Why have there been no named winter storms this year? – BBC

Omega blocking highs can remain in place for several days or even weeks [image credit: UK Met Office]

Bring on the loaded questions, such as ‘How does climate change affect windstorms?’ The BBC casts around for suspects, like La Niña and meandering polar jet streams, but it’s all inconclusive. Are the ‘extreme weather’ climate obsessives feeling deprived?
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By February, the UK would normally have had around three storms given names by the Met Office – just like Arwen, Barra and Callum, says BBC News.

But so far this autumn and winter, there hasn’t been a single one.

Weather patterns have been calmer across the Atlantic and towards northwest Europe. But why?

Benzene and toluene in polar oceans have a biological origin, study finds

Natural aerosols, not ‘human pollution’. Another climate assumption gets blown out of the water.
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In addition to oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, the air we breathe contains small amounts of organic gases, such as benzene and toluene, says Phys.org.

These oxidize into small particles or aerosols that contribute to the condensation of water in the droplets that form clouds.

Now, a study by the Institut de Cièncias del Mar (ICM-CSIC), the Instituto de Química Física Rocasolano (IQFR-CSIC) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) stresses the importance of clouds, which filter solar radiation, for understanding past and future climate changes.

“If we don’t get the clouds right, we won’t get the climate right,” says Charel Wohl, ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study. “We are just beginning to unveil the multiple ingredients that form cloud seeds,” he adds.

Desert dusts convert coral reefs into carbon storage

Australian coral [image credit: heraldsun.com.au]

Professor: “this study actually contributes to more accurate accounting of carbon around the globe.” Nature’s carbon cycle continues to surprise researchers.
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An international study comparing data from Heron Reef and the Middle East’s Gulf of Aqaba has disproved the long-held theory that coral reefs only have the capacity to emit CO2, reports Phys.org.

The first-of-its-kind discovery is the result of an international study led by The University of Queensland which found that dust blown in from nearby deserts can convert coral reefs into CO2 sinks.

Professor Hamish McGowan from UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences said the discovery was made after researchers observed a correlation between influxes of CO2 and periods of increased dust concentrations in the atmosphere around the reefs.

“We were surprised at how significant a role dust accumulation played in switching coral reefs from a CO2 source to a CO2 sink,” Professor McGowan said.

“This process was previously thought to be impossible, but our research proves otherwise.

“We found that the build-up of dust in the traditionally low-nutrient and low-chlorophyll waters of the Gulf of Aqaba actually fertilizes and improves coral-growing conditions and photosynthesis in reef ecosystems.”

Professor McGowan said the results will allow for the development of more accurate carbon budgets for the world’s oceans.

“The process we have identified in this study actually contributes to more accurate accounting of carbon around the globe,” Professor McGowan said.

“This informs predictions of the impact of atmospheric carbon on climate and climate sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs.”
. . .
The research establishes the causal controls on reef water temperatures, as opposed to previous predictions which were more focused on the correlation of global warming and coral bleaching.

Professor Lensky said these findings will allow researchers to correctly attribute the cause of, for example, extreme high water temperature events that result in coral bleaching.

“Our research, which included analysis of data collected at Heron Reef on the Great Barrier Reef, has confirmed the crucial role of local meteorology and the prevailing weather patterns in determining reef water temperatures,” Professor Lensky said.

Full report here.
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Earlier research: Dust in Earth system can affect oceans, carbon cycle, temperatures, and health (2010) – ScienceDaily

N. Hemisphere Temps Set To Fall Over Next 25 Years, Say Top Intl. Scientists

Too much hot air

Predictions like this may or may not come true. Warmists may have to wheel out their standard ‘natural cooling masking human-caused warming’ excuse again.
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Whisper it quietly – and don’t tell Al ‘Boiling Oceans’ Gore – but the Northern Hemisphere may be entering a temperature cooling phase until the 2050s with a decline up to 0.3°C.

By extension, the rest of the globe will also be cooled, says Chris Morrison (via Climate Change Dispatch).

