Network Rail hopes staff will be ‘amateur meteorologists’

Among the latest excuses for train service disruption are problems caused by ‘heavier rain’ and more ‘extreme weather’, due to the catch-all climate change. Storm frequency is called ‘unprecedented’ but such claims lack substance without detailed historical data.
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Network Rail is aiming to turn hundreds of staff into “amateur meteorologists” as part of plans to deal with the effects of climate change, says BBC News.

It wants to help staff to interpret weather forecasts to make better decisions during storms or heatwaves.

The public rail body said it will spend £2.8bn over the next five years on efforts to cope with extreme weather.

Its boss Andrew Haines said climate change was “the biggest challenge our railway faces”.

El Niño fading, ‘good chance’ of La Niña to follow says atmospheric physicist

Natural phenomena dictating weather patterns. The El Niño of 2023-24 is described as ‘strange’, possibly due to some extent to the Tonga undersea volcanic eruption of 2022.
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Wild weather has been roiling North America for the past few months, thanks in part to a strong El Niño that sent temperatures surging in 2023, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

The climate phenomenon fed atmospheric rivers drenching the West Coast and contributed to summer’s extreme heat in the South and Midwest and fall’s wet storms across the East.

That strong El Niño is now starting to weaken and will likely be gone by late spring 2024.

Met Office Storm Gerrit warnings for Scotland ‘were not strong enough’

Met Office in the doghouse. Too busy hyping up warmer than normal Christmas weather in parts of England and Wales perhaps, in support of their woeful greenhouse gas obsessions, while snow was blocking the main road into and out of northern Scotland and trees were toppling onto power lines?
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The Met Office has pledged to review its weather alerts after people in Scotland claimed they were blindsided by the ferocity of Storm Gerrit, says The Telegraph.

Yellow warnings issued by the UK’s weather service had suggested a low chance of severe impacts from the storm, which has battered much of the country with 80mph winds, blizzards and heavy rain.

In the wake of travel chaos caused by snow, flooding and fallen trees, the Met Office has been challenged over whether amber alerts should have been issued.

More cloud uncertainties: researching the effect of aerosol particles on clouds and the climate

Again it turns out that climate modellers don’t understand cloud effects too well. As this article bluntly puts it: ‘The interactions of atmospheric aerosols with solar radiation and clouds continue to be inadequately understood and are among the greatest uncertainties in the model description and forecasting of changes to the climate. One reason for this is the many unanswered questions about the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles.’ — Other reasons aren’t discussed here. Why do we keep reading about ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models when they clearly have a long way to go to merit such a description? Any forecasts they produce should be treated with great caution, to say the least.
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The extent to which aerosol particles affect the climate depends on how much water the particles can hold in the atmosphere, says Phys.org.

The capacity to hold water is referred to as hygroscopicity (K) and, in turn, depends on further factors—particularly the size and chemical composition of the particles, which can be extremely variable and complex.

Through extensive investigations, an international research team under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) was able to reduce the relationship between the chemical composition and the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles to a simple linear formula.

Study of Earth’s stratosphere torpedoes another climate change fear

Earth’s atmosphere [image credit – learnweather.com]

Our headline differs slightly from the article below, which glosses over the actual research findings to some extent. Speculation about possible future unwanted climate scenarios is a favourite hobby of climate alarmists, but this one at least has been largely discarded. As a co-author put it “we were able to show that many climate model projections of very large stratospheric water vapour changes are now inconsistent with observational evidence.”
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New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reduces uncertainty in future climate change linked to the stratosphere, with important implications for life on Earth, says Science Daily.

Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today [Talkshop comment – unsupported assertion], but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses.

A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to water vapour in the stratosphere, an extremely dry region of the atmosphere 15-50 km above the Earth’s surface.

Effect of volcanic eruptions significantly underestimated in climate projections, study shows

Volcanic eruption

The idea proposed here of climate model forecasts becoming ‘more robust’ by including smaller effects depends on them being robust to some degree in the first place, which is open to question given their output to date.
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Researchers have found that the cooling effect that volcanic eruptions have on Earth’s surface temperature is likely underestimated by a factor of two, and potentially as much as a factor of four, in standard climate projections, says Phys.org.

While this effect is far from enough to offset the effects of global temperature rise caused by human activity [Talkshop comment – unsupported assertion], the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, say that small-magnitude eruptions are responsible for as much as half of all the sulfur gases emitted into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes.

The results, reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that improving the representation of volcanic eruptions of all magnitudes will in turn make climate projections more robust.

Andrew Dessler: The future will be hotter, unless it’s colder.

