Some Antarctic ice shelves grew in area over the last 20 years – study

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

Much ado about sea ice in recent times, but usually in terms of promoting climate alarm. On closer inspection East Antarctica (2/3rds of the continent) tells a somewhat different story.
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Some ice shelves in the eastern Antarctic have grown in the last 20 years despite global warming, a study suggests.

Researchers say that sea ice, pushed against the ice shelves by a change in regional wind patterns, may have helped to protect the ice shelves from losses, reports Yahoo News.

Ice shelves are floating sections of ice attached to land-based ice sheets and they help guard against the uncontrolled release of inland ice into the ocean.

Exploding e-scooters kill four as heatwave damages batteries

Ballistic battery time again. Insurers and fire fighters must be nervous as mass battery-powered travel is supposed to be the future in many countries.
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There have been near daily reports of electric scooters catching fire across India amid record-breaking temperatures, says The Telegraph.

At least four Indians have died since March after their electric scooters caught fire, with record-breaking temperatures caused by climate change now feared to be behind the deadly blazes.

A father and daughter died in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in March, while two men died in two separate incidents in April in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

World’s biggest carbon removal machine ‘freezes over’ in Iceland

Priceless!
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Enormous device to halt global warming brought to heel by unusually cold weather, reports The Independent.

Alternative source: World’s Largest Carbon Removal Facility Designed to Fight Global Warming Suffers Major Setback After Arctic Blast Freezes Machinery.

Frozen birds and flooded towns: How Britain grappled with climate change 500 years ago

Frost fair

Natural climate variation has always been, and still is, a fact of life, regardless of minor changes to trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Extreme weather not just a modern phenomenon as study reveals how British towns experienced drastic climate during ‘Little Ice Age’
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Extreme weather caused by global warming is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, claims the Daily Telegraph.

However, a research project has thrown light on the catastrophic climate shift endured by England just a few centuries ago, which brought snowstorms that lasted weeks, flooding which washed away entire villages and winds that sank flotillas of ships.

From the 1500s to the 1700s, England went through an unusually cold and stormy period, nicknamed the Little Ice Age, which was possibly caused either by reduced activity from the sun, volcanic eruptions or atmospheric changes.

French winemakers fan flames to save 2022 crop after unexpectedly sharp frosts

A winegrower lights anti-frost candles in a French vineyard [image credit: thelocal.fr]

‘Climate change’ gets the blame of course, which is code for human activities in the media, politics etc. How trace gases might cause warmth one month and frosts the next in a particular region of the world is not explained. Short video via link below.
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Climate extremes in France this spring have again made it a race against time for vineyard owners to protect their crops, reports BBC News.

March warmth and April frosts in 2021 resulted in one of the country’s lowest wine production in years. This year is proving every bit as tough.
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France experiences coldest April night since 1947
Published: 4 April 2022

The French weather forecaster Météo France recorded temperatures of -9C on Sunday night, reports Thelocal.fr.

Simulations explain Greenland’s slower summer warming, say researchers

Kangerlussuaq Fjord, Greenland [image credit: notsogreen.com]

‘Temperatures and rates of ice sheet melting both peaked in 2012’ – interesting quote from the report. The researchers assume that natural factors are merely impeding the inevitable warming they expect from carbon dioxide emission increases, but assumptions can be risky.
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A puzzling, decade-long slowdown in summer warming across Greenland has been explained by researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan, says Phys.org.

Their observational analysis and computer simulations revealed that changes in sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles to the south, trigger cooler summer temperatures across Greenland.

The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, will help improve future predictions of Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice melting in coming decades.

A ‘heat wave’ and snowfall: Why researchers are puzzled by Antarctica’s recent weather

Antarctica

The alarmist Guardian’s ‘climate disaster’ turns out to be ‘climate mitigation’, due to the massive snowfall. A so-called heatwave where temperatures reached a chilly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 Celsius), seems to have fooled a lot of people. The Guardian speculates that ‘climate breakdown could be accelerating’, but seeing what you wanted to see doesn’t always work.
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While researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change plays here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme, says NBC News.

It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.

In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.

The comparatively balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky.

This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.

