Sea level views from SEPP (190309) too superficial to be useful, say experts

This is a critique by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner and two colleagues of a recent article discussing problems with IPCC sea level claims.

The original article by Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) starts:

Rising Seas – At Sea, or Shore? The latest Summary for Policymakers of its full Assessment Report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC, AR-5, SPM, 2014) declared that sea level rise is accelerating.

Numerous studies have come out in support of that view. As shown in the 2008 report of the Nongovernment International Panel for Climate Change (NIPCC, 2008), with the ending of the last Ice Age about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, sea levels have risen about 400 feet (120 meters).

At first, the rise was slow, then rapid, then for the past several thousand years slowing to about 7 to 8 inches (18 to 20 cm) per century. There is some question about the variation during the Little Ice Age and the period following it called the industrial period since 1850.

Dust ring discovered in Mercury’s orbit

Image credit: Wikipedia

The next step is to find the source(s) of the dust, with as yet undetected asteroids thought to be the leading suspects.

Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system, says Fox News.

Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus’ neighborhood, another new paper concludes.

Web of Distrust

H/T to follower ‘@realhxn’ for flagging up this issue. There is a plugin to chrome which warns people not to trust the talkshop.

The plugin owners say this is because

Important to know that if you are using sub-domain of wordpress.com that in the past used for fraud and phishing – 
Our community has rated this all sub-domains as not trusted. 

They go on to say

New geologic evidence supports theory of major cosmic impact event about 12,800 years ago

Impact [image credit: karbalion.com]

This time, unusually, the new Younger Dryas evidence is from way below the equator, which they believe shows that ‘the Younger Dryas climatic onset was an extreme global event’.

When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be, says Phys.org.

“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” Kennett noted. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”

He’s talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning).

The Climate Debate Twenty Years Later

H/T The GWPF
Still going round in circles it seems: long on assertions but short on credible evidence of the claimed alarming human effects.

“Better climate knowledge about natural versus anthropogenic forcing seems to be a decade away”, quotes Master Resource.

That was the major takeaway from a major 1999 climate conference in Houston, Texas , as noted by Martin Cassidy of the Houston Geological Society, who authored a conference summary, “Global Climate Change: Panel Agrees: ‘In 10 Years We Will Know’.”

Fracking could cut Britain’s gas imports to zero by early 2030s

Credit: mygridgb.co.uk

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The numbers can be debated, but the point that there is an economic opportunity in front of the UK is clear. Take it or ignore it?

LONDON (Reuters) – Fracking Britain’s shale gas reserves could cut the country’s imports of gas to zero by the early 2030s, an industry group said on Monday.

Britain currently imports more than half of its gas via pipelines from continental Europe and Norway and through shipments of liquefied natural gas from countries such as Russia, the United States and Qatar.

Australian climate tool identifies end of winter by 2050

Sydney, Australia

Climate models can’t be wrong or unreliable – can they? Except they generally are.

Academics from the School of Art & Design have teamed up with colleagues from the ANU Climate Change Institute on a design project, which takes existing data and communicates the impacts of climate change in a way that people can engage with and better understand, says Phys.org.

The resulting new climate tool visualises data which shows by 2050, Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today and will experience a new season the designers are calling “New Summer”.

Leading climate researcher calls for ban on domestic flights in Germany to save emissions

Image credit: emeraldmedia.co.uk

How about a ban on endless international climate conferences that lead to hundreds of flights – including many long-haul – but produce little of value, ‘to save emissions’? In fact the ’20 flights in a lifetime’ proposed here would probably have that effect anyway. The report ends with an apparent claim that particulates in the air are a ‘climate problem’.

Leading German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has called for a substantial shift in strategy for the tourism industry to make sure that its carbon footprint does not contribute to the sector’s possible demise.

“Tourism bites the hand that feeds it if it contributes to climate change,” the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said at the ITB international tourism fair in Berlin.

