‘Weak tea’: dismayed climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer

No ‘meaningful progress’. Needless to say, climate alarmists wanted more alarm than was delivered. One wailed: “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.” Shouldn’t that already have happened according to previous COP, and other, forecasts of doom? If not, the next claim is that ‘the window is closing’. The melodrama limps on.
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A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism.

But many climate scientists said the joyful sentiments of world leaders did not accurately reflect the limited ambition of the agreement.

‘Weak tea at best’
Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized the vagueness of the fossil fuel statement, which has no firm, accountable boundaries for how much countries should do by when.

“The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP.

UK climate minister mocked for 6,313-mile round trip by plane for ‘crunch’ Rwanda vote

Airport scene
[image credit: Wikipedia]

From one so-called crisis to another. Net zero CO2 obsession takes a back seat to pressing political needs.
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The UK’s minister for climate will make a 6,313-mile round trip to take part in the government’s crunch vote on Rwanda, Number 10 has confirmed.

Graham Stuart has been in Dubai for the COP28 summit, where leaders from around the world have been discussing the best ways to tackle the climate crisis, says Sky News.

But key talks have stalled over commitments to phase out fossil fuels, with negotiations carrying on through the night to try and find agreement between different nations.
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NGOs (non-governmental organisations) at COP have accused the UK of going “AWOL” at a key time, claiming the British government had let millions of people down.

Confirming the decision to summon Mr Stuart, the prime minister’s official spokesman said: “Ministers have a number of roles, the negotiations continue and he will return to COP.”

The return flight is the equivalent of travelling from London to Edinburgh and back 10 times, and will emit around two tonnes of CO2, according to environmental charity Treedom.

Asked about the carbon emissions from the flights, the spokesman added: “This government is not anti-flying.” [Talkshop comment – especially if it’s illegal immigrants to Rwanda].

“We don’t lecture the public to that regard. The most important thing is the outcomes of COP, which minister Stuart is obviously leading for the UK on.”
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The return of Mr Stuart was the subject of ridicule from shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper as the debate began on Mr Sunak’s bill.

She told MPs: “The climate minister called back from the Dubai COP before the vote?

“Well, I guess they can say at least one flight has taken off as a result of this legislation.”

Full article here.

Climate confusion: Differing Net Zero definitions must ‘mesh’ say Met Office scientists

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Another trip to cloud cuckoo land. How do they plan to accurately measure all the so-called emissions and get all parties to agree with the results anyway? Time to return to reality and stop wasting time and effort on non-existent supposed remedies.
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A new paper published in Nature has highlighted a fundamental mismatch in the way greenhouse gas emissions are measured which could mean that Net Zero could be met in one definition up to five years ahead of the other, says the Met Office .

The IPCC report shows that global temperature will stop increasing when we reach ‘net zero’ emissions of CO2. [Talkshop comment -*claims*, not shows].

To achieve this, human activity cannot put more CO2 into the atmosphere than it removes – we need to massively reduce our emissions, with some removal of CO2 to help areas which are really hard to decarbonise.

This sits behind the principle of Net Zero, which countries including the UK hope will be reached by 2050.

More cloud uncertainties: researching the effect of aerosol particles on clouds and the climate

Again it turns out that climate modellers don’t understand cloud effects too well. As this article bluntly puts it: ‘The interactions of atmospheric aerosols with solar radiation and clouds continue to be inadequately understood and are among the greatest uncertainties in the model description and forecasting of changes to the climate. One reason for this is the many unanswered questions about the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles.’ — Other reasons aren’t discussed here. Why do we keep reading about ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models when they clearly have a long way to go to merit such a description? Any forecasts they produce should be treated with great caution, to say the least.
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The extent to which aerosol particles affect the climate depends on how much water the particles can hold in the atmosphere, says Phys.org.

The capacity to hold water is referred to as hygroscopicity (K) and, in turn, depends on further factors—particularly the size and chemical composition of the particles, which can be extremely variable and complex.

Through extensive investigations, an international research team under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) was able to reduce the relationship between the chemical composition and the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles to a simple linear formula.

Melting ice, falling snow: Sea ice declines enhance snowfall over West Antarctica, say researchers

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

There’s still a long way to go though: “We want to know how those factors are impacting the ice sheets.” Researchers conclude “it’s essential to enhance our models, particularly in representing sea ice dynamics.”
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As the world continues to warm, Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing pace, but the loss of sea ice may lead to more snowfall over the ice sheets, partially offsetting contributions to sea level rise, according to Penn State scientists. — Phys.org reporting.

The researchers analyzed the impacts of decreased sea ice in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica and found the ice-free ocean surface leads to more moisture in the atmosphere and heavier snowfalls on the ice sheet, the team reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

While the additional snowfall is not enough to offset the impacts of melting ice, including it in climate models may improve predictions of things like sea level rise, said Luke Trusel, assistant professor of geography at Penn State and co-author of the study.

