Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Yesterday was the 12th day of Christmas so it seems time to ask some hard questions, like have you taken down your decorations, what’s the point in such festivities anyway and are there any reasons to be cheerful in 2023?
Here’s someone who was feeling optimistic back in the sweltering heat (I’m imagining) of US Independence Day in 2020:
@ShellenbergerMD’s new book, Apocalypse Never, has opened the flood gates for a reversal of the climate madness we’ve been subjected to these past decades. Things are looking up.
But if you click on the date (or time) you’ll see something strange. Conversation interruptus one might call it. This may give a clue to the alert Cliscep reader that this post can be seen as a sequel to Bit Rot. It is. But when I penned those initial thoughts in February last year I had no idea that Elon Musk was going to take over Twitter. And for me that makes the question about plausible cheerfulness this year a highly interesting one. Listen for example to these four opinions:
Yeah, legacy media just tell you what you already learned on Twitter several days earlier. Much of the time, they are literally writing stories based on tweets!
Would this breakthrough in the Daily Telegraph have happened without Dr Malhotra’s sterling work on Twitter recently under the liberal, free speech-loving regime of the Tesla owner? I wouldn’t be doing this post if I didn’t think there was a connection. (And if I didn’t think this issue, and others like it, were extremely important.)
But I’m interested in anyone’s view. Musk-haters. Pessimists. Covid vaccine trusters. I’m sure you get the idea.
That’s it for now. I will add to this post in the coming days. When I make an addition to the main body I’ll add a comment to that effect.
Coal, oil and natural gas – in conjunction with innovative free-enterprise capitalism — have lifted billions out of drudgery and poverty and brought unprecedented prosperity to billions of people.
Coal, oil and natural gas – in conjunction with innovative free-enterprise capitalism — have lifted billions out of drudgery and poverty and brought unprecedented prosperity to billions of people. They’ve blessed humanity with pharmaceuticals, plastics, cell phones, sanitation and countless other benefits that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.
For example, thanks to modern fertilizers (made possible by fossil fuels), countries from Brazil to Zimbabwe are enjoying record harvests of grains and other crops.
And yet, according to the fulminations of far-Left politicians and activists, such as those who recently attended the UN’s COP-27 climate conference in Egypt, fossil fuels and capitalism bring only human misery and planetary destruction.
Despite claims to the contrary, man-made carbon emissions are only a bit player compared to the powerful natural forces that have always propelled climate and weather fluctuations. By any measure, there is no statistically significant uptick in wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, droughts, flooding or any other severe weather events that some say are “smoking-gun evidence” of climate catastrophe.
That certain scientists have crafted climate models indicating trouble ahead might be convincing, if their models actually reflected some basis in reality. Thus far, they haven’t. Yet we’re supposed to accept such scary computer models as “settled science” and adopt the radical solutions they propose to cure our “climate ills” — namely, ditch fossil fuels.
One has to believe there’s more at play here than simply the altruistic desire to “Save the Earth.” And at times, the leaders of the climate alarm movement have all but admitted such.
Former-UN climate executive secretary Christiana Figueres, for example, once stated “we are setting ourselves” the task “to intentionally transform the economic development model” that has reigned for at least 150 years.
Her UN colleague Ottmar Edenhofer was equally blunt: “International climate policy has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” It is the means by which “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
And then there’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief-of-staff who revealed his boss’s Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
As for President Joe Biden, whether he shares these views or not, he’s clearly onboard the global warming bandwagon. He made it clear that his administration would tolerate “no more drilling” and “no more pipelines.” He would use every regulation, executive order and other available means to de facto transform our energy and economic system, even if it drives Americans into the energy poverty already afflicting millions in the UK and EU.
On top of that, at COP-27, he signed off on his Climate Envoy John Kerry’s de facto pledge obligating the United States to send $1-billion or more to poor countries every year, to compensate them for “losses and damages” from “unprecedented manmade climate disasters.” And do so even as the USA is supposed to “go green” and de-industrialize!
Meanwhile, banks, politicians and climate activists are telling impoverished nations to “leapfrog” fossil fuels and limit development, farming and living standards to what “green energy” will support.
Of course, none of this applies to our adversaries. They get a pass. In fact, the climate agenda works to their benefit.
China has become an economic and military powerhouse by using oil, gas and especially coal — plus technologies and intellectual property rights stolen from capitalist companies. China controls the supply chains and manufacturing for wind, solar and battery power that’s supposed to replace fossil energy in currently wealthy countries that Figueres, Edenhofer, AOC and Biden intend to “transform.”
In fact, China generates almost 70% of its electricity with coal — and emits more greenhouse gases than all other developed countries combined. Yet it isn’t obligated to reduce its fossil fuel use or pay into UN climate losses, damages and reparations wealth-transfer funds.
If we’re going to have massive UN wealth redistributions (primarily to ruling elites in poor nations), the accounting system ought to be fair and equitable. That means any payments should be offset by the value of fossil fuel benefits still-poor nations have received. In some cases, that could mean countries like China and India should be paying us!
And if poorer nations have been slow to adopt the free-enterprise, private-property rights and fossil-fuel energy sources that made rich countries rich — they shouldn’t be rewarded with “reparations” for not embracing such practices. They should be encouraged to implement them more quickly.
These exemplary systems have been promoted for decades, or centuries. Countries that utilized them (even partially, like China and India) have benefited mightily.
In short, developing nations should ignore the climate cabal’s far-Left, ideological anti-fossil-fuel crusade that is hindering their economic development, and making kids and parents in the West emotionally distraught.
Their struggling masses will be eternally grateful.
No minimally informed person denies that climate changes. The climate has always changed. Since 1860 the predominant climate change has been warming, which is fortunate because if we had a winter like those of 1800-1850, we would be in for a shock.
No minimally informed person denies that climate changes. The climate has always changed. Since 1860 the predominant climate change has been warming, which is fortunate because if we had a winter like those of 1800-1850, we would be in for a shock.
No one has been able to prove that global warming is primarily a consequence of our emissions. It is reasonable to assume that increased CO2 has contributed to warming since the mid-20th century when our CO2 emissions increased significantly, but no one knows how much they have contributed, no matter how much the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insists that “humans are the dominant cause of observed global warming over recent decades.” (IPCC AR6, page 515).
There is no evidence for this statement. I know this because I have read thousands of scientific papers looking for it. And no, computer models are not evidence of anything but the programming skills of their authors.
Models and their predictions are constantly changing and when our knowledge of climate changes, they must be redone.
The absolute lack of evidence contrasts sharply with the decision to cut our CO2 emissions to zero by completely changing our fossil fuel-based energy system and calling CO2 a pollutant—when it is as essential to life as oxygen. All this while most of the world doesn’t give a damn about emissions and many are only on board for the promised money.
To get to the good news about global warming we need to look at variations in the rate of global warming, i.e., the speed of warming. Today we are going to use satellite-calculated global temperature data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, UAH 6.0. They are plotted in Figure 1.
Figure 1. UAH satellite global temperature anomaly data in °C relative to the mean from 1991 to 2020. In green is the linear trend of the series (+0.13 ºC/decade) and in blue is the linear trend since 2016. Data: UAH 6.0 Graph: Woodfortrees.
As we can see, the temperature trend decreases since 2016, so 2022 is the seventh warmest year. For 7 years the planet has been cooling. Does that mean that warming is over? No, periods of 7 years of cooling are frequent in the record, there being 8 of them since 1979, and the warming continues. But there is only one period of more than 15 years of cooling, from 1998 to 2014, that appears in the record for the last 45 years. It is known as the “Pause.”
To analyze the evolution of the warming rate, we subtract from each monthly data the previous one to calculate the monthly increase. We then deseasonalize the monthly increase by finding the 12-month moving average to remove a lot of the noise. Finally, we calculate the 15-year average warming rate in °C/decade by calculating the 180-month moving average and multiplying the resulting data by 120.
