Statistical politics: Prof. Mike Hulme on ‘politically charged’ climate baseline changes from 1961-1990 to 1991-2020: ‘In an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer’

Image credit: livescience.com

H/T Climate Depot

Nothing must stand in the way of the public being bombarded with supposed climate alarms, and told it’s their fault. Data jiggery-pokery serves a useful purpose in that aim – in this case, a kind of ‘climate reset’.
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Climates Multiple: Three Baselines, Two Tolerances, One Normal — Mike Hulme

Excerpt: “Friday 1 January 2021, a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climatological standard normal came into effect. The ‘present-day’ climate will now formally be represented by the meteorological statistics of the period 1991-2020, replacing those from 1961-1990. National Meteorological Agencies in member states are instructed to issue new standard normals for observing stations and for associated climatological products. Climate will ‘change’, one might say, in an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer. It is somewhat equivalent to re-setting Universal Time or adjusting the exact definition of a metre.” …

Climate stats show no significant warming trend in the last 5 years, says The GWPF

But every squillionth of a degree counts for those trying to promote a human-caused climate crisis that never lives up to the hype of the computer models. In contrast with dire predictions, the change since the 1998 El Niño is nothing to write home about.
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There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum.

Every year in the middle of January various organisations, The UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, etc. release their estimates of the annual average global temperature of our planet.

This year the conclusion is that 2020 is statistically identical to 2016. Some have placed it the second whereas the Japanese Meteorological Agency has it as the third warmest of the modern era.

The overall conclusion to be drawn however is the misunderstanding of statistics used to support a predetermined opinion.

Paris court hears landmark case on France’s [alleged] climate inaction

Political leaders are starting to find their synthetic enthusiasm for ‘fixing’ supposedly human-caused climate problems is coming back to bite them. Courts are being asked to make judgments on scientific veracity which they can’t do alone, so who will they rely on as their ‘expert’ witnesses – given that anyone selected has equally expert opponents standing by?
(Added ‘alleged’ to the original headline, to keep the right side of the law) 😆.
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A Paris court began hearing a complaint brought by NGOs backed by two million citizens on Thursday accusing the French state of failing to act to halt climate change, reports Yahoo!News.

The NGOs went to court to hold the state responsible for ecological damage and say victory would mark a symbolic step in the fight to persuade governments to do more.

An international accord signed in Paris five years ago aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5 degrees.

But experts say governments are far from meeting their commitments and anger is growing among the younger generation over inaction, symbolised by the campaigns of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.

The French case is part of a mounting push from climate campaigners across the world to use courts against governments.

Why are hundreds of Pacific Islands growing despite rising sea levels?

In the Maldives

Just as the late Nils-Axel Mörner, a lifelong sea levels researcher, explained in an interview about two years ago. Let’s hope the climate miserablists now give up on their ‘drowning islands’ nonsense.
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New research says hundreds of islands in the Pacific are growing in land size, even as climate change-related sea level rises threaten the region, says ABC News Australia.

Scientists at the University of Auckland found atolls in the Pacific nations of Marshall Islands and Kiribati, as well as the Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean, have grown up to 8 per cent in size over the past six decades despite sea level rise.

They say their research could help climate-vulnerable nations adapt to global warming in the future.

UK urged to save Cop26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow

The greenblob is right to think ‘COP-speak’ is a big turn-off for the public, but that’s about all they get right. Trying to manipulate the Earth’s climate by demonising the minor trace gas carbon dioxide is a vastly expensive exercise in futility. Seeing hundreds of planes full of delegates arriving in Glasgow (if it happens) will undermine any little public credibility the COP exercise, supposedly about ’emissions’, might have. People may be even less impressed if/when delegates start arguing for semi-permanent forms of lockdown, in pursuit of their long-term agendas.
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UK ministers are under pressure to rescue the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (Cop26) in Glasgow this year amid concerns not enough energy is being poured into preparations for the crucial talks, reports The National News (N World).

Environmental experts warned the government must step up preparations after a report claimed at the weekend Business Secretary Alok Sharma offered to quit his government post to focus on his second responsibility as Cop26 president.

The November talks are seen as critical for accelerating global action towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Participating countries are expected to hammer out new emission reduction targets to limit global warming to well below 2°C.

Summer temperatures could rise faster in the UK than average global rates, researchers suggest

Bring it on. Average August temperature in London is 22C, and much of the UK is at cooler higher latitudes than London is. A long way to go to even get close to Mediterranean-style summers, and some ‘heat deaths’ could well be due to lack of air conditioning as much as the weather itself. Deaths from cold weather are more the issue in the UK. Researchers today like to assume that temperature trends go on forever in one direction, but forget the ‘experts’ were forecasting drastic global cooling back in the 1970s, after 30 years of lack of warming. A 40 year study period is short for claiming trends, hence words like ‘could’ and ‘projected’ to hedge their bets.
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The U.K. could be facing a future of extreme heatwaves according to a new study in which scientists mapped almost 40 years’ worth of trends to project what lies ahead, says Phys.org.

