Study: Fossil fuel plans would far overshoot climate goals

Wyoming coal trains [image credit: energycatalyzer3.com/

Welcome to the real world. The UN loves to tell the world to wind down its fuel-burning ways in a hurry to satisfy the atmospheric trace gas theories of certain ‘climate experts’, but equally viable and affordable alternatives on the scale required are proving hard to find. Energy being ‘clean’ or not is a different issue, but a useful prop when your main argument is floundering.
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The world needs to cut by more than half its production of coal, oil and gas in the coming decade to maintain a chance of keeping global warming from reaching dangerous levels, according to a U.N.-backed study released Wednesday, says Phys.org.

The report published by the U.N. Environment Program found that while governments have made ambitious pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions, they are still planning to extract double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than what would be consistent with the 2015 Paris climate accord’s goal of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Q&A: La Niña’s back

The report speaks of ‘La Niña’s natural cooling’ causing drought and increasing wildfire hazards in some areas. Weren’t such things supposed to be aggravated by alleged human-caused global warming, not by natural cooling effects?
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For the second straight year, the world heads into a new La Niña weather event, says Phys.org.

This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

Just five months after the end of a La Niña that started in September 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new cooling of the Pacific is underway.

South Pole froze over in coldest winter on record

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

We’re asked to believe this is just a blip in the relentless march of supposedly human-caused global warming, but let’s give it a few more years to see how things progress.
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Antarctica’s frigid winter temperatures are in contrast to trends in the rest of the world, which overall recorded its fourth hottest summer, says LiveScience.

Between April and September, a research station sitting on a high plateau in Antarctica, registered an average temperature of minus 78 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 61 degrees Celsius).

That’s the coldest temperature recorded since record keeping began in 1957, and about 4.5 F (2.5 C) lower than the most recent 30-year average, according to The Washington Post.

No alarm here? NASA finds 2021 Arctic summer sea ice 12th-lowest on satellite record

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio

With only 43 years of official satellite data, 12th-lowest is somewhat yawn-inducing from an alarmist point of view, but interesting in that it’s 38% greater than the lowest level (since 1978) reached in 2012. But that stat probably won’t feature in any media headlines, as it might sow seeds of doubt about the supposed correlation of a slowly rising CO2 level with increasing seasonal sea ice loss, which very clearly failed to show this year.
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Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual minimum extent on Sept. 16, after waning in the 2021 Northern Hemisphere spring and summer, says SpaceRef.

The summertime extent is the 12th-lowest in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.

This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 4.72 million square kilometers (1.82 million square miles).

Climate-above-all plea by US fails to stir China

Politicians posing as climate managers is a bad joke, and ‘tackling climate change’ is an empty slogan. BBC summary: Envoy John Kerry’s ‘it’s more important than politics’ appeal falls on deaf ears.
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US climate envoy John Kerry has told China that climate change is more important than politics as tensions between the two countries continue,
reports BBC News.

He made the remarks following two days of talks with Chinese leaders in the city of Tianjin.

But China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned on Wednesday that the worsening relationship could hamper future co-operation on climate issues.

Both countries have outlined steps to tackle climate change.

But Mr Kerry has called on China to increase its efforts to tackle carbon emissions.

Tensions between the two countries have worsened in recent months with disputes over China’s human rights record, the South China Sea and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Mr Kerry said he had told the Chinese that “climate is not ideological, not partisan and not a geostrategic weapon”.

“It is essential… no matter what differences we have, that we have to address the climate crisis,” he said

Earlier, Mr Wang called on the US to “stop seeing China as a threat and an opponent”, accusing Washington of a “major strategic miscalculation towards China”.

“It is impossible for China-US climate co-operation to be elevated above the overall environment of China-US relations,” he said.

Full report here.

