Climate change: The ‘insane’ plan to save the Arctic’s sea-ice

Is this just another toytown publicity stunt to keep promoting the notion that there’s some climate problem, supposedly caused by human activities, requiring urgent corrective measures?
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Perched on sea-ice off Canada’s northern coast, parka-clad scientists watch saltwater pump out over the frozen ocean.

Their goal? To slow global warming, says BBC News.

As sea-ice vanishes, the dark ocean surface can absorb more of the Sun’s energy, which accelerates warming. So the researchers want to thicken it to stop it melting away.

An increase in the number of extreme cold days in North China during 2003–2012, research finds

The researchers wrestle with the non-correlation of extreme winter weather events and the monotonic increase in CO2 levels, offering a verdict of ‘probable’ natural variation. They try to support IPCC climate assertions, but the article keeps saying ‘however’. One of the study’s authors says: “This is still a challenging issue that needs further exploration to quantify the relative contributions of natural variability and human activity to regional extreme events.”
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A recent study by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, presents robust interdecadal changes in the number of extreme cold days in winter over North China during 1989–2021, and the findings have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, says EurekAlert.

Specifically, the number of extreme cold days increased around the year 2003 and then decreased around the year 2013, with a value of 8.7 days per year during 1989–2002, 13.5 during 2003–2012, and 6.6 during 2013–2021.

During 2003–2012, the Siberian–Ural High strengthened and the polar jet stream weakened, which favored frequent cold air intrusion into North China, inducing more extreme cold days. In addition, the intensity of extreme cold days in North China showed no significant difference in the three periods.

Sound the alarm? EU climate agency says the globe is a fraction of a degree warmer than the last ‘record’

Note the adjectives: ‘Obliterated…record-breaking…hot streak…soaring…climate change-fueled’ …leading to… ‘breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree’. The big build-up followed by the damp squib.
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For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records—with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.

The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month, says Phys.org.

And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

‘Very Bizarre’: Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

“Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century – heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” says astrophysicist Willie Soon. But data manipulation, or tampering, is rife. Most climate models over-predict warming, while natural variations continue.
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Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times. — Zerohedge reporting.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back.

Why atmospheric geoengineering is dead in the water

Another idea for slaying imaginary climate dragons runs into trouble, as new research finds ‘an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale’. So for believers in a climate crisis the desired short-term effectiveness just isn’t there.
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Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale [Talkshop comment – empty assertions]. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically [sic] be undone.

But employing “emergency” atmospheric geoengineering later this century in the face of continuous high carbon emissions would not be able to reverse changes to ocean currents, a new study finds.

This would critically curtail the intervention’s potential effectiveness on human-relevant timescales.

Oceans, especially the deep oceans, absorb and lose heat more slowly than the atmosphere, so an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale, the authors found.

Nations fail to agree on solar geoengineering regulations

Who could consider themselves qualified to attempt to interfere with the sun’s rays? The African group of countries have an answer: no-one. Overreaction to some slight warming of the globe in the current era is the problem they should be looking at. History tells us such phases come and go, in the long term.
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Governments have failed to agree on how the United Nations should regulate controversial solar radiation management (SRM) techniques, which aim to lessen the effects of climate change by dimming the sunlight reaching Earth, says Climate Home.

At the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi this week, some governments led by the African Group of countries wanted to ban SRM, while others led by Switzerland had pushed to set up an expert panel to research the nascent approach.

As countries were unable to reach consensus at talks on Wednesday, the status quo will continue. SRM is currently legal in most nations.

Atlantic’s hurricane alley is ‘so hot from El Niño’ – but not a guarantee for an active season, says UK expert

Adjectives from the alarmist climate manual are well to the fore here, but so is uncertainty.
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The Atlantic’s “hurricane alley” is already experiencing summer temperatures, despite it only being February says Live Science.

And the unprecedented temperatures could be bad news for the upcoming storm season, researchers say.

Since March 2023, average sea surface temperatures around the world have hit record-shattering highs and are still climbing. This ominous ocean heating is being driven by accelerating global warming and the El Niño climate pattern.

Is tree planting overrated as a climate benefit? Researchers think so

Nature’s carbon cycle carries on regardless.
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Roughly a third of the climate cooling that forests achieve by removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is offset through changes to atmospheric composition and decreased surface reflectivity, researchers report.

The findings suggest that the benefits of wide-scale forestation efforts may be overestimated and do not represent a single solution for addressing climate change, says EurekAlert.