Is the jet stream changing? Probably the wrong question

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

The research here finds ‘no significant change to the phase speed of waves in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly over Europe, in the last 40 years’. But in the Southern Hemisphere it’s a somewhat different picture.
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Heavy precipitation, wind storms, heat waves—when severe weather events such as these occur they are frequently attributed to a wavy jet stream, says Phys.org.

The jet stream is a powerful air current in the upper troposphere that balances the pressure gradient and Coriolis forces. It is still not known whether the jet stream is really undergoing changes at decadal timescales and, if so, to what extent.

“There are various theories as to what we can expect from the jet stream in future. However, these are all based on highly idealized assumptions,” said Dr. Georgios Fragkoulidis of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

UK government drops support for controversial deep sea mining as it backs temporary pause

Seabed mining

The report explains that the driver for a supposedly ‘greener energy future’ faces an expected global shortage of ‘critical’ raw materials. The problem of course is that just like so-called fossil fuels all these minerals have to be extracted from somewhere, so somebody is inevitably not going to like it. Plus they won’t be relying on renewable power to do the work.
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The UK has for the first time come out in support of a pause in highly controversial mining of the deep sea bed, having previously supported it, reports Sky News.

On Monday, the government added its name to a group of countries seeking a moratorium on new licences to exploit minerals such as lithium, copper and cobalt – vital for green energy – from the deep sea.

The environment department said the precautionary pause is designed to protect the world’s ocean from such projects, which involve heavy machinery scraping deposits from the world’s largest habitat, until more evidence on the impact is available.

Greenpeace loses legal challenge to UK’s new North Sea oil and gas licenses

North Sea gas rig [image credit: safety4sea.com]

Trying to subvert democracy with ‘climate lawfare’ fails again.
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LONDON (Reuters)– Britain’s decision to authorise new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea was lawful, London’s High Court ruled on Thursday, dismissing a legal challenge by Greenpeace, reports Yahoo News.

The environmental campaign group had argued Britain’s failure to assess the greenhouse gases produced by consuming oil and gas – so-called end-use or downstream emissions – rendered its offshore energy plan unlawful.

But lawyers representing Britain’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said at a hearing in July that ministers were not required to assess end-use emissions, though they nonetheless considered them.

Judge David Holgate rejected Greenpeace’s case in a written ruling on Thursday.

Full report here.

Carbon dioxide ‘pollution’ nonsense reaches record high

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Funny how plants, trees, vegetation etc. rely on ‘pollution’ for photosynthesis, according to so-called climate science. Meanwhile the costly renewables craze mandated by politicians can’t even keep pace with the inexorable global rise in demand for coal, oil and gas.
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Global emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide [Talkshop comment – a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere] are expected to rise around one percent to reach a new all-time high in 2023, the climate scientist behind the preliminary research said Tuesday.

Scientists say carbon pollution will need to be cut almost in half this decade to meet the world’s targets of limiting global warming and avoiding catastrophic climate impacts, parrots Phys.org.

Global CO2 emissions should be falling by around five percent this year, said Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO climate research institute in Norway.

Instead they have continued to rise, according to his research, with current expectations that the year will see emissions up between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent.

The BBC’s “due impartiality” hypocrisy – Net Zero Watch

Who if anyone does the BBC consider itself accountable to, or is it just a law unto itself these days?
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“Due impartiality” means one thing when it’s terrorists, and another when it’s critics of Net Zero, says Andrew Montford @ Net Zero Watch.

The BBC is currently taking a lot of flak for its refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists”. Its editorial guidelines, say that that journalists need to mindful of the need for “due accuracy and impartiality”, but say that the t-word is “a barrier to understanding”.

This is a strange position to take. As many people have observed, Hamas is, in law, a proscribed terrorist organisation, so one would have thought that any journalist who was interested in accuracy would need to refer to them as, well, terrorists.

Researchers forecast strong El Niño and ‘record-breaking’ global surface temperatures in 2023–2024

El Niño graphic [credit: NOAA]

Climate alarmists have been waiting nearly 8 years, since the last significant El Niño, for another chance to claim natural climate variation as an expression of their chosen non-natural theories. Tremble – or not – as the study authors predict ‘a cascade of climate crises’.
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A strong El Niño event is going to wreak havoc on global surface temperature and trigger several climate crises in 2023–2024, according to researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. [Talkshop comment – the hype has already started].

The El Niño event, known for releasing massive heat into the atmosphere, is poised to change atmospheric circulation patterns, influence tropical-extratropical interactions, and impact subtropical jets, monsoons, and even polar vortices, and finally results in a rapid surge in Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), says Phys.org.