If beaches around the world are flooded due to a global rise in temperature of 4 or 5 degrees Celsius, “there will be no more beach tourism,” Schellnhuber said.

The sun is quieter than normal, but don’t panic – says CBC News

Quiet sun [image credit: NASA]

In which we are informed that the Maunder Minimum was ‘an incident’, warming is due to ‘climate change’, and solar cycle 25 may not start until 2020.

Some fear that we could be heading to another Little Ice Age, but scientists say that’s unlikely, reports CBC News.

The sun is quiet … very quiet. In February, for the first time since August 2008, the sun went an entire month without any sunspots.

What does this mean for Earth?

Perspective Needed in Climate Debate

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Unfortunately the IPCC shows little interest in perspective, preferring to trumpet absurd 8.5°C warming scenarios.

PA Pundits - International

Joe Bastardi  ~   

 

I went to school with a lot of great forecasters. One of them was Scott Chesner, who is an on-air meteorologist in Tyler, Texas. Scott tweeted something this week that I thought was quite profound regarding the current generation’s “consensus” on climate:

“One problem with global warming hysteria is ‘perspective.’ The warmer global temps of recent yrs. are relatively meaningless as we only have detailed records for~200 yrs. out of the Earth’s age of 4.5 billion yrs. That=30 sec. out of a person’s 80 yr. life!”

As you know, I am a big satellite-era proponent as far as temperatures are concerned. We have simply seen too much adjustment to older temperature records, and that has to at least raise questions. In almost every single case, temperatures are adjusted down in years before the satellite era.

This has some merit, given most errors on thermometers…

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India Offers $1.4 Billion In Subsidies To Support The Domestic Electric Vehicle Industry

Electric Tuk Tuk [image credit: cleantechnica.com]

But India makes a point of not handing any money to people wanting to buy the more expensive EVs, as Forbes News reports. Whether they can produce enough electricity to back up their policy is not clear. The majority of their power supply is from coal, plus some diesel generators.

To encourage the growth of the electric vehicle (EV) industry in India, the government has developed a two-pronged strategy aimed at both buyers and manufacturers: $1.4 billion in subsidies are to be offered, followed by a hike on import tariffs within the next year to spur domestic companies to build the vehicles.

The new policy, which was cleared by the cabinet late last month but the details of which were not available till now, kicks in with the new financial year in April.

Solar farms in space could be renewable energy’s next frontier

Maybe there’s some military angle to this. As the report says, it ‘will be difficult and costly’. Capturing the sun’s power will be cloud-free, but when transmitting to the ground the clouds are still there.

China wants to put a solar power station in orbit by 2050 and is building a test facility to find the best way to send power to the ground, reports MACH (NBC News).

As the green energy revolution accelerates, solar farms have become a familiar sight across the nation and around the world.

But China is taking solar power to a whole new level. The nation has announced plans to put a solar power station in orbit by 2050, a feat that would make it the first nation to harness the sun’s energy in space and beam it to Earth.

As Energy Prices Rise Sharply, Dutch Turn Climate Sceptical

The conclusion here might be that those with their ears (or noses?) to the ground smell a rat, while those with their heads in the clouds see nothing wrong. Or is it mainly the cost factor?

The number of Dutch people who are worried about climate change decreased significantly over the past months, says The GWPF.

While the group who thinks that addressing greenhouse gas emissions is going too far is growing since the government announced their climate plans, according to a survey by Peter Kanne of I&O Research, AD reports.

Solar input to high latitudes and the global ice volume

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Theorists take another look at the mechanisms that may or may not be important regulators of Earth’s ice ages.

Climate Etc.

by Donald Rapp, Ralf Ellis and Clive Best

A review of the relationship between the solar input to high latitudes and the global ice volume over the past 2.7 million years.

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China and ‘The Pause’

The pause seems to fit nicely into the gap between two major El Niños.
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Chinese climate scientists: The so-called hiatus in global temperature is illuminating, significant and real.

