Earth’s inner core rotating slower than surface, study suggests

Some uncertainties with this topic. Researchers here propose a 70-year cycle, but other theories say 20-30 years, or even no cycle at all.
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Earth’s inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning faster than the planet’s surface and might now be rotating slower than it, research suggested on Monday.

Roughly 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) below the surface we live on, this “planet within the planet” can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core, says Phys.org.

Exactly how the inner core rotates has been a matter of debate between scientists—and the latest research is expected to prove controversial.

N. Hemisphere Temps Set To Fall Over Next 25 Years, Say Top Intl. Scientists

Too much hot air

Predictions like this may or may not come true. Warmists may have to wheel out their standard ‘natural cooling masking human-caused warming’ excuse again.
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Whisper it quietly – and don’t tell Al ‘Boiling Oceans’ Gore – but the Northern Hemisphere may be entering a temperature cooling phase until the 2050s with a decline up to 0.3°C.

By extension, the rest of the globe will also be cooled, says Chris Morrison (via Climate Change Dispatch).

These sensational findings, ignored by the mainstream media, were released last year and are the work of six top international scientists led by Nour-Eddine Omrani of the Norwegian Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.

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

Expert discusses La Niña and El Niño cycles effects on Australia

The last El Niño was 6-7 years ago, but elapsed time can’t on its own be a guarantee of one this year. Neutral ENSO conditions are another option. As usual an assertion about warming from greenhouse gases is thrown in, with no evidence to back it up.
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Climate models indicate La Niña is on the way out, with El Niño conditions expected later this year, claims Phys.org.

CSIRO Climate Scientist Dr. Wenju Cai explains what this means for Australia’s weather and how changing conditions will affect the country.

Is La Niña really on the way out? What do the climate models tell us?

We are in the mature season of the current three-consecutive La Niña years. During the three years, heat has been stored in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

’60 Minutes’ Makes Fake News About Humans Ruining Earth

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Attention seeker predicts doom, media laps it up. Nothing new there.

PA Pundits International

By Tim Graham ~

Chalk this up as 60 Minutes hosting the worst peddler of false knowledge since Dan Rather left the set.

CBS kicked off 2023 by touting “mass extinction” blather by Paul Ehrlich, the guy who’s been peddling radical and misanthropic eco-garbage since his book The Population Bomb in 1968.

That screed began: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

This may qualify as the drop-dead dumbest announcement of the Sixties and should have disqualified him from the status of Expert by the end of the 1970s. But the left-wing media never tire of him. They can’t get enough of this ecological self-loathing. The human race is always a pestilence on the planet.

Pelley led off the show with Ehrlich…

View original post 494 more words

Met Office says 2023 set to be one of the hottest years ‘ever’

Of course the Met Office doesn’t have ‘forever’ data. The two main factors here seem to be the recovery from the Little Ice Age (not mentioned) and El Niño/La Niña effects, which are admitted to be a, if not the, dominant factor. Human-caused effects are asserted but evidence is lacking.
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2023 is set to be one of the world’s hottest years ever as the temperatures continue to rise, says the Bournemouth Daily Echo.

It comes as the Met Office has predicted that global temperatures will be at least 1C above pre-industrial levels.

They added that in 2023, the global average temperature will be around 1.2C above what they were before humans impacted climate change.

How Predictive Was NOAA’s Gloomy 2022 Hurricane Forecast? Not Very

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Trying to use Atlantic hurricane patterns to promote climate alarm in the US and elsewhere was blown off course this year. Instead the predictive reputations of the experts of all shades of global warming opinion took a battering. Natural variation threw them off the scent somehow.
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While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held firm to its prediction of an above-normal hurricane season – despite zero hurricanes at the halfway mark – the 2022 season proved to be nothing out of the ordinary, says CNS News (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Hurricane season, which runs from June through November annually, turned out to be pretty average this year, NOAA’s end-of-season report reveals.

There were just two “major” hurricanes (categories 3-5), below the annual average of three and less than NOAA’s prediction that there would be 3-6.

Fieldwork starts on Thwaites Glacier – British Antarctic Survey

Thwaites glacier has its own complexities, including proximity to dozens of underwater volcanoes. Wikipedia says it’s ‘nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier’ and ‘The Thwaites Ice Shelf, a floating ice shelf which braces and restrains the eastern portion of Thwaites Glacier, is likely to collapse within a decade from 2021’. Statements like ‘computer models show’, ‘how soon a transition to more rapid ice retreat might occur’ and ‘collapse of the glacier’ (the size of Florida) arouse a certain amount of scepticism. More than a whiff of climate alarm enthusiasm here.
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Nearly 60 scientists and support staff are on their way to Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, says the British Antarctic Survey.

