Half-mile wide asteroid close approach on Wednesday

Credit: VIRTUAL TELESCOPE [click to enlarge]

Dr Roy Spencer discusses today’s asteroid approach, the closest for 13 years.

An asteroid capable of destroying Washington D.C. and New York City at the same time will be making its closest approach to Earth on April 19.

At a half-mile wide, it will have over 30,000 times as much mass as the 2013 meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013.

The current asteroid, called “2014 JO25“, is traveling at the unimaginably fast speed of 75,000 mph. It has been estimated that an asteroid of this size is capable of wiping out an area the size of New England, and causing global cooling from the dust that would be lofted into the stratosphere.

“2014 JO25” will be the closest approach asteroid of this size in the last 13 years.

We really don′t know clouds at all

Despite confessing to being ‘baffled by clouds’, climate science and its media followers are still prone to assertions like ‘as the world warms’ – as though it’s bound to do so indefinitely.

Though we see them every day, clouds remain such a mystery to scientists that they are inhibiting climate change predictions. But a new atlas could be a game changer, thinks DW.COM.

Nothing beats a lazy afternoon sitting on the grass and watching the clouds roll by. These white fluffy friends can feel like a constant and comforting presence in life. And since the dawn of air travel, as folk singer Joni Mitchell once sang, we’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.

But as Mitchell cautioned, somewhow we still don’t know clouds at all. Her words were true in 1969, and they are still true today.

Forecasters predict El Niño may return by summer

The El Niño of 1997-8

The report says ‘the possible return of El Niño this year would present a unique situation’. Is there still excess heat in the system as sunspots go further into ‘quiet mode’?
H/T GWPF

The path to another round of El Niño in 2017 appears to be shortening, as tropical Pacific Ocean waters have been warming at a substantial rate. Several models suggest that El Niño could be comfortably in place as early as May.

Weather forecasters have been eyeing for a couple of months a possible return this year of El Niño, which normally comes around every two to seven years and last occurred in 2015/16.

GWPF: Computer predictions of climate alarm are flawed

Image credit: relativelyinteresting.com

Results so far from climate models are very unconvincing, despite huge resources of manpower and technology.

London, 21 February: Claims that the planet is threatened by man-made global warming are based on science that is based on inadequate computer modelling. That is the conclusion of a new briefing paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).   

The report’s author, eminent American climatologist Professor Judith Curry, explains that climate alarm depends on highly complex computer simulations of the Earth’s climate. 

But although scientists have expended decades of effort developing them, these simulations still have to be “tuned” to get them to match the real climate. This makes them essentially useless for trying to find out what is causing changes in the climate and unreliable for making predictions about what will happen in the future. 

As heavy rain and snow end California’s 5-year drought, climate alarmists look foolish

Is this the US weather this winter? [Credit: Farmer’s Almanac]

The unending California drought theory seems to have bitten the dust, or the snow, as The GWPF reports.

The recent onslaught of rain and snow finally brought much-needed relief to northern California, ending a punishing five-year drought, federal officials said Thursday.

“Bye bye drought … Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” tweeted the National Weather Service’s office in Reno, Nev., which monitors parts of the region.

Best weather satellite ever built rockets into space

Lift-off [image credit: NASA]

Forecasters will get pictures “like they’ve never seen before” reports Phys.org. ‘More data, more often, much more detailed’ is promised.

The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives.

This new GOES-R spacecraft will track U.S. weather as never before: hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, volcanic ash clouds, wildfires, lightning storms, even solar flares. Indeed, about 50 TV meteorologists from around the country converged on the launch site—including NBC’s Al Roker—along with 8,000 space program workers and guests.

“What’s so exciting is that we’re going to be getting more data, more often, much more detailed, higher resolution,” Roker said. In the case of tornadoes, “if we can give people another 10, 15, 20 minutes, we’re talking about lives being saved.”

Per Strandberg: The physical forces driving UAH global temperature

I presented here a while back my research using an Artificial Neural Network analyzing ENSO.

Learn more here http://www.coolingnews.com/the-cause-of-enso

I’m going to write here how it all started, but first I like to show my updated recent ENSO data and forecast which I presented at the recent climate conference in London.