Victorian rainfall data shows extreme UK weather events are nothing new

It’s better than we thought! Another setback for alarmists as modern UK rainfall isn’t living up to the climate hype after all. Will the ‘adjusters’ be called in?
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Newly transcribed data from the Victorian era has ‘smashed’ current rainfall records, report experts at the Met Office and the University of Reading.

Heavy rainfall may be associated with flash floods and the modern-day battle against climate change, says the Daily Mail.

But a new study led by the Met Office and the University of Reading shows it’s nothing new – in fact, newly recovered data from the Victorian era has ‘smashed’ current rainfall records.

Nations vet 3,000-page handbook to ‘halt climate crisis’?

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

How delusional can these self-appointed weather managers get? Their ‘carbon pollution’ is a trace gas (a mere 0.04% of the atmosphere) essential to the natural world. But in their minds it’s a disaster waiting to happen, if not already happening, and so the endless hype and demands for ever more massive expenditure go on.
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Nearly 200 nations gather Monday to grapple with a question that will outlive Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (says Phys.org): how does a world addicted to fossil fuels prevent carbon pollution from making Earth unliveable?

A partial answer is set for April 4 after closed-door, virtual negotiations approve a nearly 3,000-page report detailing options for drawing down greenhouse gases and extracting them from the air.

“The impacts are costly and mounting, but we still have some time to close the window and get ahead of the worst of them if we act now,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think-tank E3G.

“This report will supply the answers as to what we need if we’re serious about getting there.”

An Atmospheric River of Dust

At least a few times a year, strong and persistent winds from the south drive Saharan dust north toward Europe, as recent research explains. Two such events in 2021 ‘led to snow darkening by dust deposition over the Alps with 40% decrease in snow albedo’, among other effects. NASA says the dust plays a major role in Earth’s climate and biological systems, absorbing and reflecting solar energy and fertilizing ocean ecosystems with iron and other minerals that plants and phytoplankton need to grow. A slight positive trend in the frequency of such events since 1980 is suggested to be related to the El Niños in the period. The research paper hints at the need for climate models to take these events into account.
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On March 15, 2022, a plume of Saharan dust was blown out of North Africa and across the Mediterranean into Western Europe, says NASA’s Earth Observatory.

The dust turned skies orange, blanketed cities, impaired air quality, and stained ski slopes.

The plume was driven by an atmospheric river arising from Storm Celia, which brought strong winds, rain, and snow to the Canary Islands.

Atmospheric rivers, normally associated with extreme moisture, can also carry dust.

Do Wind Farms Change The Weather?

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More research needed it seems, but it hasn’t been ruled out.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

The effect of lots of wind turbines on weather and climate is a small but active research area. Wind power converts wind energy into electricity, thereby removing that energy from the air.

The research issue of how taking a lot of energy out might affect weather or climate seems to have emerged as early as 2004. Studies range from the global climate impact down to the local effects of a single large wind facility.

Here is a nontechnical article on a key global climate scale paper in 2011: “Wind and wave farms could affect Earth’s energy balance“in New Scientist magazine, March 30, 2011. Must register to read here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063-300-wind-and-wave-farms-could-affect-earths-energy-balance/

Here is the seminal technical paper: “Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences” by L. M. Miller, F. Gans, and A. Kleidon; Earth System Dynamics…

View original post 657 more words

Climate of modern-day Europe mimics the climate of 14th century Europe, say researchers

Europe in 1328 [image credit: Wikipedia]

Echoes of the Medieval Warm Period here? Long before the spectre of fossil fuel emissions was put forward as a possible climatic factor of course. We already covered some of this here, but as this is a new article let’s have another go.
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LEIPZIG, Germany — Is weather history repeating itself? asks Study Finds.

The Arctic has experienced a steady increase in temperature since the 1980s, causing meteorological patterns that resemble 14th century Europe, research shows.

Scientists from the Leibniz Institutes for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) and Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) [studied] weather transitions in ancient Europe in the early 1300s and discovered droughts similar to the conditions in Europe in 2018.

