Day: December 2, 2023

Carbon Dioxide Movie Night: The Global Picture

From Watts Up With That?

By Chris Hall

Ever since that launch of the first Orbital Carbon Observatory satellite (OCO), Iโ€™ve been intrigued by the possibility of being able to directly observe where CO2 in the atmosphere comes from and goes to. Unfortunately, Iโ€™ve not seen much information in the press about the results from any of the three satellites launched so far. Maybe Iโ€™m just not looking in the right places, or maybe the researchers are unusually shy. In any case, I decided to have a look at some of the data myself. One of the things I wanted to check was how well mixed this so-called โ€œwell mixed gasโ€ really is. What follows is a collection of visualizations of OCO-2 data. The cool thing about OCO data is that the satellites provide truly global coverage with a spatial resolution, in the case of the second satellite OCO-2, of 0.5 degrees of latitude and 0.625 degrees of longitude.

The original data is in the form of XCO2, or mole fraction of CO2ย in dry air, which is equivalent to the volume fraction. For brief details of โ€œhow I did itโ€, see the Appendix below.

First, letโ€™s look at a movie of the reported CO2 concentration from the monthly OCO-2 data.

Well, thatโ€™s not all that helpful. The general pattern is for a gradual increase in global CO2 concentration, mostly originating in the Northern Hemisphere and propagating into the Southern Hemisphere. Note that there is considerable seasonal variability, no doubt driven by the cycle of plant growth and decay each year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Another problem with looking at CO2ย data is that there is a temptation to blow up any increase, possibly for dramatic effect, i.e., โ€œweโ€™re all gonna fryโ€. To try to put things into perspective, hereโ€™s the same data but presented as latitude averages. This time, I scaled the concentrations from preindustrial levels (~280 ppmv) to double that value. This should roughly correspond to a global temperature rise of ~1.5ยฐ to ~3ยฐC, depending on whose climate sensitivity value to believe.

To make the thing a bit more human in scale, I wanted to be able to calculate the mass of CO2ย in the atmosphere per square meter. To do this, I also needed an elevation model for the Earth and a reasonable global gravity model, as both you and the atmosphere weigh more at the North Pole than at the equator. Everything got sampled into a compatible 576 x 360 longitude-latitude grid, which enabled me to convert between XCO2 and mass per square meter on both a grid cell and global scale. The average CO2ย concentration map in kg/m2ย is shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1: Global CO2ย concentration in dry air in kg/m2. Note that high altitude regions have low concentrations due to their lower air pressure.

Well, thatโ€™s interesting. It looks more like a map of elevation, and it should, because high elevation sites have less CO2, mostly because they have less air due to the drop off of pressure with altitude. When you add up all the atmosphere that sits over land, it only accounts for 28.8% of the total, despite the fact that land area is about 30.6%.

Now letโ€™s see how much CO2 sits over your head. On average, at the end of 2021, the average value was 6.36 kg/m2. That may sound like a lot, but you need to consider that the average mass of air that the CO2 resides in is about 10,080 kg/m2, which is an average over the whole earth, and is slightly less than the sea level value. It turns out that most of the mass of CO2 in the air really comes from O2 via its reaction with carbon and hydrocarbons, so the average mass of C in the air (neglecting methane, etc.) was 1.73 kg/m2. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2019 was a whopping 263 grams of CO2 per m2, or 71.7 g/m2 of C. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere per m2 over 7 years is approximately the same amount that an adult human exhales in about 7 hours.

Getting back to where CO2 comes from and goes to, thereโ€™s a global increase of CO2 that tends to swamp the details. I needed to detrend the data so I could see where the major deviations from the overall global pattern occur. I tried several methods, including subtracting off a linear fit to global average concentration record over the first 84 months (7 years) of the record. I also tried subtracting off the residue (i.e. low frequency component) of the global CO2 concentration average after decomposition using the Hilbert-Huang transform (hht library in R), and both of these methods gave similar results. But it bothered me that there was no physical basis for these detrending schemes.

