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.

Why atmospheric geoengineering is dead in the water

Another idea for slaying imaginary climate dragons runs into trouble, as new research finds ‘an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale’. So for believers in a climate crisis the desired short-term effectiveness just isn’t there.
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Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale [Talkshop comment – empty assertions]. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically [sic] be undone.

But employing “emergency” atmospheric geoengineering later this century in the face of continuous high carbon emissions would not be able to reverse changes to ocean currents, a new study finds.

This would critically curtail the intervention’s potential effectiveness on human-relevant timescales.

Oceans, especially the deep oceans, absorb and lose heat more slowly than the atmosphere, so an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale, the authors found.

The regular ‘Atlantic Circulation Collapse’ story

Risking making AMOCkery of climate science with unrealistic scenarios in global models is nothing new, but this one keeps coming back like a bad penny, as NZW explains. Returning to the same faulty predictions time and again gets the headlines but is easily debunked. In this case, the researchers intend to re-run their model with ‘global warming included’, but if everything else is the same, including ‘adding unrealistically large quantities of fresh water all at once’, many of the criticisms will still apply.
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One of the many regular climate scare stories you can rely on is the one about failing currents in the Atlantic Ocean bringing cold climate chaos to Europe, says Net Zero Watch.

It’s one of the most favourite doomsday speculations, based on computer models pushed to the edge – but who cares, it’s a good shock-horror story and it pops up regularly.

Actually we should care because it’s well known that most people only register the top line of any news story — especially a climate disaster prediction – while they don’t take-in or even read up on the context and the qualifications.

Researchers probe a conundrum: If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Gulf Stream flows

Some recent cold weather events are puzzling to global warming researchers, in terms of climate model expectations. Especially so for the ‘Center for Irreversible Climate Change’ in South Korea. Temporary natural variation seems to be the conclusion. What else could they say without casting doubt on human-caused warming theories?
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If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Indeed, East Asia and North America have experienced frequent extreme weather events since the 2000s that defy average climate change projections, says Phys.org.

Many experts have blamed Arctic warming and a weakening jet stream due to declining Arctic sea ice, but climate model experiments have not adequately demonstrated their validity.

The massive power outage in Texas in February 2021 was caused by an unusual cold snap, and climate models are needed to accurately predict the risk of extreme weather events in order to prevent massive socioeconomic damage.

Study finds oceanic carbon cycle still works for carbon dioxide uptake

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

Of course it does, but there seems a hint of surprise in the findings. It’s long been known that colder water absorbs more atmospheric CO2, just as warmer water absorbs less. Anyone familiar with fizzy drinks knows the story, or ought to. The article here announces that ‘the oceans present vast and promising potential for storing carbon dioxide’. Surely this is not regarded as news? As for potential, it’s always happened.
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The recent cold spell has plunged South Korea into a deep freeze, resulting in the closure of 247 national parks, the cancellation of 14 domestic flights, and the scrapping of 107 cruise ship voyages, says Phys.org.

While the cold snap brought relief by significantly reducing the prevalence of particulate matter obscuring our surroundings, a recent study indicates that, besides diminishing particulate matter, it significantly contributes to the heightened uptake of carbon dioxide by the East Sea.

According to research conducted by a team of researchers, including Professor Kitack Lee from the Division of Environmental Science & Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and Professor Tongsup Lee and So-Yun Kim from the Department of Oceanography at Pusan National University, the cold atmosphere in the Arctic is influencing the absorption of carbon dioxide by the East Sea.

Climate scare of the day: warming shown to cause methane to be released from the deep ocean

Burning hydrate [image credit: US Office of Naval Research]

This was found to have been going on ‘during past warm periods’ (what caused those?), so we may wonder what difference a bit more now is likely to make. It’s admitted that scientists need to ‘understand better the role of hydrates in the climate system’ – or if they have one worth getting agitated about?
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An international team of researchers led by Newcastle University found that as frozen methane and ice melts, methane – a potent greenhouse gas – is released and moves from the deepest parts of the continental slope to the edge of the underwater shelf, says EurekAlert.

