Swiss parliament snubs European court climate ruling, dubbed “judicial activism”

Judges trying to punish governments for not controlling present or future weather is an absurdity ripe for knocking on the head. In any case, Swiss glaciers have advanced and retreated in the past with no input from the government or anyone else, so local climate variation is nothing new.
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BERN (Reuters) -The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted on Wednesday to reject a ruling ordering Switzerland to do more to combat global warming in a move that could encourage others to resist the influence of international courts, reports Swissinfo.ch.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued an unprecedented judgment that said Bern had violated the human rights of a group of older Swiss women, the KlimaSeniorinnen, by failing to tackle climate change.

But Bern’s lower house on Wednesday followed in the steps of the upper house and passed a non-binding motion with 111 votes in favour and 72 against blasting the court’s “judicial activism”.

Why is June so cold and when will it warm up? Wind direction as usual

When the weather systems reaching the UK are coming from the northerly Icelandic direction instead of from the sub-tropical Azores, no prizes for guessing what happens next. While the UK searches for any signs of summer, Eastern Europe has a heatwave. Sky decides to explain about the jet stream anyway, in case you overdosed on the media’s human-caused warming propaganda and thought you were entitled to expect warmer weather than what’s arriving now.
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June’s wet and grey weather does not feel particularly summery, so what is going on and, more importantly, when will it warm up?

Last month was the UK’s hottest May on record, as higher temperatures during the night and warm weather in Scotland pushed up the temperature to about one degree above average, says Sky News.

But just over a week into June, the mercury has dropped.

New paper makes ‘increasing tropical cyclone frequency’ claim, but contradicted two years ago by NOAA

NOAA July 2022 headline: Research: Global warming contributed to decline in tropical cyclones in the 20th century. Now the same global warming is supposed to be increasing their frequency? Does not compute. NOAA Research said: ‘The annual number of tropical cyclones forming globally has decreased by approximately 13% during the 20th century, and scientists say the main cause is a rise in global warming, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change by a group of international scientists including NOAA scientists.’
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EurekAlert news release: Climate: Increasing tropical cyclone frequency may have deadly consequences for seabird populations

The increase in tropical cyclone frequency and intensity due to climate change could lead to dramatic declines in seabird populations, suggests a paper published in Communications Earth & Environment.

The authors’ conclusion is based on the impacts of Cyclone Ilsa on Bedout Island, after the cyclone killed at least 80% of seabirds nesting on the island when it struck in April 2023.

Serious floods in southern Germany – Chancellor beats his climate drum, ignoring history

Flooding like this has been recorded for centuries, e.g. on the Danube at Passau, Bavaria. Politicians are doing the usual bandwagon-jumping trick by trying to invoke human causes as the problem.
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Floods caused by heavy rain in southern Germany have claimed at least four lives, reports BBC News.

The victims include three people found in flooded basements on Monday. On Sunday a firefighter died while trying to rescue trapped residents.

Thousands of people in the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have fled their homes since torrential rains began on Friday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who visited affected areas, said the flooding was a reminder of critical environmental challenges.

Climate extremes in Svalbard over the last two millennia are linked to atmospheric blocking, say researchers

Article: ‘Since observational measurements started, blocking in the Arctic has increased, as has Arctic warming.’ When researchers investigated ‘they found a stunning correlation’. No mention of greenhouse gases in the study.
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A team of scientists led by François Lapointe, a research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has combined paleoclimatic data from the last 2,000 years with powerful computer modeling and in-the-field research on lake sediments and tree rings to show that an understudied phenomenon, known as atmospheric blocking, has long influenced temperature swings in the Arctic.

As temperatures warm due to climate change, claims EurekAlert, atmospheric blocking will help drive ever-wilder weather events. [Talkshop comment – routine alarmist hype].

The study focused on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago, Svalbard, at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and was published in Nature Communications.

NOAA’s ‘record-breaking’ hurricane season forecast – heard it before?