Figure 2. Evolution of the warming rate for 15-year periods between 1979 and 2022 in °C/decade and its linear trend, from monthly UAH 6.0 satellite temperature data.
Each point on the curve in Figure 2 is the warming rate for the 15 years before that month. The Pause shows up prominently as the only period with a negative rate. For the current cooling period to appear on that graph with a negative rate would require the global temperature to remain below the 2016 level at the end of 2030.
But the good news that no one is telling us is that global warming is slowing down. The 15-year rate was very high from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, reaching 0.35 °C/decade. The average over the entire period of satellite records is 1.3 °C per century or 0.13 °C/decade, but the long-term trend has fallen from 1.6 °C/century to 1 °C/century today. The current cooling period is contributing to this decline in the long-term warming rate.
This good news is not told to us, firstly, because it has been achieved without doing anything to reduce our global CO2 emissions, which calls into question the peremptory need to make a major effort to reduce them.
Second, we are not told this “good” news because the reduction in the rate of warming has taken place while rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 is accelerating, as shown in Figure 3. The data from NOAA has already been deseasonalized, so we skipped this step. We follow the same process for the same period (1979-2022) as for the graph in Figure 2.
Figure 3. Evolution of the CO2 rate of increase for 15-year periods between 1979 and 2022 in ppm/decade and its linear trend, from deseasonalized monthly CO2NOAA data.
The problem with the theory of anthropogenic warming is that while the rate of warming is slowing down, the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 is steadily increasing, and in the same period it has gone from growing 14 parts per million (ppm) per decade to 23.5 ppm/decade. In other words, its growth rate has almost doubled.
According to the greenhouse gas climate change theory, it is not possible for warming to slow down while CO2 is strongly accelerating. The consequence of the CO2 increase on the greenhouse effect is well known. Each additional molecule intercepts infrared radiation, raising the average height of emission from the atmosphere and requiring an increase in surface temperature for the planet to maintain its radiative balance, that is, to radiate an energy equivalent to that which it receives from solar radiation. The theory does not allow global warming to slow with accelerating CO2 emissions. The theory is wrong or incomplete. There are fundamental things about climate change that we do not understand, that are capable of offsetting, canceling, and even reversing the effect of the CO2 increase on temperature. I have already proposed an alternative, which is not considered by the IPCC, in the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis, based on changes in poleward energy transport.
Thirdly, we are not bombarded daily with the good news that global warming is slowing down because the models predict just the opposite, which indicates that despite costing a fortune these models are useless. The 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) was already projecting greater warming for the period 2006-2022 than has been observed. To the dismay of climatologists (Voosen 2022), the changes introduced in the CMIP6 models cause much more warming to be projected, so they have decided that, instead of averaging all models as was done in CMIP5, only the coolest ones should be averaged. Even so, the deviation between models and reality becomes more unbearable with each passing year (Figure 4).
Figure 4. In blue is the UAH 6.0 temperature anomaly data, in red is the CMIP5 mean projection and in green is the CMIP6 mean projection. The actual temperature is already more than one degree below what CMIP6 predicts. Graph by Charles May.
Other good climate news
2022 has been full of more good climate news that we haven’t heard about.
In September, sea ice reached a minimum extent of 4.87 million square kilometers in the Arctic. This is higher than the extent in 2007, which means the Arctic summer sea ice trend is zero for the past 16 years (Figure 5). We were told ad nauseam that the Arctic was melting, and Greenpeace used it to raise money from the unwary. Well-intentioned money which it used, among other things, to maintain the high lifestyle of its executives. The Arctic melted significantly between 1990 and 2007, but it has not done so for the past 16 years, and I don’t think it is because of the money given to Greenpeace.
Figure 5. Average Arctic sea-ice extent in the month of September between 2007 and 2022 with a linear trend. NSIDC data.
With data available till September, sea level has risen only 2 millimeters in the first 9 months of the year. The decreasing sea level rise trend over the last 10 years continues (Figure 6). This indicates that sea level rise is probably linked to temperature rise, which is logical. Therefore, sea level rise models are at least as wrong as the temperature models, and those sea level rise figures of one meter or more that the media are trying to scare us with are ridiculous.
Figure 6. Annual mean sea level rise in mm/year and its linear trend between 2012 and 2022. NASA data up to September 2022.
It must be said that satellites measure a rate of sea level rise that is about twice that recorded by coastal tide gauges. Either the sea is rising more in the center than on the coasts, or there is a problem in measuring sea level rise to the center of the Earth that does not take into account what is happening at the bottom of the oceans.
In any case, the ridiculous sea level rise is only a problem in areas where there is subsidence by human action, due to groundwater extraction or excessive coastal construction. As an example of the non-existence of a serious problem here are two photos separated by 45 years of the same building located just 10 meters from the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, where I spend my vacations (figure 7). Coastal erosion has affected the profile somewhat, but the sea level does not appear to have risen detectably. The local Alicante II tide gauge shows a sea level rise of about 10 cm in 60 years or one-and-a-half millimeters per year.
Figure 7. Sea level rise, although measurable, is negligible over the course of a human lifetime. The tidal effect is much larger.
Despite all the continuous claims that climate change is making extreme events more intense and frequent, there is no data to support this, which is why the data are never presented. The IPCC reports do not conclude that extreme events are getting worse, except heat waves, which are definition dependent.
2022 has been a very quiet year in terms of hurricanes, continuing the downward trend since the mid-1990s in both frequency and energy (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Top, frequency of hurricanes with winds over 63 knots (upper curve) and over 95 knots (lower curve) between 1981-2022. Bottom, global (upper curve), and Northern Hemisphere (lower curve) cumulative cyclone energy between 1972-2022. Data from Ryan Maue.
I have already mentioned on occasions that in a warmer world, the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles is smaller, reducing the amount of energy to be transported and the intensity of atmospheric circulation, so we should not expect warming to increase the frequency of extreme events, just as we should not expect the global precipitation level to decrease.
Conclusion
2022 has been a good year in terms of climate, and it also reaffirms the positive trends toward a reduction in the intensity of climate change in many of the main indicators: temperature, Arctic sea-ice extent, sea level, and extreme phenomena. Let us not be fooled by those supported by our taxes.
We have nothing to fear from climate change now or in the foreseeable future. Richard Feynman, one of the best physicists of the 20th century, said in 1966 that “science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”, and Stuart Firestein teaches us that ignorance is the fuel that makes science advance.
Those who believe they know what is wrong with the climate, who refuse to accept their ignorance, are not advancing science, but hindering its progress by slowing it down. They do not deserve to be called scientists because they do not serve the cause of science, which is to increase knowledge. They are only trying to line their pockets by defending an orthodoxy of clear political interest. It is clear why the climate panel is called “intergovernmental.”
This year the Australian Bureau of Meteorology waited until after close of business on Friday 6th January 2023 to release the official climate statistics for 2022. After claims of unprecedented extreme rainfall all year, the statistics must be disappointing for those animated by the idea of a climate catastrophe
This year the Australian Bureau of Meteorology waited until after close of business on Friday 6th January 2023 to release the official climate statistics for 2022. After claims of unprecedented extreme rainfall all year, the statistics must be disappointing for those animated by the idea of a climate catastrophe:
Nationally averaged rainfall was [just] 25% above the 1961–1990 average at 582.2 mm, which makes 2022 [only] the ninth wettest on record for Australia.
It is the sixth wettest year for Eastern Australia, where there had been extensive flooding.
Flooding that the Climate Council relentlessly blamed through 2022 on climate change. The Council is headed by Tim Flannery who at the end of April 2007, when most of Australia remained in the grip of severe drought, hyped global warming by claiming our dams would never fill again. Last year they filled to overflowing – again.