Climate model shows drought in North and South America at the same time during La Niña events

La Niña pending

Natural climate change has always been around, as this study indicates. Attempts at attribution of weather-related conditions like droughts to recent (in historical terms) fuel-burning activities are full of pitfalls and uncertainties.
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A team of researchers at Columbia University has shown that long-term droughts in southwestern parts of North America and in southwestern parts of South America have occurred at the same time on multiple occasions over the past 1,000 years coinciding with La Niña events, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the group describes how they used archival data and paleoclimate proxies (materials preserved in the geologic record that can be used to estimate climate conditions) to create climate models.

La Niña events are climatic occurrences that are kicked off when trade winds in the Pacific Ocean are pushed toward Asia. This results in a cooling effect in the waters off the coasts of North and South America. It pushes the jet stream northward just enough to create drier conditions across parts of both continents.

Fewer El Niño and La Niña events in a warmer world, says computer model

Credit: concernusa.org

A key premise of most computer models seems to be that the atmosphere, with its 0.04% CO2 content, drives ocean temperatures. As most of the energy is in the oceans, why wouldn’t it be the other way round?
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The cycling between warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific (commonly referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO) has persisted without major interruptions for at least the last 11,000 years, says Phys.org.

This may change in the future according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea, the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, U.S.

The team conducted a series of global climate model simulations with an unprecedented spatial resolution of 10 km in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere.

National Trust to give staff ‘Mediterranean hours’ and siestas amid climate change

Ham House

That increase in average temperatures of around one degree Celsius since the mid-19th century must be really stressful. It’s probably cheaper to offer siestas than to buy and operate suitable ventilation systems.
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The National Trust is giving its workers Mediterranean-style siestas in summer due to climate change making the weather increasingly hot, reports Indy100.com.

Staff and volunteers in the south of England will start the day earlier, finish later, and have a long lunch break to avoid the hottest part of the day, as people already do in countries such as Italy and Spain.

A spokesperson for the charity told The Guardian: “It’s fair to say that, as we experience more extreme temperatures, we will be looking to offer Mediterranean working hours, especially in the east which is likely to experience more frequent higher temperatures to ensure the health and safety of our staff and volunteers.”

Net zero switch threatens new oil shock, warns top economist

This economist clearly has faith in IPCC climate models and theories, but he may be in for his own shock by putting all his climate eggs in the carbon dioxide emissions basket. Meanwhile, brace for economic pain.
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The vast expense of ending global warming [Talkshop comment: reality may differ] will trigger a blow to the world economy that is as damaging as the 1974 oil shock, a top international economist has warned. The Telegraph reporting.

A scramble to cut carbon emissions is likely to send energy prices rocketing and hold back living standards for years to come, Jean Pisani-Ferry said in a report published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Mr Pisani-Ferry – a public policy expert who has served in senior economic roles in the European Union for decades – said that although the bill is both manageable and necessary to halt climate change, politicians are failing to be honest with the public about the dramatic effect on their lives and livelihoods.

Challenging UN, Study Finds Sun –not CO2 — May Be Behind Global Warming

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Finding the Sun the main player in climate would be the default position in any normal world, but now it gets billed as the challenger.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

The sun and not human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be the main cause of warmer temperatures in recent decades, according to a new study with findings that sharply contradict the conclusions of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The peer-reviewed paper, produced by a team of almost two dozen scientists from around the world, concluded that previous studies did not adequately consider the role of solar energy in explaining increased temperatures.

The new study was released just as the UN released its sixth “Assessment Report,” known as AR6, that once again argued in favor of the view that man-kind’s emissions of CO2 were to blame for global warming. The report said human responsibility was “unequivocal.”

But the new study casts serious doubt on the hypothesis.

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Climate Modeling Civil War

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‘You’re more wrong than we are!’ – seems to be the state of play here. Are there any models that wouldn’t get improved results if their so-called ‘greenhouse gas’ forcing was reduced or even removed?

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

Looks like the climate modeling community may have a civil war on its hands. Some serious players are rejecting the new hot models, but probably not their owners. If so we will see modeler against modeler. Be still my heart.

The first loud public shot has been fired by the prestigious journal Science (actually it is more of a magazine but never mind). Science is devoutly alarmist but they reject the hot models in the strongest possible terms (in a lengthy article that is not paywalled).

