Net zero CO2 emissions: A damaging and totally unnecessary goal – Roy Spencer explains why

We may not believe CO2 plays a big part in global atmospherics anyway, but even if it somehow does, the full story is not being told according to this information. Quote: ‘Even though the CO2 emissions continue, atmospheric CO2 levels start to fall around 2060.’
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The goal of reaching “net zero” global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide sounds overwhelmingly difficult.

But that’s not true, because nature doesn’t work that way, says Dr.Roy Spencer (via Climate Change Dispatch).

While humanity continues producing CO2 at increasing rates (with a temporary pause during COVID), how can we ever reach the point where these emissions start to fall, let alone reach zero by 2050 or 2060?

What isn’t being discussed (as far as I can tell) is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels (which we will assume for the sake of discussion causes global warming) will start to fall even while humanity is producing lots of CO2.

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?

Climate change ‘could’ affect timekeeping, study says

The BBC wants this to be all about the climate, but the study is also pushing the propaganda boat out a long way by claiming that ‘we’ are the cause. It’s known that the Earth’s rotation isn’t constant. ‘In 2022 the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the organization responsible for global timekeeping, voted to abolish leap seconds by 2035. How this new research could impact such a decision remains to be seen.’ Source – Scientific American, which also has this:
“Despite our perceptions as humans, the Earth is not a perfect timekeeper,” says Harvard University geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, who reviewed the new study and co-wrote a commentary on it for Nature. He says these findings highlight the divide between our lived experience and the technology that surrounds us. “How do we handle that divide?” he says. “Do we continue to address this divide by adding or subtracting seconds from our definition of a day, or do we accept this irregular difference as normal and give up the bother of continuously correcting?” — If it’s normal, the human causation argument looks even weaker.
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Climate change is affecting the speed of the Earth’s rotation and could impact how we keep time, a study says.

Accelerating melt from Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the world’s seas, redistributing mass, reports BBC News.

That is very slightly slowing the Earth’s rotation. But the planet is still spinning faster than it used to.

The effect is that global timekeepers may need to subtract a second from our clocks later than would otherwise have been the case.

“Global warming is already affecting global timekeeping,” says the study, published in the journal Nature.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – which is used by most of the world to regulate clocks and time – is calculated by the Earth’s rotation.

But the Earth’s rotation rate is not constant and can therefore have an effect on how long our days and nights are.

As a result, since the 1970s around 27 seconds – known as leap seconds – have been added on to keep our time accurate.

The study finds that a “negative leap second” – subtracting a second from world clocks – would have been needed in 2026 without accelerating polar ice melt.

But now, with ice sheets losing mass five times faster than they were 30 years ago, this change is needed in 2029, the study suggests.

“It’s kind of impressive, even to me, we’ve done something that measurably changes how fast the Earth rotates,” Duncan Agnew, the author of the study, told NBC News. [Talkshop comment – ‘we’?]

Full report here.

Flying laboratory measuring cloud chemistry above Australia aims to improve climate model predictions

The German scientists are engaged in an ongoing project intended to help refine climate modelling. One sums up their approach: “To predict it, we really need to understand it.” But ideally that understanding, if or when it occurs, should have preceded many of the dire claims already put forward that the global climate is going downhill due to human activities. Such biases could be a hindrance to research.
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A team of German scientists have been circling the skies above northern Australia and the Pacific Ocean in a high-tech research aircraft studying the atmospheric chemistry occurring above the clouds, says ABC News.

The Chemistry of the Atmosphere: Field Experiment (CAFE) team has tracked weather events and taken samples and measurements up to 15 kilometres above sea level.

Professor Mira Pöhlker from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research and Max Planck Institute for Chemistry said the team’s research would help refine weather and climate models leading to better forecasts and projections.

Clouds disappear quickly during a solar eclipse, shows study – ‘a warning for climate engineering’

The research, titled ‘Clouds dissipate quickly during solar eclipses as the land surface cools’, suggests interfering with solar radiation to try and weaken natural warming would be even riskier than previously thought.
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Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse, says Phys.org.

Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method.

The results may have implications for proposed climate engineering ideas because disappearing clouds can partly oppose the cooling effect of artificial solar eclipses.

Climate confusion: Differing Net Zero definitions must ‘mesh’ say Met Office scientists

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Another trip to cloud cuckoo land. How do they plan to accurately measure all the so-called emissions and get all parties to agree with the results anyway? Time to return to reality and stop wasting time and effort on non-existent supposed remedies.
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A new paper published in Nature has highlighted a fundamental mismatch in the way greenhouse gas emissions are measured which could mean that Net Zero could be met in one definition up to five years ahead of the other, says the Met Office .

The IPCC report shows that global temperature will stop increasing when we reach ‘net zero’ emissions of CO2. [Talkshop comment -*claims*, not shows].

