Jet stream waviness theory of Arctic warming revived by modellers after scientific debunking

Credit: weather.com

A 2020 news report (H/T Belfast Telegraph) headlined Extreme weather being caused by jet stream ‘not because of Arctic warming’, with the sub-heading: ‘Any link is more likely to be a result of random fluctuations in the jet stream influencing Arctic temperatures, researchers say’ – cites a study that comprehensively contradicts the findings described in the article below. “The well-publicised idea that Arctic warming is leading to a wavier jet stream just does not hold up to scrutiny”, said Professor James Screen [University of Exeter]. “With the benefit of 10 more years of data and model experiments, we find no evidence of long-term changes in waviness despite on-going Arctic warming.” But the stated lack of evidence hasn’t deterred this new research. Are they flogging the proverbial dead horse?
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A quartet of researchers, two with the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics and two with Pukyong National University, has created a group of simulations of changes to the jet stream under global warming, says Phys.org.

In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes using math theory to describe wind motion under given circumstances to create their simulations.

Over the past several years, the jet stream has become wavier than it used to be. Both peaks and valleys have become more extreme.

This has led to changes in weather patterns—some places have grown wetter and some drier, and there have also been more extended hot and cold spells around the globe.

More droughts and flooding predicted as La Niña weather pattern goes into third consecutive winter

A media campaign to point the finger at the ‘greed of rich countries’ for local weather conditions is already underway in Pakistan. But NASA gave the game away after the last time this happened, in 2010: ‘The rainfall anomaly map published by NASA showed unusually intense monsoon rains attributed to La Niña’ – Wikipedia. Of course it’s now standard practice to try to blame humans in the more industrialised countries for any seriously bad weather.
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More droughts and flooding are being predicted as the La Nina weather pattern goes into its third consecutive winter – something known as a “triple dip”, says Sky News.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicts it will last until at least the end of the year.

That means it will have spanned three consecutive northern winters for the first time this century.

La Nina is the cooling of ocean surface temperatures coupled with winds and rainfall.

Norway’s future CO2 cemetery takes shape – but what’s the point?

Credit: klimatetochskogen.nu

An expensive exercise in futility. As noted below, ‘the scheme will be able to process 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, then later between five and six million tonnes. But that is just a tiny fraction of annual carbon emissions across Europe.’ Even Greenpeace opposes it. It’s for show, not for any useful purpose.
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On the shores of an island off Norway’s North Sea coast, engineers are building a burial ground for unwanted greenhouse gas, reports Phys.org.

The future terminal is to pump tonnes of liquefied carbon dioxide captured from the top of factory chimneys across Europe into cavities deep below the seabed.

The project in the western municipality of Oygarden aims to prevent the gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

Collapse of G20 climate talks in Bali : ‘nothing happened’

A lot of ‘carbon emissions’ to get there, followed by much fruitless arguing. Sounds shambolic.
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Climate and energy ministers clashed over Ukraine, climate finance, methane, shipping, carbon levies and whether 1.5C or 2C should be the world’s warming limit, summarises Climate Home News.

Energy and climate ministers from some of the world’s largest economies have failed to agree on joint texts at G20 meetings in Bali, Indonesia.

With two months to the Cop27 summit, host Egypt has warned against “backtracking” on climate commitments.

Dutch record highest solar radiation levels since 1970s

Netherlands beach [image credit: dutchreview.com]

Dutch meteorologists expect ‘we will have more cloudy summer weather again’ sometime in the future. For now: more sun = more heat. Who knew?
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The Netherlands this summer has had the highest amount of solar radiation recorded since 1976, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KMNI) reported.

The “sunny summer fits in with the trend of increasing solar radiation in the Netherlands since the 1990s,” the KMNI added.

The Dutch west coast currently receives 9% more sunshine than the country’s east though solar radiation has increased 3% in summer and 5% in spring, KMNI reported.

Gamblers update: Eli Rabett vs Tallbloke on Arctic Sea Ice extent

Six years ago this week, I agreed to a wager with Eli Rabett on the trend in Arctic sea ice extent from 2006-2026. Now we’re more than halfway to the finish line, it’s a good time to check on progress. Here’s how the Sea Ice Extent graph looks from mid 2006 to mid 2022. The trend is still towards less ice, but not by much. There’s no ‘climate emergency tipping point’ visible in the data.

The terms we agreed are detailed in the image of the twitter convo below.