The ‘average’ 2022 season was supposed to be a big one but not much happened until near the end of it. Any hurricane season prediction could turn out to be better than guesswork of course, but the current skill level of forecasters is debatable, perhaps coloured by alarmist expectations in some cases. Last week a Forbes article had the title: Climate Change, Though Quite Real, Isn’t Spawning More Hurricanes. (‘Quite real’ is an amusingly weak endorsement, one of the I-suppose-I-should-say-that variety as a nod to alarmist theory). Forbes: ‘are we seeing an ominous upward historical trend in the hazard posed by major Atlantic hurricanes? No.’
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More than two dozen hurricanes could be on their way this year, thanks to climate change [Talkshop comment – of course!] and La Niña, experts have forecast.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have made their highest-ever May forecast for an Atlantic hurricane season: 17 to 25 named storms, says LiveScience.

According to the forecast, 13 of these storms will be hurricanes, with winds of 74 mph (119 km/h) or higher, and four to seven will be major hurricanes, with winds of 111 mph (179 km/h) or higher.

Data Refutes Media’s ‘Attribution’ Con That Climate Change Boosted Dubai’s Rainfall

Time to put the great(?) climate attribution con game to bed permanently. By assuming what it’s trying to prove it becomes seriously unconvincing. Talk of ‘fingerprints of climate change’ is more like waffle than science.
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A few media outlets, including CNN and BBC, have run recent articles talking about flooding in Dubai, claiming that climate change made the storms worse. This is false, says Climate Realism (via Climate Change Dispatch).

There is no evidence that climate change made the rain more extreme, instead, evidence indicates that El Niño and even cloud-seeding may have contributed.

Both the BBC’s article, “Deadly Dubai floods made worse by climate change,” and the one posted by CNN, “Scientists find the fingerprints of climate change on Dubai’s deadly floods,” reference a study done by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, which claimed that climate change made the rain events 10 to 40 percent more intense than if global warming was not occurring.

Drought study raises tricky questions for UN’s climate loss and damage fund

What defines a ‘climate victim’? The impossible conundrum for the UN, facing claims for any climate-related disaster, is: would/could it have happened (to the same magnitude) anyway, for example due to natural factors or mistakes of some kind, regardless of unproven theories about possible human causes behind weather events? Eligibility for compensation depends on the answer, but funds obviously aren’t unlimited and nobody will readily accept a refusal.
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Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger.

But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses, says Climate Home News.

Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food.

“Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside his church last month.

The government and some humanitarian agencies were quick to blame the lack of rain on climate change.

Photos of torrential Dubai flash floods show the downsides of trying to control the weather

The UAE’s cloud seeding operations worsened the Dubai flash floods according to this source. Would-be climate savers with grandiose schemes can take note.
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Summary:
— The United Arab Emirates experienced torrential rainfall and severe flash floods on Tuesday.
— The flooding was worsened by the UAE’s cloud seeding practice to address water scarcity.
— The weather modification method involves getting clouds to drop more precipitation.
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Torrential rainfall pummeled the United Arab Emirates this week, resulting in flash floods that have caused air travel delays, closed schools, and deluged homes, says Business Insider.

Dubai International Airport — recently named the most luxurious airport in the world — was diverting planes as of Tuesday evening until the weather conditions improved, according to a statement.

El Niño ends with uncertainty over cooler future, says BBC

The BBC likes to lace articles like this with ‘climate change’ as though it’s a brand, without ever defining it. As usual an obvious case of a natural cycle is infected by some preconceived ideas and assertions of alarmists. But their high hopes and predictions of a lengthy El Niño have faded on this occasion, as potential La Niña conditions start to appear. There’s talk of uncharted territory ahead due to last year’s unexpected ‘heat spike’.
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The powerful El Niño weather event which along with climate change has helped push global temperatures to new highs, has ended, say scientists.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says the Pacific Ocean has “cooled substantially” in the past week.

This naturally occurring episode that began last June brought warmer waters to the surface of the Pacific, adding extra heat to the atmosphere, says BBC News.

But what happens next is uncertain, say researchers.

Dundee blame global warming for Rangers pitch call-off

The UN’s climate change mind virus is having damaging effects on a variety of people. Weather conditions can sometimes be a problem for sports venues, but inventing spurious excuses only leads to ridicule. This may be a minor story but indicative of a wider malaise in some people’s thinking, or lack of thinking perhaps.
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Dundee have just been embarrassed by an amateur Tayside club after their call off with Rangers, says Rangers News.