The study was published in The Innovation Geoscience on Sept. 15.

Rosebank: Biggest untapped UK oil field approved by regulators – net-zero climate obsessives chew the wasp

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

Opponents don’t have much to say about where they think the essential oil and gas should come from, but churn out the usual dogmatic moans anyway. Even by 2050 under net-zero policies, large quantities of these products are still expected to be needed keep the country functioning. Renewables just don’t scale up enough to replace them.
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Summary (by BBC News).

— The UK’s largest untapped oil field has been approved by regulators

— It’s estimated that Rosebank, 80 miles west of Shetland, could produce 300 million barrels of oil [or more]

— The UK government welcomes the decision, saying it will raise billions of pounds and “make us more secure against tyrants like Putin”

— “As we make the transition to renewables, we will still need oil and gas – it makes sense to use our own,” says Rishi Sunak

— But Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf says he’s “disappointed”, while the Green Party calls the decision “morally obscene”

BBC Live Reporting here.
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Sky News reports:
The GMB Union agrees with the government’s approach to granting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea and similarly believes it will make the UK less reliant on imported gas.

Their general secretary, Gary Smith, even took a swipe at Labour’s stance, claiming: “We need a plan, not bans.”
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“Mind-blowing” Claims of Record Low Antarctica Sea Ice on BBC Contradicted by Statements Made Seven Years Ago – The Daily Sceptic

Antarctica [credit: Wikipedia]

The BBC once again trying to pull the wool over the unsuspecting public’s eyes on climate? Surely not! Or…guilty as charged? With Arctic sea ice scare stories looking increasingly hollow, something along apparently similar lines at the other end of the globe proved irresistible.
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Antarctica sea ice is at a “mind-blowing” record low winter area of 17 million square kilometres, reports a three-person BBC “News Climate & Science and Data Journalism Team”, as lower levels than those recorded in the recent past provide the cue for yet more media climate hysteria, says The Daily Sceptic.

Of course, the BBC headline is clickbait nonsense, not least because it has been generally known in scientific circles that early NASA Nimbus satellites showed even lower winter levels around 15 million sq. kms in 1966.

But the BBC story does provide an excellent example of how science is twisted to fit the political narrative supporting the collectivist Net Zero agenda.

New Paper Reveals Classic Logical Fallacy In IPCC Report

The alarmist media bought it at the time, which may well have been the idea.
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A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that the IPCC’s 2013 report contained a remarkable logical fallacy, says Climate Change Dispatch.

The author, Professor Norman Fenton, shows that the authors of the Summary for Policymakers claimed, with 95% certainty, that more than half of the warming observed since 1950 had been caused by man.

But as Professor Fenton explains, their logic in reaching this conclusion was fatally flawed.

Volkswagen cuts jobs as demand for EVs plunges

VW ID.3 [image credit: Alexander Migl @ Wikipedia]

Subsidies, wealthy buyers and niche markets only get EV makers so far, it seems. The old problems are still there – initial cost, range anxiety, slow charging, battery life etc. Moaning about humans supposedly having adverse effects on the weather turns out to be a weak selling point for the mass market.
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Volkswagen is cutting almost 300 roles at a factory in Germany as demand for electric cars dwindles, reports The Telegraph.

The redundancies are being carried out at the car giant’s plant in Zwickau, where a further 2,000 temporary workers are also at risk of losing their jobs.

Volkswagen’s Zwickau factory only produces electric vehicles, which have fallen in popularity due to high inflation and faltering government support. [Talkshop comment – is that crutch expected to go on forever?]

New research looks at ‘stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007’

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Not the often-quoted ‘rapid decline’ any more then. But what’s behind the stalled trend? The researchers point to a climate cycle known as the Arctic dipole, first proposed in 2006, which ‘reverses itself’, and should (they say) be about to do so again. Are declining solar cycles accompanied by greatly reduced geomagnetic activity (see here) in the same recent years another factor, or just coincidental?
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New research by an international team of scientists explains what’s behind a stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007, says Phys.org.

The findings indicate that stronger declines in sea ice will occur when an atmospheric feature known as the Arctic dipole reverses itself in its recurring cycle.

The many environmental responses to the Arctic dipole are described in a paper published online today in the journal Science. This analysis helps explain how North Atlantic water influences Arctic Ocean climate.

Scientists call it Atlantification.

Study shows a decrease in Indian Ocean cyclones, due to natural climate cycle (PDO)

Indian ocean

Natural climate variation is there to be observed (see title of paper), if anyone wants to. No dependency on CO2 levels required, despite the vague assertions made here.
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While the threat of tropical cyclones increases around the world – [Talkshop comment – which study said that?], a new study published in Nature Communications shows one area experienced a significant decline in cyclone activity, says Phys.org.

