Is the Arctic set to become a main shipping route?

Northwest Passage routes [image credit: NASA @ Wikipedia]

Probably not, but this report loses some credibility and misleads readers when it claims: ‘But in 2014 the Nunavik became the first cargo ship to traverse the [Northwest] passage unescorted when it delivered nickel from the Canadian province of Quebec to China.’ It fails to mention the obviously important fact that Nunavik is an icebreaking bulk carrier.

Wikipedia says: ‘She is strengthened for navigation in ice according to the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) Polar Class 4, which allows year-round operation in thick first-year ice which may include old ice inclusions. Furthermore, she fulfills the requirements for ice class ICE-15 by Det Norske Veritas.’ So hardly the run-of-the-mill cargo ship that the BBC pretends it is.

Having tried to talk up the prospects of opening up this sea route, a note of caution is sounded: ‘However, some Arctic experts are not convinced that the Northwest Passage will ever be a busy commercial trade route.’ As well as unpredictable sea ice, unfavourable geography and disputed territorial claims are among the issues.

Climate change is increasingly opening up the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route north of the Canadian mainland, says the BBC.

Could it herald an era of more cargo shipping around the top of the world?

Climate predictions could be wrong in UK and Europe

Topographic map of Greenland

Such predictions are usually wrong anyway, the real question being the degree of ‘wrong-ness’ compared to the actual data. The expected (by climate models) linear progression of global temperatures has fizzled out – inasmuch as it ever existed – since the ‘pause’, apart from a recent El Niño blip. Solar cycle activity is also declining compared to other recent cycles..

Current climate change predictions in the UK and parts of Europe may be inaccurate, a study conducted by researchers from the University of Lincoln, UK, and the University of Liège, Belgium, suggests.

Existing computer model simulations have failed to properly include air pressure changes that have occured in the Greenland region throughout the past 30 years, says The GWPF.

Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field

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Interesting solar predictions from Professor Zharkova.

The Next Grand Minimum

Presentation by Professor Valentina Zharkova

When: Wednesday 31st October, from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Where: 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, SW1P 3QL

Principal component analysis (PCA) of the solar background magnetic field observed from the Earth, revealed four pairs of dynamo waves, the pair with the highest eigen values are called principal components (PCs).

PCs are shown to be produced by magnetic dipoles in inner and outer layers of the Sun, while the second pair of waves is assumed produced by quadruple magnetic sources and so on. The PC waves produced by a magnetic dipole and their summary curve were described analytically and shown to be closely related to the average sunspot number index used for description of solar activity. Based on this correlation, the summary curve was used for the prediction of long-term solar activity on a millennial timescale.This prediction revealed the presence of a grand cycle of…

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Why the current hurricane rating system needs to be scrapped

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

A rating system that may lead people to misunderstand the likely impact of an approaching storm is obviously not satisfactory. So is there a better approach?

For decades, hurricanes have been rated on a scale of 1 to 5 based solely on a storm’s wind speeds.

But as recent hurricanes show, a tropical cyclone’s winds often tell us little about its real threats — coastal storm surge and precipitation-driven flooding, say Yale researchers.

Modern meteorological data collection gives us an unprecedented view into the real-time growth, track, and death of tropical cyclones.

IEA: Petrochemicals set to be the largest driver of world oil demand

Oil extraction [image credit: ewg.org]

A recent energy conference was told: “The world will attain the 100 million barrels a day mark of [oil] consumption later this year, much sooner than we all earlier projected.” This report notes that petrochemicals ‘are required to manufacture many parts of the modern energy system, including solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, thermal insulation and electric vehicles’.

Petrochemicals are set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050, adding nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day by then, reports Green Car Congress.

They are also poised to consume an additional 56 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas by 2030, and 83 bcm by 2050.

Media hype IPCC ‘climate catastrophe’ by 2040 prediction

Yet another climate conference?

They’re still playing the same broken record after nearly ten years. These fake dramas wore very thin a long time ago, but the tedium carries on seemingly ad nauseam.
H/T The GWPF

Hundreds of diplomats from around the world are set to scrutinize the IPCC’s latest Summary for Policy Makers, which contains predictions and benchmark findings on staving off a climate catastrophe by 2040, reports AFP.

The world’s nations will gather at a United Nations conference in South Korea on Monday, October 1 to review and approve a 20-page bombshell – distilled from more than 6,000 scientific studies – laying out narrowing options for staving off climate catastrophe.

