Surprise: Some Red Auroras are *not* Auroras

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Observing a recurring feature of the Earth’s ring current system.

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 22, 2021: The biggest geomagnetic storm in years erupted this month when a Cannibal CME slammed into Earth’s magnetic field. Auroras spread as far south as California and New Mexico. Upon closer inspection, however, not all of those lights were auroras. Some were “SARs.”

SARs are pure red arcs of light that ripple across the sky during strong geomagnetic storms. Here’s an example from Finland in 2018:

“The SAR was visible to the naked eye for nearly 30 minutes and, after fading a bit, remained visible to my camera for another hour and a half,” recalls photographer Matti Helin.

On Nov 4, 2021, Earth experienced a veritable SAR storm. “We photographed SARs as far south as the McDonald Observatory in Texas,” reports Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics. “The bands of light swept over our cameras near Boston, then headed south. We knew something special was…

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Dozens of ships stuck in Arctic as ice freezes early in reverse of recent warming winters

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Where are the ‘rapidly warming winters’ this time round? It seems global warming is behaving badly, in parts of the Arctic at least.
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Shipping firms blame the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, says the Telegraph.

More than two dozen cargo vessels are stuck in Russia’s Arctic ice, waiting for ice-breakers to come to their rescue, after an inaccurate forecast from the country’s Met Office.

Maritime traffic in the Northern Sea Route has been on the rise in recent years as rapidly warming winters reduce ice cover, and Russia invests in its Arctic ports in preparation for a further boom.

But this year several segments of the Northern Sea Route froze up about a fortnight earlier than usual, catching many ships unawares.

Alexei Likhachyov – director general of Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom, which manages the country’s nuclear-power fleet of ice-breakers – said on Monday that the ships included vessels sailing under the flags of Hong Kong and Marshall Islands.

He blamed the Russian Met office for a forecast that failed to predict the early ice, in comments to local media.

Continued here.

UK’s largest electrolyser to supply hydrogen storage facility at Scottish windfarm

Whitelee wind farm, Scotland [image credit: Bjmullan / Wikipedia]

Here’s the UK government’s latest shot at ‘net zero’ climate virtue signalling. Subsidised wind farms will help produce subsidised hydrogen to fuel subsidised hydrogen vehicles such as buses and bin lorries. This is obviously even more costly than just using the wind-sourced electricity itself to run vehicles, but gets round the battery weight problem for larger vehicles like buses and goods vehicles. But to scale up, the number of wind turbines needed is going to have to be far higher than now, to provide fuel as well as nationwide electricity. Is that even feasible, let alone affordable?
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A hydrogen storage plant will be built at the UK’s largest onshore windfarm near Glasgow, after the UK government approved a £9.4m grant, reports E&T News.

The Whitelee green hydrogen project will become the UK’s largest electrolyser, a system which converts water into hydrogen gas as a way to store energy.

Hydrogen is seen as a key replacement for fossil fuels in certain applications as the world moves towards decarbonisation.

It produces just heat and water as by-products when burned or used in fuel cells, making it a highly attractive alternative to fossil fuels in industry, power, shipping and transport.

It’s weather wars as the Met Office forecasts mild winter while the BBC predicts a big freeze

Place bets now! Of course there could well be bits of both. The Met Office says its offering is ‘consistent with a warming climate’, but there was a very cold winter spell only 11 years ago, around the time of the last solar minimum.
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Most know from bitter experience that meteorology is far from an exact science, but Britain’s two leading weather forecasting services have given completely contradictory predictions on what we can expect this winter, reports the Daily Mail.

The Government-run Met Office has forecast a mild winter, but the BBC’s service predicts it is likely to be cold and harsh.

Experts last night described the opposing long-range forecasts as unparalleled and they risk causing havoc for businesses such as energy suppliers, transport firms, supermarkets and airlines which rely on forecasts to plan ahead.

Climate-friendly farming: Greenland’s melting glaciers offer an answer

Greenland drink break [image credit: leisurelylifestyle.com]

As a bonus in today’s climate obsessed times, carbon credits could come into play for farmers to sell with this discovery. Even Danish brewers can benefit. Why fear glacier melt if it makes life better?
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On a shore near Greenland’s capital Nuuk, a local scientist points to a paradox emerging as the island’s glaciers retreat: one of the most alarming consequences of global warming could deliver a way to limit its effects, says Reuters (via Yahoo News).

“It’s a kind of wonder material,” says Minik Rosing, a native Greenlander, referring to the ultra-fine silt deposited as the glaciers melt.

