New data imply slower global warming

Leaving aside whether ‘climate sensitivity’ (to carbon dioxide) is a valid concept in the first place, it’s been obvious for a while that climate modellers have seriously overestimated the actual level of any warming that has occurred in recent years. If that doesn’t suggest to them that something is wrong, what would?
H/T The GWPF

London, 24 April — A paper just published by the Journal of Climate concludes that high estimates of future global warming from most computer climate simulations are inconsistent with observed warming since 1850. The implication is that future warming will be 30 to 45% lower than suggested by the simulations.

The study estimates climate sensitivity — how much the world will warm when carbon dioxide levels increase* — from changes in observed temperatures and estimates of the warming effect of greenhouse gases and other drivers of climate change, from the mid/late 19th century until 2016.

The paper also addresses previous criticisms of the methodology used, finding that these are unfounded.

Nitrogen discovery ‘could greatly improve climate change projections’

Earth’s atmosphere [image credit: BBC]

“These results are going to require rewriting the textbooks,” according to the research program director.

Not all of the nitrogen on the planet comes from the atmosphere, according to a UC Davis study in the journal Science. Up to a quarter comes from Earth’s bedrock. 

The discovery could greatly improve climate change projections, says Eurekalert. 

New paper: Model falsifiability and climate slow modes

Image credit: NOAA @ Wikipedia]

Two professors question the validity of current climate modelling, pointing to a number of apparent difficulties.

New understanding of ultra-long timescales provides a new take on climate, says The GWPF.
– – –
A newly published paper in the journal Physica A suggests that there is an undiscovered universe all around us that we are too short-lived to perceive.

Authors Prof. Christopher Essex (Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario) and Prof. Anastasios Tsonis (Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) explain that even without external influences (e.g. man-made carbon dioxide) the weather patterns change over very long timescales, locally and globally.

If some elderly person claims to recall summers, say, that were different when that person was a child, that may not be faulty memory. Just because summers seemed warmer or colder; spring or winter seemed sooner; more or less snow was recalled, it doesn’t follow that the climate system has changed in any meaningful way.

Prof. Essex explains, “Unlike the stable virtual ‘climates’ seen in computer simulations, corresponding real-world conditions aren’t stable at all. There are perpetual, natural, internal changes in play that take longer than human lifetimes to play out.”

Human-engineered changes on Mississippi River increased extreme floods

Levee breach on the Mississippi river [image credit: Wikipedia]

This shows once again that glib claims about climate-related flooding due to ‘extreme weather’ should be treated with great caution, or even suspicion. The reality is that other factors are at work.

A new study has revealed for the first time the last 500-year flood history of the Mississippi River, as Eurakalert reports.

It shows a dramatic rise in the size and frequency of extreme floods in the past century — mostly due to projects to straighten, channelize, and bound the river with artificial levees.

The new research, led by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), also uncovered a clear pattern over the centuries linking flooding on the Mississippi with natural fluctuations of Pacific and Atlantic Ocean water temperatures.

Climate policies blamed for rising UK electricity prices

Nothing new there perhaps but, like the boiling frog, the reality of an endless upward ratchet of climate charges on bills may still not have fully sunk in with some of the public yet.
H/T The GWPF

Any doubt that increases in UK electricity prices are the result of energy and climate policies, rather than underlying wholesale energy costs, is firmly set aside by the recent announcement from Opus Energy that it must increase its prices to consumers by 7.5% even to those on Fixed Term contracts because of sharply rising “pass through” costs, namely subsidies to renewables, grid management, and the Capacity Market.

Opus Energy, part of the Drax Group and winner of the British Small Business award for Energy Provider of the Year (2017), has written to customers in the last week announcing a 7.5% increase in electricity supply charges.

New greener police cars to run on hydrogen – UK Transport Dept.

Hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai [image credit: Nikkei Asian Review]

Climate targets are invoked to justify the cost and effort. Hydrogen cars are far more expensive than fuel-burners.

Zero emission vehicles to be used by taxi firms and police, says the DoT announcement.

Police cars and taxis will be among nearly 200 new hydrogen powered vehicles switching to zero emission miles, thanks to a multi-million pound government boost.

The zero emission vehicles are part of a project that has won £8.8 million in funding from the Department for Transport to improve access to hydrogen refuelling stations up and down the country and increase the number of hydrogen cars on our roads from this summer.

Further confirmation Southern Ocean sea ice is expanding

Antarctic sea ice is still expanding [image credit: BBC]

The conclusion offered here is that ‘something must be fundamentally wrong with the climate models, for their predictions to be so far off from the observed sea ice trends’. No wonder climate alarmists focus on the Arctic.