Now at least 10 years with sea ice at 2050-like levels yet polar bears are still abundant

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With about the same minimum Arctic sea ice extent this season as 2008 and 2010, persistent claims of ‘rapid decline’ are looking more than threadbare, and polar bears don’t seem too bothered either, judging by the numbers. Climate scare merchants may have to look elsewhere to try and generate a headline.

polarbearscience

We’ve hit the seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum for this year, called this morning by US NSIDC for 19th and 23rd of Septmeber: 4.59 mkm2, the same extent as 2008 and 2010. This is not a “ho-hum” year for polar bears: it means that since 2007, they have triumphed through 10 or 11 years¹ with summer ice coverage below 5.0 mkm2 —  levels that in 2007were expected to cause catastrophic declines in numbers.

Summer sea ice below 5.0 mkm2 were not expected to occur until about 2050, according to 2005/2006 sea ice models and polar bear specialists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Polar bear survival models predicted 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would disappear when ice levels reached this threshold for 8 out of 10 years (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Hunter 2007) but polar bears have been more resilientthan expected (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford…

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Cambridge University scientists create ancient tree ring diary

Did the BBC just say in this report: ‘if the recent warming is unusual’? Whether tree ring analysis can improve predictions, as suggested, is an interesting question but open to debate.

The “longest, continuous tree ring-based diary” is being created by scientists at the University of Cambridge to help map climate change, reports BBC News.

The diary documents climatic conditions going back centuries, using trees from across the world.

Computer climate simulations just crashed

Not the actual simulations, but the already fading credibility thereof. What scientific reason is there to rely on their results?

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science, writes Andrew Montford for The GWPF.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

Nature Unbound IX – 21st Century Climate Change

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A wide-ranging discussion of climate scenarios here, including the likely efficiency of global carbon sinks and the pros and cons of a forthcoming solar grand minimum.

Climate Etc.

by Javier

A conservative outlook on 21st century climate change

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Forecast predicts below-average hurricane activity

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

US researchers who accurately forecast last year’s busy Atlantic hurricane season are not expecting a similar level of activity this year, partly due to lower sea surface temperatures as El Niño effects fade away.

Hurricane season didn’t officially start until June 1, but Subtropical Storm Alberto made an appearance early, causing more than $50 million in damage as it made its way inland and up the coast in late May, reports Phys.org.

Twelve people—seven in Cuba and five in the U.S.—died as Alberto’s fallout included flooding, landslides, tornados and mudslides.

Is Alberto’s early-season appearance an indicator of another active Atlantic hurricane season? Not necessarily, according to predictions by researchers at the University of Arizona.

Wear white on the solstice to celebrate polar bear success in a warming world

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Add polar bear non-decline to the long list of climate alarms that the doomsters have got embarrassingly wrong.

polarbearscience

Wednesday 21 June is the longest day of the year: wear something white tomorrow to acknowledge and celebrate the success of polar bears despite such low summer sea ice since 2007 that 2/3 of them were predicted to disappear.

White tie, white shirt, white socks work too. Keep cool and signal to the world that you love outstanding survivors of climate change,  fat though they may be.

Read here and here.

Global sea ice extent at 19 June 2018, well past the end of the intensive spring feeding period for polar bears:

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The alarmists are getting restless, funding cuts are leading to ever wilder predictions.

James Anderson, of ozone hole fame says:

The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero.

But that’s not all. Not only is the Arctic ice going to disappear, but WE are too.

Leif Svalgaard reveals his Solar Cycle 25 prediction “at last”

Solar scientist and part-time NSA operative Leif Svalgaard has produced a prediction for solar cycle 25, four years after Rick Salvador published his 86 year prediction in the swiftly censored “Pattern Recognition in Physics”.

It appears at the end of a 30 page pdf document he has published on his website. This is an interesting document, with a wealth of gayly coloured butterfly diagrams, polar field reconstructions and more. Leif self deprecatingly follows his Prediction title with (At last) not only because it comes at the end of 30 pages of preamble, but because he’s acutely aware of his method’s limitations.

Doubt cast on the predictive value of earthquake foreshocks

Nepal Earthquake [image credit: BBC]

Back to the drawing board for earthquake forecasting, by the sound of it.