Eastern Australia, situated to the immediate west of the southern Pacific Ocean, has always experienced cycles of drought or flood depending on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation which modulates global temperature and rainfall.
Farmers like my father always linked this cycle to changes in the declination of the Moon and there are now research papers explaining the phenomenon. For example, Jialin Lin & Taotao Qian’s ‘Switch Between El Nino and La Nina is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ published in 2019 by Nature.
Wet years are usually cooler years in Australia though the BoM claims last year to have been 0.5 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 average. In fact, discounting for the new electronic probes that I have shown can record 0.4 °C warmer for the same weather and the industrial scale remodelling (the technical term is homogenisation) that strips away past cycles of warming and cooling to the extent that past temperatures are artificially cooled relative to the present, sometimes by almost 3.0 °C (yes that much!) – in reality, last year is likely to have been on average much cooler.
But what about the rainfall statistics? Are all 697 rainfall stations spread across the land mass of Australia actually used to calculate Australia’s average rainfall, and how reliable are the new electronic rainfall gauges?
According to the BoM’s newly released 2022 statistics, the wettest year on record for Eastern Australia is still officially 1950 with 1021 mm, followed by 2010 (1012 mm), then 1956 (986 mm). The 1970s were also wet, especially 1974 with 960 mm, and 1973 with 853 mm.
The official rainfall total for Eastern Australia, where there was so much flooding through 2022, is 819 mms – much less than I expected.
There had been images on television of families huddled on the roofs of homes in Lismore on the morning of 28th February 2022. Waters rose, first entering backdoors, then filling living rooms, then forcing families to hitch each other onto rooftops. Surely the rainfall in places like Lismore was unprecedented?
Many of the submissions to the NSW Flood Inquiry from the Lismore community blamed the new highway built across the floodplain, not the rain, for all the flooding. They explain that the highway acted as a dam stopping water from flowing away and downstream.
Official reports blamed global warming, and either incorrectly reported the 24-hour rainfall total for Lismore (they published 146 mm which is the total for the 24-hours to 24th February, not 28th February 2022) or the reports ignore this important statistic altogether because the official rainfall gauge in Lismore failed. Yes, failed on 28th February 2022. And the Bureau has failed to acknowledge anywhere that there were no measurements from this official rainfall gauge in Lismore from 27th February through until 22nd July 2022.
The Bureau has also failed to acknowledge that there is data available from an alternative rainfall gauge in Dawson Street Lismore that recorded 467 mm to 9am on 28th February. This record only exists as a screenshot taken by a concerned citizen reposted at my blog on 23rd August 2022.
What should be acknowledged as a new 24-hour rainfall record for Lismore of 467 mm on 28th February has not been entered into any of the official reports or into the official Australian Data Archive for Meteorology. It presumably is not therefore part of the data used to decide that 2022 was (only) the ninth wettest on record for Australia.
There was a Special Climate Statement 76 – Extreme rainfall and flooding in south-eastern Queensland and eastern New South Wales published by the BoM on 25th May 2022 replete with regional distribution maps of rainfall across broad geographic bands and with intervals of varying quantity, with the highest value of 200 mm to an unknown total amount (pg. 5). It claims that there has been an increasing trend in extreme hourly rainfall (pg.18) but no actual data is provided – the reference is to State of the Climate 2020. I’ve also been through that report. It provides no actual observational data, nor does it cite any peer-reviewed study.
There is no mention of the reliability of any of the data – temperature or rainfall – by the Climate Council. It can only be concluded that they care more about the narrative. A narrative that is intentionally about blame and frightening especially women and children into action. It might give purpose to the lives of activists like Tim Flannery but at an enormous cost to our children, many of whom are now chronically anxious about the weather.
I was woken on Friday morning at 4am to the sound of rain. Not soft, steady rain. More like a herd of buffalo pounding across my tin roof – intense rain here in Yeppoon, to the east of Rockhampton and to the west of the South Pacific, a vast body of water that reaches about halfway around the Earth. As a child who grew up in the tropics on a farm to the south of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, I used to be reassured by the drumbeating of that intense rain. It signified the beginning of the monsoon and the end of the bushfire season. Now children are being taught to fear something as natural as heavy rain in northern and eastern Australia. The messaging on television has been relentless: rainfall is more intense now – we have a climate emergency. Fear of rainfall is increasing in Australia that is one of the driest continents on Earth.
Climate activist Mali Poppy Cooper, 22, made national headlines when she locked herself to the steering wheel of her car on the approach to a Sydney Harbour tunnel to protest all the flooding in Lismore. Terrible flooding. She was bailed on condition she get psychiatric help. There are stories emerging now of children who experience panic attacks every time it rains.
All through 2022 there was reporting and storytelling, now incorporated into the school curriculum, about how the intensity of the rainfall has increased at Lismore and other locations. Never mind that the new automatic rainfall gauge at Lismore failed and that other gauges in the flood zone show no increase in rainfall intensity or volume when considering the historical record back to at least 1900.
Back in May 2022, Chris Gillham and I made a submission to the NSW Flood Inquiry showing that for the 20 longest rainfall records for locations in the 2022 flood zone there has been no overall increase in the intensity or frequency of extremely wet days to 2021. The wettest year, measured as the year with the highest number of 99th percentile rainfall days by volume since 1900, is still 1974.
We have updated this report* to include the daily rainfall values to the end of 2022 and an additional 5 locations. Our analysis combines data from days with extreme rainfall and compares values since 1900 and for 25 locations both within the flood zones and south to the Sydney region which did indeed records its highest annual total rainfall during 2022. There is still no general trend of increasing rainfall intensity, and therefore it is nonsense to blame climate change for the 2022 flooding. The year 1974 remains the year of most intense rainfall, which was also a year of above average cyclone activity including the infamous Cyclone Tracy.
It is not only a fact that the volume and intensity of rainfall is not increasing, but neither are the number or intensity of cyclones crossing the Australian coastline. They have in fact been in decline since at least 1979, the first year from which we have reliable satellite data.
It was very wet in southeast Queensland through 2022. I was in Brisbane on 3rd March 2022 helping with the clean-up after the devastating flooding of that city.
The Brisbane city flood gauge reached 3.85 metres on the morning of 28th February 2022. This exceeds the major flood level mark but falls short of the 1974 and 2011 floods which reached 5.45 metres and 4.46m, respectively. The Brisbane city flood gauge record goes back to 1832, with the highest flood being recorded in 1841. There was also flooding in 1873 and 1893. According to Aboriginal legend the Brisbane floodplain was not a place for building humpies, yet the European settlers who followed have built a whole city.
The flooding of Brisbane in 1974 was predictable in that the SOI index was an incredibly high 31.6 in November 1973, showing an extraordinary pressure gradient across the South Pacific as measured between Tahiti and Darwin. I was fearful of flooding in late 2010 as the SOI was again very high, 27.1 in December 2010.
After the floods of 1974 the Wivenhoe dam was constructed to ensure Brisbane never flooded again.
Despite the very high SOI and warnings from the mayors of some regional councils and farmers interested in long range weather forecasting and lunar cycles, the Wivenhoe reservoir upstream of Brisbane – built for flood mitigation – was kept full of water because it was believed by the authorities that the ‘dams would never fill again’ because of climate change. They had heard Tim Flannery. The dam operators kept Wivenhoe brimming with water as we entered the 2010-2011 summer despite the high SOI values.
When the torrential rain began to fall, as it always does, and because Wivenhoe was so full of water already, the flooding of January 2011 has officially been documented as a ‘dam release flood’ caused by the emergency release of water. This from a dam originally built for flood mitigation following devastating flooding in 1974. If water levels in Wivenhoe had been reduced through 2010, there would have been no climate emergency.
A class action brought against the Queensland government and one of the dam operators found they were negligent in the way the dam was managed and awarded compensation to those that had suffered loss as a result. But no money has yet been awarded, in part because of subsequent appeals.