I then came up with a brilliant idea. Why not assume that there was some magical CO2ย concentration in pre-industrial times, letโ€™s say 280 ppmv, and that all was in perfect equilibrium then, with the amount of the gas released into the atmosphere being exactly balanced by plant growth, weathering, etc., so that Earth had achieved that sublime concentration? After that, once we started pumping CO2ย into the atmosphere, some, but not all, of that excess would raise the concentration above 280 ppmv (global average of 4.97 kg/m2), but if we stopped emitting CO2, the Earth would gradually settle back down to the Utopian level of 280 ppmv. I assumed that all of the increase from preindustrial levels was due to anthropogenic emissions, and that the restoration to 280 ppmv would be via a simple single exponential time constant. This assumes that the ability to fix CO2ย is not somehow โ€œpoisonedโ€ by rising concentrations.

Figure 2: Global average CO2ย concentrations derived from OCO-2 data, plotted with simple first order models that assume, that devoid of any anthropogenic inputs, concentrations would decay back to preindustrial levels following a single time constant โ€œtauโ€.

Sadly, I found that this elegant, simple model had already been espoused by Dr Roy Spencer. Drat, I hate it when that happens. Anyway, I had global emission data for the 84 months of the first 7 full years of OCO-2 data and the results of models with different assumed time constants ฯ„ are shown in Fig. 2.

The least squares fit of the model to the data gives a value 38.24 yr for the time constant, which is equivalent to a half-life of 26.5 yr. It is possible to calculate an โ€œinstantaneousโ€ value of ฯ„ from the data, and aside from a blip in 2015, the value is quite stable, suggesting that, at least for these 7 years, the efficiency of CO2 fixation was relatively constant. It should be noted that this model assumes that all of the increase of CO2 is due solely to anthropogenic emissions. If there are any other unaccounted-for sources, the true time constant will be shorter, so a half-life of 26.5 yr can be reasonably regarded as an upper limit. There may or may not be an โ€œeternalโ€ anthropogenic CO2 reservoir in the atmosphere, but itโ€™s not apparent in any of the data that Iโ€™ve seen.

The next step was to take this simple model of CO2ย growth and assume that it is evenly distributed across the globe. This was then used as the model to detrend the data, to see where the CO2ย sources and sinks reside. This detrended data also has a lot of seasonal variability, which still tends to obscure things. However, you can do a sort of spectral analysis of this data, and the method I applied was the Hilbert-Huang transform. This decomposes a time series into a series of intrinsic model frequencies (IMFs), along with a low frequency โ€œresidueโ€. When you do this exercise over the 84 months of the detrended data, you find that grid cells have a minimum of 2 IMFs and a maximum of 6 IMFs. Places like Siberia and regions around the Arctic tend to have large numbers of IMFs, while Antarctica and the Southern Ocean tend to only vary slowly, resulting in few IMFs. In the following video, I show the results of plotting latitude averages of the detrended data, along with the detrended data minus the first two IMFs, i.e., residues with a maximum IMF value set to two.

As you can see from this video, most of the CO2ย concentration variability is in the Northern Hemisphere, especially north of 60ยฐN. This variability โ€œwhipsโ€ its way towards the southern hemisphere. There is also a persistent โ€œbulgeโ€ in the concentration of CO2ย that resides in a zone between the equator and about 45ยฐN, and this is particularly apparent in the low pass โ€œresidueโ€ plot. This is the region where excess CO2ย comes from, and the Southern Ocean along with Antarctica is the predominant area where CO2ย โ€œgoes to dieโ€, so to speak.

Figure 3: Mean of detrended CO2ย concentration residue from 2015 to the end of 2019. Note that the island of Hawaii, where CO2ย measurements are routinely taken, averages about 20 g/m2ย above the global mean.