They also highlight the urgency of simultaneously focusing on emissions reductions. Planting trees has been widely promoted as a nature-based solution to remove anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere to help mitigate ongoing climate warming.

However, wide-scale forest expansion may drive feedbacks within the Earth system that lead to warming.

When the global climate has the hiccups – ‘repeated rapid increases in temperature’

Promoters of a current ‘climate crisis’ often call modern warming and/or events within it, ‘unprecedented’. However, compared to events like this: “A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life” [explains Prof.], not much is presently going on. Climate variability can happen in different ways, and repeat over long timescales.
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In recent geological history, the so-called Quaternary period, there have been repeated ice ages and warm periods, says Science Daily.

Researchers are able to determine past climate variability from the composition of climate records. In the case of the last glacial period 100,000 years ago, ice cores from Greenland in particular provide researchers with detailed data.

For example, Greenland ice cores show that there were repeated rapid increases in temperature.

“We are talking about increases of 5 to 10 degrees within 30 to 40 years on average in the case of Europe. A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life,” explains Prof. Dominik Fleitmann, Professor of Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel.

He calls the phenomena “climate hiccups.”

These Dansgaard-Oeschger events are well documented for the last glacial period, but the climate records from Greenland only cover the last 120,000 years.

It was therefore previously unknown whether these Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period 135,000 to 190,000 years ago.

Frederick Held, a PhD candidate in Fleitmann’s research group, was able to show that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period using isotopic measurements on stalagmites.

He is the lead author of the study which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The North Atlantic as the source of change

The stalagmites examined originate from the Sofular Cave in Turkey, which is located in a region that is very sensitive to climate change.

The researchers therefore refer to it as a key region, as it is influenced by the winds of the North Atlantic and the Black Sea is just a few kilometers away.

“We used the isotopic composition in the stalagmites to determine the moisture sources from which they are formed — the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic,” explains Frederick Held.

For the first time, the evaluations carried out on the stalagmites from the Sofular Cave have proven that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period.

“It was previously unknown whether these relatively brief temperature events actually happened in earlier glacial periods,” states Held.

However, they occurred less frequently in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one: “The temperature peaks are twice as far apart from one another, meaning there were longer cold phases between them.”

These temperature fluctuations originate in the North Atlantic, as the circulation of the ocean is a global conveyor belt for heat and can sometimes be stronger and sometimes weaker.

“For example, the circulation affects the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean, which, in turn, impacts the balance of heat in the Northern Hemisphere and air flows and rainfall,” explains Held.

He states that weakened circulation also reduces the quantity of CO2 which the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere.

These ocean currents were different in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one, which explains the different intervals between the Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

This shows that not all glacial periods are the same and not all warm periods are the same.
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The geologist also hopes to clarify any outstanding questions by means of additional analyses. “For example, we do not yet know whether the increases in temperature were periodic or stochastic, in other words random.”

Full article here.

Image: Greenland ice core [credit: K. Makinson @ Wikipedia]

The regular ‘Atlantic Circulation Collapse’ story

Risking making AMOCkery of climate science with unrealistic scenarios in global models is nothing new, but this one keeps coming back like a bad penny, as NZW explains. Returning to the same faulty predictions time and again gets the headlines but is easily debunked. In this case, the researchers intend to re-run their model with ‘global warming included’, but if everything else is the same, including ‘adding unrealistically large quantities of fresh water all at once’, many of the criticisms will still apply.
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One of the many regular climate scare stories you can rely on is the one about failing currents in the Atlantic Ocean bringing cold climate chaos to Europe, says Net Zero Watch.

It’s one of the most favourite doomsday speculations, based on computer models pushed to the edge – but who cares, it’s a good shock-horror story and it pops up regularly.

Actually we should care because it’s well known that most people only register the top line of any news story — especially a climate disaster prediction – while they don’t take-in or even read up on the context and the qualifications.

February Arctic ice ahead of recent comparisons

February Arctic Ice Jumps Over 15 Wadhams a Month Early

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Let’s see how this plays out over the full season.

UK Navy could make climate change courses compulsory

Who would bet against the climate instruction they offer being biased towards the UN/IPCC alarmist view? The new target will be net zero, and the new enemy will be climate change.
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The Royal Navy is considering introducing compulsory climate change courses for all sailors, The Telegraph can reveal.

A leaked briefing paper suggests that all Navy personnel could be forced to attend online training sessions about the impact of climate change on defence.

“While this course is not yet mandated, it does provide a comprehensive overview on the science behind climate change and most importantly its relevance to defence,” the paper reads.