They even discovered a pocket which had moved 25 miles (40 kilometres).

Publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this means that much more methane could potentially be vulnerable and released into the atmosphere as a result of climate warming.

Methane hydrate

Methane hydrate, also known as fire-ice, is an ice-like structure found buried in the ocean floor that contains methane. Vast amounts of methane are stored as marine methane under oceans.

Melting ice, falling snow: Sea ice declines enhance snowfall over West Antarctica, say researchers

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

There’s still a long way to go though: “We want to know how those factors are impacting the ice sheets.” Researchers conclude “it’s essential to enhance our models, particularly in representing sea ice dynamics.”
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As the world continues to warm, Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing pace, but the loss of sea ice may lead to more snowfall over the ice sheets, partially offsetting contributions to sea level rise, according to Penn State scientists. — Phys.org reporting.

The researchers analyzed the impacts of decreased sea ice in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica and found the ice-free ocean surface leads to more moisture in the atmosphere and heavier snowfalls on the ice sheet, the team reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

While the additional snowfall is not enough to offset the impacts of melting ice, including it in climate models may improve predictions of things like sea level rise, said Luke Trusel, assistant professor of geography at Penn State and co-author of the study.

Researchers forecast strong El Niño and ‘record-breaking’ global surface temperatures in 2023–2024

El Niño graphic [credit: NOAA]

Climate alarmists have been waiting nearly 8 years, since the last significant El Niño, for another chance to claim natural climate variation as an expression of their chosen non-natural theories. Tremble – or not – as the study authors predict ‘a cascade of climate crises’.
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A strong El Niño event is going to wreak havoc on global surface temperature and trigger several climate crises in 2023–2024, according to researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. [Talkshop comment – the hype has already started].

The El Niño event, known for releasing massive heat into the atmosphere, is poised to change atmospheric circulation patterns, influence tropical-extratropical interactions, and impact subtropical jets, monsoons, and even polar vortices, and finally results in a rapid surge in Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), says Phys.org.

The study was published in The Innovation Geoscience on Sept. 15.

New study confirms Gulf Stream weakening, but cause unknown – or is it?

Gulf Stream map [image credit: RedAndr @ Wikipedia]

The lead and co-author have clearly different views on this:
Lead author: “While we can definitively say this weakening is happening, we are unable to say to what extent it is related to climate change or whether it is a natural variation.”
Co-author: “It saddens me to acknowledge, from our study and so many others, and from recent record-breaking headlines, that even the remotest parts of the ocean are now in the grip of our addiction to fossil fuels.”
What have headlines got to do with science research?
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The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Strait has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with a 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study.

The Gulf Stream — which is a major ocean current off the U.S. East Coast and a part of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation — plays an important role in weather and climate, and a weakening could have significant implications, says Science Daily.

“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Long-lasting La Niña events more common over past century

Credit: concernusa.org

‘Global temperatures typically increase during an El Niño episode, and fall during La Niña’ – says BBC Science. This article also refers to ‘El Niño and La Niña, the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern’. The featured research concludes that recent La Niñas are different, being more to do with warming, supported by ‘complex computer simulations’. The question is: does ‘the recent increase in multiyear La Niñas’ (per the study title) since 1998 suggest more cooling, or not? In the climate science world we read that ‘answers remain elusive’.
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Multiyear La Niña events have become more common over the last 100 years, according to a new study led by University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa atmospheric scientist Bin Wang.

Five out of six La Niña events since 1998 have lasted more than one year, including an unprecedented triple-year event [Talkshop comment – no, occurred three times since 1950]. The study was published in Nature Climate Change.

“The clustering of multiyear La Niña events is phenomenal given that only ten such events have occurred since 1920,” said Wang, emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

El Niño and La Niña, the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern across the tropical Pacific, affect weather and ocean conditions, which can, in turn, influence the marine environment and fishing industry in Hawai’i and throughout the Pacific Ocean.