Fig 1: ENSO result from my ANN. Training period is from 1979 and up to 2005. The testing period is from 2005 and up to the end of 2015. From 2015 and up to the end of 2022 it is a forecast. The red line is the real ENSO value and dark line is the result I got from the ANN. As you can see the dark line is from the average values from ensemble.

How predictable is the timing of a summer ice-free Arctic?

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

‘How predictable’ assumes some predictability of a future ‘ice-free’ Arctic in summer – debatable at least.
H/T US CLIVAR – Climate Variability and Predictability Program

The strong decline in the summer sea ice cover of the Arctic over the last decades has led many to ask when the Arctic will be ice-free for the first time.

Rather than providing yet another answer to this question, in a recent Geophysical Research Letters article by Jahn et al., they focused on determining how well the occurrence of an ice-free Arctic can be predicted, due to the inherent internal climate variability of the system.

An Inconvenient Truth: Few Signs Of Global Warming In Antarctica

.
.
Ah, natural variability – the curse of the fanatical warmist.
They don’t understand it and don’t want to believe it exists.
But it does, so they’ll have to put up with it.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/27/an-inconvenient-truth-few-signs-of-global-warming-in-antarctica/

From the Daily Caller:

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades.

Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming.

“Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This applies to goings-on in Antarctica as well as in Louisiana,” Knappenberger said, referring to the recent flooding in Louisiana activists have already blamed global warming for.

What recent studies have shown is that…

View original post 856 more words

New Dawn Of Truth: London Climate Change Conference 2016

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller,  Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will  Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

Elite merchants of #Brexit doom expose their own pre #EUref lies

Post referendum analysis from Rodney Atkinson at Freenations.net

One of the most obnoxious features of the post Brexit climate is that the biggest liars and doom mongers in political history – the Remain campaigners – now accuse Leave Campaigners of lying! This has been picked up in continental attacks on Boris Johnson who, if anything, was rather kind and accommodating given the damage done to people, banks and businesses by the Euro corporatist elites. Now those liars are exposing their own lies:

THE IMF

Before the Brexit vote the IMF head, Christine Lagarde (whose appointment was avidly supported by George Osborne) said that the impact on the UK economy of a Brexit vote went from “pretty bad to very, very bad” and that there could be a recession.

Today the IMF says it has a “benign” view of the Brexit effect on the UK economy, there would be no recession and their revised forecast for UK growth is the same as their revised forecast for USA growth (-0.2% for 2016). Their forecast for UK growth in 2017 is 1.3%

A retrospective, Climate Audit and the late Prof. Kreiss

Tim writes,

Published 27th February 2016 Climate Audit published a small article in honour of Kreiss to do with atmospheric modelling, the hydrostatic balance… or not.

Comments follow from Names. I think the comments are worthy of a read and decode by Talkshop readers who have an interest in this kind of topic.

Gerry Browning: In Memory of Professor Heinz Kreiss

Gerry Browning writes:

The Correct System of Equations for Climate and Weather Models

Temperatures Falling As El Niño Fades Quickly

ENSO trend [credit: NOAA]

How much of recent El Nino-backed warming was ‘man-made’, if any? NOAA has issued a La Niña watch so we may well see average temperatures going into reverse before too long.
H/T GWPF

El Niño is quickly fading. Sea surface temperatures are coming down in the tropical Pacific, and winds in the region have weakened. History tells us, and forecast models predict, that La Niña conditions will be quick on its heels.

The long descent toward cycle 25

Our sometimes contributor Michele has posted an article on his Italian language blog.

 

Watching solar: The long descent of solar cycle SC24 has started!
(hopefully Google Translate will kick in automatically (see top of page), or use Bing translation)

Do I (Tim) agree with Michele, yes, will be about now.

We have the most uncertain solar situation in living memory.

MET Office: Forecasting months/seasons ahead “Still in its infancy”.