Clouds disappear quickly during a solar eclipse, shows study – ‘a warning for climate engineering’

The research, titled ‘Clouds dissipate quickly during solar eclipses as the land surface cools’, suggests interfering with solar radiation to try and weaken natural warming would be even riskier than previously thought.
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Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse, says Phys.org.

Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method.

The results may have implications for proposed climate engineering ideas because disappearing clouds can partly oppose the cooling effect of artificial solar eclipses.

El Niño fading, ‘good chance’ of La Niña to follow says atmospheric physicist

Natural phenomena dictating weather patterns. The El Niño of 2023-24 is described as ‘strange’, possibly due to some extent to the Tonga undersea volcanic eruption of 2022.
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Wild weather has been roiling North America for the past few months, thanks in part to a strong El Niño that sent temperatures surging in 2023, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

The climate phenomenon fed atmospheric rivers drenching the West Coast and contributed to summer’s extreme heat in the South and Midwest and fall’s wet storms across the East.

That strong El Niño is now starting to weaken and will likely be gone by late spring 2024.

Temperatures are rising, but soil is getting wetter, confounding climate theorists

One overlooked factor was the CO2 fertilization effect in plant photosynthesis. The researchers found that “it’s virtually impossible to predict soil moisture in the coming decades”, contrary to some alarmist notions about future droughts.
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Soil moisture can determine how quickly a wildfire spreads, how fast a hill turns into a mudslide and, perhaps most importantly, how productive our food systems are, says Eurekalert.

As temperatures rise due to human-caused climate change [Talkshop comment – evidence-free assertion of cause], some researchers are concerned that soils will dry.

However, between 2011 to 2020, soil moisture increased across 57% of the United States during summer, the warmest time of year.

Why did soil get wetter even as the planet got hotter?

World’s first year-long breach of ‘key’ 1.5C warming limit alarms the BBC

Alarmists mark an artificial deadline, still pretending government-driven limits can be put on long-term climate variations and attempting to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which hasn’t happened anyway. Cue the usual well-worn phrases about tackling climate change, emissions etc.
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For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts, says BBC News.

This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark “Paris agreement”, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Climate Scientists Want Space Umbrellas The Size Of Argentina To Blot Out The Sun

Mr. Burns blocks the sun

Bad luck for solar panel owners and users, and anything relying on photosynthesis. But as such umbrellas would be far too heavy to move even if they could be made, probably nothing to worry about. Just another climate alarm concoction in search of funding.
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A team of climate scientists wants to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported.

To block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding.

New study reports that Greenland is a methane sink rather than a source

Greenland settlement [image credit: climatechangepost.com]

A large dent goes in to thawing permafrost scares, as another ‘ticking time bomb’ based on greenhouse gas theories turns out to be a dud. As for carbon dioxide, the professor leading the study commented: “…the ice-free parts of Greenland have only been without ice since the last ice age, meaning that they never stored much carbon”. Climate models will have to be revised.
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Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have concluded that the methane uptake in dry landscapes exceeds methane emissions from wet areas across the ice-free part of Greenland.

The results of the new study contribute important knowledge to climate models, says Phys.org.

The researchers are now investigating whether the same finding applies to other polar regions.

Two global temperature graphs – spot the difference

We’ve done it already. The sloping green line in each graph, or ‘Manhattan’, has been added by the Talkshop. Of course it’s the same data, but the presentation is noticeably different. In the first one from The Conversation the green slope line is at 45° to the horizontal, and in the second one from NOAA (the creator of the graph) the same line is a more modest, although still quite steep, 35°. Is someone trying too hard to impress?
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Graph 1

Source: The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/ice-storms-january-downpours-heavy-snow-no-snow-diagnosing-warming-winter-syndrome-221956

Graph 2

Source: NOAA
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202313

Researchers probe a conundrum: If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Gulf Stream flows

Some recent cold weather events are puzzling to global warming researchers, in terms of climate model expectations. Especially so for the ‘Center for Irreversible Climate Change’ in South Korea. Temporary natural variation seems to be the conclusion. What else could they say without casting doubt on human-caused warming theories?
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If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder?

Indeed, East Asia and North America have experienced frequent extreme weather events since the 2000s that defy average climate change projections, says Phys.org.

Many experts have blamed Arctic warming and a weakening jet stream due to declining Arctic sea ice, but climate model experiments have not adequately demonstrated their validity.

The massive power outage in Texas in February 2021 was caused by an unusual cold snap, and climate models are needed to accurately predict the risk of extreme weather events in order to prevent massive socioeconomic damage.