Environment Agency’s alarmist climate report is partly based on an obsolete climate scenario

An obvious problem with the new Environment Agency report reportis its use of climate scenario RCP8.5, which has been widely discredited as unrealistic, impossible and so on. Surely that ought to render any related comments unsuitable as advice to a government. EA report extracts follow.
Air temperature and precipitation: We used RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 to represent climate scenarios that meet or exceed global warming +2°C and +4°C above pre-industrial by 2100.
Sea level rise: For our FCERM schemes we assess a range from the 70th to the 95th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5.
River flows: They are relative to a 1981-200 baseline and based on the 50th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5, which is consistent with at least a +4°C warming scenario by the end of the century.
Future weather: The projected values for future hot weather and wet weather are taken from UKCP Local (2.2 km) (Met Office, 2019), which complements the UKCP18 projections with data at a higher spatial and temporal resolution than previous climate projections, giving us greater detail on the 52 of 90 frequency and intensity of extreme weather. These projections are only available for a RCP8.5
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The Environment Agency has issued a stark warning on climate change: “Adapt or die”, says ITV News.

In a new report the Government body has preparations need to be made for the inevitable effects of climate change such as more flooding, an increased number of droughts and rising sea levels.

Fast changes between the solar seasons resolved by new sun clock

Our magnetic Sun [image credit: space.com]

The declining phase of the current solar cycle 25 is predicted to be short. Whether that would follow a low peak remains to be seen, but not much has happened so far in the cycle.
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Violent activity on our Sun leads to some of the most extreme space weather events on Earth, impacting systems such as satellites, communications systems, power distribution and aviation, says Phys.org.

The roughly 11-year cycle of solar activity has three ‘seasons’, each of which affects the space weather felt at Earth differently: (i) solar maximum, the sun is active and disordered, when space weather is stormy and events are irregular (ii) the declining phase, when the sun and solar wind becomes ordered, and space weather is more moderate and (iii) solar minimum, when activity is quiet.

In a new study led by the University of Warwick and published in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists found that the change from solar maximum to the declining phase is fast, happening within a few (27 day) solar rotations.

IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity’

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So say the totally predictable climate cultists in the political summary version of the IPCC’s not yet published report, version whatever.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Humanity’s damaging impact on the climate is a “statement of fact”, say UN scientists in a landmark study.

The report says that ongoing emissions of warming gases could also see a key temperature limit broken in just over a decade.

The authors also show that a rise in sea levels approaching 2m by the end of this century “cannot be ruled out”.

But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.

This sober assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) features in a 42-page document known as the Summary for Policymakers.

It leads a series of reports that will be published over coming months and is the first major review of the science of climate change since 2013. Its release comes less than three months before a key climate summit in Glasgow known as COP26.

“Today’s…

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Study ‘projects’ a surge in US coastal flooding starting in 2030s

Credit: nationalreview.com

Anything supposedly ‘rapidly increasing’ or ‘extreme’ in Earth’s climate now or in the near future has to be treated with some suspicion, to say the least. Experience tells us alarmists armed with assumptions don’t need much excuse to go off the deep end to try and stir up the populace.
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In the mid-2030s, every U.S. coast will experience rapidly increasing high-tide floods, when a lunar cycle will amplify rising sea levels caused by climate change, predicts Phys.org.

High-tide floods—also called nuisance floods or sunny day floods—are already a familiar problem in many cities on the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a total of more than 600 such floods in 2019.

Starting in the mid-2030s, however, the alignment of rising sea levels with a lunar cycle will cause coastal cities all around the U.S. to begin a decade of dramatic increases in flood numbers, according to the first study that takes into account all known oceanic and astronomical causes for floods.

Led by the members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team from the University of Hawaii, the new study shows that high tides will exceed known flooding thresholds around the country more often.

Someone leaked the next IPCC report

It’s the usual miserablist cacophony about tipping points and bleak futures by the sound of it. We’ve all heard this tune many times before, but still none of the dire predictions have occurred as climate models persistently over-estimate actual temperatures by often embarrassingly wide margins. This in turn leads to the usual lurid crystal ball gazing into some inevitably grim future the doomsters have dreamed up, in the style of plot ideas for a far-fetched Hollywood disaster movie. Yawn.
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A draft report from the world’s peak body on climate change, leaked to a global news agency, has sparked concern according to Science Alert — but the dire warnings the report details shouldn’t come as a surprise, experts say.

The draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP), a global news agency headquartered in Paris.

Ocean circulation is key to understanding uncertainties in climate change predictions

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]

Widely differing climate models are supposed to be a reliable guide to the future? Clearly not. Here the uncertainty gets investigated, and pinned on a phenomenon that was recently claimed by Mann et al not to exist. Of course all these models make the assumption that carbon dioxide at a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere is a key variable of concern, despite all the other variability in the climate system that they have to wrestle with.
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Thirty state-of-the-art IPCC-climate models predict dramatically different climates for the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe, says Phys.org.

An analysis of the range of responses now reveals that the differences are mostly down to the individual model’s simulations of changes to the North Atlantic ocean currents and not only—as normally assumed—atmospheric changes.

