fast a hill turns into a mudslide and, perhaps most importantly, how productive our food systems are, says Eurekalert.

As temperatures rise due to human-caused climate change [Talkshop comment – evidence-free assertion of cause], some researchers are concerned that soils will dry.

However, between 2011 to 2020, soil moisture increased across 57% of the United States during summer, the warmest time of year.

Why did soil get wetter even as the planet got hotter?

Aircraft observations show northern tropical Africa is not the large source of CO2 that satellite data ‘suggested’

This must put a dent in the credibility of at least some supposedly climate-related satellite data. On the positive side, a significant chunk of the alleged global carbon dioxide problem disappears, as the carbon cycle of a large region turns out to be self-balancing. The CO2 struck off, so to speak, is ‘equivalent to about 10% of annual emissions from the burning of fossil fuels’.
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The forests and grasslands of northern tropical Africa take in about as much carbon dioxide in the wet season as they release in the dry season, according to a new study based on observations from aircraft.

The findings contradict earlier research that relied on satellite data and found that these ecosystems may be adding significantly more carbon to the atmosphere than they absorb over the course of a year, says Phys.org.

The research, published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, highlights the difficulty of measuring carbon dioxide from space and the need for more frequent and robust observations from both the air and ground.

Claim: the James Webb telescope ‘threatens to break cosmology as we know it’

Ye Olde Universe
[image credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]

Or did it just confirm the unhappy status of the ‘dark energy’ seekers, long after Nobel prizes were handed out for its ‘discovery’? Quote: ‘despite much searching, astronomers have no clue what dark matter or dark energy are.’ A Nobel for having no clue – where’s the physics?
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For decades, measurements of the universe’s expansion have suggested a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Can it be fixed? asks Live Science.

Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.

Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.

Himalayan Glaciers ‘fight back’ with cooling mechanism, researchers find

Himalayan glaciers [image credit: earth.com]

Time to dial down some over-excitable climate claims perhaps. The actual mechanism has been observed elsewhere before, but ‘not all downslope winds are katabatic‘. Effects can vary according to local conditions.
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Himalayan Glaciers fight back to preserve themselves, but for how long? — asks Eurekalert.

An international team of researchers, co-led by Professor Francesca Pellicciotti of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), explains a stunning phenomenon: rising global temperatures have led Himalayan glaciers to increasingly cool the air in contact with the ice surface.

The ensuing cold winds might help cool the glaciers and preserve the surrounding ecosystems. The results, found across the Himalayan range, were published in Nature Geoscience.

Recording the first daily measurements of Earth’s rotation shifts

Credit: NASA/EPIC, edit by Tdadamemd @ Wikipedia

When they say ‘shifts’ they’re measuring in milliseconds or even smaller units of time. Physics Today says ‘The new measurements are relevant to understanding the global water cycle and atmospheric circulation and may provide an important constraint on the effect of all those processes together.’
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Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in measuring the Earth’s rotation more exactly than ever before, reports Phys.org.

The ring laser at the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell can now be used to capture data at a quality level unsurpassed anywhere in the world.

The measurements will be used to determine the Earth’s position in space, benefit climate research, and make climate models more reliable.

Care to take a quick step down to the basement and see how fast the Earth has been turning in the last few hours?

This year ‘virtually certain’ to be warmest in 125,000 years, EU scientists say — ignoring contradictory evidence?

Thermometer with Fahrenheit and Celsius units [image credit: Stilfehler at Wikipedia]

The ‘virtual’ in virtually certain is from a computer model result: ‘we combine our data with the IPCC’. Two things to bear in mind: satellite data only started in the 1970s, with other less accurate (due to shortage of data) records being kept from the 1880s onwards, and ‘the mid-Holocene … mean annual temperature reached 2.5°C above that of today’ (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica).
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This year is “virtually certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years, European Union scientists said on Wednesday (8 November), after data showed last month was the world’s hottest October in that period, says Euractiv.

Last month smashed through the previous October temperature record, from 2019, by a massive margin, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is a huge margin,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess, who described the October temperature anomaly as “very extreme”.

Hanson et al paper claims ‘climate is more sensitive than usually assumed’

Here we go again. Sound the alarm – louder! So far most climate models have consistently over-estimated temperature rises, compared to observations. The paper goes online shortly (see below for full details).
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According to a new paper in Oxford Open Climate Change, the strategies humanity must pursue to reduce climate change will have to include more than reducing greenhouse gases.

This comes from an analysis of climate data led by researcher James Hansen, says the press release (@ EurekAlert!).

Scientists have known since the 1800s that infrared-absorbing (greenhouse) gases warm the Earth’s surface and that the abundance of greenhouse gases changes naturally as well as from human actions. [Talkshop comment – the human actions part at least is still a theory].

Roger Revelle, who was one of the early scientists to study global warming, wrote in 1965 that industrialization meant that human beings were conducting a “vast geophysical experiment” by burning fossil fuels, which adds carbon dioxide (CO2) to the air.

Do human greenhouse gas emissions cause significant climate change? Two new papers have serious doubts

Climate hype

The Manhattan Contrarian takes a look at some recently published research. The author of the article says ‘Data appears to refute, and certainly does not prove the endlessly repeated claims of impending climate doom from CO2 emissions’. (First part of article omitted below. See links provided for more about the studies and further discussion).
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The climate science community calls its system for establishing causation “detection and attribution” studies, says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The basic idea is to come up with a model (i.e., a hypothesis) that predicts global warming based on increased greenhouse gases, and then collect data that show a very close match between what the model predicted and the data.

Correlation with the model’s predictions is the claimed proof of causation. There are hundreds of such studies in the climate literature.