Over the past several years, many researchers have examined the spatial extent of sea ice around Antarctica, says CO2 Science, consistently reporting an increasing trend (see, for example, our reviews on the previously published works of Yuan and Martinson, 2000, Watkins and Simmonds, 2000, Hanna, 2001, Zwally et al., 2002, Vyas et al., 2003, Cavalieri et al., 2003, Liu et al., 2004, Parkinson, 2004, Comiso and Nishio, 2008, Cavalieri and Parkinson, 2008, Turner et al., 2009, Pezza et al., 2012, Reid et al., 2013, Reid et al., 2015, Simmonds, 2015, He et al., 2016 and Comiso et al., 2017).

The latest study to confirm this ongoing expanse comes from the South American research team of De Santis et al. (2017).

Poland clamps down on environmental defenders ahead of UN climate talks

The notoriety of the next IPCC climate conference (COP24 in November) is already infecting the host country, which is a heavy user of its own coal for electricity generation. Maybe COP should read COPS? They clearly suspect trouble is likely.

Poland recently passed a bill that bans spontaneous protests and allows police surveillance at this year’s world climate summit, reports DW.com.

Civil society groups say Poland wants to silence environmental defenders.

There are still eight months to go until the international community meets for the UN climate talks in Poland’s Katowice, but the host is already causing controversy.

The Changing Arctic–Nov 1922

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Arctic warming up – 1922 edition. Has climate science got anything to say about it?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

In 1922, NOAA knew that the Arctic was undergoing a “radical change of climate”, and was “not recognizable” from the climate of 1868 to 1917.

In November that year, NOAA published this chapter in their Monthly Weather Review:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/toc/mwre/50/11

They must have had proper scientists in those days.

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New study: Cooling cloud cycle caused global warming hiatus

Is this how it works? [image credit: politics.ie]

An obvious problem with studies like this is that as soon as natural climate variation is invoked – to explain the lack of expected warming from so-called greenhouse gases – the argument that such gases could be a dominant factor in climate processes is then severely weakened to say the least. It is in effect an admission that such variations could cause warming as well as cooling. How long can a ‘hiatus’ last before it becomes the status quo?

Reinforcement of Climate Hiatus by Decadal Modulation of Daily Cloud Cycle
– By Jun Yin and Amilcare Porporato, Princeton University
H/T The GWPF

Based on observations and climate model results, it has been suggested that the recent slowdown of global warming trends (climate hiatus), which took place in the early 2000s, might be due to enhanced ocean heat uptake.

Here we suggest an alternative hypothesis which, at least in part, would relate such slowdown to unaccounted energy reflected or re-emitted by clouds.

North Pacific climate patterns influence El Niño occurrences

Image credit: NOAA

Another attempt to shed light on this recurring but tricky to predict climate phenomenon.

For decades, scientists have observed the phenomena known as El Niño and La Niña, says Phys.org. Both significantly impact the global climate and both pose a puzzle to scientists since they’re not completely understood.

Now, a new study clarifies some of the obscurity surrounding El Niño and La Niña, which together are called the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Glaciers in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert actually shrank during the last ice age

Tavan Bogd Mountains in Mongolia [imagecredit: Altaihunters @ Wikipedia]

Why glaciers are not always climate thermometers.

High in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, the climate is so dry and cold that glaciers shrank during the last ice age. Dating of rock deposits shows how glaciers in this less-studied region behave very differently as the climate shifts.

The simple story says that during the last ice age, temperatures were colder and ice sheets expanded around the planet, says EurekAlert.

That may hold true for most of Europe and North America, but new research from the University of Washington tells a different story in the high-altitude, desert climates of Mongolia.

Climate-industrial complex wasting £100 billion and shutting down debate – warns Lilley

Credit: Fenbeagle

H/T The GWPF

Former Trade and Industry Minister, Peter Lilley warns that vested interests in the renewables industry, politicians of all parties, the bureaucracy and academia have together largely suppressed debate about their reckless waste of public money exposed by the government’s own Review of the Cost of Energy by Dieter Helm.

In a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Peter Lilley highlights Professor Dieter Helm’s devastating critique, outlined in the Cost of Energy Review which was commissioned by the government.

“Helm shows that the Climate Change Act objective of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide could have been met for a fraction of the £100 billion so far committed, which has already raised the cost of energy by 20%.”

Climate scientists admit they need more reliable temperature measurements

Weather station [image credit: UK Met. Office]

Making so-called ‘adjustments’ to existing temperature data, followed in some cases by adjustments to the adjustments, was never going to be a credible scientific method.
H/T The GWPF

A group of prominent scientists are calling for a global network of advanced weather stations that don’t need to go through controversial data adjustments, and it’s vindication for global warming skeptics, writes Michael Bastasch.