Known as glacial rock flour, the silt is crushed to nano-particles by the weight of the retreating ice sheet, which deposits roughly one billion tonnes of it on the world’s largest island per year.

Professor Minik Rosing and his team at the University of Copenhagen have established the nutrient-rich mud boosts agricultural output when applied to farmland and absorbs carbon dioxide from the air in the process.

IPCC Climate Models Keep Failing Because They Don’t Respect Physics – The Daily Sceptic

Credit: NASA

H/T Tallbloke
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By Dr. Rudolph Kalveks — As the media, politicians and climate activists continue to circulate hysterical hot air from the Cop26 conference, the topic of climate change or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has become an emotional one, increasingly detached from the thoughtful and meticulous process of theory development, calculation and observation that is supposed to characterise scientific endeavour.

It may come as a surprise to some that “The Science”, as expounded in the IPCC Summaries for Policymakers that inform conference participants, is not uncritically accepted by all scientists in the field, and that widely different views are held by a substantial cadre of experienced and eminent researchers.

Moreover, a multitude of peer-reviewed papers contradict many aspects of the IPCC’s alarmist narrative.

Furthermore, a coherent theory about the impact of changes in greenhouse gases (GHGs) is starting to emerge, one that is built up from the underlying physics, rather than extracted from fanciful computer simulations.

My aim here is to highlight some of the relevant papers and to inform any motivated layman who wishes to explore outside the dogmatic strictures of the mainstream narrative.

Let us start with an irrefutable example of the inability of climate models (general circulation models, GCMs) to provide meaningful projections.

Continued here.

The Palaeoclimate Problem – Net Zero Watch

The author notes, with examples, that ‘it is difficult to reconcile this latest research with many other lines of inquiry to determine past temperatures.’ Using a single computer model to ‘fill in gaps’ in data has its own drawbacks, as mentioned below.
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Modern warming differs from the gradual rise in temperature seen in the past 10,000 years. That’s the conclusion of a paper just published in the journal Nature, says David Whitehouse.

Reconstructing the temperature timeline back to 24,000 years ago – the so-called Last Glacial Maximum – a team of researchers show that recent warming is unusual.

Knowledge of past climate is important to put our present climate into context, allowing us to see what climatic variations can take place in the absence of contemporary amounts of greenhouse gasses.

The longest lunar eclipse in centuries will happen tonight

November 19, 2021 lunar eclipse [credit: NASA]

For UK observers the best time to look will be about 7-8:00 am Friday morning (19th Nov.) depending on location, e.g. Manchester. [Click on image to enlarge the eclipse map]
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You can see the longest partial lunar eclipse in hundreds of years this week.

The “nearly total” lunar eclipse is expected overnight Thursday, Nov. 18, to Friday, Nov. 19, NASA said.

“The Moon will be so close to opposite the Sun on Nov 19 that it will pass through the southern part of the shadow of the Earth for a nearly total lunar eclipse,” NASA said on its website.

The eclipse will last 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, making it the longest in centuries, Space.com reported.

Only a small sliver of the moon will be visible during the eclipse. About 97% of the moon will disappear into Earth’s shadow as the sun and moon pass opposite sides of the planet, EarthSky reported.

The moon should appear to be a reddish-brown color as it slips into the shadow, NASA reported.

Full article here.
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More from Phys.org — Moon lighting: partial lunar eclipse to be longest since 1440

The real reasons COP26 flopped – Climate Change Dispatch

Only alarmists could be impressed by an alarmist echo chamber, and even that didn’t work on the street protesters. As CCD puts it: ‘what kind of conference is it that invites only people with one viewpoint?’
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King coal is dead, long live king coal! That might be a fitting epitaph for COP26, which mercifully ended last Friday, says Climate Change Dispatch.

It culminated with an agreement, which had not so much been watered down as to have virtually evaporated. Fossil fuels, it seems, are here for the foreseeable.

What went wrong? That’s a question the ‘deeply frustrated’ COP26 president Alok Sharma might well be asking himself.

He appeared to be close to tears at the denouement of the negotiations, pushed to emotional extremis by the last-minute wrangling over a single word: should we commit ourselves to phase out our use of coal, or phase- down our use of coal.

Early freeze: Arctic shippers eye release from Russian ice captivity

Russian icebreaker Novorossisk [image credit: Okras @ Wikipedia]

Good news for ever-fearful climate obsessives leaving COP26, but not for stranded sea captains.
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The 15 ships that for the last two weeks have been ice-locked in Russian Arctic waters see release coming as a second icebreaker makes its way into the East Siberian Sea, says the Barents Observer.