The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, draws on datasets from the Met Office’s U.K. Climate Projections, specifically UKCP18, which contains global climate model projections and simulations from around the world, as well as high resolution climate model projections on a local and regional scale for the U.K. and Europe.

Between 2016 and 2019 there were more than 3,400 excess deaths in England as a result of heatwaves.

2020 – what a year of climate alarmism tells us about green ideology

From: Ben Pile at Climate Resistance

Many climate alarmist’s failed predictions were centred around 2020. This video examines just ten, and argues that they were produced not by science, but by ideology.

This is proved by the fact that rather than suffering any consequences to their careers or public standing, fearmongering individuals and institutions enjoy continued and undeserved success.

The analysis of the ten predictions was produced by Steve Milloy and can be read at his website.
[Or via the Talkshop, here].

More climate craziness: a burp-catching mask for cows

Image credit: Zelp

Fashion accessories for cows: how much more absurd and foolish can climate obsession get? Atmospheric methane is negligible anyway, being measured in parts per billion.
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Methane from cattle accounts for a significant amount of global warming [Talkshop comment: evidence-free assertion] — startup Zelp has a comfortable and stylish solution, says Wired.

There are 1.6 billion cattle on Earth, and their burps and farts are becoming a big problem.

Cows expel methane, a colourless and odourless gas which is approximately 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the planet.

Ten climate predictions for 2020 that went horribly wrong

Arctic sea ice [image credit: Geoscience Daily]

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

As ever, too much reliance on climate models is liable to lead to embarrassment and failure. But there’s always a supply of new or recycled scares to fall back on, preferably those with distant expiry dates to avoid loss of face.
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It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical, says PJ Media.

Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had 10 years left for humans to act against climate change, alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another, each of which stubbornly failed to materialize.

Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020.

Newly discovered Greenland hot rock mantle plume drives thermal activities in the Arctic

Topographic map of Greenland

We’re told ‘The North Atlantic region is awash with geothermal activity’. Any day now we should be hearing how a few extra molecules of (human-caused) CO2 make the Earth’s innards hotter than they used to be. Or maybe we won’t.
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A team of researchers understands more about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, says SciTech Daily.

They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle plume, rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath central Greenland that melts the ice from below.

Crystal ball time as the BBC and Met Office unveil their climate postcode lottery

Brits can get their fix of climate doom here. All based on greenhouse gas theory, even though the greenhouse itself is mythical. What could possibly go wrong? Just ‘Enter your postcode above to reveal how hot it could get near you’, says the BBC. Will you be roasted, flooded or maybe both?
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How high might temperatures climb where you live – and is it likely to rain more?

The BBC and the Met Office have looked at the UK’s changing climate in detail to find out.

The Met Office climate projections cover different levels of global warming.

Boris Johnson mocks ‘tree-hugging, mung bean-munching eco-freaks’ at UN climate summit

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

All the while sounding like an eco-freak himself, who thinks carbon dioxide is a ‘toxic’ gas? Ask a scientist.
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Boris Johnson has said he is not a “mung-bean munching eco freak”, but instead supports green policies because they are “right for the world”, reports I-news.

The Prime Minister was speaking at the 2020 Climate Ambition Summit, which is marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The UK has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 68 per cent on 1990s levels by 2030, and Mr Johnson highlighted that the UK had earmarked £11.6 billion in overseas aid to support green technology and decarbonisation across the planet.

Solar activity and climate

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

Wikipedia’s Solar activity and climate web page says:
Solar activity has been on a declining trend since the 1960s, as indicated by solar cycles 19-24, in which the maximum number of sunspots were 201, 111, 165, 159, 121 and 82, respectively.

We’re probably not surprised that they prefer a metric which appears to support their often-expressed view in various climate-related pages that modern global warming can’t be natural.

But is the sunspot maximum the most relevant metric to judge the level of solar activity by? Another Wikipedia page is its List of Solar Cycles.

Hollywood scenarios ruled out in north Atlantic Ocean study

Credit: NASA – GISS

The researchers conclude that “the AMOC states in both the subpolar and subtropical North Atlantic between the 1990s and 2010s are indistinguishably different from each other”. In effect: nothing to see here, put the alarm bells away.
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Ocean vertical structures are changing as a result of global warming, says Phys.org.

Whether these changes are in pace with the ocean circulation is unknown.

Now, an international team of scientists from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology (SCSIO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Georgia Institute of Technology, U.S., and GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, gave an answer to the question.

According to their study published in Science Advances on Nov. 27, ocean circulation changes and ocean interior property changes may not occur at the same pace as it was previously suggested.