The paper, “Pacific Decadal Oscillation Causes Fewer Near-Equatorial Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean,” is co-authored by Pallav Ray, associate professor in meteorology at Florida Tech, along with researchers from [various universities] and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (India).

But, with recent changes in climatic patterns in the Pacific, the number of cyclones is expected to increase in the coming decades.
. . .
The findings showed a 43% decline in the number of low latitude (originating between 5–11 degrees) cyclone formations from 1981–2010 in the north Indian Ocean compared to the number of formations between 1951–1980.

The decline is primarily due to the weakened low-level vorticity modulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the increased vertical wind shear. The PDO is a long-term fluctuation in sea surface temperature of the north Pacific Ocean.

The PDO waxes and wanes approximately every 20 to 30 years, going through “cool” and “warm” phases.

Tropical cyclones do not form easily near the equator but can intensify rapidly. The wind pattern in the Indian Ocean helps initiate the cyclone spin near the equator. Without the storm-weakening wind shear, storms can move and strengthen more easily.

This research can help communities in the path of these rapidly intensifying storms better understand how to be prepared for them.

“I hope that this paper will bring a lot more interest in these types of storms,” Ray said. “One of the reasons why these types of storms have not received much attention is because most cyclone researchers work on the Atlantic and such storms are very rare there.”
. . .
“There has been a decline close to the equator, but there has been an increase at the same time away from the equator, in the Indian Ocean,” Ray said. “Overall, there is a decline definitely, but the decline is not this high, because there was an increase away from the equator.”

Full article here.

Walker Circulation study is a damp squib for climate worriers, contradicts models

Walker Circulation – El Niño conditions [image credit: NOAA]

The paper this article is based on informs us that ‘The Pacific Walker circulation (PWC) has an outsized influence on weather and climate worldwide. Yet the PWC response to external forcings is unclear’. Under a headline saying: ‘Greenhouse gases are changing air flow over the Pacific Ocean, raising Australia’s risks of extreme weather’, the article here offers almost nothing to support an argument for any human-caused climate effects ‘in the industrial era’. The paper is somewhat embarrassing for climate models: ‘Most climate models predict that the PWC will ultimately weaken in response to global warming. However, the PWC strengthened from 1992 to 2011, suggesting a significant role for anthropogenic and/or volcanic aerosol forcing, or internal variability’. So that role could be anything or nothing, but the models trended the wrong way anyway. The search for ‘anthropogenic fingerprints’ continues.
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After a rare three-year La Niña event brought heavy rain and flooding to eastern Australia in 2020-22, we’re now bracing for the heat and drought of El Niño at the opposite end of the spectrum, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

But while the World Meteorological Organization has declared an El Niño event is underway, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is yet to make a similar declaration. Instead, the Bureau remains on “El Niño alert.”

The reason for this discrepancy is what’s called the Pacific Walker Circulation. The pattern and strength of air flows over the Pacific Ocean, combined with sea surface temperatures, determines whether Australia experiences El Niño or La Niña events.

Wavelet footprints – The Climate Clock

Gas giants of the solar system [image credit: Wikipedia]

Wavelet transforms reveal solar system footprints in climate time series, says Prof. Harald Yndestad. He explains how TSI (total solar irradiance) has a mean growth from 1700 to 2014. We believe the ideas here have links with this recent Talkshop post. (For the full technical discussion and wavelet examples see the linked article. Some extracts here.).
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In the mid-1980s, the mathematician Yves Mayer from the University of Marseille and the petroleum engineer Jaean Morlet worked with the analysis of data from petroleum surveys at Elf-Aquitaine, writes
Harald Yndestad @ The Climate Clock.

In their efforts to find better methods for frequency analysis, they rediscovered a set of a new type of transformations which they called Wavelets.

The wavelet transform solved some of the weaknesses of the Fourier transform. It required less computing power; it was possible to identify period and phase relations in time-series, and non-stationary periodic variations in nature.

Giant Alaskan dust storms impact the world’s climate, say scientists

Alaskan dust storm [image credit: NASA]

Although this was already a known effect to some extent, the new research suggests the effect is ‘bigger than previously thought’. Anything linked to cloud formation is significant, including for climate modellers.
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Giant dust storms in the Gulf of Alaska can last for many days and send tons of fine sediment or silt into the atmosphere, and it is having an impact on the global climate system, say scientists.

The storms are so extensive they can be seen by satellites orbiting the Earth, reports Phys.org. An image captured by the Landsat satellite in 2020 shows dust blowing out of the valley and over Alaska’s south coast.

Exactly how the dust may be influencing the global climate system is not yet clear, although new research from the University of Leeds and the National Center for Atmospheric Science suggests the effect is bigger than previously thought.