Diesel-powered icebreaker Novorossisk early this week made its way into the Chukchi Sea with course for the ships that are battling to make it out of the sea-ice in the East Siberian Sea.

The vessels, among them an oil tanker and several fully loaded bulk carriers, have been captured in thick sea-ice in the far eastern Arctic waters since early November as an early freeze took captains and shipping companies by surprise.

Over the last weeks, only one icebreaker, the nuclear-powered Vaigach, has been available for escorts through the increasingly icy waters. That has been insufficient to aid the many vessels that have been on their way across the Northern Sea Route.

Over the past years, ice conditions in late October and early November have allowed extensive shipping along the vast Russian Arctic coast. This year, however, large parts of the remote Arctic waters were already in late October covered by sea-ice.

There is now an ice layer more than 30 cm thick cross most of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea. And in the strait separating the mainland with the Island of Wrangel is an area with more than a meter thick multi-year old ice.

Full article here.

The 800 million barrel oilfield getting Boris Johnson in trouble

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Politics versus climate dogma. Oil products are still in high demand, so blocking one project to make some sort of point wouldn’t make any difference to UK consumption levels. Recent events showed the chaos that can easily happen when fuel isn’t readily available at filling stations. But climate obsessives will drone on endlessly about such things anyway.
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The planned Cambo oilfield in the U.K.’s North Sea, thought to hold 800 million barrels of oil, faced significant pressure in the lead up to COP26, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared hypocritical in his promise for a clean energy transition while giving the go-ahead on a new oil exploration project.

Following the global climate summit, will Cambo go ahead? — asks OilPrice.com.

The proposed exploration would take place in the Cambo oil field, located around 125km west of the Shetland Islands, at a depth of between 1,050m to 1,100m underwater.

Johnson continues to back the project, stating that as licensing approval took place in 2001, well before recent considerations for new exploration licensing restrictions, there is no reason to cancel a project that will support the U.K.’s energy security in the coming years.

Earth Tipped on Its Side 84 Million Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia]

The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of the mineral magnetite, offer some of the most convincing evidence yet of true polar wander in the Late Cretaceous – and it may help settle a scientific debate that’s been going on for decades.

The Net Zero Watch guide to decarbonising your life

Join the world savers now! Get into plant-based sausage making for example…
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COP26 has been a flop, says Andy Shaw at Net Zero Watch.

The world’s leaders have failed to stop climate change and it is now up to us to save the world from catastrophe.

Ever since the first COP, in 1995, we have been living at ‘one minute to midnight’ and the clock is still ticking.

Continued here.

World leaders have made complete fools of themselves at UN climate summit promoting ‘utter unscientific garbage’

Climate conference transport

Is anyone anywhere impressed by COP26? Maybe those who enjoy tiresome heard-it-all-before apocalyptic-sounding climate waffle, or like travelling at someone else’s expense. The rest are left to cringe.
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By Melanie Phillips – a British journalist, broadcaster and author whose weekly column currently appears in The Times of London.

What would happen if a doomsday cult were to take over the world? Science fiction? No. It’s happened.

How else to explain the collective lunacy of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, an absolute farce where world leaders made complete fools of themselves?

There’s been much criticism of the hypocrisy of the event, with hundreds of private jets flying into Glasgow to hector the world about reducing carbon emissions.

Far, far worse has been the total erasure of rationality in the hysterical chorus that this was the “last chance to save the planet” — and the fact that no-one in mainstream debate has challenged this as utter unscientific garbage.

Residents in Wales coastal village dubbed the UK’s first ‘climate refugees’

Doomed by predictions it seems. Although sea levels have been very slowly rising at a more or less known rate in many places around the world since about the mid-19th Century, predictions of an accelerating rate in the next decades are based on climate models, guesses at government climate policies and attribution of vast powers to trace gases. ‘Scientists say…’
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Like many others who came to Fairbourne, Stuart Eves decided the coastal village in northern Wales would be home for life when he moved here 26 years ago, says USA Today (from AP).

He fell in love with the peaceful, slow pace of small village life in this community of about 700 residents nestled between the rugged mountains and the Irish Sea.

“I wanted somewhere my children can have the same upbringing as I had, so they can run free,” said Eves, 72, who built a caravan park in the village that he still runs with his son. “You’ve got the sea, you’ve got the mountains. It’s just a stunning place to live.”

