Gulf Stream and Kuroshio Current found to be synchronized on decadal time scale

Credit: NOAA

Researchers propose another weather/climate cycle.
– – –
A team of researchers with members affiliated with a large number of institutions across Japan has found that the Gulf stream and Kuroshio are synchronized on a decadal time scale, says Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of decades of weather satellite data and the link between the two ocean currents.

Paola Cessi, with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, has published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in Japan in the same journal issue.

Q&A: La Niña’s back

The report speaks of ‘La Niña’s natural cooling’ causing drought and increasing wildfire hazards in some areas. Weren’t such things supposed to be aggravated by alleged human-caused global warming, not by natural cooling effects?
– – –
For the second straight year, the world heads into a new La Niña weather event, says Phys.org.

This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

Just five months after the end of a La Niña that started in September 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new cooling of the Pacific is underway.

An energy crisis is gripping the world, with potentially grave consequences – WashPo

Some world leaders just can’t get it into their heads that the wind doesn’t blow on demand, and the sun by definition is daytime only and subject to cloud cover. This has all been said frequently enough, but never seems to hit home in terms of credible energy policies. Ignoring the obvious, they insist that removing reliable power generation is the only way to go, in pursuit of their absurd ‘net zero’ climate targets. An energy crisis in early October doesn’t bode well for the approaching northern hemisphere winter.
– – –
Energy is so hard to come by right now that some provinces in China are rationing electricity, Europeans are paying sky-high prices for liquefied natural gas, power plants in India are on the verge of running out of coal, and the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States stood at $3.25 on Friday — up from $1.72 in April, says the Washington Post (via MSN).

As the global economy recovers and global leaders prepare to gather for a landmark conference on climate change, the sudden energy crunch hitting the world is threatening already stressed supply chains, stirring geopolitical tensions and raising questions about whether the world is ready for the green energy revolution when it’s having trouble powering itself right now.

The economic recovery from the pandemic recession lies behind the crisis, coming after a year of retrenchment in coal, oil and gas extraction.

SSE’s renewable energy output drops almost a third – due to wrong type of weather

Windy enough today?

Weather conditions can vary year on year, but ‘some of the poorest wind conditions in the North Sea for more than two decades’ probably wasn’t on anyone’s list of scenarios. As a result the not-so wondrous wind turbines are under-performing, and with less electricity to sell comes less profit so shareholders won’t be impressed either. What will next year bring? Place bets now!
– – –
SSE’s renewable energy output over spring and summer was almost a third lower than planned, as low winds and dry weather combined with high gas prices to push up energy prices, reports the Financial Times (via Swiftheadline).

The FTSE 100 energy supplier said on Wednesday its wind and hydro output between April 1 and September 22 was 32 per cent beneath its target — equivalent to an 11 per cent hit to its full-year production forecast.

The summer was “one of the least windy across most of the UK and Ireland and one of the driest in SSE’s hydro catchment areas in the last 70 years”, the company said in a statement.

SSE’s update is the latest sign of how unfavourable weather conditions are hitting the renewables sector.

It comes as a global gas shortage, a rebound in energy demand after coronavirus lockdown restrictions and some of the poorest wind conditions in the North Sea for more than two decades have propelled UK and continental European energy prices this month to their highest ever levels.

Full report here.

Climate Narcissism

.
.
Climate is not subject to debate – because they have nothing to say except repeating dogma and empty slogans.

PA Pundits - International

By Peter Murphy~

Are humans causing extraordinarily bad weather events in the United States?

The question should seem ludicrous on its face, yet many serious, educated and accomplished people in the U.S. and globally claim we are, starting with the President of the United States, Joseph Biden. Add about half of the U.S. Congress, much of the corporate America, and the media and entertainment industries, which purportedly believe such drivel.

Making and believing evidence-free claims about human behavior contributing to catastrophic weather may be explained at least in part by the narcissistic tendencies of so many politicians and others with grandiose feelings of power and importance.

That human actions, namely, our economic behavior in an industrialized world, are causing the planet to warm in a tangible way and resulting in bad weather is belied by science and history.  Something deeper is occurring.

President Biden constantly asserts human-induced global warming…

View original post 776 more words

Biden Wrong On Fires And Ida

.

Climate headline chasing every time some bad weather arrives is not a good look, and has nothing to do with science.