These sensational findings, ignored by the mainstream media, were released last year and are the work of six top international scientists led by Nour-Eddine Omrani of the Norwegian Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.

Calif. Storms Mark Wettest Three Weeks In Bay Area Since Lincoln’s Presidency

Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point, San Francisco

Such is the natural variability of weather and climate. So it’s all happened before, only worse back then before mass industrialisation and greenhouse gas theories.
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San Francisco has experienced the wettest three-week period since Abraham Lincoln was president during the Great Flood of 1862, says Breitbart News (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The San Jose Mercury News reported Tuesday:

New rainfall totals show that no person alive has ever experienced a three-week period as wet as the past three weeks were in the Bay Area. The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.

The Silly Giant Scale Of U.S. Offshore Wind Development

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If the North Atlantic Right Whale is a right-thinking whale, it will leave that area and not come back.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

The world’s biggest offshore wind array is Hornsea 2, which is 1,386 MW with a turbine size of 8.4 MW. Operational in 2022 it is the state of the OSW art. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms

But Virginia’s phase 1 array is a whopping 2,600 MW, with huge 15 MW turbines. Clearly it is a giant, far bigger than anything that has ever been built. The cost is estimated as $10 billion to build.

Moreover there are a dozen or more comparable giant arrays proposed to be built at the same time, lining the Atlantic coast. Last I heard the combined proposals topped a gigantic 40,000 MW.

From an engineering point of view this is nuts. No one has ever done anything like this so let’s do a hundred billion dollars worth and see how it goes, right? Work up to it? Start small then scale up, learning…

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Expert discusses La Niña and El Niño cycles effects on Australia

The last El Niño was 6-7 years ago, but elapsed time can’t on its own be a guarantee of one this year. Neutral ENSO conditions are another option. As usual an assertion about warming from greenhouse gases is thrown in, with no evidence to back it up.
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Climate models indicate La Niña is on the way out, with El Niño conditions expected later this year, claims Phys.org.

CSIRO Climate Scientist Dr. Wenju Cai explains what this means for Australia’s weather and how changing conditions will affect the country.

Is La Niña really on the way out? What do the climate models tell us?

We are in the mature season of the current three-consecutive La Niña years. During the three years, heat has been stored in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Temps Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse. 2023 Update

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Not forgetting that CO2 is only a minor trace gas, at ~0.04% of the atmosphere.

Science Matters

This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed.  In order to do  that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.

Climate science is unsettling because past data are not fixed, but change later on.  I ran into this previously and now again in 2021 and 2022 when I set out to update an analysis done in 2014 by Jeremy Shiers (discussed in a previous post reprinted at the end).  Jeremy provided a spreadsheet in his essay Murray Salby Showed CO2 Follows Temperature Now You Can Too posted in January 2014. I downloaded his spreadsheet intending to bring the analysis up to the present to see if the results hold up.  The two sources of data were:

Temperature…

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How Predictive Was NOAA’s Gloomy 2022 Hurricane Forecast? Not Very

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Trying to use Atlantic hurricane patterns to promote climate alarm in the US and elsewhere was blown off course this year. Instead the predictive reputations of the experts of all shades of global warming opinion took a battering. Natural variation threw them off the scent somehow.
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While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held firm to its prediction of an above-normal hurricane season – despite zero hurricanes at the halfway mark – the 2022 season proved to be nothing out of the ordinary, says CNS News (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Hurricane season, which runs from June through November annually, turned out to be pretty average this year, NOAA’s end-of-season report reveals.

There were just two “major” hurricanes (categories 3-5), below the annual average of three and less than NOAA’s prediction that there would be 3-6.

Long-term Western precipitation trends are stable, says atmospheric scientist

California flood control channel [image credit: UC Berkeley]

Looking a lot further back than the satellite era can give a better perspective in weather trends. Nothing for alarmists to see here.
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Although the West has experienced major ups and downs in its precipitation patterns from year to year, over the past 130 years regions that provide the major source for spring and summer runoff have not shown a long-term pattern that indicates a permanent decline in precipitation, according to research by Dr. John Christy, a distinguished professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Earth Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

The results of Dr. Christy’s construction and analysis of the longest, regional-scale time series of snowfall accumulations for Washington, Oregon and California from 1890–2020 are in a paper in the December 2022 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology, says Phys.org.