New research looks at ‘stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007’

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Not the often-quoted ‘rapid decline’ any more then. But what’s behind the stalled trend? The researchers point to a climate cycle known as the Arctic dipole, first proposed in 2006, which ‘reverses itself’, and should (they say) be about to do so again. Are declining solar cycles accompanied by greatly reduced geomagnetic activity (see here) in the same recent years another factor, or just coincidental?
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New research by an international team of scientists explains what’s behind a stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007, says Phys.org.

The findings indicate that stronger declines in sea ice will occur when an atmospheric feature known as the Arctic dipole reverses itself in its recurring cycle.

The many environmental responses to the Arctic dipole are described in a paper published online today in the journal Science. This analysis helps explain how North Atlantic water influences Arctic Ocean climate.

Scientists call it Atlantification.

Study shows a decrease in Indian Ocean cyclones, due to natural climate cycle (PDO)

Indian ocean

Natural climate variation is there to be observed (see title of paper), if anyone wants to. No dependency on CO2 levels required, despite the vague assertions made here.
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While the threat of tropical cyclones increases around the world – [Talkshop comment – which study said that?], a new study published in Nature Communications shows one area experienced a significant decline in cyclone activity, says Phys.org.

The paper, “Pacific Decadal Oscillation Causes Fewer Near-Equatorial Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean,” is co-authored by Pallav Ray, associate professor in meteorology at Florida Tech, along with researchers from [various universities] and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (India).

But, with recent changes in climatic patterns in the Pacific, the number of cyclones is expected to increase in the coming decades.
. . .
The findings showed a 43% decline in the number of low latitude (originating between 5–11 degrees) cyclone formations from 1981–2010 in the north Indian Ocean compared to the number of formations between 1951–1980.

The decline is primarily due to the weakened low-level vorticity modulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the increased vertical wind shear. The PDO is a long-term fluctuation in sea surface temperature of the north Pacific Ocean.

The PDO waxes and wanes approximately every 20 to 30 years, going through “cool” and “warm” phases.

Tropical cyclones do not form easily near the equator but can intensify rapidly. The wind pattern in the Indian Ocean helps initiate the cyclone spin near the equator. Without the storm-weakening wind shear, storms can move and strengthen more easily.

This research can help communities in the path of these rapidly intensifying storms better understand how to be prepared for them.

“I hope that this paper will bring a lot more interest in these types of storms,” Ray said. “One of the reasons why these types of storms have not received much attention is because most cyclone researchers work on the Atlantic and such storms are very rare there.”
. . .
“There has been a decline close to the equator, but there has been an increase at the same time away from the equator, in the Indian Ocean,” Ray said. “Overall, there is a decline definitely, but the decline is not this high, because there was an increase away from the equator.”

Full article here.

SITYS: Climate models do not conserve mass or energy – Roy Spencer, PhD.

‘Potentially serious problems’. Advisable to view the linked blog post before commenting, it’s quite short.
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See, I told you so — says Roy Spencer.

One of the most fundamental requirements of any physics-based model of climate change is that it must conserve mass and energy.

This is partly why I (along with Danny Braswell and John Christy) have been using simple 1-dimensional climate models that have simplified calculations and where conservation is not a problem.
. . .
Now, I just stumbled upon a paper from 2021 (Irving et al., A Mass and Energy Conservation Analysis of Drift in the CMIP6 Ensemble) which describes significant problems in the latest (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models regarding not only energy conservation in the ocean but also at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA, thus affecting global warming rates) and even the water vapor budget of the atmosphere (which represents the largest component of the global greenhouse effect).

These represent potentially serious problems when it comes to our reliance on climate models to guide energy policy. [Talkshop note – author’s emphasis]

It boggles my mind that conservation of mass and energy were not requirements of all models before their results were released decades ago.

Full post here.