Is electricity for air conditioning unsustainable?

Air conditioning sign
[image credit: BBC]

‘Is propane a solution for more sustainable air conditioning?’ asks TechXplore. We put the question another way in our headline. The article asserts: ‘Apart from the rise in energy consumption, space-coolers also threaten the environment in different ways…’. So someone has concluded that rises in energy consumption – meaning electricity here – are a threat of some sort to the environment. One question then might be: where does that leave electric vehicles, or data centres, for example? The IEA estimates ‘that by 2025, data centres will consume 1/5 of the world’s power supply’.
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Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential.

A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase from space cooling.

We spend enormous amounts of energy on fighting off the heat in the summer, or throughout the whole year at lower latitudes—about one-tenth of the total worldwide electricity supply.

The climate attribution game

As described below, when climate scientists removed the warming factors they chose to create in their models, the results showed lower temperatures. They seem unaware or uninterested that this proves little or nothing, but label it science anyway and say their studies attribute most of the blame for any observed warming to human factors.
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Since 1880, the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1 °C. The culprit? Climate change, of course, asserts Phys.org.

Getting hotter, faster

According to findings released by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, a global collaboration between climate scientists and specialists, the record temperatures would have been up to 4 °C cooler without human-caused climate change.

The hottest day ever (40.3 °C) in the UK was registered on 19 July. The WWA analysis also claims [sic] that climate change made this heatwave 10 times more likely.
. . .
Dr. Radhika Khosla from the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment applauded the WWA’s efforts:

London’s desalination plant won’t be fired up even if official drought is declared

Beckton desalination plant, London [image credit: Acciona]

Is the plant, which is supposed to run on renewable energy, deemed too expensive to operate except as a last resort, or are there other problems? Hosepipe bans are obviously a cheaper alternative.
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London’s desalination plant won’t be fired up even if official drought is declared, says The Telegraph (via MSN).

It was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 2010 and promised to be the saviour for thousands of Londoners in case of drought.

Twelve years later, its moment arrived during the driest July on record – but the desalination plant in Beckton, east London, was effectively mothballed with no clear date for its resurrection.

UK heatwave: Weather forecasters report unprecedented trolling

Might be related to them trying a bit too hard to make a meal of it? They could have chosen to stick to the role their job title suggests.
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Weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling during this month’s extreme heat in the UK, according to leading figures in the industry – says BBC News.

The BBC’s team received hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to “get a grip”, as temperatures hit 40C.

BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather.

The Royal Meteorological Society condemned the trolling.

Climate models: Wildfire-smoke observations may help ‘fill gap’ in estimating soot’s role, researchers hope

California wildfire [image credit: NASA]

Another day, another topic of model uncertainty. ‘Refining’ an admitted high level of uncertainty is an odd concept, but researchers assert the issue will be ‘cleared up’. However, their belief in ‘potent climate-warming agents’ doesn’t inspire confidence.
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New research refining the amount of sunlight absorbed by black carbon in smoke from wildfires will help clear up a long-time weak spot in earth system models, enabling more accurate forecasting of global climate change, says Phys.org.

“Black carbon or soot is the next most potent climate-warming agent after CO2 and methane, despite a short lifetime of weeks, but its impact in climate models is still highly uncertain,” said James Lee, a climate researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters on light absorption by wildfire smoke. “Our research will clear up that uncertainty.”

The Los Alamos research resolves a long-time disconnect between the observations of the amount of light absorbed by black carbon in smoke and the amount predicted by models, given how black carbon is mixed with other material such as condensed organic aerosols that are present in plumes.

Future temperature growth in Asia is being overestimated by between 3.4% and 11.6%, say researchers

Monsoon region

A familiar story of inaccurate climate models. The overestimates would undermine various predictions.
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Global climate tools being used to predict future temperature rises and rainfall across Asia are significantly overestimating their potential growth and impact, according to new research.

A study published in Nature Communications suggests predictions by the World Climate Research Program’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) are overestimating future temperature growth by between 3.4% and 11.6%, says Phys.org.

Based on revised calculations, an international team of researchers say this could result in the rate of snow cover loss in Asia, notably in the Himalayas, being between 10.5% and 40.2% lower than previously predicted.

As well as the physical effects on the landscape, this, they add, could have significant knock-on effects on both predicted future climate warming and water availability in Asia.

