Renewables will save us a billion trillion pounds! Yeah, right – Net Zero Watch

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

Until we hear that wind and solar power to generate electricity will be adequate 24/7 without $trillions spent on unfathomably large quantities of batteries, other cost discussions – while obviously important – are of secondary interest. But big numbers may fool some folk.
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Yesterday, the Green media was getting extremely excited about a new paper, which claimed that renewable energy was going to save society millions and billions and trillions of pounds by 2050 (or something like that), writes Andrew Montford.

Ten trillion pounds by 2050 said the BBC.

As readers here know, I keep a close eye on the cost of renewables, and have published papers on both offshoreand onshorewind, showing that the financial accounts of operators in both sectors show no sign of significant cost reductions.

It’s not just me either: my findings closely match those of the energy economist, Professor Gordon Hughes, the energy analyst Kathryn Porter, and an important paper in the peer reviewed literature.

No change in weather extremes, just a moving of the goalposts

A reading of the executive summary of the new GWPF paper is probably enough to confirm many suspicions about alarmist claims.
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A PAPER from the Global Warming Policy Foundation says that a recent shift in methodology by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has led to misleading claims about increases in weather extremes.

The review by physicist Dr Ralph Alexander finds that IPCC claims are largely unsupported by observational evidence, says Paul Homewood @ The Conservative Woman.

Use of ‘too hot’ climate models exaggerates impacts of global warming

Too much hot air

We’ve been hearing this for years, but here it is again. It seems hard to get climate science to follow best practice and discard models that perform poorly against observational data, or at least the worst ones. Time’s up now as it’s getting too embarrassing, with the climate clearly failing to comply with ultra-warmist predictions. But over-optimistic belief that the models are nearly on course is still rife.
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U.N. report authors say researchers should avoid suspect models – from Science.org.

One study suggests Arctic rainfall will become dominant in the 2060s, decades earlier than expected. Another claims air pollution from forest fires in the western United States could triple by 2100. A third says a mass ocean extinction could arrive in just a few centuries.

All three studies, published in the past year, rely on projections of the future produced by some of the world’s next-generation climate models.

But even the modelmakers acknowledge that many of these models have a glaring problem: predicting a future that gets too hot too fast.

The Palaeoclimate Problem – Net Zero Watch

The author notes, with examples, that ‘it is difficult to reconcile this latest research with many other lines of inquiry to determine past temperatures.’ Using a single computer model to ‘fill in gaps’ in data has its own drawbacks, as mentioned below.
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Modern warming differs from the gradual rise in temperature seen in the past 10,000 years. That’s the conclusion of a paper just published in the journal Nature, says David Whitehouse.

Reconstructing the temperature timeline back to 24,000 years ago – the so-called Last Glacial Maximum – a team of researchers show that recent warming is unusual.

Knowledge of past climate is important to put our present climate into context, allowing us to see what climatic variations can take place in the absence of contemporary amounts of greenhouse gasses.

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.

MET Office global temperature prediction falls 0.35C in 5 years.

Back in 2016, the UK MET Office’s median projection to the start of 2021 forecast a global temperature temperature anomaly of 1.4C above their 1850-1900 “Pre-Industrial” baseline. Their recently published five year model projection (rightmost blue blob on graph), shows a 2021 median anomaly 0.35C lower, at 1.05C.

Their HADcruT 4GL temperature time series (data since 2016 added in red on graph) shows a linear trend of +0.09C/semi-decade for the last 50 years. CO2, by far the biggest forcing in their model, is still rising in lockstep with the 50 year temperature trend. What could have caused this remarkable downward step change in their model output?

Is ‘Planet Nine’ actually a grapefruit-sized black hole?

Credit: NASA

Could there even be more than one black hole? The search for a significant extra planet has drawn a blank so far.
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A coming sky survey will help test a wild idea — that a grapefruit-sized black hole lurks undiscovered in the outer solar system, says Mike Wall @ Space.com.

Over the past few years, researchers have noticed an odd clustering in the orbits of multiple trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which dwell in the dark depths of the far outer solar system.

Some scientists have hypothesized that the TNOs’ paths have been sculpted by the gravitational pull of a big object way out there, something 5 to 10 times more massive than Earth (though others think the TNOs may just be tugging on each other).

This big “perturber,” if it exists, may be a planet — the so-called “Planet Nine,” or “Planet X” or “Planet Next” for those who will always regard Pluto as the ninth planet.

But there’s another possibility as well: The shepherding object may be a black hole, one that crams all that mass into a sphere the size of a grapefruit.

NASA space lasers show sea levels have risen by 14mm in 17 years – but what’s the latest trend?

Kangerlussuaq Fjord, Greenland [image credit: notsogreen.com]

Less than a year ago NASA was reporting from Greenland: Jakobshavn Glacier Grows for Third Straight Year, and ‘The glacier grew 22 to 33 yards (20 to 30 meters) each year between 2016 and 2019.’ So this new report may be, to some degree at least, already obsolete since it says: ‘The largest thinning rates were between 4 and 6 m a−1 in Jakobshavn and Kangerlugssuaq glaciers’.
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Sea levels have risen by 14mm since 2003 due to ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, scientists have said.

Nasa launched a satellite to measure global heights in 2018 and spotted the rise after bouncing laser pulses against sheets of ice, says the London Evening Standard.

The study found that Greenland lost an average of 200 billion tonnes of ice per year, and Antarctica lost an average of 118 billion tonnes.

One billion tonnes of ice is enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington compared the data with measurements taken by the satellite between 2003 and 2009.

The findings, published in the journal Science, found the loss of ice from Antarctica and Greenland outweighs any gains from accumulated snow.