It’s part of an ambitious international effort to understand the glacier and surrounding ocean system to determine its future contributions to global sea-level rise.

This season represents the fourth of five planned field seasons.

New analysis attempts to reconcile differences between satellites and climate models

Space satellite orbiting the earth

An academic attempt to gloss over some glaring discrepancies between results from theory-based climate models and observed data. The research paper says: ‘Climate-model simulations exhibit approximately two times more tropical tropospheric warming than satellite observations since 1979’. Over forty years of being so wrong, by their own admission, takes a lot of explaining.
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Satellite observations and computer simulations are important tools for understanding past changes in Earth’s climate and for projecting future changes, says Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (via Phys.org).

However, satellite observations consistently show less warming than climate model simulations from 1979 to the present, especially in the tropical troposphere (the lowest ~15 km of Earth’s atmosphere).

This difference has raised concerns that models may overstate future temperature changes.

Another Kilimanjaro glacier prediction, following earlier failures

Here’s a recent report, posting a video from 2014 saying the glaciers could be gone by 2020. The report itself, headlined ‘Mount Kilimanjaro’s Glaciers Estimated to be Gone by 2030’, says: ‘In 2006, National Geographic News published some stunning satellite images of Africa, courtesy of United Nations Environment Program. One of the images shows the glacial retreat occurring on Mount Kilimanjaro between 1976 and 2006. Earlier predictions of the glaciers disappearing by 2020 were obviously incorrect.’ (Al Gore was in the 2020 camp).
The next line is interesting: ‘Glacial retreat is attributed to lower precipitation, and not global warming.’ No research is quoted to support that statement, but this journal article says: ‘During the last 120 years, annual precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) has decreased by 600–1200 mm (Hemp, 2005a)’. UNESCO pushes the usual CO2 climate theory and hazards another prediction, much more cautious now, as COP27 is about to start.
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Glaciers at many UNESCO World Heritage sites including Yellowstone and Kilimanjaro National Park will likely vanish by 2050, the UN agency warned Thursday, urging leaders to act fast to save the rest, reports Phys.org.

The warning followed a study of 18,600 glaciers at 50 World Heritage sites—covering around 66,000 square kilometres (25,000 square miles)—which found glaciers at a third of the sites were “condemned to disappear”.

The study “shows these glaciers have been retreating at an accelerated rate since 2000 due to CO2 emissions, which are warming temperatures”, UNESCO said.

Vapour buoyancy flaw leads to inaccurate simulations of cloud distributions in climate models, study finds

Tropical scene

The researchers say ‘climate models often differ on the precise degree of future warming, largely due to their representation of clouds.’ For decades we’ve been told to believe variations in carbon dioxide are the key to any future warming, but climate model forecasts have been unable to deliver the hoped-for precision. Predicting future cloud variations looks like a tall order.
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Quick Summary

— Study adds a missing piece to the climate science puzzle of simulating clouds.
— Lightness of water vapor influences the amount of low clouds.
— Some leading climate models don’t include this effect.
— Including vapor buoyancy into climate models helps improve climate forecasting.

Clouds are notoriously hard to pin down, especially in climate science, says UC Davis.

A study from the University of California, Davis, and published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that air temperature and cloud cover are strongly influenced by the buoyancy effect of water vapor, an effect currently neglected in some leading global climate models.

Researchers studying climate futures shouldn’t jump to extremes, say scientists

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Hollywood-style climate scenarios may entertain some but the science content is suspect, judging by their failure to materialise. Excessive alarmism is self-defeating in the end as more of the public switches off.
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We’ve seen it splashed across news headlines: future sea-level rise that could consume the state of Florida, predicted global temperature spikes of 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100—threats of catastrophic climate scenarios leading to societal collapse, says Eurekalert.

But now, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team is pushing for climate scientists to put the more likely and plausible middle-range scenarios to the research forefront, instead of solely the worst-case futures.

“We shouldn’t overstate or understate our climate future,” said Matt Burgess, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) fellow, assistant professor at CU Boulder and lead on a letter published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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.

Megadroughts are part of Australia’s past and may return soon, warn alarmists

A dried up Lake Hume, 2007 [image credit: suburbanbloke @ Wikipedia]

Attribution of events, known to have happened many times before, to human causes by invoking ‘the role of climate change’ in the modern era is speculation at best, as is any vague claim that humans could ‘increase the risk’ of such events. As usual, climate alarmists want people to feel guilty and nervous.
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Most Australians have known drought in their lifetimes, and have memories of cracked earth and empty streams, paddocks of dust and stories of city reservoirs with only a few weeks’ storage, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

But our new research finds over the last 1,000 years, Australia has suffered longer, larger and more severe droughts than those recorded over the last century.