Climate mania: When will the UK heatwave peak and how hot will it get?

Warm day in London

People in many parts of the world must be wondering what all the fuss is about, but Brits like to discuss their ever-changeable weather now and again…and again. Of course there’s now the added element of wild panic-mongering (see below) from the usual climate-obsessed suspects like the Met Office, trying to blame humans for natural events plus all the rest of their tedious hype. We’ve had hot days before, and some like to pay to find hotter ones on their travels, so let’s dial back on the shrill alarmism.
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The Met Office has issued its first red warning for extreme heat, warning of a “potentially very serious situation” in parts of England, says ITV News.

The UK Health Security Agency has increased its heat health warning from level three to level four – a “national emergency.”

Level four is reached only when a heatwave is “so severe and/or prolonged that its effects extend outside the health and social care system”, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

Illness and death may occur even among the fit and healthy, and “not just in high-risk groups.”

Plankton will store more carbon as Earth’s climate warms, but ‘Twilight Zone’ uncertainties remain say researchers

CO2 is not pollution

The researchers are not going overboard with positivity, but seem clear that the Earth’s carbon cycle is still working much as expected. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they theorise problems might occur by 2100 if some presently unknown limit is approached, but say ‘the Twilight Zone region of the ocean’ needs more research. In short, so far so good.
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The amount of carbon stored by microscopic plankton will increase in the coming century, predict researchers at the University of Bristol and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

Using the latest IPCC models (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the team expects the “biological pump”—a process where microscopic plants, often called phytoplankton, take up carbon and then die and sink into the deep ocean where carbon is stored for hundreds of years—to account for between 5 and 17% of the total increase in carbon uptake by the oceans by 2100.

Their findings were published today in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), says Phys.org.

Lead author Dr. Jamie Wilson, of the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, explained, “The biological pump stores roughly double the amount of carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere in the deep ocean. Because plankton are sensitive to climate change, this carbon pool is likely to change in size, so we set out to understand how this would change in the future in response to climate change by looking at the latest future projections by IPCC models.”

Microscopic organisms called plankton, living in the sunlit surface of the ocean, use carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. When these plankton die, their remains rapidly sink down through the “Twilight Zone” of the ocean (200–1000m), where environmental factors, such as temperature and oxygen concentration, and ecological factors, such as being eaten by other plankton, control how much reaches the deep ocean where the carbon from their bodies is stored away from the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.

Warming of the oceans slows down the circulation, increasing the time that carbon is stored in the deep ocean.

Contributing author Dr. Anna Katavouta, who worked alongside early-career scientist Dr. Chelsey Baker, both from the National Oceanography Centre, added, “Our research found a consistent increase in the carbon stored in the ocean by the biological carbon pump over the 21st century in the latest IPCC model projections. In contrast, we found a decline in the global export production (the amount of organic matter, such as dead plankton, sinking below the ocean surface), which suggests that export production may not be as accurate a metric for the biological carbon pump than previously thought. We demonstrated that the organic matter flux at 1000 meters is instead a better predictor of long-term carbon sequestration associated with the biological carbon pump. This outcome will help us to better understand the processes that control the biological carbon pump and to predict more reliably how much of the carbon released due to human activity will be stored in the ocean in the future.”

However, the IPCC models have no consistent representation of the environmental and ecological processes in the Twilight Zone. This leads to a large uncertainty in how much carbon dioxide originating from the atmosphere the biological pump will store beyond the end of the century.

In theory, after 2100, carbon storage by the biological pump could stall and instead may start acting as a source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which could exacerbate climate change further.

Full article here.

Spain, Portugal dryness ‘unprecedented’ in 1,200 years – or maybe not, say critics

Credit: NOAA

Some scientists contacted by Carbon Brief have their doubts about the reasons given for the reported expansion of the Azores high. An assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, warns that “the title statement is not justified by the study”. Another assistant professor, at the University of Dartmouth, told Carbon Brief ‘that changes in the size and intensity of the Azores high could also have been driven by changes in aerosol levels, rather than changes in greenhouse gases emissions. (For example, the passing of the US Clean Air Act in the 1970s saw pollution levels drop significantly, causing localised warming.) That the authors did not investigate this factor is “a curious omission” he says.’ On top of that, Prof Richard Seagar – a research professor at Columbia University – told Carbon Brief that the expansion in the Azores high could also “easily be explained by the long-term variability and changes of the North Atlantic Oscillation”.
In short, this attempt to put the blame on humans for the more recent climatic conditions related to this phenomenon is already starting to look shaky.
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Parts of Portugal and Spain are the driest they have been in a thousand years due to an atmospheric high-pressure system driven by climate change, according to research published Monday, warning of severe implications for wine and olive production.