During the worst of the flooding last year, in 2022, the dam operators again kept releasing water causing the city of Brisbane to flood. However, this time the torrential rain had stopped. Water kept being released because the BoM incorrectly forecast that more – even worse – rain was imminent. Rain that never eventuated. Now the mantra is that it just keeps raining and the dams will inevitably overflow.
I have benchmarked the skill of the BoM’s simulation modelling for seasonal rainfall forecasting in a series of papers with John Abbot. Our research papers, published in international peer-reviewed journals, as conference papers and book chapters from 2012 to 2017, show that the rainfall forecasting methods developed over a period of 20 years by the BoM provide no significant improvement in forecast skill beyond just simply calculating a long-term average rainfall for the period in question. This is despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive computers and models that attempt to replicate atmospheric processes.
There are much better methods for seasonal rainfall forecasting that use statistical modelling coupled with the latest advances in machine learning. This is a method that John Abbot and I pioneered and that is detailed in those same scientific papers. The first of these papers was rejected by the BoM’s own publication series in 2012, but accepted and published by the Chinese Academy of Science (Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 29, Number 4, entitled ‘Application of Artificial Neural Networks to Rainfall Forecasting in Queensland, Australia’).
While the SOI was very high during December 2010, and thus the extreme rainfall of January 2011 easily forecast, the SOI was only 13.8 during December 2021. It was thus not at all obvious to those interested in pressure patterns across the Pacific Ocean as an indicator of seasonal rainfall that we should expect flooding.
The flooding through 2022 was likely exacerbated by an atmosphere exceptionally high in volcanic aerosols from the explosion of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano a month earlier. If the BoM had been tracking volcanic ash from that volcano and using a more reliable system of rainfall forecasting, and there was better town planning with the new highway through Lismore built on piers to let the water flow under the road and across the floodplain, there may have never been the tragedy at Lismore.
Exceptionally high rainfall totals in Hong Kong in 1982 correlate with the arrival of stratospheric aerosol plumes from the eruption of El Chichon in Mexico. Atmospheres high in aerosols can contribute to exceptionally high rainfall, but this is ignored by mainstream climate scientists including meteorologists at the BoM who continue to run simulation models inventing a role for carbon dioxide.
El Chinon was a large volcanic eruption, reaching 31 kms (19 miles) into the atmosphere. Mt Pinatubo that erupted in the Philippines in 1991 was larger, reaching 40 kms (25 miles) and causing surface cooling in the Northern Hemisphere of up to 0.6°C. The eruption of Hunga Tonga in the South Pacific on 15th January 2022 was even larger, reaching 57 kms (35 miles). Yet the BoM continues to deny it has had any effect on temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere. And the Climate Council would be hard pressed to blame us for explosive volcanic activity.
The aerosol plume from Hunga-Tonga travelled west, reaching Australia on 18th January 2022. Flooding followed with main railway lines and roads in central Australia washed away. By February 15th, the volcanic ash had circled the Earth and was back over Australia, evidenced by unusually intense sunsets. After that, it began to rain so intensely that Brisbane flooded – again, and so I was part of the clean-up on 3rd March 2022.
That afternoon a group of us working in Sandford Street, St Lucia, were told to down tools at 2pm. The BoM was announcing on radio that our situation was ‘dangerous’ and ‘potentially life threatening’. All the while the sun kept shining. Not a drop of rain fell from the sky and the waters of the Brisbane River below continued to recede.
As I drove out of Brisbane a few hours later, the flash flooding forecast for that same afternoon was cancelled. Next, on radio there was talk of the climate emergency and the scary ‘rain bombs’ of five days earlier. How it was all ‘unprecedented’ – the volume and intensity of rainfall. More than one metre of rain had fallen at some locations in just a few days.
The rain that fell in Brisbane was not unprecedented, neither in volume or intensity. Back in February 1893 nearly two metres of rain had fallen over a similar period of time at Crohamhurst just to the north of Brisbane. And there was no mention of the 24-hour record of 907mm, the amount of rain that fell at Crohamhurst on 3rd February 1893. This remains the highest 24-hour rainfall total for anywhere in Australia and it was 130 years ago. That rainfall recording station has since been closed.
There was also no mention on the radio of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano a month earlier, the largest volcanic eruption anywhere on Earth so far this century, and how these volcanoes can supercharge the atmosphere to make Eastern Australia even more susceptible to heavy rainfall – and that the ash plumes could be monitored as they cross the Pacific Ocean just as weather stations monitor air pressure and so provide an SOI index.
There was also no mention on the radio that evening of 3rd March 2022 that the BoM seasonal rainfall forecasts are completely lacking in any skill. That the BoM consistently gets its seasonal rainfall forecasting wrong, and that not only did it not forecast the torrential rains at Lismore on 28th February 2022 but that it has so far refused to record any value for the 24 hours to 28th February 2022 at Lismore into the Australian Data Archive for Meteorology.
The most accurate seasonal weather prediction systems rely on statistical models using advances in machine learning to elucidate patterns in historical data. So, the integrity of Australia’s temperature and rainfall record is paramount. Yet both temperature and rainfall records are being constantly eroded by the BoM. Major rainfall events are not being entered into the database. Important weather stations are being closed and the available temperature data remodelled, stripping away evidence of past cycles of warming and cooling that correspond with periods of drought and floods.
But of even more concern to me is that since 2011 the BoM has stopped numerical averaging of the instantaneous one-second readings from the electronic probes in its automatic weather stations used to measure temperature. I have shown that this could result in a probe recording up to 0.4 °C warmer for the same weather. To know the effect of this more generally on Australia’s climate through 2022 the parallel data – the measurements taken from mercury thermometers and electronic probes in the same weather stations – needs to be made public. Since 2015, when I first requested this data, the Bureau has steadfastly refused to release it but my appeal against this will finally be heard on 3rd February 2023 by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Brisbane.
Wind turbine fires are ten times more common than the wind industry and its parasites claim (see our post here and check out this website: http://turbinesonfire.org).
Americans have had more than their fair share of fiery ‘green’ energy excitement – see our posts here, here and here.
The wind industry has been forced to concede that at least 4 bushfires were started by wind turbines in Australia, so far:
Ten Mile Lagoon in Western Australia in the mid-1990s;
Lake Bonney, Millicent (SA) in January 2006 (see the photo above);
Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm, Port Lincoln (SA) in February 2009 (see this post); and
In Australia, plenty of other turbines have self-immolated, like this one at Windy Hill, near Ravenshoe west of Cairns in Far North Queensland:
However, fortunately for the communities in which these things get speared, not all of them lead to life and property-threatening bushfires.
Such as this recent event at Gunning, near Goulburn in New South Wales.
Fiery spectacle as wind turbine ignites near Goulburn Riotact Ian Bushnell 5 January 2023
A spectacular fire at the top of a wind turbine near Goulburn that could be seen for kilometres around has burnt itself out, but not before generating multiple calls to the NSW Rural Fire Service.
Six crews responded just after 6 am this morning (5 January) to the turbine fire off the Hume Highway at the wind farm on Lerida Road at Breadalbane, southwest of Goulburn.
But the blaze on the 90-metre-high turbine mast was well out of reach and crews could only keep a watching brief to ensure there were no spot fires in the surrounding grassland.
NSW RFS spokesperson Greg Allan said there had not been any threat to neighbouring properties and the fire self-extinguished just after 10 am and the scene was handed back to the wind farm contractor, which had shut down the turbine.
“I believe it’s standard practice for the industry to let them burn out,” he said. “It’s the only thing they can do.”
Mr Allan said it was not the standard type of fire the RFS attended.
“It certainly is unique for our crew, which usually deal with bush and, particularly this year, grass fires,” he said.
