Close Encounters with the Taurid Swarm

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Get ready: “In June 2019 the Earth will approach within [0.06 AU or 9 million km] of the center of the Taurid swarm, its closest post-perihelion encounter with Earth since 1975”. Is there a Tunguska link?

Spaceweather.com

May 24, 2019: In November 2032, Earth will pass through the Taurid Swarm, a cloud of debris from Comet 2P/Encke that makes brilliant fireballs when its gravelly particles occasionally hit Earth’s atmosphere. Previous encounters with the Swarm in 2005 and 2015 produced showers of bright meteors observed around the world; in 1975 the Swarm contacted the Moon, making Apollo seismic sensors ring with evidence of objects hitting the lunar surface. If forecasters are correct, we’re in for similar activity 13 years from now.

Some researchers are beginning to wonder if there might be more to the Taurid Swarm than the pebble-sized particles that make fireballs–something, say, that could level a forest. On June 30, 1908, a forest in Siberia did fall down when a 100-meter object fell out of the sky and exploded just above the Tunguska River. Back-tracking the trajectory of the impactor suggests it may have come from…

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Burning Trees Is a Multi-Billion £ Industry

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No let-up in sight in the ongoing biomass disaster.

sunshine hours

Burning trees produces more CO2 than coal. So if you are in the UK and your energy bill makes you want to cry, just remember it’s green!

A surcharge on UK energy bills is funding subsidies for biomass electricity generation that is making climate change worse, polluting communities, destroying forests and harming wildlife.

In 2017, the UK Government granted around £1 billion in renewable subsidies to power stations – including Drax Power Station in Yorkshire – to burn millions of tonnes of wood for electricity.

Drax alone received £729 million – around £2 million per day – in subsidies to burn wood pellets and is now the world’s largest biomass burner.

Biodiversity hotspots

Despite claims by the biomass industry that they mostly burn “low-grade wood residues”, US conservation NGOs have proven that a significant proportion of wood pellets for Drax and other UK power stations comes from the clearcutting of whole trees…

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Tree-planting drones could help restore world’s forests

Image credit: Biocarbon Engineering

This report is talking about coastal mangrove forests in particular. The target is over a billion new trees, but it’s claimed two operators with ten drones could plant 400,000 trees a day.

British engineers have created a seed-planting drone which could help restore the world’s forests, reports the London Evening Standard.

Biocarbon Engineering, a start-up based in Oxford, designed the drones to fire seed missiles across fields, planting hundreds of potential trees in a matter of minutes.

In September 2018, the drones were deployed in a field just south of Yangon, Myanmar.

The seeds they sowed have since grown into tiny mangrove saplings, about 20-inches tall.

Climate Models Fail: Climate Warming Experiment Finds Unexpected Results

Credit: klimatetochskogen.nu

Climate models are known to have their shortcomings, whether due to use of faulty theories or shortage of computing skills.

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Tropical forests store about a third of Earth’s carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass.

Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But new research presented at the American Geophysical Union’s 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory.

USGS: California wildfires emitted as much CO2 as an entire year’s worth of electricity for the state

California wildfire [image credit: NASA]

Buying electric cars, solar panels and the like isn’t going to make much of a dent in the ’emissions’ California likes to fret about, as long as current forestry practices – or lack of them – are allowed to continue.

According to data analyzed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), the 2018 wildfire season in California is estimated to have released emissions equivalent to roughly 68 million tons of carbon dioxide, reports Green Car Congress.

This number equates to about 15% of all California emissions, and it is on par with the annual emissions produced by generating enough electricity to power the entire state for a year.

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.

Study: global forest loss over past 35 years more than offset by new forest growth

The world has more natural carbon dioxide absorbers in the shape of trees than was thought, to the tune of an extra 2.2 million kilometers² relative to 1982.

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so.

Researchers report overnight cycle of water movement in trees

We’re informed that ‘these findings definitely challenge the widespread view of trees as static, passive organisms’.

A high-precision, three-dimensional survey of 21 different species of trees has revealed an as-yet unknown cycle of subtle canopy movement during the night, reports Phys.org.

Such ‘sleep cycles’ differed from one species to another. Detection of anomalies in overnight movement could become a future diagnostic tool to reveal stress or disease in crops.

Switzerland’s carbon capture plant is a giant waste of money

Trees ‘remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store large quantities of carbon in their tissues.’ – Wikipedia

If absorbing carbon dioxide is the idea, which is better value for money: big technology, or plain old-fashioned trees?

On May 31, 2017, the world’s first commercial atmospheric carbon-capture plant opened for business in Hinwil, Switzerland, reports Climate Change Dispatch.

The plant, designed and operated by a Swiss company called Climeworks, is different from existing carbon-capture facilities because it filters carbon dioxide out of the ambient atmosphere using proprietary technology, rather than from industrial exhaust, which is quite common.

