Is NASA’s ‘Key Takeaway’ on Arctic summer sea ice minima obsolete?

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Recent data tell a somewhat different story to the one NASA want to put forward. The mean rate of change in September minima reduced to something akin to zero after 2007, maybe even a small (relative to the 1980 peak) rise.

‘Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.6% per decade as a result of global warming’, says NASA.

But their own interactive ‘ANNUAL SEPTEMBER MINIMUM EXTENT’ graph (here) gives the game away. For example:

2007 minimum: 4.07 km. (lowest since 1979, at the time).
2021: 4.72 km.
2022: 4.67 km.

Only two of the last fifteen years (2012, 2020) were lower than 2007, the rest at least the same (2016) or upto 25% above.

Peak decline was from 1996-2007, about one solar cycle (SC 23). Those days seem to have gone, for now at least. The most recent decade did not show a decline anywhere near 12.6%, or even any net decline.

September minima for 2021 and 2022 were both noticeably higher than those of 2011 and 2012, for example.
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NASA: Arctic sea ice minimum ties for tenth lowest

NASA: Scientific Visualization Studio

Fresh understanding of ice age frequency – Otago study

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

By saying, of Antarctica’s ice sheets, “this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago”, the research adds a new twist to the longstanding 100,000 year problem of ice ages. It puts obliquity firmly back in the frame.
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A chance find of an unstudied Antarctic sediment core has led University of Otago researchers to flip our understanding of how often ice ages occurred in Antarctica, says Eurekalert.

Lead author Dr Christian Ohneiser, of the Department of Geology, says it turns out they were much more frequent than previously assumed.

“Until this research, it was common knowledge that over the last million years global ice volume, which includes Antarctica’s ice sheets, expanded and retreated every 100,000 years.

“However, this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago,” he says.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen rejects ‘climate change’ as ‘a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative’

Dr. Lindzen – a long-time critic of IPCC-sponsored climate theories – argues, among other things, that ‘Changes in mean temperature are primarily due to changes in the tropic-to-pole difference, and not to changes in the greenhouse effect.’ Unfortunately decades at the forefront of climate research don’t count with some people unless you’re making the right alarmist noises.

H/T Climate Depot
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Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative. – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022:

Climate change is “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” –

“The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂.”

“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”

Source here.

What may be the largest source of abiotic methane gas on Earth

Natural gas flare [credit: Wikipedia]

abiotic — Not associated with or derived from living organisms. Calling methane, aka natural gas, a ‘fossil fuel’ is shown by geological evidence to be inaccurate.
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Methane (CH4), the chief constituent of natural gas, is one of the most widely used “clean” fuels, says Phys.org.

Although methane is usually considered to originate from organic matter, recently, more and more evidence shows that methane can be produced by abiotic processes.

In a recent paper published in National Science Review (NSR), Professor Lifei Zhang’s team from Peking University demonstrated that large amounts of methane gas can form during prograde metamorphism in a cold subduction zone, evidenced by the massive CH4-rich fluid inclusions in eclogites from Western Tianshan, China.

How well do state-of-the-art climate models simulate sea level?

Are the models wrongly expecting sea level rise to closely mirror the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 content, in all regions? It seems it doesn’t work like that. The study itself says: ‘As for simulation of the interannual variance, good agreement can be seen across different models, yet the models present a relatively low agreement with observations. The simulations show much weaker variance than observed’.
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According to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in the last 3000 years, says Eurekalert.

This makes hundreds of coastal cities and millions of people vulnerable to a threat of higher water levels.

State-of-the-art climate models provide a crucial means to study how much and how soon sea levels will rise.

However, to what extent these models are able to represent sea level variations remains an open issue.

Sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea branded ‘staggering’, due to scientists ‘using a vital new method’

Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia

Vastly higher? Enormous? Staggering? – should we be shocked? No, because none of these words from the article below appear in the study itself, which notes: ‘We find that, between 1960 and 1989, sea level in the Mediterranean fell’. It then ‘started accelerating rapidly’. The study also admits: ‘The relative contributions from sterodynamic changes (i.e., changes in ocean density and circulation) and land-ice melting to this recent increase in the rate of Mediterranean sea-level rise remain unclear.’ Looks like the press release resorted to colourful language.
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Scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have discovered a substantial rise in sea-levels in the Mediterranean Sea, using a vital new method to measure changes in sea-level, says the NOC.