The cause of the fire was not known and Mr. Allan could not say if a weather event such as a lightning strike from recent storms had sparked the blaze. Riotact
When and wherever these things explode into balls of flame and toxic smoke they send a shower of molten metal and over 1,000 litres of flaming gear oil, hydraulic fluid (see our post here) and burning plastic composites earthwards.
That the pyrotechnics referred to above did not result in a runaway bushfire was more luck than good management. STT’s NSW operatives – who were on the scene and took the video below – reported that the conditions were cool with light rain, rather than 42°C with a howling northerly; which is part and parcel of Australia’s summer weather, and the type that has rural folk on high alert and on a constant lookout for smoke and the terror that follows.
So, if you’re one of the unfortunates with these things speared into your backyard, STT suggests you check your insurance policy is up-to-date (and your property is fully covered for damage caused by fire); your fire-fighting equipment is primed up and ready to go; and, if that fails, you’ve got a prearranged escape route to safety.
h/t rhs; A congressionally mandated report has revealed the hit on Montana’s economy and the lost jobs and income caused by President Biden canceling the Keystone Pipeline.
Biden admin quietly admits canceling Keystone XL Pipeline cost thousands of jobs, billions of dollars
President Biden’s decision to revoke pipeline’s permits hurt ‘working families,’ Montana senator says
The Biden administration published a congressionally mandated report highlighting the positive economic benefits the Keystone XL Pipeline would have had if President Biden didn’t revoke its federal permits.
The report, which the Department of Energy (DOE) completed in late December without any public announcement, says the Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion, citing various studies. A previous report from the federal government published in 2014 determined 3,900 direct jobs and 21,050 total jobs would be created during construction which was expected to take two years.
But immediately after taking office in January 2021, Biden canceled the pipeline’s permits, effectively shutting the project down.
“The Biden administration finally owned up to what we have known all along — killing the Keystone XL Pipeline cost good-paying jobs, hurt Montana’s economy and was the first step in the Biden administration’s war on oil and gas production in the United States,” Sen. Steve Daines. R-Mont., said Thursday in a statement. “Unfortunately, the administration continues to pursue energy production anywhere but the United States.”
… The 2014 Final SEIS estimated that about 42,100 total jobs, or 21,050 jobs annually, would be created if construction were to take two years (direct, indirect, and induced), as well as $2.05 billion in earnings in the United States. About 3,900 of these jobs would be direct construction jobs in Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The project was expected to support 50 jobs during the operation. The SEIS estimated that the construction of the KXL pipeline would contribute $3.4 Billion (or 0.02 percent) to the United States Gross Domestic Product.
At the time the KXL was cancelled, TC Energy announced that approximately 1,000 workers “on both sides of the border” were impacted. To the extent that some U.S. employment had already occurred, the numbers of jobs lost as a consequence of KXL’s cancellation would likely be less than these job estimates as they cover the total projected employment from the construction and operation of KXL. …Read more: https://www.daines.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/12.23.22-KXL-Pipeline-Job-Loss-and-Impacts-on-Consumer-Energy-Costs-001245.pdf
The consequences go far beyond financial losses and lost jobs. The cancellation sent a message to the industry, that petroleum investment is not welcome in Biden’s America.
Every day Americans pay for that lack of petroleum investment, through inflated gasoline pump prices.
The science of solar ponds shows useful inexpensive natural heating, without the need for exotic materials. Furthermore, an understanding of the science of solar pond heating will profoundly change how you view climate crisis narratives.
The science of solar ponds shows useful inexpensive natural heating, without the need for exotic materials. Furthermore, an understanding of the science of solar pond heating will profoundly change how you view climate crisis narratives.
Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.
This is the transcript to the video at https://youtu.be/wl3_YQ_Vufo
Welcome everyone.
Today I want to demonstrate how the science of solar ponds can provide useful inexpensive heating, without the need for exotic materials. Furthermore, an understanding the science of solar pond heating will profoundly change how you view climate crisis narratives. Despite air temperatures averaging 68F, solar ponds can fantastically almost triple temperatures in their bottom layer to over 190F.
There are 2 major ways to raise a solar ponds’ temperature:
Radiative heating and Dynamical heating.
Radiative heating, increases the amount of light energy. Sunny days raise temperatures more than cloudy days. But high solar pond temperatures can peak without any change radiative heating due to dynamical heating. Dynamical heating happens by suppressing convection & cooling, so that heat accumulates and drives very high temperatures.
Solar pond dynamical heating suppresses cooling by creating a density gradient, with fresh water at the surface and dense salt water at the bottom. Because the dense salty bottom water is heavier, it doesn’t rise to the surface, despite warming to 190F.
Bottom layer heat can only ventilate via its micron thick skin surface. Unable to rise to the skin surface, heat rapidly accumulates in the bottom layer.
Solar pond science is based primarily on an 8th grade understanding that things less dense than water will float and denser things will sink.
A pot of water on your stove first heats the bottom layer. Heating makes the bottom layer expand and become less dense. That causes a convection current with the warmer water rising and cooler denser water from the top sinking.
But that dynamic doesn’t happen in a salt pond, because the bottom water’s high salt concentrations overcome any heating effect.
Typical density demonstrations for 8th grade science use colored water to visualize salinity effects and are available online. For example, on the left side of the container, the yellow water is fresh. The blue-green water with added salt, here measured at 35 parts per thousand, was added but immediately sank below the fresh water. To continue the demonstration, green water separated on the right side had only half the salt, 17 ppt. When the separator was removed, that water inserted between the fresher and denser layers.
Adults have embraced this science, making layered cocktails using liqueurs with different densities, such as this Patriot drink for the 4th of July. Hopefully, adults can extend that understanding to better understand our changing climate.
Here’s a closer look at salt pond dynamics. Ponds are typically just 10.5 feet deep. An upper layer of fresh water must be maintained at a depth of 1.6 feet. Temperatures in this layer never get hot enough to be useful as it is constantly cooled by radiating heat away or by losing it via evaporation and contact with the air.
The pond’s bottom half is nearly 5 feet thick and saturated with salt. That water is too dense to rise and mix with the fresh surface layer. So unable to convect upwards and cool, the heat accumulates.
The trapped hotter bottom water is then circulated to heat a building or a greenhouse. Or the near boiling temperatures can drive turbines that generate electricity. Although solar ponds can never solve all our energy needs, the most promising environmental application is desalinization. Ocean water provides an endless cheap supply of salty water. Producing fresh water for desalinization reduces water withdrawal from our streams and rivers, thus benefitting aquatic animals. Desalinization would also reduce ground water withdrawals that have caused many coastal cities to sink closer to and below sea level.
The same dynamical heating seen in solar ponds is ubiquitous throughout nature. Antarctica’s Lake Vanda (highlighted by red rectangle and red dot in upper left), provides a testimonial to the power of dynamical heating. Despite brutal sub-freezing air temperatures averaging from -22F to 5 F, heat accumulates in its bottom layers and reaches room temperature, 70F.
That amplification of solar heating is more amazing when you consider Lake Vanda receives very little sunshine for half the year, receiving just 40% of the sunshine entering tropical waters. Furthermore, the sunlight that reaches the bottom layers is minimal, being at the depth limit of sunlight penetration.
Nor does greenhouse warming from CO2 contribute at all. Researchers have shown Antarctica gets so cold, that uniquely, greenhouse gases there have a cooling effect. Like the bottom layer of a salt pond, it is the salty bottom layer of Lake Vanda that accumulates heat.
Although short wave energy from the sun and longwave energy from greenhouse gases are all measured in W/m2, they affect water very differently! (For those unfamiliar with Watts, it is simply a measure of energy per second. More Watts simply indicate more energy). Using 260 W/m2 as the average shortwave solar energy entering the water, the uppermost layers absorb the most energy. Without a salinity effect the upper layers are the warmest. Solar penetration then declines with depth. In completely clear water, absorbed solar energy is reduced to near zero at a 100 meters depth.