PA Pundits - International

By Craig Rucker ~

Hurricane Ida brought powerful wind and rain to Louisiana and drenched the Northeast.

Devastating fires have consumed California forests and burned people out of their homes.

Politicians and pressure groups, from President Biden on down, rushed to capitalize on people’s heart-rending losses, and exploit them to push the global warming narrative.

President Biden said, “The past few days of Hurricane Ida and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “Global warming is upon us, and it’s going to get worse, and worse, and worse, and that’s why it’s so imperative that we pass the two bills.”

Embattled Governor Gary Newsom, speaking on the Caldor and Dixie fires, vowed to “continue to lead on climate change, and that is our resolve and…

View original post 307 more words

National Trust to give staff ‘Mediterranean hours’ and siestas amid climate change

Ham House

That increase in average temperatures of around one degree Celsius since the mid-19th century must be really stressful. It’s probably cheaper to offer siestas than to buy and operate suitable ventilation systems.
– – –
The National Trust is giving its workers Mediterranean-style siestas in summer due to climate change making the weather increasingly hot, reports Indy100.com.

Staff and volunteers in the south of England will start the day earlier, finish later, and have a long lunch break to avoid the hottest part of the day, as people already do in countries such as Italy and Spain.

A spokesperson for the charity told The Guardian: “It’s fair to say that, as we experience more extreme temperatures, we will be looking to offer Mediterranean working hours, especially in the east which is likely to experience more frequent higher temperatures to ensure the health and safety of our staff and volunteers.”

La Niña to emerge in Aug-Oct season, U.S. weather service says

No imminent upward pressure on global temperatures resulting from the ENSO phenomenon, judging by the latest analysis. Possibly the opposite, if current trends continue.
– – –
Aug.12 (Reuters) — The La Niña weather pattern could potentially develop during the August-October season, and last through the 2021-22 winter, the U.S. government’s National Weather Service said on Thursday. (Yahoo Finance reporting.)

The La Niña pattern is characterized by unusually low temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and is linked to floods and drought.

Punishing Climate Policies to Fix What’s Not Broken

.

‘The higher global warming, the more rainfall’, say climate alarmists — then complain about droughts causing wildfires. Confused? Yes they are. Here, Ben Pile looks at the case of the UK .

Science Matters

Ben Pile writes at Spiked Climate policy, not climate change, poses the biggest risk to our daily lives.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Firstly, Ben provides evidence for a reasonable person to conclude the weather and climate is doing nothing out of the ordinary.  Drawing on this year’s UK State of the Climate report:

But how significant are these changes really? Take, for example, the claim that the UK’s temperatures have increased. Leaving aside the possibility that land-use change thanks to the UK’s economic development might influence temperatures, the report offers this chart depicting 140 years of anomalies in UK and global annual temperatures:

Though the chart clearly shows that UK temperatures have risen, there is substantial year-to-year variability – far greater in the UK than for the world as a whole – that might make us wonder how impactful this extra warmth really is.

The point is…

View original post 701 more words

IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity’

.

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…

View original post 419 more words

Arctic climate change may not be making winter jet stream ‘weird’ after all

Arctic sea ice [image credit: Geoscience Daily]

‘New research is pouring cold water on once-hot theory’ – WashPo. Researchers refer to ‘overestimation’. (Weird in this context at least tends to mean something like ‘not well understood’).
– – –
An influential, highly publicized theory — that a warming Arctic is causing more intense winter outbreaks of cold and snow in midlatitudes — is hitting resistance from an ongoing sequence of studies, including the most comprehensive polar modeling to date, says the Washington Post.

The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.

Over the past decade, this hypothesis sparked widespread public interest and scientific debate, as various high-profile cold waves and snow onslaughts hit North America and Eurasia, including a deadly, prolonged cold wave in Texas last February.

Locals fascinated as rare heavy snow covers Brazil

Dude! What’s this cold white stuff doing here?
– – –
Brazil has experienced rare heavy snowfall since Thursday, threatening crops and bewildering locals who don’t usually see snow, reports The Independent.

More than 40 cities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul had icy conditions and at least 33 municipalities had snow, reported the meteorology company Somar Meteorologia.

On Friday, there were warnings of cold temperatures as a polar air mass travelled toward the centre-south of the agricultural powerhouse, threatening coffee, sugarcane and orange crops with frost.