A new study questions previous findings about the value of foreshocks as warning signs that a big earthquake is coming, instead showing them to be indistinguishable from ordinary earthquakes, reports Science Daily.

No one can predict when or where an earthquake will strike, but in 2011 scientists thought they had evidence that tiny underground tremors called foreshocks could provide important clues. If true, it suggested seismologists could one day warn people of impending temblors.

But a new study published in the online June 4 issue of Nature Geoscience by scientists at Stanford University and Bogaziçi University in Turkey has cast doubt on those earlier findings and on the predictive value of foreshocks.

Met Office Predicted The Cold Weather That They Did Not Predict!

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Met Office seasonal forecasting skill turns out to be below average – heading towards the lowest 20%.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Conditions over the weekend and into the early part of next week will become increasingly cold, possibly exceptionally cold.

Yellow National Severe Weather Warnings for snow are in force for parts of eastern and southeast England from 4pm on Monday and for large parts of the UK through Tuesday and Wednesday.

Snow showers are expected to develop widely during the start of the week, with some locations likely to see accumulations of 5 to 10 cm. Although other sites may see less frequent showers leading to much smaller accumulations up to 2 cm.

The very cold conditions, which are likely to be the coldest spell of weather for several years, are likely to remain in place for the remainder of next week. The cold easterly wind will persist bringing a significant wind chill which will make it feel several degrees colder than thermometers indicate. Even without…

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Giant earthquakes: not as random as thought, say researchers

Earthquake zones in Chile [image credit: lahistoriaconmapas.com]

One finding was that ‘giant earthquakes (like the one in 1960) re-occur every 292 ±93 years’. Coincidentally or not, these numbers seem to align with lunar apsidal cycles (33 ±10.5).

By analyzing sediment cores from Chilean lakes, an international team of scientists discovered that giant earthquakes reoccur with relatively regular intervals, reports Phys.org.

When also taking into account smaller earthquakes, the repeat interval becomes increasingly more irregular to a level where earthquakes happen randomly in time.

“In 1960, South-Central Chile was hit by the largest known quake on Earth with a magnitude of 9.5. Its tsunami was so massive that –in addition to inundating the Chilean coastline– it travelled across the Pacific Ocean and even killed about 200 persons in Japan,” says Jasper Moernaut, an assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and lead author of the study. “Understanding when and where such devastating giant earthquakes may occur in the future is a crucial task for the geoscientific community”.

Worst-case global warming scenarios not credible: study

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

But the researchers are still hooked on the unlikely idea that trace gases alone can ‘determine’ variations in global temperatures, despite lack of correlation in the data and poor results from climate model ‘projections’.

Earth’s surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study released Wednesday which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions, reports Phys.org.

A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature.

“Our study all but rules out very low and very high climate sensitivities,” said lead author Peter Cox, a professor at the University of Exeter.

Alan Carlin: None of the climate alarmist apocalypses have occurred or are even possible

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Lack of predictive success is a strong warning sign that something is amiss in the world of climate science in general and its modelling in particular.

The climate alarmists have long tried to sell their apocalyptic scam by claiming that their policies will avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures, writes Alan Carlin.

The Daily Caller has recently inventoried some of the widely publicized such climate apocalypses predicted over the last 30 years by examining 12 of them.

The alarmists’ 12 apocalyptic predictions have proved uniformly wrong. That’s zero percent correct.

North Atlantic variability and its links to European climate over the last 3000 years

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The scientists conclude:
‘It is therefore essential that we continue to improve our understanding of the LSW/subpolar gyre dynamics at a range of time scales to reduce uncertainty in future climate predictions.’
[LSW = Labrador Sea Water]

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

A newly published paper has linked changes in European climate to North Atlantic variability over the last 3000 years:

ABSTRACT

The subpolar North Atlantic is a key location for the Earth’s climate system. In the Labrador Sea, intense winter air–sea heat exchange drives the formation of deep waters and the surface circulation of warm waters around the subpolar gyre. This process therefore has the ability to modulate the oceanic northward heat transport. Recent studies reveal decadal variability in the formation of Labrador Sea Water. Yet, crucially, its longer-term history and links with European climate remain limited. Here we present new decadally resolved marine proxy reconstructions, which suggest weakened Labrador Sea Water formation and gyre strength with similar timing to the centennial cold periods recorded in terrestrial climate archives and historical records over the last 3000 years. These new data support that subpolar North Atlantic circulation changes, likely…

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