The added red line approximates the typical solar pond depth of 10.5 feet. At that depth, enough heat is absorbed and accumulates quickly enough for efficient practical use of its heat, by raising temperatures to over 180F. Deeper ponds are avoided because as solar penetration declines, the average bottom temperatures also decline making it less efficient for any practical use.
The generalized temperature gradient in lakes and oceans is just the opposite of what is observed in solar ponds, or Lake Vanda or everywhere there is a salinity effect. Without a salty layer to trap subsurface heat, upper layers are always warmer than deeper layers. The upper layer can have a uniform temperature because the winds and convection constantly mix the water. Below 200 meters, the deep water uniformly averages 39°F (4°C)
However, the mixed layer’s temperature is not completely uniform. The skin layer is almost always cooler than the warmer mixed layer below. The skin layer averages just a few microns deep. But any heat absorbed in the mixed layer of the ocean, or a salt pond, can only escape via that very shallow skin layer. The skin layer is cooler because it is constantly losing heat to the atmosphere.
The mixed layer is warmer because its heated water must first rise next to the skin layer, where heat is slowly transported via conduction and warms the skin layer. Only then can the mixed layer’s absorbed solar heat be radiated away or be lost via evaporative cooling. That delay in cooling causes a daily temperature cycle with a warm solar-heated diurnal layer that cools during the night. Similarly deeper waters will accumulate heat during the summer and ventilate it during the winter.
In contrast to deep solar heating, longwave greenhouse energy behaves very differently. Although greenhouse energy supplies nearly twice the energy to the skin layer, that energy does not penetrate any deeper than a few microns. Thus, unlike the delayed cooling of deeper layers, absorbed greenhouse heat can be radiated back to space immediately.
A 2018 ocean study measured 410 W/m2 of greenhouse longwave energy entering the ocean’s skin surface, while simultaneously the skin surface radiated away 470 W/m2. The skin layer almost immediately radiated the 410 W/m2 of greenhouse heat back to space plus an additional 60 W/m2 of radiation from the rising solar-heated layers. In addition, the skin surface lost latent heat (LH) via evaporation and sensible heat (SH) via contact with the atmosphere.
Like the dense salty layers of a solar pond that trap and accumulate heat, oceans naturally have salty Barrier Layers, trapping heat that affects climate and extreme weather. Ocean “Barrier Layers” were first detected just 30 years ago, but since then 100s of studies point out the importance Barrier Layer heating and the need for such dynamical heating to be included more realistically in global climate models.
While this 1992 diagram may seem a bit confusing at first glance, the science of a Barrier Layer isn’t much more complex than concepts taught in 8th grade.
The black line shows how measured temperatures change with depth. The blue line shows salinity changes and the red line shows density changes. Based on density, in this study the ocean’s upper 40 meters represents the ocean’s well “mixed layer” where temperature and salinity are homogeneous.
The middle layer highlighted in orange, is the Barrier Layer between 40 & 80 meters depth. Despite declining solar penetration, the Barrier Layer contains warm water similar to the upper mixed layer. Below the Barrier Layer is the colder thermocline where temperatures rapidly cool as solar penetration declines.
The increasing salinity and density of the Barrier Layer minimizes both any upward mixing of colder thermocline waters while trapping heat much longer than possible in the mixed layer. Barrier Layers are often detected because that trapped heat raises temperature higher than the upper mixed layers.
Several studies have recently shown that understanding ocean Barrier Layers provides valuable knowledge for predicting intense deadly hurricanes and cyclones. Without a Barrier Layer, hurricanes rapidly pull cool thermocline waters into the mixed layer, weakening the heat supply that drives the storms. In contrast, a thick Barrier Layer helps a storm maintain its intensity by inhibiting that upward circulation of cooler water.
In contrast to media fear mongering, the international disaster database, shows climate-related deaths since the 1920s have plummeted from nearly 250 per million to less than 10. Our increasing ability to predict and prepare for devastating storms has largely been responsible for this success. And our increasing understanding of the effects of Barrier Layers is improving that knowledge.
Also, as illustrated by this study in England, the number of deaths, (represented by the vertical bars) increase, as temperatures decrease (represented by the curves). Peak deaths correlate with the coldest temperatures from December through February. The good news is, there is reason to believe that any accumulation of heat in our oceans’ Barrier Layers could drive warmer & milder temperatures and reduce winter deaths.
The Pacific Warm Pool is the earth’s greatest example of a natural solar pond. The warm pool contains the earth’s warmest body of ocean water averaging between 82F and 90F. Because the warm pool generates the earth’s greatest amount of heat and moisture which then gets transported across the world and affects global climates, it is nicknamed the “earth’s climate heat engine”. The warm pool has been increasing since the end of the Little Ice Age, correlated with our 150 years of global warming. Warm pool warmth has also sustained the greatest diversity and abundance of coral reefs, giving the region another nickname “the Coral Triangle”.
The size of the warm pool and its stored heat increases during La Nina-like conditions, and La Nina-like conditions have predominated over the past 150 years. During La Nina -like conditions the trade winds remove surface water heated in the eastern Pacific and sweeps it westward to the warm pool. There, with the assistance of a strong Barrier Layer, heat is stored as deep as 200 meters.
The removal of warm surface water results in a cooler eastern Pacific which reduces cloud cover. That increases solar heating and increases evaporation, producing saltier surface waters.
The red regions here represent the areas where ocean evaporation exceeds precipitation, increasing surface salinity. The trade winds then transport that warm salty water westward, where the higher salinity drives dynamical heating of the warm pool.
The warm pool’s freshwater layer, required to create a natural solar pond, is provided by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ. The ITCZ produces 32% of all global rainfall.
In this December 28th, 2022, screen shot from a national weather service model, the lighter blue represents the regions with the most rainfall, and ITCZ’s location. The observed heaviest rainfall over the warm pool completes the conditions needed to accumulate the warm pool heat that powers our earth’s heat engine. Despite solar pond dynamics, warm pool temperatures never reach the extreme levels observed in solar ponds.
Three major dynamics prevent such extreme warming. First, warmer ocean temperatures enable more intense atmospheric convection that removes heat via evaporation. The second factor is an El Nino. During an El Nino the warm water stored deeply in the warm pool migrates eastward towards the Americas. That brings deeply stored warm water closer to the surface where it can now ventilate and shifts heavy rainfall to the eastern Pacific.
During each El Nino event (represented here by the red arrows), the ventilation of stored ocean heat confusingly raises the global air temperature. The media incorrectly attributes such warmer air temperatures to global warming. But counter-intuitively the earth is really cooling because heat that had been stored in the warm pool for years is now being ventilated back to space.
Long term changes in the Pacific Warm Pool over thousands of years provide scientists with critical information about the most important factors controlling the world’s heat engine and thus our weather today.
During the Holocene Optimum around 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, the thermocline at the bottom of the warm pool, was over 1F warmer than today. Since that time, its temperature has steadily declined. In contrast, most climate models erroneously simulate steadily rising temperatures in the warm pool over the past 10,000 years.
These modeling failures largely happen when warm pool temperatures are incorrectly assumed to be driven by rising CO2. Unfortunately, dynamical heating by the warm pool’s Barrier Layers is not well modeled.
Ice cores find that CO2concentrations were at a low point 10,000 years ago and have increased throughout the Holocene. Despite all the evidence that the warm pool cooled while CO2 concentrations increased, insufficient climate models still suggest that rising CO2 will cause catastrophic ocean warming.
The declining Holocene warm pool temperatures are better explained by increasing El Nino events. 10,000 years ago, El Nino events were more rare and most researchers suggest the Pacific ocean was predominantly in a La Nina-like state. (Note that the timeline direction is reversed in this graph).