To achieve this, human activity cannot put more CO2 into the atmosphere than it removes – we need to massively reduce our emissions, with some removal of CO2 to help areas which are really hard to decarbonise.

This sits behind the principle of Net Zero, which countries including the UK hope will be reached by 2050.

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?

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.

What uncertainties remain in climate science?

How long is a piece of string? The waffle about ‘climate deniers’ and ‘reputable scientists’ is a waste of time. There will always be known unknowns and unknown unknowns – that’s science.
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[Last paragraph of the article only]
The uncertainties in climate science that remain are not a justification for not acting to slow climate change, because uncertainty can work both ways: Climate change could prove to be less severe than current projections, but it could also be much worse, says State of the Planet @ Phys.org.

Full article here.
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Talkshop comments:
— ‘Climate change could prove to be less severe’ – or not related to human activity, or not severe at all
— ‘Could also be much worse’ – ‘could’ be this or that, i.e. they can only speculate about the future, but nevertheless demand ‘action’ now

New tool helps researchers investigate clouds, rain and climate change

Anvil of a thundercloud over Columbia [image credit: Eulenjäger @ Wikipedia]

Researchers hope ‘to ease comparisons between climate and weather models with observations from weather instruments’, broadly speaking. In terms of modelling this is a known area of difficulty.
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The Earth Model Column Collaboratory is an open-source research platform that pairs complex data with weather observations to create highly accurate climate models and forecast predictions.

Clouds come in all shapes and sizes, says Phys.org.

While we might imagine puppies or whales or breaking waves, climatologists look at them as massive bundles of water in various forms that contribute to the daily weather, and ultimately, climate.

The numbers, shapes and sizes of the liquid drops and ice crystals contained in a cloud, for example, will determine how it will scatter light or emit and absorb heat.

Oh my days! Midnight comes a fraction sooner as Earth spins faster

As Nasa is reported as suggesting that ‘stronger winds in El Niño years can slow down the planet’s spin’, can we – on the basis of no research at all – nominate La Niña as a suspect here? Just trying to be helpful, as MSN claims: Experts confused after earth spins faster.
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Analysis: Reflecting a recent trend, 29 June was the shortest day on our planet since the 1960s. What’s going on? – wonders The Guardian.
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If time feels tighter than ever of late, blame it on the revolution. On 29 June this year, Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s, when scientists began measuring the planet’s rotation with high-precision atomic clocks.

Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years.

But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected.

Earth is spinning faster now than it was 50 years ago, say scientists

Credit: NASA

Compensating for the lost time may prove challenging for scientists, says Astronomy magazine. Turning the internet clock back one second implies a repeat of a computer-generated timestamp for example, which might confuse some vital systems not designed to handle that.
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Ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Turns out, you might be onto something.

Earth is rotating faster than it has in the last half-century, resulting in our days being ever-so-slightly shorter than we’re used to.

Ocean eddies could explain Antarctic sea-ice paradox, say climate modellers

Opposite sea ice trends? [Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng]

Climate modellers need yet more and bigger computers to stand a chance of eradicating faulty sea ice projections in the polar regions, apparently. Meanwhile, they believe there must be some ‘delay’ in their long-predicted but not (yet?) happening Antarctic sea ice decline. Quote: “Our study supports the hypothesis that climate models and projections of the Antarctic sea ice will be far more reliable as soon as they are capable of realistically simulating a high-resolution ocean, complete with eddies”.
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Despite global warming and the sea-ice loss in the Arctic, the Antarctic sea-ice extent has remained largely unchanged since 1979, says Eurekalert.

However, existing climate model-based simulations indicate significant sea-ice loss, contrary to actual observations.

As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now shown, the ocean may weaken warming around Antarctica and delay sea-ice retreat.

Residents in Wales coastal village dubbed the UK’s first ‘climate refugees’

Doomed by predictions it seems. Although sea levels have been very slowly rising at a more or less known rate in many places around the world since about the mid-19th Century, predictions of an accelerating rate in the next decades are based on climate models, guesses at government climate policies and attribution of vast powers to trace gases. ‘Scientists say…’
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Like many others who came to Fairbourne, Stuart Eves decided the coastal village in northern Wales would be home for life when he moved here 26 years ago, says USA Today (from AP).

He fell in love with the peaceful, slow pace of small village life in this community of about 700 residents nestled between the rugged mountains and the Irish Sea.

“I wanted somewhere my children can have the same upbringing as I had, so they can run free,” said Eves, 72, who built a caravan park in the village that he still runs with his son. “You’ve got the sea, you’ve got the mountains. It’s just a stunning place to live.”

That changed suddenly in 2014, when authorities identified Fairbourne as the first coastal community in the U.K. to be at high risk of flooding due to climate change.