Jet stream that brought storm Eunice has been getting faster over last century

Forecaster highlights the jetstream over the UK [image credit: BBC]

Worth noting, even if the somewhat vague conclusion favoured here is that it’s likely to be an effect of global warming (etc.).
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New research from the University of Southampton shows that the winter jet stream over the North Atlantic and Eurasia has increased its average speed by 8% to 132 miles per hour, says Phys.org.

The jet stream, which this week brought storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin to the UK, has also has moved northwards by up to 330 kilometers.

The findings relate to the 141-year period from 1871–2011.

Snow depth trends revealed from CMIP6 models conflict with observations

Erie, Pennsylvania [image credit: UK Met Office]

Another modelling problem to add to the list: ‘The models reproduced decreasing snow depth trends that contradicted the observations’. Will any of this get a mention in next week’s new IPCC report?
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Seasonal snow cover plays an important role in the interactions between ground and atmosphere, including energy and hydrological fluxes, thus influencing climatological and hydrological processes, says Phys.org.

Researchers from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Lanzhou University evaluated the simulated snow depth from 22 CMIP6 models across high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere over the period 1955–2014 by using a high-quality in situ observational dataset.

Related results were published in the Journal of Climate.

Met Office: Why Storm Eunice was so severe, and will violent wind storms become more common?

Credit: Wikipedia

Spoiler: the Met Office wouldn’t ask its ‘more common’ question if it was confident it knew the answer. Instead it turns to its new buzz term: “sting jet”.
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The UK Met Office has issued two red weather warnings in as many months for strong winds, says Phys.org.

These are the highest threat levels meteorologists can announce, and are the first wind-only red warnings to be issued since 2016’s Storm Gertrude.

So what’s behind the UK’s recent spate of dangerous wind storms? And are these events likely to become more common in future?

Storm Arwen in late November 2021 caused devastation across Scotland, northern England and parts of Wales. Winds of 100mph killed three people, ripped up trees, and left 9,000 people without power for over a week in freezing temperatures.

The destruction caused by Arwen is still apparent in some areas, and the clean-up from Storm Dudley—which battered eastern England on Wednesday February 16—is underway at the time of writing.

Now the UK faces Storm Eunice, and its gusts of up to 122 miles per hour. Eunice bears a striking similarity to the “Great Storm” of 1987, which unleashed hurricane-force winds and claimed 22 lives across Britain and France in October of that year. Both are predicted to contain a “sting jet”: a small, narrow airstream that can form inside a storm and produce intense winds over an area smaller than 100 km.

Sting jets, which were first discovered in 2003, and likely occurred during the Great Storm and Storm Arwen, can last anywhere between one and 12 hours. They are difficult to forecast and relatively rare, but make storms more dangerous.

Sting jets occur in a certain type of extratropical cyclone—a rotating wind system that forms outside of the tropics. These airstreams form around 5km above the Earth’s surface then descend on the southwest side of a cyclone, close to its center, accelerating as they do and bringing fast-moving air from high in the atmosphere with them.

When they form, they can produce much higher wind speeds on the ground than might otherwise be forecast by studying pressure gradients in the storm’s core alone.

Meteorologists are still working to understand sting jets, but they are likely to have a significant influence on the UK’s weather in a warming climate. [Talkshop comment: Isn’t everything, in Met Office model world?]
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Our research team’s new high-resolution climate models predict bigger increases in winter rainfall than standard global climate models due to a large increase in rainfall from thunderstorms during winter.

We are less certain about how the pattern of extreme wind storms, like Eunice, will change, as the relevant processes are much more complicated.

The UK’s recent cluster of winter wind storms is related to a particularly strong polar vortex creating low pressure in the Arctic, and a faster jet stream—a core of very strong wind high in the atmosphere that can extend across the Atlantic—bringing stormier and very wet weather to the UK.

A stronger jet stream makes storms more powerful and its orientation roughly determines the track of the storm and where it affects.

Some aspects of climate change strengthen the jet stream, leading to more UK wind storms. Other aspects, like the higher rate of warming over the poles compared with the equator, may weaken it and the westerly flow of wind towards the UK.

Our high-resolution models predict more intense wind storms over the UK as climate change accelerates, with much of this increase coming from storms that develop sting jets.