Changes in the sun’s strength have also played a role. Based on carbon-14 dating, the coldest period of the Holocene, the Little Ice Age, coincides with a weaker sun and sunspot minimums. Despite higher CO2 concentrations than the Holocene Optimum, during the Little Ice Age, Arctic sea ice reached both its greatest extent and thickness in 10,000 years.
Most researchers have determined the Pacific Ocean was in an El Nino -like state during the little ice age. Although slightly lower solar output during sunspot minimums, would only slightly weaken radiative heating, lower solar heating does weaken the trade winds causing a much greater effect on dynamical heating of the warm pool.
Extreme warm pool temperatures are also prevented because its accumulated heat is constantly exported. The pathways of warm ocean currents emanating from the tropics and moving towards the poles are illustrated here in pink.
Satellite data reveal where more heat enters the ocean than leaves (shown in red). The location of the greatest heat entering the ocean is consistent with La Nina like conditions. Regions shown in blue represent regions where exported tropical heat is ventilated and warms the air in that region, warmer than local radiative heat would.
I’ll end here with an extreme example demonstrating the enormous impact of exported heat from ocean warm pools and its effect on the earth’s climate. When antarctica was part of a single continent called Pangea, Antarctica was insulated from ocean currents, and accordingly much of Antarctica was glaciated. During the Cretaceous period, 94 million years ago, the continents were separating, allowing warm waters from the tropics to reach Antarctica. Despite being centered over the south pole, warm ocean currents promoted a warm Antarctic climate where dinosaurs thrived. Thick coal producing forests survived after the dinosaur extinctions.
As the continents continued to spread, about 35 million years ago, Antarctica became an island surrounded by the Antarctic Circum-polar Current, and once again tropical heat was blocked from reaching Antarctica.
As a result, despite CO2 concentrations 4 times higher than today, glaciers began forming in Antarctica, and Antarctica has continued to became so cold that only one vertebrate species, the Emperor Penguin, can survive its winter.
So before adopting bizarre solutions by egomaniacs like Bill Gates, who is working to block the sun and cool the planet, please examine all the science.
Likewise before believing, we are plunging into a human-caused climate crisis, please ask:
How does radiative and dynamical heating increase warm pool temperatures?
How does greenhouse energy possibly heat below the skin surface?
How does exported heat from warm pools affect our climate and what are the contributions of natural La Nina and El Nino-like conditions.
If you follow all the science undeniably affecting our climate, you just might sleep better tonight knowing there is no climate crisis.
Our democracy depends on a diverse array of good critical thinkers. So, please shun mindless group think. Instead embrace renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley’s advice:
“Skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
so if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media then please click the like button, share and subscribe to this channel and leave a comment.
Germany continues to intensify draconian measures to cut energy consumption…
Germans struggling to keep warm. (Symbol image, cropped here).
As if the costs for heating in Germany weren’t expensive enough. Already addled with high natural gas and heating oil costs, German residential building owners are now being required to replace gas furnaces that are 30 years old or more, according to a new law that went into effect on January 1st.
Violators will see their heating systems shut down
German site Blackout News.de here: “Homeowners in Germany are legally obligated under the Building Energy Act § 72 (GEG) to replace their old boilers after 30 years. This affects about 2 million oil and gas heating systems in Germany at the end of the year. Refusal or failure to do so will result in fines and the responsible chimney sweeper can even have the heating system shut down.”
In Germany, by law, all chimneys are inspected at least annually by chimney sweepers, who will be checking the gas heater’s nameplate. Of course, “heating systems that are powered by renewable energies, e.g. wood pellets burners, are exempt from the obligations.”
“Homeowners who purchased their property after Feb. 1, 2002, have two years to install a new heating system if they purchase an older home with an existing old heating system,” reports Blackout News.
More costs for tenants
“And if the apartment or house is rented, “the owner is required to replace the heating system if it is 30 years or older. Anyone who has purchased or is about to purchase a property with oil or gas heating after the cut-off date must replace the heating system in any case if it is over 30 years old, even if they live in it themselves.”
The law will further increase the burden on landlords, who in turn will pass the costs on to their tenants.
New law bans new oil heating systems in private buildings beginning in 2026
“The installation of new oil condensing boilers is only permitted until the end of 2025; from 2026, the installation of new oil heating systems is generally prohibited – provided that alternative heat generation is possible,” writes Blackout News. “The state is promoting the replacement of old heating systems with a number of subsidy programs to reduce the costs for those affected. However, corresponding applications for subsidies must be submitted before the conversion is carried out.”
This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed. In order to do that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.
This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed. In order to do that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.
Climate science is unsettling because past data are not fixed, but change later on. I ran into this previously and now again in 2021 and 2022 when I set out to update an analysis done in 2014 by Jeremy Shiers (discussed in a previous post reprinted at the end). Jeremy provided a spreadsheet in his essay Murray Salby Showed CO2 Follows Temperature Now You Can Too posted in January 2014. I downloaded his spreadsheet intending to bring the analysis up to the present to see if the results hold up. The two sources of data were:
Uploading the CO2 dataset showed that many numbers had changed (why?).
The blue line shows annual observed differences in monthly values year over year, e.g. June 2020 minus June 2019 etc. The first 12 months (1979) provide the observed starting values from which differentials are calculated. The orange line shows those CO2 values changed slightly in the 2020 dataset vs. the 2014 dataset, on average +0.035 ppm. But there is no pattern or trend added, and deviations vary randomly between + and -. So last year I took the 2020 dataset to replace the older one for updating the analysis.
Now I find the NOAA dataset starting in 2021 has almost completely new values due to a method shift in February 2021, requiring a recalibration of all previous measurements. The new picture of ΔCO2 is graphed below.
The method shift is reported at a NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory webpage, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) WMO Scale, with a justification for the difference between X2007 results and the new results from X2019 now in force. The orange line shows that the shift has resulted in higher values, especially early on and a general slightly increasing trend over time. However, these are small variations at the decimal level on values 340 and above. Further, the graph shows that yearly differentials month by month are virtually the same as before. Thus I redid the analysis with the new values.
Global Temperature Anomalies (ΔTemp)
The other time series was the record of global temperature anomalies according to RSS. The current RSS dataset is not at all the same as the past.
Here we see some seriously unsettling science at work. The purple line is RSS in 2014, and the blue is RSS as of 2020. Some further increases appear in the gold 2022 rss dataset. The red line shows alterations from the old to the new. There is a slight cooling of the data in the beginning years, then the three versions mostly match until 1997, when systematic warming enters the record. From 1997/5 to 2003/12 the average anomaly increases by 0.04C. After 2004/1 to 2012/8 the average increase is 0.15C. At the end from 2012/9 to 2013/12, the average anomaly was higher by 0.21. The 2022 version added slight warming over 2020 values.
RSS continues that accelerated warming to the present, but it cannot be trusted. And who knows what the numbers will be a few years down the line? As Dr. Ole Humlum said some years ago (regarding Gistemp): “It should however be noted, that a temperature record which keeps on changing the past hardly can qualify as being correct.”
Given the above manipulations, I went instead to the other satellite dataset UAH version 6. UAH has also made a shift by changing its baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020. This resulted in systematically reducing the anomaly values, but did not alter the pattern of variation over time. For comparison, here are the two records with measurements through December 2022.
Comparing UAH temperature anomalies to NOAA CO2 changes.
Here are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.
Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. As stated above, CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example June 2022 minus June 2021). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month.
The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:
For each subsequent year, the co2 level for each month was generated
CO2 this month this year = a + b × Temp this month this year + CO2 this month last year
Jeremy used Python to estimate a and b, but I used his spreadsheet to guess values that place for comparison the observed and calculated CO2 levels on top of each other.
In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9985 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically.
Previous Post: What Causes Rising Atmospheric CO2?
This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.