The ‘Gulf Stream’ will not collapse in 2025: What the alarmist headlines got wrong

Gulf Stream map [image credit: RedAndr @ Wikipedia]

This article at The Conversation, by a former IPCC author warning against the excesses of media climate catastrophism, appeared on the 4th August but was somewhat undermined by another one it published the next day: The Atlantic is at risk of circulation collapse. It would mean even greater climate chaos across Europe.
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Those following the latest developments in climate science would have been stunned by the jaw-dropping headlines last week proclaiming the “Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests” — which responded to a recent publication in Nature Communications, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” announced the New York Post. “A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted CNN in the U.S. and repeated CTV News here in Canada.

One can only imagine how those already stricken with climate anxiety internalized this seemingly apocalyptic news as temperature records were being shattered across the globe.

The Guardian’s (ocean) circulation problem – Net Zero Watch

Gotta keep those climate alarm bells ringing in media-land! A review of the Guardian’s habitual Gulf Stream misreporting.
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Is there no loyalty among climate extremists? – asks David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

The Guardian makes a mistake about the fundamental difference between the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and suddenly everyone is on its case, some accusing it of sloppy reporting, others demanding a correction of its fake news (which didn’t come.)

To be fair it wasn’t just the Guardian – the BBC, CNN and others also got it wrong.

The slowdown or possible collapse of Atlantic currents was everywhere on the internet.

Scientists Say More Marine Life Is Greening The Oceans, So Media Freak Out

Cumulus clouds over the Atlantic Ocean [image credit: Tiago Fioreze @ Wikipedia]

Knee-jerk alarm goes up yet another notch in the climate-obsessed media. Look what *you’ve done*, they try to insinuate.
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Climate change is benefiting life in the oceans so much that ocean color is becoming noticeably greener as a result, scientists reported this week.

Bodies of water with little life tend to be bluer, the scientists observed, while bodies of water rich in life tend to be greener.

Responding to the wonderful news about the recent burst of ocean life, the media have instead sounded a breathless alarm leading people to believe that climate change making the oceans greener is bad, says Climate Realism (via Climate Change Dispatch).

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.

Today’s ocean models can only simulate less than 5% of the currents at 1,000-meter depth

The study hopes its observations will help the search for ways to ‘reduce the large and significant biases between models and observations’. The article refers to a ‘mismatch between scientific knowledge and the actual ocean environment’.
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Ocean motion plays a key role in the Earth’s energy and climate systems. In recent decades, ocean science has made great strides in providing general estimates of large-scale ocean motion, says Phys.org.

However, there are still many dynamic mechanisms that are not fully understood or resolved.

Prof. Su Fenzhen’s team at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators found that humans know less than 5% of the ocean currents at depths of 1,000 meters below the sea surface, with important implications for modeled predictions of climate change and carbon sequestration.

How seaweed has been misleading scientists about reef health

Coral reefs can have their ups and downs, due to various factors. Not for the first or last time, scientists have made the occupational hazard of erroneous assumptions.
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For decades, scientists have looked to seaweed as an indicator of the health of coral reefs lying underneath, says Phys.org.

But what if the seaweed was misleading them?

New UBC research reveals it was, and scientists need new ways to determine whether human activity is harming a particular reef.

Benzene and toluene in polar oceans have a biological origin, study finds

Natural aerosols, not ‘human pollution’. Another climate assumption gets blown out of the water.
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In addition to oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, the air we breathe contains small amounts of organic gases, such as benzene and toluene, says Phys.org.

These oxidize into small particles or aerosols that contribute to the condensation of water in the droplets that form clouds.

Now, a study by the Institut de Cièncias del Mar (ICM-CSIC), the Instituto de Química Física Rocasolano (IQFR-CSIC) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) stresses the importance of clouds, which filter solar radiation, for understanding past and future climate changes.

“If we don’t get the clouds right, we won’t get the climate right,” says Charel Wohl, ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study. “We are just beginning to unveil the multiple ingredients that form cloud seeds,” he adds.