The work, by Katinka Bellomo, National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and colleagues is published today in Nature Communications and is part of the European science collaboration, TiPES, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen.

All climate models vary in the details. Variables such as atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, temperature gradients, sea surface temperatures, and many more are tuned to interact slightly differently for every model. This means that the predictions of the many models also vary.

The Termination Event

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Testable science ideas here. What’s not to like?

“What can I say?” laughs McIntosh. “We’re heretics!”

H/T g2

Spaceweather.com

June 10, 2021: Something big may be about to happen on the sun. “We call it the Termination Event,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “and it’s very, very close to happening.”

If you’ve never heard of the Termination Event, you’re not alone.  Many researchers have never heard of it either. It’s a relatively new idea in solar physics championed by McIntosh and colleague Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland – Baltimore County. According to the two scientists, vast bands of magnetism are drifting across the surface of the sun. When oppositely-charged bands collide at the equator, they annihilate (or “terminate”). There’s no explosion; this is magnetism, not anti-matter. Nevertheless, the Termination Event is a big deal. It can kickstart the next solar cycle into a higher gear.

Above: Oppositely charged magnetic bands (red and blue) march toward the sun’s equator…

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Electric vehicles cheaper than combustion by 2027, study predicts

EV charging station [image credit: Nissan UK]

A prediction from Bloomberg. Only 5-6 years to wait to see if it comes true. If EVs and plug-in hybrids are going to be much cheaper by then, there’s even less incentive to buy one now. A looming shortage of battery materials could put a spanner in the works.
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Electric cars will be cheaper to build than fossil fuel vehicles across Europe within six years and could represent 100 percent of new sales by 2035, according to a study published Monday, says TechXplore.

Carmakers are shifting en masse to electric and hybrid models in order to bring average fleet emissions under a European Union limit of 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, or face heavy penalties.

The study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that electric sedans and sport-utility vehicles will be as cheap to make as combustion vehicles from 2026.

Above-average Atlantic hurricane activity again expected in 2021

Typical influence of La Niña on Pacific and Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity. Map by NOAA Climate.gov, based on originals by Gerry Bell.

Prediction time as the 2021 season approaches. The expected impacts of El Niño and La Niña on hurricane seasons in both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean areas are discussed by NOAA here. Hurricane detection has improved over time, so what is considered ‘average’ now is unlikely to be the same as it used to be.
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The year 2020 saw the most active hurricane season on record and marked the fifth consecutive year for above-average activity, says Phys.org.

A University of Arizona-led hurricane forecasting team predicts another year of above-average hurricane activity over the Atlantic Ocean in 2021.

The team predicts 18 named storms, including eight hurricanes, throughout the 2021 North Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

In comparison, the 30-year average is 13 named storms and seven hurricanes annually.

Abrupt ice age climate changes behaved like cascading dominoes

Rinks Glacier, West Greenland [image credit: NSIDC]

Interesting, but as we’ve had a temperature rise of about 1.2ºC since 1880, according to one source at least, comparisons with much bigger historical increases in shorter timescales seem somewhat ambitious, to say the least.
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Throughout the last ice age, the climate changed repeatedly and rapidly during so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, where Greenland temperatures rose between 5 and 16 degrees Celsius in decades, says Phys.org.

When certain parts of the climate system changed, other parts of the climate system followed like a series of dominos toppling in succession.

This is the conclusion from an analysis of ice-core data by a group of researchers that included postdoc Emilie Capron and associate professor Sune Olander Rasmussen from the Section for the Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, in Denmark.

This discovery, just published in the journal Nature Communications, is concerning because the extent of sea ice in the Arctic played an important part in these dramatic climate shifts of the past.

The Chance of Storms Just Doubled

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A prediction for the Talkshop to mull over.

Spaceweather.com

April 8, 2021: If you think you are safe from geomagnetic storms, think again. A new study just published in the journal Space Weather finds that powerful storms may be twice as likely as previously thought.

Jeffrey Love of the USGS, who authored the study, analyzed Earth’s strongest geomagnetic storms since the early 1900s. Previous studies looked back only to the 1950s. The extra data led to a surprise:

“A storm as intense as, say, the Québec Blackout of 1989 is predicted to occur, on average, about every four solar cycles. This is twice as often as estimated using only the traditional shorter dataset,” says Love.

Above: The data Love used in his extreme value analysis. Red and blue circles denote the two strongest storms in each solar cycle.

A study like this is part physics, part math, and part detective work.

Love has spent recent years digging deeply into…

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Summers in the UK could last almost six months by 2100, claim researchers

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

H/T msn.com
That was the Daily Mail headline, but the research paper is not about the UK only. An obvious problem is that their data only runs up to 2011 (from 1952). The paper asserts: ‘We find that lengths and start dates of the four seasons have changed, and the changes will be amplified in the future’. Crystal ball-gazing climate alarmism can be so tedious and predictable.
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Unless measures are taken to curb climate change, summers in the UK and the rest of the northern hemisphere could last for six months come 2100, a study warned.

Researchers from China used historical climate data and modelling to determine how the seasons have shifted in the past, and will likely alter in the future, says the Daily Mail.