As part of a joint project between UAH and the Department of Energy, Dr. Christy examined archived snowfall data dating back to 1890 from over 700 stations located in the three states.

Wall Street’s Biggest Names Are Backing Off Their Climate Commitments

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

Finance giants don’t like hefty fines for exaggerating their supposed climate virtues, or law suits for not acting in the best interests of their clients. Solution: leave their net-zero climate club.
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Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, announced that it is resigning from a global net-zero initiative.
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Shortly before COP26, last year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, financial institutions were rushing to announce their climate commitments, says Grist (via Gizmodo).

The conference’s leadership and Mark Carney, a special envoy appointed by the United Nations to push private finance to invest in climate solutions, announced the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ.

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.

Lomborg & Peterson: COP27 Proposing Insane Emissions Policies

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Having got pretty much nowhere in 30 years, what do the COP-ites expect to achieve in the next 30 as populations increase along with per capita energy consumption rates?

Science Matters

Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson wrote in The Telegraph Pushing the same old climate policies at COP27 is simply insane.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

After decades of failure to curb emissions, let’s accept that capitalist investment is not the problem: it’s the solution

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This famous quote – often misattributed to Albert Einstein – might very well become the unofficial motto of the UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (Cop27).

Global CO₂ emissions have kept increasing since the world’s nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris. This is the case, once again, in 2022, when…

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COP27 – UK lead negotiator: “I’m incredibly disappointed”

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Still claiming a minor trace gas essential to nature causes ‘huge climate impacts’. Unbelievable.
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A historic deal has been struck at the UN’s COP27 summit that will see rich nations pay poorer countries for damage and economic losses caused by climate change, claims BBC News.

It ends almost 30 years of waiting by nations facing huge climate impacts.

But developed nations left dissatisfied over progress on cutting fossil fuels.

“A clear commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels? Not in this text,” said the UK’s Alok Sharma, who was president of the previous COP summit in Glasgow.

Experts ‘explain slowing Atlantic ocean currents’ – or do they?

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]

The article below links to another one which appears to contradict it. In ‘The threshold between natural Atlantic current system fluctuations and a climate change-driven evolution’ we’re told ‘natural variations are still dominant’ in the AMOC or “Gulf Stream System.” Then the key part:
‘According to the researchers, part of the North Atlantic is cooling—a striking contrast to the majority of ocean regions. All evaluations indicate that since the beginning of the 20th century, natural fluctuations have been the primary reason for this cooling. Nonetheless, the studies indicate that the AMOC has started to slow down in recent decades.’ If the slowdown occurred under cooling, why should future warming be likely to cause more of it?
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For decades, oceanographers have been measuring the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a large system of ocean currents that greatly influence Earth’s climate, says Phys.org.

In recent years, the data show it is weakening. But what does this mean?

“If this system of currents significantly slows down, this could change weather patterns in the tropics, with a detrimental effect on crop yields,” said Spencer Jones, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.

How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox

Bush fire

Hardly a surprising conclusion in this research. A classic example of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Southeast Australia’s bushfire crisis culminated in the devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 that burnt nearly 25 million hectares of bush, says Phys.org.

Our new research demonstrates how the scale of this disaster blew out due to legislation introduced in the 1970s, which was based on idea that nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention.

We investigated the bushfire history of one of the worst hit areas: Buchan on Gunaikurnai Country in Victoria.

We found no bushfires burned there for almost a century until the mid 1970s, following the establishment of the Land Conservation Act of 1970—legislation that sought to protect the Australian bush from humans.

This legislation banned farmers from mimicking Aboriginal burning practices by using frequent fires to promote grass for livestock. As a result, the amount of flammable trees and shrubs exploded in the region.

It was only after this prohibition on burning that catastrophic bushfires became an issue in the Buchan area.

The prolonged neglect of southeast Australian forests under the guise of conservation means our forests now carry dangerous levels of fuels. This creates the conditions in which climate-driven bushfires become megafires, devastating Country and people’s lives.

