Funding appeal: Mike McCulloch needs your help to make interstellar travel possible.

Dr Mike McCulloch has been making truly remarkable discoveries about some of the mysteries of the cosmos over the last two decades. He has answers to fundamental questions such as ‘what causes the force that resists the change in speed and direction of any mass?’, ‘why do observations indicate that the inertial force varies with acceleration in the outer reaches of galaxies?’ and ‘how can we tap into the implicated energy fields to generate propellant-less thrust, and potentially generate electrical energy to power our homes, industries and vehicles?’. His published papers cover the first two of these questions, and touch on the third, although there’s plenty more to be teased out of the implications of his Quantised Inertia theory. The third question is the acid test.

Mike believes science has to have practical, applicable results, and for the last few years, he has been successfully generating those at his lab in Plymouth University, funded by DARPA. He has been getting measurable thrust from purely electrical input. Other collaborating labs have similar results. Exciting times indeed.

But like many scientists who threaten the established and accepted theory in their field, his work has been largely ignored because it falsifies mainstream ‘dark matter’ theory, or dismissed because it ‘must be impossible’. Although he has got measurable results, DARPA funding is ending, and he has no more teaching work to return to at Plymouth University. Mike wants, as far as possible, to keep the ongoing developments of QI publicly accessible, by crowdfunding. He needs our help to fund and equip a new lab, and set up a ‘Horizon Institute’, online initially, to enable the collaboration of academics and citizen scientists. Please read his message below, and then I’ll let you know how you can help.

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.

King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down

Image credit: BBC News

Climate alarmism with an end date is asking for trouble, to say the least. Gems such as this from 2008 — Prince Charles: Eighteen months to stop climate change disaster — spring to mind.
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This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history, says Rupert Darwall.

No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly.

Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.

Climate models have a volcano problem

Volcanic eruption

At least they now know about it. In tests, ‘inclusion of the eruptions degraded the model’s predictive capabilities’.
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Simulated volcanic eruptions may be blowing up our ability to predict near-term climate, according to a new study published in Science Advances.

The research, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), finds that the way volcanic eruptions are represented in climate models may be masking the models’ ability to accurately predict variations in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific that unfold over multiple years to a decade, says Phys.org.

These decadal variations in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific are linked to climate impacts across the globe, including variations in precipitation and severe weather.

Accurate predictions, therefore, could provide community leaders, farmers, water managers, and others with critical climate information that allows them to plan years in advance.

“Near-term climate prediction on annual to decadal timescales is a rapidly growing and important field in the climate community because it bridges the gap between existing seasonal forecasts and centennial climate projections,” said Xian Wu, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at NCAR.

“When we rely on models to make these predictions, it’s important to carefully consider the model’s fidelity. In this case, we found that model errors in simulating the response to volcanic eruptions degraded our prediction skill.”

For the study, Wu and her colleagues relied on two parallel collections of climate simulations from the Decadal Prediction Large Ensemble, a dataset produced using the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model.

These simulations were run as hindcasts and cover the years from 1954–2015, allowing scientists to compare the simulations with what really occurred and evaluate their skill at predicting the future.

One collection of simulations included the three major volcanic eruptions that occurred during the study period: Agung (1963), El Chichón (1982), and Pinatubo (1991). The other collection did not.

Because it is well established that large volcanic eruptions can have significant, long-term cooling effects on the climate, Wu and her colleagues expected that the collection of simulations that included the volcanic eruptions would produce more accurate multiyear and decadal climate predictions.

Instead, they found that the inclusion of the eruptions degraded the model’s predictive capabilities, at least in the tropical Pacific, an area that is especially important because of the connections between sea surface temperatures and near-term climate events.

For example, the simulations that included the volcanoes predicted a subsequent cooling of the sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific after the eruptions. In reality, that region of the ocean warmed, a change that was well predicted by the simulations that did not include the volcanic eruptions.

These findings highlight the difficulty of accurately representing the complex climate impacts that follow a volcanic eruption in a model, a task made more challenging because researchers only have a few real-life examples in the observational record.

Scientists know that volcanoes can loft sulfur gases high into the stratosphere where they can transform into sunlight-reflecting aerosols. But how the resulting cooling ultimately affects the entire Earth system, including sea surface temperatures, is not well understood.

“We just don’t have enough observations,” Wu said. “And our methods to observe what is happening in the stratosphere have only been available since the satellite era, which means we only have Chichón and Pinatubo.”

Full article here.

Solar maximum may arrive later this year, say researchers

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

Nothing better than actual observations to make a forecast change. The sun may have put one over the pundits again.
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Solar Maximum is coming–maybe this year, says Spaceweather.com.

New research by a leading group of solar physicists predicts maximum sunspot activity in late 2023 or early 2024, a full year earlier than other forecasts.

“This is based on our work with the Termination Event,” explains Scott McIntosh, lead author of a paper describing the prediction, published in the January 2023 edition of Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

Researchers investigate the “Warm Arctic-Cold Continent” (WACC) climate theory

Their analysis relates to 1979-2018 only. Media talk of ‘stranded’ polar bears, not mentioned in the study, ignores the fact that they are talented swimmers. The unresolved issue of the wavier jet stream is noted in the study, but that’s all. They admit prediction of where it’s all going is difficult.
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Pictures of melting glaciers and stranded [?] polar bears on shrinking sea ice in the Arctic are perhaps the most striking images that have been used to highlights the effects of global warming, says Phys.org.

However, they do not convey the full extent of the consequences of warmer Arctic. In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the Arctic’s role in driving extreme weather events in other parts of the world. [Talkshop comment – dubious assertions]

While the Arctic has been warming at a rate twice as fast as the global average, winters in the midlatitude regions have experienced colder and more severe weather events.

Summer sea ice disappearance from the Arctic has happened before, say researchers

They studied molecules from certain algae that are only produced when there is sea ice. Natural climate variation alone was all it took to reach the required temperature level.
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The “Last Ice Area” north of Greenland and Canada is the last sanctuary of all-year sea ice in this time of rising temperatures caused by climate change.

A new study now suggests that this may soon be over, says Phys.org.

Researchers from Aarhus University, in collaboration with Stockholm University and the United States Geological Survey, analyzed samples from the previously inaccessible region north of Greenland.

The sediment samples were collected from the seabed in the Lincoln Sea, part of the “Last Ice Area”. They showed that the sea ice in this region melted away during summer months around 10,000 years ago.

The research team concluded that summer sea ice melted at a time when temperatures were at a level that we are rapidly approaching again today.

Catastrophism update: Governments to vet ‘crucial’ UN climate science report

The ‘Pakistan one third underwater’ lie gets yet another airing here, while Arctic summer sea ice keeps confounding the doomsters. Pretending to know the future of global climate via modelling has only led to the failure of numerous over-the-top predictions so far.
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Diplomats from nearly 200 nations and top climate scientists begin a week-long huddle in Switzerland Monday to distill nearly a decade of published science into a 20-odd-page warning about the existential danger of global warming, and what to do about it, says Phys.org.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report—to be released on March 20—will detail observed and projected changes in Earth’s climate system; past and future impacts such as devastating heatwaves, flooding and rising seas; and ways to halt the carbon pollution [sic] pushing Earth toward an unlivable state. [Talkshop comment – unverified claim].

“It’s a massive moment, seven years since the Paris Agreement and nine years since the last IPCC assessment report,” Greenpeace Nordic senior policy advisor Kaisa Kosonen, an official observer at IPCC meetings, told AFP.

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).