Ice Age Testing Reveals Challenges in Climate Model Sensitivity

Cloud formation [image credit:NASA]

‘Challenges’ is a polite way of putting it. Is the alleged human-caused climate problem really more of a human-caused climate models problem?
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Increased reflection of incoming sunlight by clouds led one current-generation climate model to predict unrealistically cold temperatures during the last ice age [Source: Geophysical Research Letters].

Key to the usefulness of climate models as tools for both scientists and policymakers is the models’ ability to connect changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to corresponding shifts in temperature, says Eos.

Summer temperatures could rise faster in the UK than average global rates, researchers suggest

Bring it on. Average August temperature in London is 22C, and much of the UK is at cooler higher latitudes than London is. A long way to go to even get close to Mediterranean-style summers, and some ‘heat deaths’ could well be due to lack of air conditioning as much as the weather itself. Deaths from cold weather are more the issue in the UK. Researchers today like to assume that temperature trends go on forever in one direction, but forget the ‘experts’ were forecasting drastic global cooling back in the 1970s, after 30 years of lack of warming. A 40 year study period is short for claiming trends, hence words like ‘could’ and ‘projected’ to hedge their bets.
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The U.K. could be facing a future of extreme heatwaves according to a new study in which scientists mapped almost 40 years’ worth of trends to project what lies ahead, says Phys.org.

The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, draws on datasets from the Met Office’s U.K. Climate Projections, specifically UKCP18, which contains global climate model projections and simulations from around the world, as well as high resolution climate model projections on a local and regional scale for the U.K. and Europe.

Between 2016 and 2019 there were more than 3,400 excess deaths in England as a result of heatwaves.

2020 – what a year of climate alarmism tells us about green ideology

From: Ben Pile at Climate Resistance

Many climate alarmist’s failed predictions were centred around 2020. This video examines just ten, and argues that they were produced not by science, but by ideology.

This is proved by the fact that rather than suffering any consequences to their careers or public standing, fearmongering individuals and institutions enjoy continued and undeserved success.

The analysis of the ten predictions was produced by Steve Milloy and can be read at his website.
[Or via the Talkshop, here].

Ten climate predictions for 2020 that went horribly wrong

Arctic sea ice [image credit: Geoscience Daily]

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

As ever, too much reliance on climate models is liable to lead to embarrassment and failure. But there’s always a supply of new or recycled scares to fall back on, preferably those with distant expiry dates to avoid loss of face.
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It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical, says PJ Media.

Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had 10 years left for humans to act against climate change, alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another, each of which stubbornly failed to materialize.

Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020.

Wrong Again: 2020’s Failed Climate Doomsaying

Credit: nationalreview.com

We confidently predict more doom-laden claims, and more failures. Josh cartoon: GRETA THE DOOMSAYER here.
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2020 has been the wildest and most unpredictable year in the memory of most people.

But did the climate doom that was predicted to occur in or by 2020 materialize? — asks Steve Milloy @ JunkScience.com.

What follows are 10 predictions made for 2020 and what really happened.

As it turns out, climate doomsayers weren’t seeing so 20-20 when it came to 2020.

Link to JunkScience.com.

New sunspot cycle could be one of the strongest on record, says NCAR

Credit: cherishthescientist.net

‘Scientists use an extended, 22-year solar cycle to make the forecast’ is the sub-heading to the article. In other words the Hale cycle. At the end of last year The Talkshop detailed Plenty of predictions from a wide range of research groups, including our own, made in 2013. A possible (?) early indicator is that the ‘smoothed minimum’ of sunspots at the start of solar cycle 25 is given by Wikipedia as 1.8, the lowest recorded since cycle 7 (0.2) in 1823.
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In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began, says NCAR News.

In a new article published in Solar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed.

Met Office: Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past

UK winter weather forecast [image credit: BBC]

It’s nearly Christmas so maybe time to get the old chestnuts out, and this one is now 20 years old. Let’s see how it fares in the next 20.
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By the 2040s most of southern England may no longer get sub-zero days, new Met Office data suggests.

It is one of a series of projections about how UK’s climate could change, shared with BBC Panorama.

It suggests by the 2040s most of southern England could no longer see sub-zero days. By the 2060s only high ground and northern Scotland are still likely to experience such cold days.

UK: emission impossible?

Green dreamland

Futile obsession with the trace gas carbon dioxide looks likely to expose the UK government’s so-called climate policies as hopelessly unrealistic, soon enough. Net zero or not zero?
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The UK is on course to reduce its emissions by less than a fifth of what’s needed to meet interim climate change targets, according to data shared exclusively with Sky News.

The think tank Green Alliance says its analysis of current policies shows the longer-term goal of being net zero by 2050 is also in jeopardy.

The government is shortly expected to announce a ten point plan of action on climate change. But Green Alliance says even proposed policies including bringing forward the banning of sales of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars wouldn’t be enough to get the government to even half of its interim reduction target.

Sales of petrol, diesel and hybrid cars are currently due to end in 2040 though the government is considering bringing that forward to 2035 and green groups want them withdrawn by 2030.