The study, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, demonstrated that sea levels in the Mediterranean Sea have risen at vastly higher rates over the past 20 years compared to the entirety of the 20th century.

The study revealed that sea level in the Mediterranean Sea increased by about 7cm in the period 2000–2018.

Previous changes in sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea have been highly unpredictable due to limited observational data but using this latest method, scientists analysed sea-level data from tide gauges and satellites to reveal an enormous increase as a result of ocean warming and land ice-melt.

Ned Nikolov: Does a Surface Solar Radiation Dataset Expose a Major Manipulation of Global Temperature Records?

Once again it’s my pleasure to publish a new paper by Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller at the Talkshop. In this study, we see the presentation of a climate conundrum, and recent surface solar radiation data which helps shed new light on the questions surrounding the ongoing adjustment of global temperature datasets. This new study applies theory developed in Ned and Karl’s previous paper to enable quantification of the global temperature drop during the “1970s ice-age scare”. This won’t be the last word on the topic, but it offers a solid grounding for further research.

A PDF version of this article can be downloaded here.

Implications of a New Gridded Dataset of Surface Solar Radiation
for the Evolution of Earth’s Global Surface Temperature Since 1960

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. and Karl Zeller, Ph.D.
July, 2022

Abstract

A new data set of measured Surface Solar Radiation (SSR) covering six continents (Yuan et al. 2021) reveals that the Earth surface received annually 6.6 W m^-2 less shortwave energy in 2019 than it did in the early 1960s, and that the average solar flux incident on land decreased by 8.2 W m^-2 between 1962 and 1985. Since the Sun is the primary source of energy to the climate system, this pattern of SSR change over the past 60 years (oftentimes referred to as global dimming) suggests that the early 1960s were much warmer than the present. However, all modern records of global surface air temperature show a net warming of about 1.0 K between 1962 and 2019. We investigate this conundrum with the help of an independently derived model (previously verified against CERES observations) that accurately converts observed SSR anomalies into changes of global surface temperature. Results from the SSR-based temperature reconstruction are compared to observed global surface temperatures provided by UAH 6.0 and HadCRUT5 datasets. We find that the SSR-based global temperature estimates match quite well the UAH satellite record from 1982 to the present in terms of overall trend and interannual variability suggesting that the observed warming of the past 40 years was the result of a decreased cloud albedo and an increased SSR rather than rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The HadCRUT5 record also shows a satisfactory agreement with the SSR-based temperatures over the same time period. However, between 1962 and 1983, the SSR-based temperature reconstruction depicts a steep global cooling reaching a rate of -1.3 K/decade during the 1970s. This is drastically different from the mild warming claimed by HadCRUT5 over this time period. The cooling episode indicated by the SSR data is corroborated by more than 115 magazine and newspaper articles published throughout the 1970s as well as a classified CIA Report from 1974 all quoting eminent climatologists of the day, who warned the public that the observed worldwide drop of temperatures threatened the global food supply and economic security. Based on this, we conclude that researchers in charge of the HadCRUT dataset have likely removed the 1962 – 1983 cooling episode from the records before the publication of HadCRUT1 in 1994 in an effort to hide evidence contradicting the UN Resolution 43/53 from 1988, which proclaimed a global warming caused by greenhouse gases as a major societal concern, and urged Governments to treat it as a priority issue in climate research and environmental protection initiatives.

1. Introduction

It is a matter of conventional wisdom now that the Earth was significantly cooler during 1960s compared to the 21^st Century. Similarly, no one disputes that the planet’s surface temperature was 1.2^oC lower in the beginning of the 20^th Century compared to the present. This paradigm of climate change is based on surface temperature records maintained by several research teams that show remarkable consistency with one another. Figure 1 portrays global temperature anomalies based on 6 datasets supposedly constructed using different approaches summarized by Morice et al. (2021). All global records depict a nearly continuous warming since 1920 with a brief pause of the temperature rise between 1940 and 1980. No record shows a drop of global temperature between 1960 and 1980, which is at odds with a well-documented, decade-long discussion in the media about an ongoing rapid cooling during the 1970s currently known as the “1970s ice-age scare”.

Figure 1. Global surface temperature anomaly from 1850 to 2021 according to 6 official data sets. Note the remarkable consistency among various time series (borrowed from Fig. 8 of Morice et al. 2021).

Ned Nikolov: Call for papers – Special Issue of MDPI’s Journal ‘Climate’.

Ned Nikolov sends exciting news. He’s been invited to co-edit a special issue of ‘Climate’ jounal, carried by high impact factor open access publisher MDPI; the world’s largest and fastest growing open access publisher. He has now issued the call for papers.