The Azores High, an area of high pressure that rotates clockwise over parts of the North Atlantic, has a major effect on weather and long-term climate trends in western Europe says Phys.org.

But in a new modeling study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers in the United States found this high-pressure system “has changed dramatically in the past century and that these changes in North Atlantic climate are unprecedented within the past millennium”.

Alarmist dismay as US Supreme Court rules against EPA on climate regulation powers

Verdict [image credit: coindesk.com]

Democracy overseeing the flow of EPA climate edicts? A ‘huge blow’, say alarmists, as over-the-top reactions from some of the usual suspects pour in.
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This means Congress will now have to pass off on any climate regulations, says Energy Live News.

In what’s been considered a blow to climate mitigation in the US, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This means the EPA will now be limited in how it can regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and help stave off global warming in the country.

The Moon’s climate influence detected by researchers

Image credit: interactivestars.com

Not exactly a new idea, but worth pursuing. Given the present feverish pursuit of supposedly climate-related policies that attempt to counter imagined human-caused effects, all known aspects of natural variation must be highlighted and included in models.
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New analysis suggests that the Moon might be an unappreciated factor in climate change and, according to researchers from the Universities of East Anglia and Reading, its influence “cannot be discounted as an important driver of multidecadal variability of global temperature.”

It’s a suggestion that is bound to prompt debate and a possible reassessment of the relative influence of human factors on climate change in the past and the future when the lunar effect is included, says Dr. David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

It arises from the so-called lunar nodal cycle of 18.6 years caused by variations in the angle of the Moon’s orbital plane. During this period the Moon’s orbit “wobbles” between plus or minus 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s equator.

Research shows tropical cyclones forming globally decreased by about 13% during the 20th century compared to the 19th

Landfalling hurricane [credit: NOAA]

A reconstructed record of cyclone activity going as far back as 1850 doesn’t show what climate alarmists, with their assertions of ‘human-induced’ global warming, might have expected. The intensity question is left for future research. The researchers note that ‘For most tropical cyclone basins (regions where they occur more regularly), including Australia, the decline has accelerated since the 1950s. Importantly, this is when human-induced warming also accelerated.’ [Or so they believe.] ‘The only exception to the trend is the North Atlantic basin’. Of course detailed historical records of natural climate variation may also be hard to find.
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The annual number of tropical cyclones forming globally decreased by about 13% during the 20th century compared to the 19th, according to research published today in Nature Climate Change.

Tropical cyclones are massive low-pressure systems that form in tropical waters when the underlying environmental conditions are right, says The Conversation.

These conditions include (but aren’t limited to) sea surface temperature, and variables such as vertical wind shear, which refers to changes in wind speed and direction with altitude.

Met Office 2050 forecasts use ‘plausible scenarios’ that aren’t plausible

Image credit: livescience.com

In their computer model game they use the discredited RCP 8.5 formula that assumes a highly unlikely surface energy increase of 8.5W/m^2 by 2100 (not 2050). What’s the point?
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You may have seen some of our forecasts that look a little further ahead than you would usually expect, says the UK Met Office.

Although they use the same graphics as our normal weather forecasts, we’ve been producing theoretical ‘forecasts’ for 2050 to look at what conditions we could expect to see in the UK if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

One of the greatest challenges with communicating the risks of climate change is how to show, in a relatable way, how changes in our atmosphere could impact the weather we experience on the Earth’s surface.

Have climate models outlived their usefulness? – Net Zero Watch

Is more computing power just getting us the wrong results from overheated models faster?
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Outside of their academic fascination, looked at in terms of their contribution to climate policy, it seems that we may have reached the useful limit of computer climate modelling, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

The first computers built in the 1950s allowed climate scientists to think about modelling the climate using this new technology.

The first usable computer climate models were developed in the mid-1970s.

Shortly afterwards the US National Academy of Sciences used their outcomes to estimate a crucial climate parameter we still calculate today – the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) – how much the world would warm (from ‘pre-industrial’ levels) with a doubling of CO2 — and concluded that it had a range of 1.5 – 4.5°C.