Andrew Dessler @AndrewDessler Prof of Atmospheric Sciences & climate scientist @ Texas A&M; AGU and AAAS Fellow has been prognosticating on Twitter, talking up a model that predicts another 2C of warming by 2100 (0.25C/decade, twice the rate 2013-2023).

When challenged about this alarming rate of warming, he clarified for us.

Arctic sea ice volume anomaly May ’23 update: A tale of two paradigms.

A polar bear inspects a US submarine near the North Pole [credit: Wikipedia]

Talkshop readers will remember the post last month looking at PIOMAS ice volume data in relation to two alternate futures. One is the future predicted by IPCC scientists that says we’re heading for an ice-free Arctic in summer 2035 on a fairly linear trend all the way down from when the satellite record begins (well, the section they show us anyway). The other is the sceptical null hypothesis, that Arctic ice variation is natural, cyclic, and probably following the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

These two alternatives appear on our plot below, along with the updated PIOMAS volume data. Up until now, both possible futures have been plausible, within two-sigma envelopes (not shown this time), with a few outliers for either scenario. This month’s updated current datapoint lies very close to the 65 year sinusoidal oscillation model’s median line, and just within the two-sigma envelope of the linear model. Click through to see the plot below the break.

El Niño on the way?

The SIS Group surveys the recently active commentary/prediction scene, finishing with climate alarm central aka the UN. Elsewhere, NOAA’s ENSO blog explains Why making El Niño forecasts in the spring is especially anxiety-inducing. Warmists are willing one to get going soon.
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The story begins at https://www.netzerowatch.com/rapid-ocean-temperature-rise-puzzles-scientists/  … rapid ocean temperature changes are on the way as the planet moves from a persistant La Niña position into El Niño conditions.

This will please the alarmists as global ocean temperatures appear to be a forewarning of El Niño – the only few times in the last 25 years that there has been an upward spike in global temperatures.

Mostly, it has flatlined.

Continued here.

U.S. Net Debt To Exceed 110% By 2028 As Decarbonization Costs Mount

This is where choosing carbon dioxide obsession over proper understanding of Earth’s complex and dynamic climate could be leading the unwary.
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While the latest IMF forecasts were mostly lost in the din surrounding the start of earnings season, besides the now standard cuts to global growth forecasts, there was one standout item, says Zero Hedge (via Oilprice.com).

As National Bank of Canada points out, the IMF’s projections forecast U.S. net debt to rise from 95% of GDP in 2023 to 110% by 2028, which actually is a conservative estimate when comparing a similar, if even more concerning longer-term forecast from the Congressional Budget Office, which effectively projects hyperinflation.

But while the fate of US debt/GDP in 2050 may feel like someone else’s problem to most Americans, NBC warns that a far more pressing issue may emerge as soon as a decade from today.

That’s because unless Washington raises taxes more or slashes benefits (an unlikely outcome), the Social Security fund will hit net zero – i.e., will be exhausted – in just 10 years.

Read more here.

How well do state-of-the-art climate models simulate sea level?

Are the models wrongly expecting sea level rise to closely mirror the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 content, in all regions? It seems it doesn’t work like that. The study itself says: ‘As for simulation of the interannual variance, good agreement can be seen across different models, yet the models present a relatively low agreement with observations. The simulations show much weaker variance than observed’.
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According to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in the last 3000 years, says Eurekalert.

This makes hundreds of coastal cities and millions of people vulnerable to a threat of higher water levels.

State-of-the-art climate models provide a crucial means to study how much and how soon sea levels will rise.

However, to what extent these models are able to represent sea level variations remains an open issue.

Satellite Temperature Data Show Almost All Climate Model Forecasts Over the Last 40 Years Were Wrong

Image credit: livescience.com

Maybe a climate model with no ‘ECS’ factor could do better? But anything that smacks of natural variation inevitably faces resistance from climate alarm promoters.
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A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements, says the Daily Sceptic.

The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.

Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail.

More droughts and flooding predicted as La Niña weather pattern goes into third consecutive winter

A media campaign to point the finger at the ‘greed of rich countries’ for local weather conditions is already underway in Pakistan. But NASA gave the game away after the last time this happened, in 2010: ‘The rainfall anomaly map published by NASA showed unusually intense monsoon rains attributed to La Niña’ – Wikipedia. Of course it’s now standard practice to try to blame humans in the more industrialised countries for any seriously bad weather.
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More droughts and flooding are being predicted as the La Nina weather pattern goes into its third consecutive winter – something known as a “triple dip”, says Sky News.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicts it will last until at least the end of the year.