Scientists predict average late winter precipitation in western Europe for the next decade

We like to see a few bold predictions here at the Talkshop, even if they expect things to be ‘average’, but as these go out to ten years ahead we’ll add them to the (imaginary) list. The current very low solar minimum could be a wild card.

In a new study, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that the average March precipitation, over the next ten years in western Europe is predictable using a novel method, says Phys.org.

The research team also issued a forecast for the coming years.

Deep learning application able to predict El Niño events up to 18 months in advance

In 24 out of 34 cases anyway, which is said to be better than existing methods.

A trio of researchers from Chonnam National University, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that a deep learning convolutional neural network was able to accurately predict El Niño events up to 18 months in advance, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Nature, Yoo-Geun Ham, Jeong-Hwan Kim and Jing-Jia Luo, describe their deep learning application, how it was trained and how well it worked in predicting El Niño events.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation events are periods during which water warms above normal temperatures in tropical parts of the Pacific. When that warm water moves east, it leads to more rainfall and other weather events, such as hurricanes, in the Americas, and less rain in Australia and Indonesia.

South Korea accepts geothermal plant probably caused destructive quake

National flag of South Korea

Is this the end for ‘enhanced’ geothermal technology? Note this quake was 1,000 times stronger than the next one of similar causes.

The nation’s energy ministry expressed ‘deep regret’, and said it would dismantle the experimental plant, as Nature News reports.

A South Korean government panel has concluded that a magnitude-5.4 earthquake that struck the city of Pohang on 15 November 2017 was probably caused by an experimental geothermal power plant.

The panel was convened under presidential orders and released its findings on 20 March.

What can machine learning reveal about the solid Earth?

The ability to recognize patterns in Earth’s behaviour by sifting through masses of geological data could be programmed into machines.

Scientists seeking to understand Earth’s inner clockwork have deployed armies of sensors listening for signs of slips, rumbles, exhales and other disturbances emanating from the planet’s deepest faults to its tallest volcanoes.

“We measure the motion of the ground continuously, typically collecting 100 samples per second at hundreds to thousands of instruments,” said Stanford geophysicist Gregory Beroza. “It’s just a huge flux of data.”

Yet scientists’ ability to extract meaning from this information has not kept pace, reports Phys.org.

Machine learning ‘causing science crisis’

Science under stress?[image credit: thespiritscience.net]

Problems can arise ‘because experiments are not designed well enough to ensure that the scientists don’t fool themselves and see what they want to see in the results.’ For example, it seems ‘up to 85% of all biomedical research carried out in the world is wasted effort’.

Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong, reports BBC News.

Dr Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.

MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.

Models of a Truly Settled Science will all have the Same Results

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Playing around with CO2 levels doesn’t work, either in climate models or real life.

Scientific error upends major ocean warming study

Apparently you’re a ‘climate contrarian’ if you dare to check the claimed results of climate-related studies. The researchers ‘calculated heat based on the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the ocean, filling round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe’. But now they admit this ‘novel method’ didn’t work out the way they first thought, having had the error pointed out to them.

Researchers with the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University recently walked back scientific findings published last month that showed oceans have been heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change, reports Phys.org.

A Conversation with Brandon R Gates about climate models

Brandon R. Gates‏ @brandonrgates 3h3 hours ago

It bears repeating that the RCP8.5 scenario is clearly indicated on the plot, and that any honest truth-seeker with a pulse and half a brain could figure out on their own where to find the forward projection. But since Rog can’t even do a better hindcast, he picks bogeys and …

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 2h2 hours ago

Rog Tallbloke Retweeted Rog Tallbloke

Rog Tallbloke added,

Rog Tallbloke @RogTallbloke

I already showed it to you Brandon. So now let’s resume discussion of your “The data doesn’t know the future” objection to the solar data integration technique I employ to obtain a realistic replication of the effect of the sun on the high heat capacity overturning deep oceans.

Alan Carlin: Press Release on new research report showing CO2 has no significant effect on temperatures

In their latest report the authors point out: ‘it is never mathematically proper to attempt to validate any theory embedded in a model using the model itself.’

As discussed last week, several reports have shown in the last year or two that carbon dioxide (CO2) does not significantly affect global temperatures, contrary to endless repetitions to the contrary by climate alarmists and the mainstream press.

Today some of the same authors of the reports discussed last week have released a new report that among other things makes a similar point using a different data set, making a total of 15 such data sets between the earlier reports and this new report.

Extraterrestrial Forcing of Surface Temperature and Climate Change: A Parody

Jamal Munshi
Sonoma State University

Date Written: March 21, 2018

Abstract
It is proposed that visitation by extraterrestrial spacecraft (UFO) alters the electromagnetic properties of the earth, its atmosphere, and its oceans and that these changes can cause global warming leading to climate change and thence to the catastrophic consequences of floods, droughts, severe storms, and sea level rise. An empirical test of this theory is presented with data for UFO sightings and surface temperature reconstructions for the study period 1910-2015. The results show strong evidence of proportionality between surface temperature and cumulative UFO sightings. We conclude that the observed warming since the Industrial Revolution are due to an electromagnetic perturbation of the climate system by UFO extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Keywords: Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Action, UFO, Extraterrestrial, Parody, Correlation, Proportionality, Cumulative Values

Pruitt to end EPA’s use of secret science to justify regulations

Surely a step in the right direction. The public is entitled to something better than smoke and mirrors when it comes to the use of science – or alleged science – to determine national policy. But the aim of objectivity is a tough one.
H/T The GWPF

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt will soon end his agency’s use of “secret science” to craft regulations, reports Michael Bastasch.

“We need to make sure their data and methodology are published as part of the record,” Pruitt said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Otherwise, it’s not transparent. It’s not objectively measured, and that’s important.”