The Ibrox side are furious after Dens Park failed a second pitch inspection ahead of the visit of Philippe Clement’s treble-chasing bears.
. . .
Tayside Fire Brigade game goes ahead

The Tayside Fire Brigade – who play in the Dundee Saturday Morning Football League Division 1 – will be able to play their game this evening. [Talkshop comment – morning/evening?!]

The club are set to take on St Andrews Amatuers at the Riverside Playing Fields at the University of Dundee.

On the banks of the River Tay, Riverside is only 12 minutes drive from Dens Park and the game will add extra embarrassment to Dundee following the Rangers game being called off.

Network Rail hopes staff will be ‘amateur meteorologists’

Among the latest excuses for train service disruption are problems caused by ‘heavier rain’ and more ‘extreme weather’, due to the catch-all climate change. Storm frequency is called ‘unprecedented’ but such claims lack substance without detailed historical data.
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Network Rail is aiming to turn hundreds of staff into “amateur meteorologists” as part of plans to deal with the effects of climate change, says BBC News.

It wants to help staff to interpret weather forecasts to make better decisions during storms or heatwaves.

The public rail body said it will spend £2.8bn over the next five years on efforts to cope with extreme weather.

Its boss Andrew Haines said climate change was “the biggest challenge our railway faces”.

Polar vortex is ‘spinning backwards’ above Arctic after major reversal event

The new polar vortex blog hosted by NOAA says ‘some winters come and go without a single interesting thing happening in the stratosphere’, but this one wasn’t one of those. The blog also notes: ‘Odds of polar vortex collapse boosted during El Niño…But not all the El Niños’. The article below says ‘Changes to the polar vortex influence the jet stream, which can in turn impact weather across the Northern Hemisphere’ (caption to NOAA graphic).
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The polar vortex circling the Arctic is swirling in the wrong direction after surprise warming in the upper atmosphere triggered a major reversal event earlier this month, says Live Science.

It is one of the most extreme atmospheric U-turns seen in recent memory.

In the past, disruptions to the polar vortex — a rotating mass of cold air that circles the Arctic — have triggered extremely cold weather and storms across large parts of the U.S.

The current change in the vortex’s direction probably won’t lead to a similar “big freeze.” But the sudden switch-up has caused a record-breaking “ozone spike” above the North Pole.

An increase in the number of extreme cold days in North China during 2003–2012, research finds

The researchers wrestle with the non-correlation of extreme winter weather events and the monotonic increase in CO2 levels, offering a verdict of ‘probable’ natural variation. They try to support IPCC climate assertions, but the article keeps saying ‘however’. One of the study’s authors says: “This is still a challenging issue that needs further exploration to quantify the relative contributions of natural variability and human activity to regional extreme events.”
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A recent study by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, presents robust interdecadal changes in the number of extreme cold days in winter over North China during 1989–2021, and the findings have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, says EurekAlert.

Specifically, the number of extreme cold days increased around the year 2003 and then decreased around the year 2013, with a value of 8.7 days per year during 1989–2002, 13.5 during 2003–2012, and 6.6 during 2013–2021.

During 2003–2012, the Siberian–Ural High strengthened and the polar jet stream weakened, which favored frequent cold air intrusion into North China, inducing more extreme cold days. In addition, the intensity of extreme cold days in North China showed no significant difference in the three periods.

Two million animals dead as extreme winter weather hits Mongolia

The UN as usual blames ‘climate change’ (no definition available) which is synonymous with global warming to a lot of people. Snowfall in the country is reported as the heaviest since 1975.
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Bayanmunkh Sum: More than two million animals have died in Mongolia so far this winter, a government official said Monday, as the country endures extreme cold and snow, reports Gulf News.

The landlocked country is no stranger to severe weather from December to March, when temperatures plummet as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 Fahrenheit) in some areas.

But this winter has been more severe than usual, with lower than normal temperatures and very heavy snowfall, the United Nations said in a recent report.

As of Monday, 2.1 million head of livestock had died from starvation and exhaustion, Gantulga Batsaikhan of the country’s agriculture ministry said.

Mongolia had 64.7 million such animals, including sheep, goats, horses and cows, at the end of 2023, official statistics show.

The extreme weather is known as “dzud” and typically results in the deaths of huge numbers of livestock.

The United Nations said climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of dzuds.

Mongolia has experienced six dzuds in the past decade, including the winter of 2022-23 when 4.4 million head of livestock perished.