That means it will have spanned three consecutive northern winters for the first time this century.

La Nina is the cooling of ocean surface temperatures coupled with winds and rainfall.

Gamblers update: Eli Rabett vs Tallbloke on Arctic Sea Ice extent

Six years ago this week, I agreed to a wager with Eli Rabett on the trend in Arctic sea ice extent from 2006-2026. Now we’re more than halfway to the finish line, it’s a good time to check on progress. Here’s how the Sea Ice Extent graph looks from mid 2006 to mid 2022. The trend is still towards less ice, but not by much. There’s no ‘climate emergency tipping point’ visible in the data.

The terms we agreed are detailed in the image of the twitter convo below.

What happened to that hyper-busy 2022 hurricane season? Forecasters say wait

Saharan dust cloud over the Atlantic [image credit: NASA]

For the first time in seven years, no hurricane has formed in the Atlantic Basin by mid-August. An excess of Saharan dust is thought to be a factor.
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After two years of alphabet-exhausting tropical storms, and the disruptive remnants that have soaked the Philly region, the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season is off to a surprisingly benign start, says The Philadelphia Inquirer.

And it may have something to do with all the heat the Philly region and much of the East endured July into August.

All those ominous outlooks notwithstanding, for the first time in seven years, no hurricane has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, or the Gulf of Mexico by Aug. 15. The long-term average for a first hurricane, one with peak winds of at least 74 mph, is Aug. 11.

ENSO update: La Niña continues

It could still be active into next spring, according to some forecasters. Unusual by its own historical (back to 1950) standards.
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La Niña continues! It’s likely that the La Niña three-peat will happen: the chance that the current La Niña will last through early winter is over 70%, says NOAA’s ENSO blog.

If it happens, this will be only the third time with three La Niña winters in a row in our 73-year record.

ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the whole La Niña and El Niño system) has the greatest influence on weather and climate during the Northern Hemisphere cold season, so forecasters pay especially close attention when it looks like ENSO will be active in the winter.

UK heatwave: Weather forecasters report unprecedented trolling

Might be related to them trying a bit too hard to make a meal of it? They could have chosen to stick to the role their job title suggests.
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Weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling during this month’s extreme heat in the UK, according to leading figures in the industry – says BBC News.

The BBC’s team received hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to “get a grip”, as temperatures hit 40C.

BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather.

The Royal Meteorological Society condemned the trolling.

Climate mania: When will the UK heatwave peak and how hot will it get?

Warm day in London

People in many parts of the world must be wondering what all the fuss is about, but Brits like to discuss their ever-changeable weather now and again…and again. Of course there’s now the added element of wild panic-mongering (see below) from the usual climate-obsessed suspects like the Met Office, trying to blame humans for natural events plus all the rest of their tedious hype. We’ve had hot days before, and some like to pay to find hotter ones on their travels, so let’s dial back on the shrill alarmism.
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The Met Office has issued its first red warning for extreme heat, warning of a “potentially very serious situation” in parts of England, says ITV News.

The UK Health Security Agency has increased its heat health warning from level three to level four – a “national emergency.”

Level four is reached only when a heatwave is “so severe and/or prolonged that its effects extend outside the health and social care system”, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

Illness and death may occur even among the fit and healthy, and “not just in high-risk groups.”

A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts

Cloud guesswork is hindering climate models, therefore relying heavily on their outputs to decide policies must be risky. A professor commented that we may “need a Manhattan Project level of new federal funding and interagency coordination to actually solve this problem.” This can’t be brushed aside as a minor issue.
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We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice says Eurekalert.

But how will it affect clouds?

“Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets,” says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. “Or they could thicken and become more reflective.”

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.

Dozens of ships stuck in Arctic as ice freezes early in reverse of recent warming winters

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Where are the ‘rapidly warming winters’ this time round? It seems global warming is behaving badly, in parts of the Arctic at least.
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Shipping firms blame the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, says the Telegraph.

More than two dozen cargo vessels are stuck in Russia’s Arctic ice, waiting for ice-breakers to come to their rescue, after an inaccurate forecast from the country’s Met Office.

Maritime traffic in the Northern Sea Route has been on the rise in recent years as rapidly warming winters reduce ice cover, and Russia invests in its Arctic ports in preparation for a further boom.

But this year several segments of the Northern Sea Route froze up about a fortnight earlier than usual, catching many ships unawares.

Alexei Likhachyov – director general of Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom, which manages the country’s nuclear-power fleet of ice-breakers – said on Monday that the ships included vessels sailing under the flags of Hong Kong and Marshall Islands.

He blamed the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, in comments to local media.

Continued here.