These are called “megadroughts,” and they’re likely to occur again in coming decades.

Days get longer when the wind blows, say Met Office researchers

Credit: Wikipedia

Interesting, if the suggested predictions work. Tallbloke identified this 13 years ago.
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How long is a day on earth? The obvious answer of 24 hours is accurate enough for many applications, says the Met Office blog.

But for those interested in GPS or deep space, then understanding the fluctuations of about one millisecond in the length of a day can be fundamentally important.

A team at the Met Office, led by Professor Adam Scaife, has calculated that these length of day fluctuations are predictable out to more than one year ahead and this is all to do with predicting the strength of atmospheric winds.

Climate models unreliable in predicting wave damage to coral reefs

Australian coral [image credit: heraldsun.com.au]

Probably not much of a shock. One researcher said: “The models are accurate in projecting at a global scale that cyclones in the future are highly likely to be more intense because of climate change. But they are less accurate in projecting how those cyclones will affect individual coral reefs — that is the result of more localised conditions such as the pounding of waves.” But ‘accurately projecting’ that something is ‘highly likely’ in the future sounds more like an assertion than actual science.
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Climate models are unreliable when it comes to predicting the damage that tropical cyclones will do to sensitive coral reefs, according to a study published in the journal Earth’s Future.

With the expectation that tropical cyclones will increase in intensity with climate change, there has been interest among conservationists to use the models to identify the vulnerability of reef communities to storm damage, and to target conservation and protection efforts at those coral reefs that are less likely to be impacted by climate change, says Science Daily.

But a team of researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK, the Australian Institute for Marine Science and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISRO) is urging caution when using the climate models, arguing they are not yet reliable enough to determine which reefs will be most at risk from cyclone damage.

Updated climate models clouded by scientific biases, researchers find

Southern Ocean surrounds Antarctica [image credit: theozonehole.com]

Another hole in ‘settled’ climate science? Over-sensitivity to changing conditions may sound familiar. Researchers find “The major implication is that, even though the latest CMIP models improve the simulation of their mean states, such as radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere, the detailed cloud processes are still of large uncertainty.” Southern Ocean clouds seem to have been ‘improperly simulated’ when compared to data.
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Clouds can cool or warm the planet’s surface, a radiative effect that contributes significantly to the global energy budget and can be altered by human activities, claims Eurekalert.

The world’s southernmost ocean, aptly named the Southern Ocean and far from human pollution but subject to abundant marine gases and aerosols, is about 80% covered by clouds.

How does this body of water and relationship with clouds contribute to the world’s changing climate?

Faster in the Past: New seafloor images of West Antarctic Ice Sheet upend understanding of Thwaites Glacier retreat

Some like to call it the Doomsday Glacier. The research results are probably open to a variety of interpretations, in terms of predictions. But we’re told that whatever is being observed at present is by no means exceptional, making attempts at attribution of its ever-changing condition to human activity even more problematic. Volcanic activity is an obvious confounding factor here.
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The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — about the size of Florida — has been an elephant in the room for scientists trying to make global sea level rise predictions, says Science Daily.

This massive ice stream is already in a phase of fast retreat (a “collapse” when viewed on geological timescales) leading to widespread concern about exactly how much, or how fast, it may give up its ice to the ocean.

The potential impact of Thwaites’ retreat is spine-chilling: a total loss of the glacier and surrounding icy basins could raise sea level from three to 10 feet.

Global Financial System at Risk From Flawed Climate Models

An unflattering analysis of climate models. Using mean values from numerous models is questioned. Climate attribution studies don’t fare any better: “these approaches are likely to be flawed”.
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A team of Australian scientists, financiers and economists have issued a stark warning over the use of “flawed” climate models to predict financial risk, says Net Zero Watch.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research they say building future strategies on information that is not understood and potentially misleading is likely to expose the global financial system to systemic risks of its own making.

Politicians and policy-makers are increasingly seeking to assess the potential risks to the financial system associated with climate change.

Newly described “solar clock” can precisely predict solar cycle events years in advance

Some bold claims made here. Results needed to back them up.
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New research shows that a “solar clock” based on the sun’s magnetic field, rather than the presence or absence of sunspots, can precisely describe and predict many key changes throughout the solar cycle, says Eurekalert.

The new framework offers a significant improvement over the traditional sunspot method, because it can predict surges in dangerous solar flares or changing weather trends years in advance.

It also accurately describes many more parameters related to the solar cycle than sunspots alone.