The IPCC doctrine which has long been promoted goes as follows. We have a number over here for monthly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, and a number over there for monthly atmospheric CO2. We don’t have good numbers for the rest of it-oceans, soils, biosphere–though rough estimates are orders of magnitude higher, dwarfing human CO2. So we ignore nature and assume it is always a sink, explaining the difference between the two numbers we do have. Easy peasy, science settled.
What about the fact that nature continues to absorb about half of human emissions, even while FF CO2 increased by 60% over the last 2 decades? What about the fact that in 2020 FF CO2 declined significantly with no discernable impact on rising atmospheric CO2?
These and other issues are raised by Murray Salby and others who conclude that it is not that simple, and the science is not settled. And so these dissenters must be cancelled lest the narrative be weakened.
The non-IPCC paradigm is that atmospheric CO2 levels are a function of two very different fluxes. FF CO2 changes rapidly and increases steadily, while Natural CO2 changes slowly over time, and fluctuates up and down from temperature changes. The implications are that human CO2 is a simple addition, while natural CO2 comes from the integral of previous fluctuations. Jeremy Shiers has a series of posts at his blog clarifying this paradigm. See Increasing CO2 Raises Global Temperature Or Does Increasing Temperature Raise CO2 Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The following graph which shows the change in CO2 levels (rather than the levels directly) makes this much clearer.
Note the vertical scale refers to the first differential of the CO2 level not the level itself. The graph depicts that change rate in ppm per year.
There are big swings in the amount of CO2 emitted. Taking the mean as 1.6 ppmv/year (at a guess) there are +/- swings of around 1.2 nearly +/- 100%.
And, surprise surprise, the change in net emissions of CO2 is very strongly correlated with changes in global temperature.
This clearly indicates the net amount of CO2 emitted in any one year is directly linked to global mean temperature in that year.
For any given year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the sum of
all the net annual emissions of CO2
in all previous years.
For each year the net annual emission of CO2 is proportional to the annual global mean temperature.
This means the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be related to the sum of temperatures in previous years.
So CO2 levels are not directly related to the current temperature but the integral of temperature over previous years.
The following graph again shows observed levels of CO2 and global temperatures but also has calculated levels of CO2 based on sum of previous years temperatures (dotted blue line).
Summary:
The massive fluxes from natural sources dominate the flow of CO2 through the atmosphere. Human CO2 from burning fossil fuels is around 4% of the annual addition from all sources. Even if rising CO2 could cause rising temperatures (no evidence, only claims), reducing our emissions would have little impact.
Yesterday the Guardian claimed an exclusive for the story that “Bude in Cornwall awarded £2m to fight climate threat”.
The Money
Apparently the National Lottery “is distributing £100m over 10 years across the UK to local climate action groups”. One of those local climate action groups is the Bude Climate Partnership, whose website tagline is “Working on positive climate-change projects to future-proof the Bude area”.
The problem is, on looking at the projects they refer to, we find that they are almost all about education and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the locality – things like a community carbon audit; transport study; sustainable tourism audit; climate impact study; climate-resilient catchments project; reaching older generations study; the library of things; the physical hub project; a community climate change festival; and connecting with our community (“to succeed in our mission of becoming carbon neutral by 2030”).
There’s a small problem with all this. Auditing the emissions of the Bude area, holding festivals, lending and borrowing things instead of buying them, trying to make tourism (on which Bude depends heavily) “sustainable”, asking older people to educate younger people as to how to live a simpler less carbon-intensive life, etc, will make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the climate, or to the alleged climate change from which Bude is supposedly suffering (‘We’re the UK’s Maldives: idyllic and beautiful, but facing an existential and imminent threat to our way of life due to climate change’ according to the Guardian, quoting Robert Uhlig, the founder and programme director of the Bude Climate Partnership).
Even if every locale and organisation in the UK reduced its emissions to zero, it would make no meaningful difference to global emissions, and no difference to the climate. For that to happen, as a minimum, the rest of the world would have to follow suit, but it isn’t.
This sort of thing is hubris of the highest order (as well as being a waste of National Lottery money, and let’s not forget that the National Lottery represents a voluntary indirect tax on the poorest in society, since they tend to be the people who are sufficiently desparate as to spend quite a lot of money on the lottery in the misguided hope that it is the answer to their financial problems).
We aren’t supplied with a detailed breakdown regarding the £2M grant made to Bude and eleven surrounding parishes, but we are told that £750,000 of it “is being targeted at making tourism more sustainable within Bude”. Given that the grant has apparently been awarded “to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change”, that sounds to me like a misuse of the funds, since using the money in that way will make no difference to Bude’s climate (mitigation) nor will it provide adaptation in the face of “the intense heat this summer to flooding, and tidal changes” (sic).
Tidal changes
No evidence was provided in the article to back up the claim that Bude is under threat from tidal changes, though I accept that it may be, since sea levels are indeed rising. However, in order for that to be the result of climate change, an accelerating trend of sea level rise would have to be demonstrated, and in the area round Bude I have found no such evidence. Unfortunately I haven’t found any long-term tidal data for Bude, but data is available for other places along the Cornish coast and around the Severn Estuary.
The National Tidal and Sea Level Facility offers up the ten highest tides recorded at various sites (but regrettably ceasing in December 2012, for some reason), such as Newlyn and Ilfracombe. In the case of Newlyn, it is difficult to discern a rising trend, never mind an accelerating one, with 2012 tides featuring in fifth and ninth place, while top spot goes to 2004, second place being in 1985, and even 1948 featuring in fourth place. As for Ilfracombe, a similar picture emerges, with 2012 tides featuring in sixth and tenth places, the winner being 1985, second place going to 1997, and third place being 1989.
However, it must be conceded that this data doesn’t cover the last ten years. To try to rectify that lacuna, I turned instead to the website of the National Oceanography Centre Permanent Service For Mean Sea Level. This also offers up tidal information for Ilfracombe, and this appears to show – if anything – a decline in sea level since 2012. Unfortunately the detailed graph for a newish station at Port Isaac ceases in 2015, but it doesn’t appear to show any increasing trend. As for Newlyn the sea level is clearly rising, but it is difficult to discern an accelerating trend.
There are other stations in the general area. St Mary’s, in the Scilly Isles, seems to have peaked around 2002 and to be declining since then. Devonport doesn’t seem to be showing higher sea levels than back in the late 1980s, and on the other side of the Severn Estuary from Bude, Mumbles (regrettably ending in 2014) doesn’t seem to show any discernible trend.
The Tower
In order to spice up the story, the Guardian refers us to the awful story of the tower – “Bude’s 186-year old storm tower,which sits on the edge of a crumbling coastline, is one of the first structures in the UK that is being moved because of the impacts of climate change.”
Helpfully the Guardian links to the local newspaper website which provided this dramatic story. The irony here is that the story provides evidence, not of recent man-made climate change, but of cliffs that have been eroding for some considerable time.
What we learn, on reading as far as the Devon Live sub-heading, is that this is the second time that the tower has had to be moved to protect it from “climate change” and coastal erosion. When was the first time? Surely it must have been fairly recently, given that the “climate crisis” is itself a recent phenomenon? Well, not exactly – last time was 142 years ago, in 1881, just 45 years after it was first constructed at Compass Point.
A slightly different sequence of events is told at the Folly Flaneuse website, but not so different as to affect the basic point:
Overlooking the sea at Bude, in Cornwall, stands an elegant little tower. It was first built in the 1830s, but after being battered by the elements it was rebuilt a little inland fifty years later.
In other words, nice try Guardian, but this story doesn’t begin to back up claims of Bude being affected by a new “climate crisis” involving coastal erosion – rather the coast is continuing to erode just as it has done for a long time.
It is also difficult to see that the National Lottery money is going to make much difference to anything. Perhaps there are some practical mitigation projects that I have overlooked, but the bulk of the projects appear to me to be little more than yet more net zero propaganda and ineffectual hand-wringing.
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