The unusually cold temperature in the country has already forced coffee prices to rise.

Could Pacific Northwest heatwave, European floods have been caused by the Sun?

Credit: The Weather Network

Of course they could have been. The question is, were they? Assigning weather events to ‘global warming’ is ambiguous without a full definition of what the assigner means by that term. Jet stream blocking events discussed below are well-known to meteorologists, and constantly claiming them as evidence of a new human-caused problem with the climate is a stretch, to say the least.
– – –
The recent record-shattering heat wave in the Pacific northwest and devastating floods in western Europe have both been ascribed to global warming by many climate scientists, says Science Under Attack.

But an alternative explanation, voiced by some climatologists yet ignored by the mainstream media, is that the disasters were caused by the phenomenon of jet-stream blocking – which may or may not be a result of global warming, and could instead arise from a weakening of the sun’s output.

Blocking refers to the locking in place for several days or weeks of the jet stream, a narrow, high-altitude air current that flows rapidly from west to east in each hemisphere and governs much of our weather.

One of the more common blocking patterns is known as an “omega block,” a buckling of the jet stream named for its resemblance to the upper-case Greek letter omega, that produces alternating, stationary highs and lows in pressure as shown in the figure below. Under normal weather conditions, highs and lows move on quickly.

According to the blocking explanation, the torrential rains that hovered over parts of western Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands came from a low-pressure system trapped between two blocking highs to the west and east – the opposite situation to that shown in the figure.

Precipitation tends to increase in a warmer world because of enhanced evap­oration from tropical oceans, resulting in more water vapor in the atmosphere. So with a blocking low stuck over the Rhine valley and the ground already saturated from previous rainfall, it’s not surprising that swollen rivers overflowed and engulfed whole villages.

A similar argument can be invoked to explain the intense “heat dome” that parked itself over British Columbia, Washington and Oregon for five blisteringly hot days last month. In this case, it was a region of high pressure that was pinned in place by lows on either side, with the sweltering heat intensified by the effects of La Niña on North America.

Several Pacific northwest cities experienced temperatures a full 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above previous records.

There’s little doubt that both of these calamitous events resulted from jet-stream omega blocks. Blocking can also induce cold extremes, such as the deep freeze endured by Texas earlier this year. But how can blocking be caused by the sun?

Over the 11-year solar cycle, the sun’s heat and visible light fluctuate, as does its production of invisible UV, which varies much more than the tenth of a percent change in total solar output. It’s thought that changes in solar UV irradiance cause wind shifts in the stratosphere (the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere), which in turn induce blocking in the tropospheric jet stream via a feedback effect.

Blocking can also stem from other mechanisms. In the North Atlantic at least, a 2008 research paper found that during periods of low solar activity, blocking events in more eastward locations are longer and more intense than during higher solar activity.

Right now we’re entering a stretch of diminished solar output, signified by a falloff in the average monthly number of sunspots as depicted in the next figure.

The decline in the maximum number of sunspots over the last few cycles likely heralds the onset of a grand solar minimum, which could usher in a period of global cooling.

Full article here.

UK government backs scheme for motorway cables to power lorries

E-truck test route in Germany [image credit: transport-online.de]

Another one from the Department of Bad Ideas? Before they rush into anything, they might want to note the assessment of a writer for Mass Transit magazine 10 years ago, on the subject of overhead (catenary) lines. Here’s the opening paragraph in full: ‘They are expensive. They are dangerous. They are unsightly.’ Much more here, but let’s quote a few other comments:
‘Overhead lines require a lot of maintenance given the direct contact of the pantographs and their constant exposure to weather’
‘Winter storms play havoc with overhead wire systems’
‘Loose wires in the summer and wire breaks in the winter as a result of lines contracting and expanding with the temperature also create maintenance headaches’
‘A catenary line is a live wire suspended in the air. Weather issues therefore become serious safety concerns.’

Did somebody mention climate change as a reason for the road experiment?
– – –
The government will fund the design of a scheme to install overhead electric cables to power electric lorries on a motorway near Scunthorpe, as part of a series of studies on how to decarbonise road freight, reports The Guardian.

The electric road system – or e-highway – study, backed with £2m of funding, will draw up plans to install overhead cables on a 20km (12.4 miles) stretch of the M180 near Scunthorpe, in Lincolnshire.

If the designs are accepted and building work is funded the trucks could be on the road by 2024.