Roundup of comment on MET Office performance with UK summer weather forecasting from Benny Peiser at GWPF:

 Image Credit: Cartoons by Josh

The Met Office has defended its forecast for a hot, dry summer despite some areas looking set to have the most rain since records began. As summer officially came to a close amid extreme downpours on Monday, the forecaster was left facing questions about why it predicted a ‘drier-than-average’ season even though a strong El Nino climate event was expected. In May the Met Office said that it ‘wouldn’t expect (El Nino) to be the dominant driver of our weather’ in the summer months. Yet this weekend Met Office chief scientist Professor Dame Julia Slingo said that the El Nino phenomenon had disturbed weather patterns, which might have been predicted. “We all know that forecasting months and seasons ahead is still in its infancy and much more research needs to be done.”–Sarah Knapton, The Daily Telegraph, 31 August 2015

Frosty forecast for BBC-MET Office relations

Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract.
[Josh has waved magic –Tim (replacement image Original image)]

The UK’s weather service has provided the data used for BBC forecasts since the corporation’s first radio weather bulletin on 14 November 1922.

The BBC said it was legally required to secure the best value for money for licence fee payers and would tender the contract to outside competition.

The Met Office said it was disappointed by the decision. A replacement is expected to take over next year.

NASA releases dataset of global climate change predictions up to 2100

NASA ‘global warming satellite’ (their description)
[credit: NASA]

Two choices: whether to laugh or cry at the latest fortune-telling exercise from NASA’s warming-obsessed spin-doctors. Climate models are famed for their predictive inadequacy – incompetence even – so this looks exactly like an exercise in futility.

NASA has released a dataset setting out how rainfall and temperature patterns are likely to change in the coming decades, Gizmag reports. The data covers 21 climate models, mapping how our environment could change due to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Ian Wilson: Connecting the Planetary Periodicities to Changes in the Earth’s LOD

Relevant to current discussions on the talkshop concerning changes in Earth’s length of day (LOD) and the effect of planetary orbital resonances on the Moon’s orbital parameters and Earth climatic variation; this is a repost from Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate-Connection website. Ian very generously opens with a hat tip to this blog, (at which he is one of the ‘collaborators’ he mentions). 

Connecting the Planetary Periodicities to Changes in the Earth’s LOD
Monday, October 14, 2013 : Ian Wilson PhD

[(*) Some of the findings in this blog post concerning the connection between the Earth’s rotation rate and the planetary configurations have also been independently discovered by Rog “Tallbloke” Tattersall and his collaborators]

A. The Connection Between Extreme Pergiean Spring Tides and Long-term Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate as Measured by the Rate-of-Change of its Length-of-Day (LOD). (*)

If you plot the rate of change of the Earth’s Length of Day (LOD) [with the short-term atmospheric component removed] against time [starting in 1962] you find that there is a ~ 6 year periodicity that is phase-locked with the 6 year period that it takes the lunar line-of-nodes  to re-align with the lunar line-of-apse [see the first note directly below and reference [1] for a description of the method used to determine the time rate of change of LOD].

NB: The pro-grade precession of the lunar line-of-apse once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 8.8504 Julian years (J2000) while the retrograde precession of the lunar line-of-apse line-of-nodes once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 18.6000 Julian years (J2000). Hence, the lunar line-of-apse and the ascending node of the lunar line-of-nodes will realign once every:

(18.6000 x 8.8504) / (18.6000 + 8.8504)  = 5.9969 Julian years

Figure 1

So you like reanalysis, the 3 var trick

NCAR Research Data Archive Blog

2015-03-30
1938 atmospheric river that caused the Los Angeles flood of 1938
At least one person asked why I used a reanalysis that does not assimilate satellite water vapor data to study an atmospheric river (AR) event.

That’s a good question because the NOAA/CIRES Twentieth Century Global Reanalysis Version 2c (20thCR V2c) only ingests three things: surface pressure, sea ice coverage and sea surface temperature. The rest of the analysis is generated by the physical models of NOAA’s Global Forecast System (GFS).

— http://ncarrda.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/1938-atmospheric-river-that-caused-los.html

Blizard and solar CME forecasting

This failed work is presented as a cautionary tale but nevertheless there might be good parts.

Earlier oldbrew published an article on a theory by Nelson on forecasting the armada of radio propagation conditions. There were not many comments, possibly from the lack of solid further material.

From this paper, we can see why the technique fell at the hurdle. Nevertheless looking at what people were thinking and doing is important.