Projections from global climate models are uncertain and suggest only small increases in the number of extreme cyclones. But these models fail to represent sting jets and poorly simulate the processes that cause storms to build. As a result, these models probably underestimate future changes in storm intensity.

We think that using high-resolution climate models, which can represent important processes like sting jets, alongside information from global models on how large-scale conditions might change, could give a more accurate picture. But the UK isn’t doing enough to prepare for the increasingly severe extreme weather already predicted.

Humanity has a choice in how much warmer the world gets based on the rate at which we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [Talkshop comment: evidence-free assertion].

While more research will confirm if more extreme wind storms will hit the UK in the future, we are certain that winter storms will produce stronger downpours and more rain and flooding when they do occur.

Full article here.

Storm Eunice: Was climate change responsible? – asks the BBC

Having recently advanced the idea that climate change was pushing UK storms further south, from Scotland to northern England, the BBC now features someone saying that the jet streams will move further north – for the same reason, i.e. climate change. Of course their chosen weather predicter is a net-zero enthusiast spouting the usual alarmist propaganda.
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Heavy rainfall, flooding and storm surges will become more common in the UK if global temperatures continue to increase, say scientists.
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Some scientists have suggested that the impact of storm Eunice – and future storms – has been exacerbated by the climate crisis, says BBC Science Focus.

But how exactly do rising temperatures affect the UK weather?

More than eight million trees lost this winter in the UK – BBC invokes climate change, as usual

Storm Arwen damage 2021 [image credit: Cwmcafit @ Wikipedia]

You just know that sooner rather than later the BBC will play its climate change (meaning humans in their book) card in an article about any kind of adverse or unusual weather conditions, even if only lasting a day or two, and sure enough…so predictable and tedious. They also conveniently forgot that in the ‘Great Storm’ of 1987 which felled an estimated 15 million trees in England alone, much of the damage was in southern England, northern France and the Channel Islands.
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It is the untold story of the winter storms, says BBC News.

More than eight million trees have been brought down and many are now threatened by another two named storms bearing down on Britain.

Forest managers warn that already “catastrophic” damage will be made worse by Storms Dudley and Eunice.

There are warnings that the heating climate is making our weather more severe and unpredictable, and that management and planting strategies must adapt more quickly.

Southern Ocean storms cause outgassing of carbon dioxide

Antarctica

A key sentence to note in this report says: ‘Half of all carbon dioxide bound in the world’s oceans is found in the Southern Ocean.’ What impact does the outgassing have on the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, which we’re expected to believe is a matter of huge climate concern requiring drastic and expensive measures for decades to come?
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Storms over the waters around Antarctica drive an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new international study with researchers from the University of Gothenburg. — Phys.org reporting.

The research group used advanced ocean robots for the study, which provides a better understanding of climate change and can lead to better global climate models.

The world’s southernmost ocean, the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, plays an important role in the global climate because its waters contain large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Road to net zero will cost trillions a year, report says

This BBC report trots out the usual evidence-free assertions about the supposed human causes of recent warming. But ignoring the role of natural variation and spending fortunes on the basis of poorly performing climate models looks little better than casino gambling. For waverers the threat of extreme weather is pulled out of the hat.
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Trillions of dollars need to be spent every year for almost three decades to hit net zero targets, according to consultancy McKinsey. — BBC News reporting.

On top of current spending, the equivalent of half of all corporate profits will have to be invested to tackle global warming, it says.

McKinsey highlights that gaining acceptance will be tough, especially from those paying energy bills.

But the alternative is more extreme weather, experts have warned.

Frozen Turkey, snow havoc in southeast Europe

‘Climate crisis’ latest: too much snow and severe cold at night in parts of the Mediterranean region.
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Europe’s busiest airport shut down in Istanbul on Monday while schools and vaccination centres closed in Athens as a rare snowstorm blanketed swathes of the eastern Mediterranean, causing blackouts and traffic havoc, reports Phys.org.

The closure of Istanbul Airport — where the roof of one of the cargo terminals collapsed under heavy snow, causing no injuries — grounded flights stretching from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and Asia.

Travel officials told AFP it marked the glass-and-steel structure’s first shutdown since it replaced Istanbul’s old Ataturk Airport as the new hub for Turkish Airlines in 2019.