A special issue of Climate (ISSN 2225-1154): “Natural Drivers of Climate Change: New Frontiers”
This special issue belongs to the section “Climate and Environment“.
UPDATE: Deadline for manuscript submissions now : 30 June 2023 |

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to welcome contributions for a Special Issue in the MDPI journal Climate focused on natural drivers of the Earth’s climate. Results from Atmosphere/Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) highlight the critical role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in determining the course of future climatic change. These models, rooted in theory, do not successfully simulate natural phenomena such as ENSO, PDO and AMO. However, recent published research suggests that the natural forcing of climate may have been underestimated and that the lack of proper representation of such forcing in models may be highly consequential for climate projections. For example, studies have shown that cloud albedo has decreased over the past 40 years, and the resulting increase of surface solar radiation is a significant contributor to the observed warming (Herman et al. 2013; Hofer et al. 2017; Pfeifroth et al. 2018; Pokrovsky 2019; Delgado-Bonal et al. 2020; Dübal & Vahrenholt 2021). At the same time, the inability of AOGCMs to predict changes in cloud albedo has been recognized as a leading source of uncertainty in climate projections (Williams et al. 2020; Ceppi & Nowack 2021).

A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts

Cloud guesswork is hindering climate models, therefore relying heavily on their outputs to decide policies must be risky. A professor commented that we may “need a Manhattan Project level of new federal funding and interagency coordination to actually solve this problem.” This can’t be brushed aside as a minor issue.
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We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice says Eurekalert.

But how will it affect clouds?

“Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets,” says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. “Or they could thicken and become more reflective.”

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.

Why did Mars dry out? Carbon dioxide loss not a factor, say scientists

Mars from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

The hunt is now on for the offending ‘missing ingredient’: “Carbon dioxide is a strong greenhouse gas, so it really was the leading candidate to explain the drying out of Mars,” said Kite, an expert on the climates of other worlds. “But these results suggest it’s not so simple.” The article calls this ‘unusual’, but is what it considers usual really so?
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Mars once ran red with rivers, says Phys.org.

The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet.

But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why.

“People have put forward different ideas, but we’re not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. “We’d really like to understand, especially because it’s the only planet we definitely know changed from habitable to uninhabitable.”

Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller: Exact Calculations of Climate Sensitivities Reveal the True Cause of Recent Warming

I’m delighted Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have chosen the Talkshop as the venue for the publication of this new open peer review paper on climate sensitivity. Scientific advance at the cutting edge has always been the most important aim of this blog, and I think this paper truly is an advance in our understanding of the climate system and the factors which support and modulate surface temperature on Earth and other rocky planets. 

The paper is mathematically rigorous, but is also accessible to everyone, thanks to Ned and Karl’s exemplary effort to fully explain their concepts and definitions in terms which can be understood by any interested reader who has some familiarity with the climate debate. Building on the bedrock of their 2014 and 2017 papers, this new work extends the applicability and validates the postulates of those previous papers by examining the causes of variability in planetary surface temperature and incorporating the previous findings in quantifying and deriving equations to model them. They find that Earth is sensitive to changes in cloud cover, which affects the amount of solar shortwave radiation reaching the surface, but not very sensitive to changes in Total Solar Irradiance arriving at the top of the atmosphere. They also find that the sensitivity to changes in CO₂ levels has been heavily overestimated by current climate models. They show that a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm will cause an undetectable global warming of 0.004K.

A PDF of the paper can be downloaded here:  ECS_Universal_Equations.

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Exact Formulas for Estimating the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of Rocky Planets & Moons to Total Solar Irradiance, Absorbed Shortwave Radiation, Planetary Albedo and Surface Atmospheric Pressure.
Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. and Karl Zeller, Ph.D.
April, 2022

