Researchers Against CO2

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Ron Clutz takes a closer look at the latest attempt to demonise the trace gas carbon dioxide, which as biology tells us is essential to plant life.

Science Matters

The media are reporting stories with a new theme: More CO2 is bad for plant life. This flies in the face of biochemistry, but the activist motivation is clear: They want people thinking CO2 is bad in every way. They don’t want the warming scare undermined by the idea that CO2 along with warming actually helps plant life and agriculture.

The current stories are coming from researchers involved with an outdoor laboratory site called Jasper Ridge, affiliated with Stanford University, my alma mater and home to famous alarmist Stephen Schneider (deceased). The headlines are occasioned by a new paper appearing Sept. 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, authored by Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment..

Headlines Claim, Details Deny

Headlines and claims like those below are appearing this week, but as we shall see, the details do not support the conclusions…

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Clark needs to ‘reset’ the UK energy system, says Helm

UK electricity supply – approaching the cliff edge? [image credit: Wikipedia]

Utility Week highlights an expert’s view of the dire state of the UK’s electricity network, largely driven by the climate dogmatism of government policies. Urgent action is advised, with Brexit in mind.

UK Business and Energy secretary Greg Clark needs to “reset the balance between the market and the state” and avoid “more patching up of what he has inherited”, [Professor] Dieter Helm has said.

The energy sector is “not in good shape,” and is unable to fulfil the needs of a major industrial economy, “especially for one doing Brexit”.

Growing electricity demand, as heat and energy are electrified, will make the “current capacity margin of roughly zero even more alarming than it is now”, the Oxford economist said in a paper.

Cease tax-funded climate tourism

Credit: http://www.clexit.net.

By Viv Forbes

For at least 21 years now, the U.N. and the IPCC have been ringmaster to a troupe of thousands. They perform at massive annual conferences held in exotic locations, serviced by top hotels and airlines, and funded largely, directly or indirectly, by reluctant taxpayers. 

An estimated 45,000 attendees, including 114 from the Australian government, achieved nothing useful at Copenhagen and just more green tape in Paris. Each of these climate-fests is preceded by numerous meetings of bureaucrats drafting and redrafting their wish lists.

Now the U.N. Climateer-in-Chief, Ban Ki-moon, has jetted into the G20 summit in China to claim climate victory over climate skeptics.

Is there no end to this energy-wasting climate tourism? If they believe that the science is settled, no more conferences are needed.

Booker: Rising CO2 emissions show Paris climate agreement is an act of delusion

Not news to Talkshop readers, but it helps when these points appear in mainstream outlets like the Daily Telegraph.
Via the GWPF

It is hard to recall any event in history that has been more absurdly and comprehensively misrepresented by politicians and the media.

Naturally the BBC and others have been quick to trumpet the news that China and the US yesterday agreed to ratify last December’s Paris agreement on climate change.

This “historic landmark”, it is being claimed, will be a major step towards saving the planet, by slashing the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, thus supposedly preventing global temperatures from rising more than two degrees C above their pre-industrial levels.

But like everything else we have been told about that Paris agreement, it is all smoke and mirrors.

Waiting for the next sunspot cycle: 2019-2030

A solar cycle 24 prediction chart [credit:NASA]

What follows are extracts, omitting a few of the more technical aspects which can be viewed in the GWPF’s full article here. Possible ‘colder climates’ get a mention.

Sten Odenwald of NASA Heliophysics Education Consortium writes:
Forecasters are already starting to make predictions for what might be in store as our sun winds down its current sunspot cycle in a few years. Are we in for a very intense cycle of solar activity, or the beginning of a century-long absence of sunspots and a rise in colder climates?

Ever since Samuel Schwabe discovered the 11-year ebb and flow of sunspots on the sun in 1843, predicting when the next sunspot cycle will appear, and how strong it will be, has been a cottage industry among scientists and non-scientists alike.

Mystery as stratospheric wind patterns change for first time in 60 years of observations

This plot shows the QBO during the 1980s. [credit: Wikipedia / FU Berlin]

Another climate mystery – this time the QBO – for scientists to get their teeth into, as the Mail Online reports.

For more than 60 years, atmospheric scientists have observed the consistent behaviour of a wind pattern known as the ‘quasi-biennial oscillation’ – a phenomenon that repeats every 28 months. But in late 2015, the long-reliable pattern suddenly changed. 

The winds have since returned to their normal course, and while no immediate effects were detected, astronomers are working to understand if this was just a one-time ‘black swan’ event, or a ‘canary in the coal mine’ signalling unseen conditions.

A lovely summer, lots of blue sky, warm? Fish would fly first.

Tim writes,

The famous flying carp. (photo, the author)

Summer this year came late. In at least the south the weather was unusually good, with blue skies, fairly warm, not a great deal in the way of rain.

I was expecting screeching from the Met Office about the warmest August evva. They popped up a blog article mid-month then nothing.

Inhofe to Obama: Your climate agenda will fail

Senator Inhofe – not a snowball’s chance…?

Getting any Paris-related climate legislation passed by the US Senate will be ‘Mission Impossible’ for Obama according to this report from the DC’s Michael Bastasch.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe criticized President Barack Obama Thursday for joining an international global warming treaty without Senate approval.

The Senate committee chair also warned Obama his global warming ambitions were bound to fail since he needs legislative approval to make the emissions cuts he’s promised the United Nations.

“History already shows that this Paris Agreement will fail,” Inhofe said in an emailed statement.

EDF board members seek court annulment of Hinkley decision

Hinkley Point, Somerset
[image credit: conservativehome.com]

Seconds out, round 10 – or so it might seem in the Hinkley nuclear struggle. Who kept who in the dark [pun intended]? PEI’s Diarmaid Williams takes a ringside seat.