Germany’s flood disaster exposes folly of misbalanced Net Zero policies – The Global Warming Policy Forum

Credit: BBC

A meandering jet stream can lead to unusual weather conditions. Blaming ‘climate change’ (pick your own definition) is so vague as to be meaningless, but may serve to divert the spotlight away from political leaders.
– – –
The Global Warming Policy Forum has called on the UK government to learn the key lesson from the German flood disaster and adopt policies that prioritise effective and relative low cost flood protection over massively expensive and ineffective renewable energy targets.

In recent days, meteorologists and extreme weather researchers have blamed a ‘monumental failure of Germany’s flood warning system’ for the death and devastation triggered by disastrous flooding.

Experts had warned the German government four days before the first floods about the high risk of flooding in the Rhine basin, but the government failed to implement flood protection measures that are, in any case historically underfunded and thus ineffective.

Old-school data suggests hurricanes in the Atlantic are not more frequent than in the past

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Quote: ‘No evidence’. Not more intense either. Reports claiming otherwise were greatly exaggerated or at least ill-informed, it seems (as well as being frequent, and intensely irritating). Climate alarmists will not be amused.
– – –
Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States have determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.

Over the past several decades, scientists studying satellite data have found that the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean has been increasing.

Many in the field have suggested that this is due to the impact of global warming.

Science failed to predict flood and heat intensity, needs better computer – BBC

Weather forecasting technology

Maybe they need better ideas, not just more expensive modelling gear run by the same climate obsessives pushing worn-out theories that have never worked. Sales talk of ‘delivering the quantum leap’ sounds a bit thin after decades of posing as masters of climate understanding.
– – –
Top climate scientists have admitted they failed to predict the intensity of the German floods and the North American heat dome, says BBC News.

They’ve correctly warned over decades that a fast-warming climate would bring worse bursts of rain and more damaging heatwaves.

But they say their computers are not powerful enough to accurately project the severity of those extremes.

They want governments to spend big on a shared climate super-computer.

Britain faces power cuts as electricity begins to run everything from cars to boilers, say ‘climate change advisers’

[credit: green lantern electric]

‘What a surprise’, said no-one. Cue vague waffle about facing the issues, mainly caused by ditching reliable (compared to renewables) on-demand electricity generation from coal and gas.
– – –
Britain faces catastrophic power cuts because of an increasing reliance on electricity to run everything from cars to home boilers, the Committee on Climate Change has warned. The Telegraph reporting.

Decarbonisation plans, which involve switching transport and heating away from petrol and gas, will mean outages in the future have a greater impact, the Government’s independent advisory committee on climate change has said, as it urged the Government to make sure the system could withstand extreme weather.

Are wind farms slowing each other down?

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

Wind ‘farms’ are allergic to each other it seems, sometimes leading to sizable drops in output. Awkward when space isn’t unlimited, some of the best sites are already taken, and the plan is to multiply the existing fleets. Weather dependency is even greater than expected.
– – –
The expansion of wind energy in the German Bight and the Baltic Sea has accelerated enormously in recent years, TechXplore.

The first systems went into operation in 2008. Today, wind turbines with an output of around 8,000 megawatts operate in German waters, which corresponds to around eight nuclear power plants.

But space is limited. For this reason, wind farms are sometimes built very close to one another.

A team led by Dr. Naveed Akhtar from Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon has found that wind speeds at the downstream windfarm are significantly slowed down.

Newly discovered African ‘climate seesaw’ drove human evolution

Generalized Walker Circulation (December-February) during ENSO-neutral conditions. Convection associated with rising branches of the Walker Circulation is found over the Maritime continent, northern South America, and eastern Africa. [Credit: NOAA Climate.gov — drawing by Fiona Martin]

El Niño and 100,000 year glaciation/climate cycles feature prominently in this research. The Walker circulation has been described as ENSO’s atmospheric buddy.
– – –
While it is widely accepted that climate change drove the evolution of our species in Africa, the exact character of that climate change and its impacts are not well understood, says Phys.org.

Glacial-interglacial cycles strongly impact patterns of climate change in many parts of the world, and were also assumed to regulate environmental changes in Africa during the critical period of human evolution over the last ~1 million years.

The ecosystem changes driven by these glacial cycles are thought to have stimulated the evolution and dispersal of early humans.

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week challenges this view.