This year’s dzud has been exacerbated by a summer drought that prevented animals from building up enough fatty stores to survive the harsh winter.

‘Praying for warmer weather’
Seventy percent of Mongolia is experiencing “dzud or near dzud” conditions, the UN said.

That compares with 17 percent of the country at the same time in 2023.
. . .
Snowfall this year – the heaviest since 1975 – has compounded herders’ woes, trapping them in colder areas and making them unable to buy food and hay for their animals from the nearby towns.

Full report here.
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Image: Another tough winter for Mongolian livestock [credit: eurasianet.org]

Flying laboratory measuring cloud chemistry above Australia aims to improve climate model predictions

The German scientists are engaged in an ongoing project intended to help refine climate modelling. One sums up their approach: “To predict it, we really need to understand it.” But ideally that understanding, if or when it occurs, should have preceded many of the dire claims already put forward that the global climate is going downhill due to human activities. Such biases could be a hindrance to research.
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A team of German scientists have been circling the skies above northern Australia and the Pacific Ocean in a high-tech research aircraft studying the atmospheric chemistry occurring above the clouds, says ABC News.

The Chemistry of the Atmosphere: Field Experiment (CAFE) team has tracked weather events and taken samples and measurements up to 15 kilometres above sea level.

Professor Mira Pöhlker from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research and Max Planck Institute for Chemistry said the team’s research would help refine weather and climate models leading to better forecasts and projections.

‘This is weird’: Experts ‘shocked’ by record-breaking longevity of Death Valley’s phantom lake

No sign of any blame being attached to human activities, in this article at least.
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A temporary lake at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park has persisted for more than six months, which is far longer than it has lasted before.

And experts say that it could stick around for quite a while yet, says Live Science.

Park rangers in Death Valley are scratching their heads as to how the desert’s phantom lake has persisted for more than half a year — likely its longest lifespan in living memory.

A recent rain dump also means that the puzzling pool of water, which normally dries up within weeks of appearing, could remain intact for several more months.

El Niño fading, ‘good chance’ of La Niña to follow says atmospheric physicist

Natural phenomena dictating weather patterns. The El Niño of 2023-24 is described as ‘strange’, possibly due to some extent to the Tonga undersea volcanic eruption of 2022.
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Wild weather has been roiling North America for the past few months, thanks in part to a strong El Niño that sent temperatures surging in 2023, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

The climate phenomenon fed atmospheric rivers drenching the West Coast and contributed to summer’s extreme heat in the South and Midwest and fall’s wet storms across the East.

That strong El Niño is now starting to weaken and will likely be gone by late spring 2024.

Researchers probe a conundrum: If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Gulf Stream flows

Some recent cold weather events are puzzling to global warming researchers, in terms of climate model expectations. Especially so for the ‘Center for Irreversible Climate Change’ in South Korea. Temporary natural variation seems to be the conclusion. What else could they say without casting doubt on human-caused warming theories?
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If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Indeed, East Asia and North America have experienced frequent extreme weather events since the 2000s that defy average climate change projections, says Phys.org.

Many experts have blamed Arctic warming and a weakening jet stream due to declining Arctic sea ice, but climate model experiments have not adequately demonstrated their validity.

The massive power outage in Texas in February 2021 was caused by an unusual cold snap, and climate models are needed to accurately predict the risk of extreme weather events in order to prevent massive socioeconomic damage.

French ‘rubbing their hands’ as Britain forced to import £1.5bn of electricity

Another expensive and wasteful result of ‘net zero’ climate obsession in government, as the much vaunted renewables policy continues to prove fatally flawed, no matter how much is spent on it. One obvious problem with wind power is that the times of peak electricity demand and the times of optimal wind conditions rarely coincide. In other words, variable weather, not properly factored in by policymakers. Relying on averages won’t work either.
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Britain imported a record amount of electricity from Europe last year as solar and wind farms struggled to generate sufficient energy in the wake of coal and nuclear power plant closures, says The Telegraph.

The UK forked out £3.5bn on electricity from France, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands last year, accounting for 12pc of net supply, according to research from London Stock Exchange (LSEG) Power Research.

According to official data, France accounted for around £1.5bn of power sold to the UK in the year to November 2023 while Norway earned around £500m.