Their blunt article title is “U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming“. When it comes to science, “implausibly hot” is very strong language. Scientific language is normally extremely polite. (The U.N. climate panel is of course the IPCC.)

But it gets even stronger in the text. Here we find NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, arguably…

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Punishing Climate Policies to Fix What’s Not Broken

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‘The higher global warming, the more rainfall’, say climate alarmists — then complain about droughts causing wildfires. Confused? Yes they are. Here, Ben Pile looks at the case of the UK .

Science Matters

Ben Pile writes at Spiked Climate policy, not climate change, poses the biggest risk to our daily lives.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Firstly, Ben provides evidence for a reasonable person to conclude the weather and climate is doing nothing out of the ordinary.  Drawing on this year’s UK State of the Climate report:

But how significant are these changes really? Take, for example, the claim that the UK’s temperatures have increased. Leaving aside the possibility that land-use change thanks to the UK’s economic development might influence temperatures, the report offers this chart depicting 140 years of anomalies in UK and global annual temperatures:

Though the chart clearly shows that UK temperatures have risen, there is substantial year-to-year variability – far greater in the UK than for the world as a whole – that might make us wonder how impactful this extra warmth really is.

The point is…

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Revealed: the BBC’s guide for pushing climate propaganda

BBC staffers were recently taught how best to push messages about climate doom. So much for impartiality. Licence payers never agreed to this condescending nonsense.
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Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda, says The Spectator (via Climate Change Dispatch).

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world.

The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories on its homepage today to climate change.

IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity’

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So say the totally predictable climate cultists in the political summary version of the IPCC’s not yet published report, version whatever.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Humanity’s damaging impact on the climate is a “statement of fact”, say UN scientists in a landmark study.

The report says that ongoing emissions of warming gases could also see a key temperature limit broken in just over a decade.

The authors also show that a rise in sea levels approaching 2m by the end of this century “cannot be ruled out”.

But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.

This sober assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) features in a 42-page document known as the Summary for Policymakers.

It leads a series of reports that will be published over coming months and is the first major review of the science of climate change since 2013. Its release comes less than three months before a key climate summit in Glasgow known as COP26.

“Today’s…

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UN climate chief moans about lack of emission ambition before global summit

‘Climate chief’ – really?
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A few months before the COP26 global climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the United Nations climate chief has called on the international community to make more ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says Phys.org.

Patricia Espinosa said on Saturday that significantly more countries had submitted their plans for emissions reduction by Friday’s deadline than had been submitted six months earlier.

However, only 58% of the countries have met the cut-off deadline, and proposals were often not ambitious enough.

Science magazine blows the whistle on climate model failure

Image credit: livescience.com

It’s not as hot as we thought, they could say. That’s been obvious for a long time, but the defensive bluster of modellers has finally dried up, it seems. Time to dump the pointless and ‘implausible’ extreme scenarios and think seriously about some of the assumptions, such as greenhouse gas theory and its supposed climate consequences, and other suggested shortcomings.
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Leading climate scientists conceded that models used to estimate how much the world will warm with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are running too hot, reports The Australian (via The GWPF).

“It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Science ­magazine.

The admission is seen as a significant development by scientists who argue that not enough attention has been paid to natural ­cycles in the earth’s climate.

It puts another question mark over the use of the most extreme scenarios generated by models, RCP8.5, to estimate what could be expected in a warming world.

Could Pacific Northwest heatwave, European floods have been caused by the Sun?

Credit: The Weather Network

Of course they could have been. The question is, were they? Assigning weather events to ‘global warming’ is ambiguous without a full definition of what the assigner means by that term. Jet stream blocking events discussed below are well-known to meteorologists, and constantly claiming them as evidence of a new human-caused problem with the climate is a stretch, to say the least.
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The recent record-shattering heat wave in the Pacific northwest and devastating floods in western Europe have both been ascribed to global warming by many climate scientists, says Science Under Attack.