Seventeen climate scientists co-authored a research article published in the International Journal of Climatology calling for a global climate station network modeled after the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) to use as a baseline for data quality.

‘First hint’ of a puzzling change in Southern Ocean revealed by CSIRO

Image credit: theozonehole.com

‘The salinity puzzle’ – something new for climate theorists to ponder and debate. Here they still refer to ‘heat-trapping’ gases, having ignored or forgotten about convection.

Researchers aboard an Australian ship undertaking pioneering work in the Southern Ocean have found the “first hint” of a shift in a decades-long trend towards fresher, less dense water off Antarctica, reports The Age.

Teams of scientists on the RV Investigator have been profiling the salinity and temperature of water between Tasmania and Antarctica at 108 locations. They also released the first batch of deep Argot floats to measure conditions as deep as 4000 metres.

But it is the early analysis of data on salinity in the so-called bottom waters near the seabed that may stir international debate.

Bordeaux’s ‘magnificent’ lost vintage pushes small growers to the edge

Bordeaux in south western France
Credit: worldatlas.com

The French wine industry in Bordeaux is counting the cost of the unusual April 2017 frosts that wiped out 40% of its expected crop, with some growers losing over 70%. Nothing like it had happened in the region for over 25 years. Quote: “As of January 3, banks are starting to pull back. They’ve been sending out letters demanding that short-term loans be paid back immediately”.

Surveying a nearly empty cellar, Frederic Nivelle of Bordeaux’s prestigious Chateau Climens, reflects on what might have been an outstanding year for the sweet white Sauternes wine, reports Phys.org.

“We have nine batches which are satisfactory but not enough to produce a Climens,” Nivelle says of the 2017 harvest.

“It’s a shame, it had a nice potential.”

Research finds link between rainfall and ocean circulation in past and present

The lead author found it ‘remarkable’ that ‘The results indicate that in present and past the Atlantic Ocean surface currents correlate with rainfall patterns in the Western Hemisphere.’
It turns out that ‘If we go back in increments of 30 [years], we’re well positioned to understand things on the order of centuries.’ Could we call it natural variation perhaps…?

Research conducted at The University of Texas at Austin has found that changes in ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean influence rainfall in the Western Hemisphere, and that these two systems have been linked for thousands of years, reports Phys.org.

The findings, published on Jan. 26 in Nature Communications, are important because the detailed look into Earth’s past climate and the factors that influenced it could help scientists understand how these same factors may influence our climate today and in the future.

Alps hit by ‘once-in-a-generation’ snow storms

Image credit: Andrew Holt

Parts of the Alps have seen a return to 1978 weather conditions according to this report, with some places only accessible by helicopter.

Hundreds of roads across the Alps in France, Italy and Switzerland were closed, cutting off resorts and villages, after the kind of snowfall that only comes once every 30 years, as Euronews reports.

Tens of thousands of people have been stranded across the Alps after ‘once-in-a-generation’ weather dumped almost 2 meters of snow on some ski resorts in less than 48 hours.

Schools and nurseries have been closed and roads cut off after the Savoie department in France was placed on red alert – the highest warning for avalanches.

Tignes and Val d’Isere have been in lockdown with tourists and residents confined to the area.

New study identifies thermometer for global ocean

Thermometer with Fahrenheit and Celsius units [image credit: Stilfehler at Wikipedia]

Geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus said: “Our precision is about 0.2 ºC (0.4 ºF) now, and the warming of the past 50 years is only about 0.1 ºC,” adding that advanced equipment can provide more precise measurements, allowing scientists to use this technique to track the current warming trend in the world’s oceans, reports Phys.org. Quite modest recent warming then?

There’s a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

In an article published in the Jan. 4, 2018, issue of the journal Nature, geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus and colleagues at Scripps Oceanography and institutions in Switzerland and Japan detailed their ground-breaking approach.

The Sun is cooling faster than anyone suspected

Quiet sun [image credit: NASA]

This is an opinion piece, a sort of alarmism-in-reverse, and no-one can be sure that any given weather or climate forecast will prove to be accurate or even on the right lines, but the arguments are here to consider. Numerous climate researchers do expect the solar slowdown to push average temperatures lower for at least a decade or two. Others think 0.04% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will counter all that.

The danger from the Global Warming crowd is that they are misleading the entire world and preventing us from what is dangerously unfolding that sparks the rapid decline in civilization – GLOBAL COOLING, says Martin Armstrong at Armstrong Economics.

I previously warned that this is not my opinion, but simply our computer. If it were really conscious it would be running to store to buy heating pads. This year will be much colder  for Europe than the last three. It will also be cold in the USA.

We are in a global cooling period and all the data we have in our computer system warns that the earth is turning cold not warm.