Full article here.
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Related — in California ‘roughly 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent…were released by the state’s 2020 wildfires…[The] draft 2022 Scoping Plan…urges state and federal authorities to drastically increase the thinning and treatment of forests that have become dangerously overgrown with flammable vegetation.’

UK Trapped In A Green-Energy Cul-De-Sac

Try to cover up the chronic energy policy mistakes made in the name of climate theories by doling out vast sums of borrowed money to the struggling customers. That’s the current UK approach. Why should anyone be content with putting the exchequer ever further in the mire to keep futile net zero dogma alive?
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Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California, and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall,” says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy.

A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way.

In the cul-de-sac, you are trapped with no evident way of getting out.

COP27 – Hopeless Hopeful Money Will Dominate The Discussion

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The most industrialised countries should pay the bills for everybody else’s bad weather, forever? Not going to happen of course.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

The UN’s annual climate change global negotiating festival — in this case COP27 in Egypt — is less than a month away. This one could be a real hoot to watch because there is only one big issue left on the table and that is MONEY.

Lots of money, many trillions by the wishes, all flowing from the developed world to the “developing” world. (Since the so-called developing world still includes the super economy of China the word has lost all meaning.)

The money hopes are spectacular but also hopeless, hence the show. How this immense absurdity will emerge during the lucky 13 days of negotiations between the rich countries and the we-want-your-riches countries should be fun to watch.

Here is a simple scorecard so you can follow the action. First and foremost the code word is “finance”. This is not foreign aid and you…

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Steve Baker says UK cannot afford net zero pledge ‘in the short run’

Having tied their own hands with the Climate Change Act, UK politicians are now locked in arguments about how best to implement unworkable energy policies. Intermittency of electricity supply is baked into the legislation.
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A Conservative minister has said “in the short run” the UK cannot afford net zero, reports Sky News.

Speaking at an event run by the Institute of Economic Affairs at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker told a packed room of party members that cutting net zero commitments this year would save households more than £1,500 amid the ongoing energy crisis.

“It’s time to have a sensible conversation about net zero,” Mr Baker urged.

He said that the government remains committed to net zero in the long term, but “the big problem that we’ve got is that renewables are intermittent”.

“The reality is that renewables are great when they are available, but they still require a lot of subsidies going in.

“So what we need is a gas to nuclear strategy. We are going to need gas as a transition fuel.”

But fellow Tory MP and panellist Bim Afolami disagreed with Mr Baker’s remarks, saying “we can afford net zero and we need to”.

He told the audience that “we need more nuclear” and “yes, we need gas as a transitional fuel as well”, adding: “But crucially, we need wind and solar.”

Mr Afolami continued: “We have some of the windiest coastlines in the world. Let’s use it. And most importantly, when there’s a war in Ukraine or anywhere else, we are not dependent on anyone else.”

Full report here.

Is net zero climate dogma more important to the government than the entire UK economy?

The difficulty of getting any economic common sense into the heads of carbon dioxide obsessed leaders seems insurmountable at present.
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Economic disaster beckons without radical policy changes, says Net Zero Watch.

London, 27 September – Net Zero Watch has said that negative market reactions to the Government’s mini-budget show that domestic and international investors are highly sceptical about what appears to be half-baked policy proposals.

Investors can see that hardly anything is being done to address the underlying reasons for Britain’s economic and energy cost crisis.

Tax cuts in conjunction with astronomical and indeterminate handouts to energy suppliers announced by the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng last week have alarmed financiers because they shift the energy cost burden onto the UK’s debt mountain and future generations. As a result, the pound has crashed against the dollar and market reactions have been highly critical.

Net Zero Watch director, Dr Benny Peiser has warned that the country faces years of inflation and in all likelihood a major economic depression unless the government announces radical energy policy reforms:

The economy looks likely to tank and suffer for years to come because the Government refuses to abandon its suicidal Net Zero targets which are effectively preventing solutions to the catastrophic energy crisis.”

Full press release here.