That changed suddenly in 2014, when authorities identified Fairbourne as the first coastal community in the U.K. to be at high risk of flooding due to climate change.

Predicting faster sea level rises and more frequent and extreme storms due to global warming, the government said it could only afford to keep defending the village for another 40 years.

COP26: Richer countries don’t own the climate

Did the poorer countries reject the use of petroleum or modes of travel like vehicles, railways, planes, metal-hulled ships, etc.? Obviously not, because they valued the benefits as much as anyone else did. But the IPCC-backing countries have put their own heads, and a lot of public money, on the block by demonizing carbon dioxide and claiming the climate can somehow be ‘fixed’ by outputting less of it (‘net zero’). Natural climate variability is never even discussed.
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Vulnerable countries at COP26 say rich nations are pushing back against their attempts to secure compensation for the damage caused by climate change.

Poorer countries see it as critical that money for loss and damage be part of negotiations this week, says BBC News.

Negotiators agreed in Paris in 2015 to address the issue, but there is no agreement on who should pay for it.

Rich nations are said to be resisting any commitments as they do not want to accept liability and risk being sued.

Small scale nuclear to get green light this week

SMR transporter

Nuclear is a slow-moving game but signs of progress are emerging. The problems of intermittent wind and solar power are only going to increase in step with their share of the UK power supply, as the government has caved in to the ’emissions’ obsessions of the climate lobby.
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Reactor designer Rolls-Royce will announce that a consortium of investors will back plans for a new smaller nuclear reactor project, reports BBC News.

As part of its 10 point green energy plan, the government has already announced it would provide £210m in funding if that could be matched by private capital.

An announcement that money has been raised could come as soon as Tuesday.

Around 21% of Britain’s electricity supply is provided by nuclear power.

Extreme Heat Led to Episodic Deluges on Ancient ‘Hothouse’ Earth, Scientists Say

Looking ahead to the days when children won’t know what central heating was? Probably not, although there’s a nod towards such scenarios here. Their 64x CO2 ‘experiment’ seems way over the top, but it’s only a model.
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The distant past of Earth and potentially its future include extremely warm ‘hothouse’ climate states, but little is known about how the atmosphere of our planet behaves in such states, says Sci-News.

“If you were to look at a large patch of the deep tropics today, it’s always raining somewhere,” said Dr. Jacob Seeley, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

“But we found that in extremely warm climates, there could be multiple days with no rain anywhere over a huge part of the ocean.”

“Then, suddenly, a massive rainstorm would erupt over almost the entire domain, dumping a tremendous amount of rain. Then it would be quiet for a couple of days and repeat.”

Cannibal CME Sparks Low Latitude Auroras

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See also: ‘AURORA SOUNDS’ RECORDED DURING STRONG GEOMAGNETIC STORM.

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 4, 2021: Auroras in California? Believe it. On Nov. 4th, the glow of a strong (G3) geomagnetic storm spread almost to Los Angeles. Aurora chaser Hongming Zheng took this picture just outside Lincoln CA at latitude +39N:

“This was my southernmost aurora sighting yet!” says Zheng. “A red glow and occasional pillars were visible to the naked eye. I was very pleasantly surprised with this unexpectedly strong geomagnetic storm.”

More reds appeared in Joshua Tree, California (+34N). “I could not see them with my naked eye,” says veteran observer Don Davis, “but my camera recorded these rare SoCal auroras.”

The CME that sparked the display was a special “Cannibal CME“–that is, a mashup of multiple solar storm clouds striking Earth all at once. Cannibal CMEs contain tangled magnetic fields and compressed plasmas that often do a good job sparking auroras.

At the apex of…

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COP 26: Methane Madness

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Since 1,800 parts per billion is 1.8 parts per million, let’s not waste too much time fretting about this.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

The grandly aspirational announcements getting all the COP 26 press actually have nothing to do with the COP, which is basically a business meeting.

Most of these big news events are in reality trivial, such as India saying it will try to hit net zero 50 years from now. Greta Thunberg will be pushing 70 so she is right that this is not action. (As blah blah goes this is the real deal, hence her strident take on coming around the mountain, which I love. See https://www.cfact.org/2021/11/02/cop-26-greta-thunberg-sings-shove-your-climate-crisis-up-your-a/)

One grand aspiration, however, is worth a closer look, because it is worse than empty. It is dangerously stupid. This is the growing pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

Here is how Climate Home News put it: “The US and EU got more than a hundred countries on board with a commitment to cut…

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