Five of the 17 board members who voted to approve a decision by EDF to press ahead with the development of Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in England are now seeking a court annulment of that decision.

The board members, all union representatives, say they were not provided with information that was crucial to their decision on the day.

How predictable is the timing of a summer ice-free Arctic?

A polar bear inspects a US submarine near the North Pole [credit: Wikipedia]

‘How predictable’ assumes some predictability of a future ‘ice-free’ Arctic in summer – debatable at least.
H/T US CLIVAR – Climate Variability and Predictability Program

The strong decline in the summer sea ice cover of the Arctic over the last decades has led many to ask when the Arctic will be ice-free for the first time.

Rather than providing yet another answer to this question, in a recent Geophysical Research Letters article by Jahn et al., they focused on determining how well the occurrence of an ice-free Arctic can be predicted, due to the inherent internal climate variability of the system.

They’re dragging out ocean acidification again

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It’s getting tougher every year for ‘warmists’ to dream up climate scare stories that aren’t obviously just that.

American Elephants

James Delingpole, British writer, rants regularly at Breitbart about the utter goofiness of the world’s climate true believers.  He wrote today about a  climate “science” scam  that keeps on rearing its ugly head, in spite of being debunked thoroughly over and over.

Aside from the need to debunk once more, it’s a classic example of the workings of climate science. In this case, one of Delingpole’s articles was supposedly debunked in The Marine Biologist(the magazine of the marine biologist community). He wrote:

There was a time when I would have just ignored it: the guy who wrote it – one Phil Williamson – is the embodiment of Upton Sinclair’s dictum that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Not only is Williamson based at the “University” of East Anglia – aka Climate Alarmism Central, heavily featured in the Climategate scandal…

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Oregon is replacing coal power with wind – let’s see what happens

What the US government thinks wind power ‘could’ do

If Oregon is modelling its electricity supply policy on South Australia, it should know what to expect, as Hot Air reports.

If you live in Oregon and rely on certain fancy, high tech features of the industrial revolution such as having lights in your home and refrigerated food, you might want to start stocking up on candles and non-perishable goods.

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner.

An Inconvenient Truth: Few Signs Of Global Warming In Antarctica

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Ah, natural variability – the curse of the fanatical warmist.
They don’t understand it and don’t want to believe it exists.
But it does, so they’ll have to put up with it.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/27/an-inconvenient-truth-few-signs-of-global-warming-in-antarctica/

From the Daily Caller:

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades.

Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming.

“Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This applies to goings-on in Antarctica as well as in Louisiana,” Knappenberger said, referring to the recent flooding in Louisiana activists have already blamed global warming for.

What recent studies have shown is that…

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Solar cycle history extended back to cycle 7, newly digitised Schwabe data

Tim writes,

A new paper of considerable interest at the Talkshop…

Properties of sunspot cycles and hemispheric wings since the 19th century
Raisa Leussu, Ilya G. Usoskin, Rainer Arlt and Kalevi Mursula
http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201628335
Open access with registration.

Why Phi? – modelling the solar cycle

Credit: cherishthescientist.net

We’re familiar with the idea of the solar cycle, e.g.:
‘The solar cycle or solar magnetic activity cycle is the nearly periodic 11-year change in the Sun’s activity (including changes in the levels of solar radiation and ejection of solar material) and appearance (changes in the number of sunspots, flares, and other manifestations).

They have been observed (by changes in the sun’s appearance and by changes seen on Earth, such as auroras) for centuries.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle

Here we’ll try a bit of pattern-hunting, so to speak.

Biofuels increase, rather than decrease, carbon dioxide emissions: study

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

Promoters of biofuel are running out of excuses for converting vast tracts of valuable farmland into fuel sources, as this Phys.org report shows. This non-solution to a debatable problem needs reviewing urgently.

A new study from University of Michigan researchers challenges the widely held assumption that biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are inherently carbon neutral.

Contrary to popular belief, the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas emitted when biofuels are burned is not fully balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurs as the plants grow, according to a study by research professor John DeCicco and co-authors at the U-M Energy Institute.

Scientists begin to unravel summer jet stream mystery

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

Why jetstream shifts might be linked to Arctic ice (among other factors) is not made clear, so we’re left wondering.

Scientists have discovered the cause of the recent run of miserable wet summers as they begin to unravel the mysteries of the Atlantic jet stream, reports Phys.org.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield and The Met Office have identified a number of possible factors that may influence the Atlantic jet stream and therefore help to predict summer climate from one year to the next.

Eli Rabett bets on Arctic ice against Tallbloke – hopes to keep fur coat

Gerald Warner: Brexit ‘negotiations’ are a nonsense: we just need to say goodbye politely

Enjoyable piece from Gerald Warner

It is time to stop using the misleading term “Brexit negotiations”. Britain’s exit from the European Union is not subject to negotiation: it has been determined by the British people, the sole legitimate authority on this issue. One negotiates to enter an institution, not to leave it. We are simply checking out of the EU hotel; we paid our bill long ago and we are free to leave. We are merely saying a courteous farewell.

The weasel term “negotiations” – too uncritically accepted by Leavers – suggests we can only leave the EU by gracious permission of the Brussels apparatchiks, that they will decide whether a partial break with the EU is permitted and how many laws, regulations and even payments into the EU budget will still be imposed on Britain. Unhappily, many British civil servants who will be involved in the “negotiations” share this absurd mindset.

Mag 6.2 ‘quake central Italy, significant fatalities

Tim writes,

Figure 1, plot from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusiasts

Earthquake at 01:36 UT

Once again the spectre of space weather correlation with earthquakes turns up.