Climeworks claims their facility will be able to remove 900 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. Furthermore, its modular design will allow it to be scaled up as the demand for carbon dioxide increases.

What do they plan to do with said carbon?

Good News! We Have Lots More Forest Than We Thought

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Time to update those climate models.

American Elephants

A new survey using high-definition satellite images has found 378 million additional hectares of forest around the globe—it’s as if all of Earth’s forests just grew by 9%.

(The hectare is an SI accepted metric system unit of area equal to 100 ares (10,000 m²) and primarily used in the measurement of land. An acre is about 0.4047 hectare and one hectare contains about 2.47 acres. I don’t do metric, and assume that some of you don’t either. You can also think of it as an area of forest equal to sixty percent of the size of Australia, if that helps)

“The forests have been identified in drylands in the Sahara desert, around the Mediterranean, southern Africa, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, north-east Brazil, northern Columbia and Venezuela and northern parts of Canada and Russia.”

*The image is of coastal Australia.

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Mass tree-planting plans ‘could ruin Scottish landscape’

Map of Scottish woodlands

A related issue is that Scottish woodland is currently being invaded by an army of wind farm constructors whenever they get the chance.

The SNP’s plans to increase the amount of woodland in Scotland in an attempt to fight climate change risks damaging the nation’s “dramatic open views and vistas”, according to mountaineering and gamekeepers groups.

The Scottish Government has proposed increasing the amount of woodland cover from 17 per cent to 25 per cent by 2050, with a commitment to planting 10,000 extra hectares of trees between now and 2022 included in its draft Climate Plan, as iNews reports.

But Mountaineering Scotland and the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA) are concerned that the changes could damage the nation’s wild moorland, arguing it forms a crucial part of Scotland’s “unique” landscape.

CERN: Pre-industrial skies cloudier than previously thought

 

Credit: CERN

CLOUD experiment at CERN shows that the skies were much cloudier before the industrial revolution than previously thought.

Luning presentation: geological view on solar dominance

Pierre L. Gosselin provides an English overview of a video presentation in German given by Dr. Sebastian Lüning, a geologist and co-author of the book “The Neglected Sun

This is a geological context that unfortunately is lost on many people like physicists who believe their formulae more than they believe the true facts.

Pierre mentions “All graphics cropped from Lüning’s presentation with permission.” so I won’t copy them here.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/29/german-geologist-ipcc-models-a-failure-have-no-chance-of-success-sees-possible-0-2c-of-cooling-by-2020

Swiss geology father throws spanner in AGW works

Once again Pierre L. Gosselin brings fascinating content from the German speaking world

Distinct solar imprint on climate What’s more worrisome,

Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.

“The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”

That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.

Article “Giant Of Geology/Glaciology Christian Schlüchter Refutes CO2…Feature Interview Throws Climate Science Into Disarray”

Back when BBC Panorama reported on science

From the Nature Wildlife web pages at the BBC there is natural history.

Image Wikipedia and BBC

Scientific name: Spagosus pastara (not the young lady you understand)

UK Weather: Incoming!

Batten down and hang on. 100mph gusts expected on coasts and exposed ground.

A 70-80 year peridiocity identified from tree ring temperatures AD 550 – 1980 in Northern Scandinavia

Here’s a nice confirmation of Harald Yndestad’s work on Long term lunar tides in the north Atlantic. He found a 74 yr cycle.

A 70-80 year peridiocity identified from tree ring temperatures AD 550 – 1980 in Northern Scandinavia

• Juhani Rinne^a, ,
• Mikko Alestalo^a,
• Arto Miettinen^b

• ^a Finnish Meteorological Institute, P.O. Box 503, FI – 00101 Helsinki, FINLAND
• ^b Department of Geosciences and Geography, P.O. Box 64, FI – 00014 University of Helsinki FINLAND

Abstract

The classical Maximum Density data of 65 Torneträsk trees from years 441-1980 AD are studied in millennial, centennial and volcanic scales. The millennial scale is analyzed applying a specific filtering method. In that scale, the climate is cool after 1200-1400 AD. This more or less steady period is suggested to be due to volcanic episodes, which reduced the northward heat transport in the North Atlantic. The century scale variation, on the other hand, is suggested to be due to internal oscillations in sea surface temperature (SST) and to be connected to variations in the Arctic sea ice. Specifically, these oscillations have caused an additional warming and cooling trend in Northern Fennoscandian temperatures before and after 1930’s, respectively.

Variations in the temperature estimates are explained by the results for different temporal scales. All of them show local impacts leading to differences when compared with hemispheric estimates. The long-term estimate of the temperature as derived from the present Torneträsk data is found to be biased. The source of that is unknown.