Predicting faster sea level rises and more frequent and extreme storms due to global warming, the government said it could only afford to keep defending the village for another 40 years.

New evidence that solar forcing is greater than CO2 forcing.

An IPCC scientist on twitter alerted me to this animation created by Chris Rentsch which analyses the data from the AIRS satellite measuring outgoing longwave radiation.

This GIF took 3 years to make.

Python/Jupyter #dataviz of 17 years (1,400 GB) of 🛰️ measurements, visualized in 17 seconds.

This is the first analysis of 🌎 outgoing IR declining at 13-15μm due to rising CO₂. Warming at 10-13μm is also evident. pic.twitter.com/GFo6USqm37

— Chris Rentsch (@crentsch) October 23, 2020

Here’s a still from the end of the video sequence.

As we can see, by 2019, there is a decrease in OLR at the wavelengths absorbed by CO2 (13-15um) as its atmospheric fraction increases. But we can also see that there is a much bigger increase in OLR at the wavelengths within the ‘atmospheric window’ (10-13um) where it isn’t absorbed by any atmospheric gases.

Was 2020 a Record-Breaking Hurricane Season? Yes, But. . .

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Quote: ‘the bottom line is that the doubling in the number of named storms over a century is very likely due to technology change, not natural or man-made climate change.’

Inside the Eye

Chris Landsea and Eric Blake [1]

An Incredibly Busy Hurricane Season

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was extremely active and destructive with 30 named storms.  (The Hurricane Specialists here at the National Hurricane Center use the designation “named storms” to refer to tropical storms, subtropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes.)  We even reached into the Greek alphabet for names for just the second time ever.  The United States was affected by a record 13 named storms (six of them directly impacted Louisiana), and a record yearly total of 7 billion-dollar tropical cyclone damage events was recorded by the National Centers for Environmental Information (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series/US).  Nearly every country surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and tropical/subtropical North Atlantic was threatened or struck in 2020.  Total damage in the United States was around $42 billion with over 240 lives lost in the United States and our neighboring…

View original post 2,983 more words

Ned Nikolov: What Can NASA Planetary Data Tell Us about Drivers of Earth’s Climate?

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. Has written to me with news of the presentations he made at this years AMS meeting. It’s vital we get people to understand the implications of the discoveries he and Karl Zeller have made. With our western governments jumping aboard the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘NetZero’ bandwagons, we will need to work hard to rise awareness of viable alternative hypotheses for ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ which better explain the phenomena we can measure around us. Ned and Karl’s work should be given proper attention, because it strives for universality and general application of physics solar system wide, rather then treating Earth as a ‘special case’.

Two studies presented at the American Meteorological Society’s 34^th Conference on Climate Variability and Change in January 2021 employed a novel approach to identify the forcing of Earth’s climate at various time scales. The new method, never attempted in climate science before, relies on the fundamental premise that the laws of nature are invariant across spacetime.

The Earth has been spinning faster lately

In fact it’s unprecedented, in recent history at least. But 2021 is predicted to be even shorter.
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Scientists around the world have noted that the Earth has been spinning on its axis faster lately—the fastest ever recorded, says Phys.org.

Several scientists have spoken to the press about the unusual phenomenon, with some pointing out that this past year saw some of the shortest days ever recorded.

For most of the history of mankind, time has been marked by the 24-hour day/night cycle (with some alterations made for convenience as the seasons change). The cycle is governed by the speed at which the planet spins on its axis.

A wetter world as solar grand minimum deepens.

Image credit: Tallbloke

A few days ago I tweeted this comment above some remarkable video of the Three Gorges Dam bypass sluices.

The atmosphere cools and shrinks when the Sun gets sleepy. Rain is wrung out of it like a sponge. We have been entering a solar grand minimum since 2008. The bottom of it will be around 2035. https://t.co/2b6LlanjFH

— Rog Tallbloke (Righto/Chief) 🇬🇧 (@RogTallbloke) July 8, 2020

Among other people, this was picked up by Willis, the warmist at WUWT, who used it as an opportunity to attack the reality of the Sun-climate connection:

New study detects ringing of the global atmosphere

Researchers now want to ‘understand both the processes that excite the waves and the processes that act to damp the waves.’
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A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound, says Phys.org.

A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, shows that the Earth’s entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries.

In the case of the atmosphere, the “music” comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east.

Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell.

The basic understanding of these atmospheric resonances began with seminal insights at the beginning of the 19th century by one of history’s greatest scientists, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Research by physicists over the subsequent two centuries refined the theory and led to detailed predictions of the wave frequencies that should be present in the atmosphere. However, the actual detection of such waves in the real world has lagged behind the theory.

Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years.

The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes.

Full article here.