Covid pandemic has little impact on rise in CO2

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

This seems open to interpretation. Does it lead to the possibility that most CO2 rise is natural, and therefore all attempted reductions are an even bigger waste of time, money and resources than they were anyway? Here the BBC serves up another dollop of warmist assertions it can’t or won’t try to justify, presumably in an attempt to prevent any inconvenient notions about greenhouse gas theory from entering its audience’s heads.
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The global response to the Covid-19 crisis has had little impact on the continued rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, says the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

This year carbon [dioxide] emissions have fallen dramatically due to lockdowns that have cut transport and industry severely, says BBC News.

But this has only marginally slowed the overall rise in concentrations, the scientists say.

Scare of the day: Rising use of nitrogen fertilisers could jeopardise global climate goals

Image credit: wisegeek.com

That’s a large chunk of the global food supply in the dock then, according to IPCC-based ‘greenhouse’ climate theories that perform badly in climate models, leading to endless over-prediction of global warming.
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The growing use of nitrogen fertilisers in world food production could put ambitious climate targets out of reach, as it leads to rising levels of nitrous oxide (N2O) in the atmosphere, a new University of Oslo study shows.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a highly potent greenhouse gas, and its impact on global warming is 300 times larger than that of carbon dioxide (CO2). Once emitted, N2O remains in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. What’s more – it also depletes the ozone layer.

If left unabated, the emissions resulting from the growing use of nitrogen fertilisers will require bigger reductions in CO2 emissions to reach the goal of the Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the study.

France’s top court gives government three months to honour climate commitments

It seems courts in some countries are now in effect regarding as proven something that is not proven, namely that rises in Earth’s meagre 0.04% atmospheric carbon dioxide content will necessarily cause serious problems requiring urgent governmental action – whatever that may be – to ‘tackle’ the situation. Not only is this not proven, but science was arguing against such theories in published papers as far back as 1900, and continues to do so in various quarters today. The upshot is that, in these countries at least, governments have lumbered themselves with the legal duty of trying to reduce Earth’s average temperature, on pain of being found in contempt of court (or some such charge) for not trying hard enough, or at all. Not what President Macron would have had in mind when he strutted the stage at his notorious 2015 Paris climate summit.

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France’s top administrative court has given the government a three-month deadline to show it is taking action to meet its commitments on global warming, reports Yahoo News with AFP.

The Council of State, which rules on disputes over public policies, said that “while France has committed itself to reducing its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, it has, in recent years, regularly exceeded the ‘carbon budgets’ it had set itself.”

It also noted that President Emmanuel Macron’s government had, in an April decree, at the height of the first wave of Covid-19 infections, deferred much of the reduction effort beyond 2020.

Meet ‘The Centre for Climate Repair’

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

This takes climate pretension to a new level. Bizarre.
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WHO WE ARE — The Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge is working in affiliation with Cambridge Zero at the University of Cambridge to safeguard our planet from the disastrous effects of global warming.

We are a cross-disciplinary research institution, aiming to develop and understand the solutions that will safeguard our planet from the disastrous consequences of global warming.
[Talkshop note: their repetition, not ours.]

‘Unstoppable’ global warming claim withdrawn by Scientific Reports journal

Overblown warming claims, arising from climate modellers obsessing over trace gases, may be unstoppable but some measure of reality surfaces briefly here.
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A top scientific journal which claimed that global warming may already be unstoppable has been forced to issue a clarification after being accused of potentially causing “unnecessary despair”, says The GWPF.

Scientific Reports sought to publicise a study by Norwegian scientists with a doom-laden press release headlined: “Ending greenhouse gas emissions may not stop global warming.”

After being strongly criticised by leading British scientists, the journal issued a revised press release which admitted that the prediction was based on a particular computer model and said the results should be tested by “alternative models”.

Cloud shapes and formations impact global warming – but we still don’t understand them

Cumulus clouds over the Atlantic Ocean [image credit: Tiago Fioreze @ Wikipedia]

Clouds again: “For 50 years, people have been making climate projections, but all of them have had a false representation of clouds”, says a top atmospheric science professor who served as a lead-author of Chapter 7, “Cloud and Aerosols” for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Despite this glaring deficiency in climate models, governments insist on framing energy policies on the assertion that human ’emissions’ will be the main cause of any observed or future global climate change.
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Above the Atlantic Ocean, puffy white clouds scud across the sky buffeted by invisible trade winds.

They are not ‘particularly big, impressive or extended,” says Dr. Sandrine Bony, a climatologist and research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “But they are the most ubiquitous clouds on Earth.”

Clouds are one of the biggest question marks in global climate models, and a wild card in predicting what will happen to the climate as temperatures rise, says Phys.org.

They play a vital role in how much of the sun’s radiation makes it into and gets trapped in our atmosphere.

The more clouds there are, the more radiation bounces off their tops and is reflected back into space; it also means that if there are more clouds, the radiation reflected by Earth gets trapped.