1. Introduction

The term “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” (ECS) has become a synonym for the steady-state response of global surface temperature to a modeled long-wave radiative forcing caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration with respect to an assumed pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. According to climate models based on the Greenhouse theory, an increase of atmospheric CO₂ from 280 ppm to 560 ppm would produce a net radiative forcing (i.e. an atmospheric radiant-heat trapping) of 3.74 W m^-2 (Gregory et al. 2004) resulting in a global surface warming between 2.5 K and 4.0 K with a central estimate of 3.0 K according to IPCC AR6 (see p. 11 in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers). This implies an average unit ECS of 3.0/3.74 = 0.8 K / (W m^-2) with a range of 0.67 ≤ ECS ≤ 1.07 K / (W m^-2). Contemporary climate science and IPCC Assessment Reports do not discuss global temperature sensitivities to changes in cloud albedo, absorbed solar radiation or total surface atmospheric pressure. Consequently, no equations have been derived/proposed thus far to calculate these sensitivities. Part of the reason is that variations of cloud albedo are typically viewed in modern climate science as internal feedback to a climatic change induced by external forcing such as increasing anthropogenic carbon emissions. This notion is based on the 19^th-Century Greenhouse theory (Arrhenius 1896) adopted by IPCC, which attributes most of the observed warming during the 20^th Century and especially over the past 40 years to rising atmospheric  CO₂ concentrations believed to trap outgoing long-wave radiation in the Earth’s troposphere and reduce the rate of surface infrared cooling to Space.

However, a plethora of studies published during the past 15 years have shown through both satellite and surface observations that the absorption of solar radiation by the Earth-atmosphere system has increased significantly since 1982 due to a decreased cloud cover/albedo, a phenomenon often referred to as “global brightening” (e.g. Goode & Pallé 2007; Wild 2009; Herman et al. 2013; Stanhill et al. 2014; Hofer et al. 2017; Pfeifroth et al. 2018; Pokrovsky 2019;  Delgado-Bonal et al. 2020; Dübal & Vahrenholt 2021;  Yuan et al. 2021).

UK energy Balancing Mechanism costs ‘skyrocketed by 294%’ – to nearly £1 billion for the quarter year

Of course if the UK was willing to tap its own coal and onshore gas and had enough places to burn them, which could have been the case but isn’t, much of this eye-watering expense wouldn’t be needed. But foolish climate obsessions like costly so-called renewables and ‘net zero’ have dulled the minds of too many politicians so here we are. Expect more of the same.
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From September to November, the BM cost reached £967m, compared to £337m the same period last year, reports Energy Live News.

The crisis in the energy market has so far had many collateral damages – one of them, the cost of the Balancing Mechanism (BM) that soared by 234% during the three-month period, from September to November.

People are driving electric vehicles less than projected

Not the latest model

Reluctance to having to waste time looking for and/or using public charging stations might be a factor, plus the old favourite of range anxiety. An EV may also be the second car in a household, in the US at least.
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New data indicates that electric vehicles may not be an easy future substitute for the gasoline-powered fleet, as EVs are currently being used half as much as conventional cars, says TechXplore.

That is according to a paper published from the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis, and UC Berkeley.

As the Biden administration voices its commitment to moving the country toward electric vehicles, or EVs, and states like California work to ban the sale of new fully gas-powered cars in the next 15 years, the pledge for an EV-powered fleet leaves a question unanswered: Are consumers actually driving them?

U.S. should launch a national energy innovation mission to reach climate goals, says report

If the U.S or anywhere else thinks it needs to spend a fortune on energy innovation to meet ‘critical needs’, which may or may not deliver anything useful, what does that say about existing technologies like wind and solar power? This report suggests they’re at least 50% short of reaching the pie-in-the-sky targets of climate alarmist dreamers with existing (zero emission) technology, so they must now try to invent their way out of trouble with what they call ‘advanced energy’. Good luck with that, if they still intend to shun nuclear power. Will the climate notice anyway, whatever they end up doing?
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Research released today recommends that the U.S. federal government triple its annual investment in energy innovation over the next five years to speed clean energy transitions around the world and build advanced energy industries at home, says TechXplore.

The Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia SIPA released Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, a detailed guide for federal policymakers to raise energy innovation as a core national priority.

Co-authored with scholars from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Energizing America is the first in a series of volumes to kickstart a U.S. federal clean energy innovation policy agenda.

Mystery of how Earth barely escaped an atomic bomb-scale mega meteor

Credit: Wikipedia

Time for another Tunguska meteor theory.
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When a meteor zooms toward Earth at 45,000 mph with the strength 10-15 megatons of TNT—185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb—it could possibly take out the entire planet, says Syfy.

If something like that doesn’t scream total annihilation, it’s hard to say what does, except this time it just missed.

Scorched earth and flattened trees were all that was left of the mysterious object after it passed dangerously close to the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908.

Theories have ranged from a black hole colliding with Earth to a clash of matter and antimatter to an alien spaceship crash-landing. An eyewitness even swore the sky was being ripped in two. But why no crater? No debris?