Chinese climate scientists are clearly off-message, says Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor.

They keep referring to the global warming hiatus which so many scientists and activists – those who shout on twitter and prowl the comment sections of off-colour articles on the subject – know has been trounced and discredited again and again. They clearly ought to have a word with the emerging science powerhouse that is China.

Belgian scientists use solar panels to make hydrogen gas from air

These types of tech ‘breakthroughs’ tend to have a low survival rate in the real world, so we await any developments – or not.

Bioscience engineers at KU Leuven have created a solar panel that produces hydrogen gas from moisture in the air, reports Science Business.

After ten years of development, the panel can now produce 250 litres per day – a world record, according to the researchers.

Twenty of these solar panels could provide electricity and heat for one family for an entire winter. 

The long march to #Brexit : Part One

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  Sixer of the fox patrol bearing the Union flag in 1972

When I was a ten year old kid back in 1974 I got a first inkling that my country becoming a member of an international club might have some downsides. One evening, I overheard my Grandfather, a veteran of two world wars, and my Dad, an engineer, discussing ‘the common market’. They both had misgivings about it being ‘the thin end of the wedge’. I don’t recall many of the details, but the following year during the referendum campaign, I chose to wear an ugly yellow pin badge handed out by local Labour party campaigners which said ‘NO’ on it in black block capitals. My sister chose the pretty white badge with the flying dove carrying an olive branch on it which said ‘YES’; a much more positive message from that nice Mr Heath.

By the age of twenty, I was far too busy riding fast motorcycles, courting young ladies and climbing mountains to be interested in international politics. It wasn’t until I joined the Motorcycle Action Group [MAG] that I learned about the increasing amounts of bureaucratic regulation emanating from Brussels which was affecting our lifestyle. This reached a head in 1992 when the Brussels commissioners sent a raft of new legislation called the ‘Vehicle Multi-directive’ to the European parliament for rubber stamping.

Move over dark matter, here comes the photon mass

Spiral galaxy NGC 5457 aka the Pinwheel Galaxy [image credit: European Space Agency & NASA]

OK, that’s not the original title of the article below – but it sounded a bit more interesting from a layman’s perspective 🙂

The rotation of stars in galaxies such as the Milky Way is puzzling, says Phys.org.

The orbital speeds of stars should decrease with their distance from the center of the galaxy, but in fact, stars in the middle and outer regions of galaxies have the same rotational speed.

This may be due to the gravitational effect of matter that we can’t see. But although researchers have been seeking it for decades, the existence of dark matter has yet to be definitively proven and we still don’t know what it might be made of.

With this in mind, the physicists Dmitri Ryutov, Dmitry Budker and Victor Flambaum have suggested that the rotational dynamics of galaxies might be explained by other factors. They hypothesize that the mass of photons, which are particles of light, might be responsible.

Norwegian energy group launches UK virtual power plant

Virtual power plant concept

In a nutshell: when part-time renewables aren’t producing, something else – which has to be paid for and is likely to be expensive – must take over, because virtual electricity doesn’t work.

Norwegian energy group Statkraft has unveiled a virtual power plant in the UK which connects wind, solar and gas engines with battery storage and can respond to market demands in seconds, reports PEI.

Scientists track deep history of planets’ motions, and effects on Earth’s climate

Planetary theory lives on, even if it now has to nod towards trace gases in the atmosphere to be in fashion with the times.

Scientists have long posited that periodic swings in Earth’s climate are driven by cyclic changes in the distribution of sunlight reaching our surface, says Phys.org.

This is due to cyclic changes in how our planet spins on its axis, the ellipticity of its orbit, and its orientation toward the sun—overlapping cycles caused by subtle gravitational interplays with other planets, as the bodies whirl around the sun and by each other like gyrating hula-hoops.

But planetary paths change over time, and that can change the cycles’ lengths. This has made it challenging for scientists to untangle what drove many ancient climate shifts.