But an alternative explanation, voiced by some climatologists yet ignored by the mainstream media, is that the disasters were caused by the phenomenon of jet-stream blocking – which may or may not be a result of global warming, and could instead arise from a weakening of the sun’s output.

Blocking refers to the locking in place for several days or weeks of the jet stream, a narrow, high-altitude air current that flows rapidly from west to east in each hemisphere and governs much of our weather.

One of the more common blocking patterns is known as an “omega block,” a buckling of the jet stream named for its resemblance to the upper-case Greek letter omega, that produces alternating, stationary highs and lows in pressure as shown in the figure below. Under normal weather conditions, highs and lows move on quickly.

According to the blocking explanation, the torrential rains that hovered over parts of western Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands came from a low-pressure system trapped between two blocking highs to the west and east – the opposite situation to that shown in the figure.

Precipitation tends to increase in a warmer world because of enhanced evap­oration from tropical oceans, resulting in more water vapor in the atmosphere. So with a blocking low stuck over the Rhine valley and the ground already saturated from previous rainfall, it’s not surprising that swollen rivers overflowed and engulfed whole villages.

A similar argument can be invoked to explain the intense “heat dome” that parked itself over British Columbia, Washington and Oregon for five blisteringly hot days last month. In this case, it was a region of high pressure that was pinned in place by lows on either side, with the sweltering heat intensified by the effects of La Niña on North America.

Several Pacific northwest cities experienced temperatures a full 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above previous records.

There’s little doubt that both of these calamitous events resulted from jet-stream omega blocks. Blocking can also induce cold extremes, such as the deep freeze endured by Texas earlier this year. But how can blocking be caused by the sun?

Over the 11-year solar cycle, the sun’s heat and visible light fluctuate, as does its production of invisible UV, which varies much more than the tenth of a percent change in total solar output. It’s thought that changes in solar UV irradiance cause wind shifts in the stratosphere (the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere), which in turn induce blocking in the tropospheric jet stream via a feedback effect.

Blocking can also stem from other mechanisms. In the North Atlantic at least, a 2008 research paper found that during periods of low solar activity, blocking events in more eastward locations are longer and more intense than during higher solar activity.

Right now we’re entering a stretch of diminished solar output, signified by a falloff in the average monthly number of sunspots as depicted in the next figure.

The decline in the maximum number of sunspots over the last few cycles likely heralds the onset of a grand solar minimum, which could usher in a period of global cooling.

Full article here.

Old-school data suggests hurricanes in the Atlantic are not more frequent than in the past

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Quote: ‘No evidence’. Not more intense either. Reports claiming otherwise were greatly exaggerated or at least ill-informed, it seems (as well as being frequent, and intensely irritating). Climate alarmists will not be amused.
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Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States have determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.

Over the past several decades, scientists studying satellite data have found that the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean has been increasing.

Many in the field have suggested that this is due to the impact of global warming.

Climate referendum: Swiss reject higher carbon taxes

Credit: myswitzerland.com

Democratic accountability can be a menace to climate obsessives. Suppressing and ignoring widespread disagreeable — to them — views is more their style. Looking at you, G7 leaders.
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Swiss voters have rejected legislation at the heart of the country’s strategy to abide by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reports Swiss Info (via The GWPF).

The CO2 law was turned down on Sunday by 51.6% of voters. The negative outcome represents a major upset in the tiny nation that is disproportionately affected by climate change [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Switzerland’s temperatures are rising at about twice the pace of the global average [Talkshop comment – says who?] and its Alpine glaciers risk disappearing by the end of the century [Talkshop comment – empty waffle].

Deep ‘decarbonization’ by 2050 currently not plausible, study finds

Some climate theories aren’t plausible either, including the one that thinks that atmospheric goings-on are more important than ocean dynamics like El Niño and La Niña. But the fear show must go on.
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Today the Hamburg-based Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS) publishes a new, essential study on climate futures, reports Phys.org.

The study represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible.

The authors examine plausibility from a technical-economic perspective, but also with regard to the societal changes necessary for such a future.

They conclude that deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible—the current efforts to bring about societal transformation need to be far more ambitious.