This point is further illustrated in Fig. 3, which shows the mean of the low frequency residue from the global detrended CO2ย concentrations. From this figure, we can see that the elephant in the room is clearly China, which acts as a major hot spot that sends CO2ย across the Pacific and even into the Atlantic. India is also a significant hot spot, but its emissions bump into the Tibetan Plateau. The US is a very minor hot spot, and despite Canadaโ€™s relatively high emissions per capita, the original Dominion barely registers at all. Iโ€™m afraid that all the angst about emissions from the 2ndย and 3rdย Dominions, Australia and New Zealand, is hard to justify from this plot, as both countries are on average below the mean and appear completely featureless. Europe is โ€œmehโ€, but major petroleum producing areas do register a bit above average. It is also interesting to note that the generally accepted figure for CO2ย content is based on measurements on the island of Hawaii, but in Fig. 3, we can see that it averages about 20 g/m2ย higher than the global average, which is roughly a bias of 0.3% for this โ€œwell mixed gasโ€.

Figure 4: Standard deviations of detrended CO2ย concentration residues from 2015 to the end of 2019.

While Fig. 3 shows the mean of the detrended residues, Fig. 4 shows their standard deviations. This map illustrates where there is the greatest variability in CO2 concentrations over the seven-year period.

The places with the least variability in CO2 concentrations include:

  • Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean.
  • A zone near the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) running through the Pacific and Atlantic.
  • The Sahara.
  • The Tibetan Plateau
  • Mountain ranges in the Western USA and Central Mexico.
  • Portions of the N. Pacific east of Japan.

Places with very high variability include:

  • Russia, especially Siberia.
  • The Arctic north of Russia.
  • Parts of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
  • The Canadian Maritime Provinces.
  • A small part of W. Europe centered on the Netherlands, the breadbasket of Europe.
  • Parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, especially the Congo Basin.
  • Southern British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec.
  • A hint of variability in the Mississippi Valley.
  • Some strange โ€œblobsโ€ in the N. Pacific. More on these later.
Figure 5: CO2ย mass per m2ย mean anomalies over three separate 15 degree latitudinal bands

Itโ€™s clear from Figs. 3 and 4 that all the โ€œactionโ€ is in the Northern Hemisphere, specifically between the equator and 45ยฐN. In Fig. 5, Iโ€™ve plotted the average CO2 mass anomaly from the detrended and low pass filtered data for three separate bands spanning 15ยฐ of latitude. The plots start at 105ยฐE longitude, which is roughly at the western edge of China. Here you can see that China is by far the biggest anomaly, with concentrations generally falling as you go further east.

In the bottom panel of Fig. 5 (equator to 15ยฐN), you can see that concentrations are relatively flat, with a bump up near Venezuela (northern S. America), and a later bump around the Congo Basin. In the second panel (15ยฐN to 30ยฐN), concentrations start high in China, with a gradual decline until we get to the Gulf States and India, where there is a rise in CO2. The exception to this general pattern is about 150ยฐ from the starting point, which corresponds to the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. In the top panel (30ยฐN to 45ยฐN), there is an early rise in China, followed by a steady decline until the Tibetan Plateau, after which CO2 rises again in the vicinity of western China. Within the USA, there is a sharp dip near the Rocky Mountains, which is similar to the pattern seen in Mexico for the middle panel.

It seems that mountain ranges are regions where CO2 concentrations sharply decline. One might be tempted to think that this is solely due to their lower overall concentration values, but this same pattern is exhibited when molar fractions are plotted instead of kg/m2. Some of this drop might be due to weathering, but Liu et al. (2004) suggested that rainwater is also an important mechanism for soaking up CO2 from the atmosphere, and this idea is compatible with the pattern we see in the USA and Mexico, where the concentration of CO2 drops in the area west of the mountains where one might expect orographic rain, and it rises again sharply in the rain shadow.

Now letโ€™s see how the low pass filtered detrended data evolved over the seven years of OCO-2 data from 2015 to the end of 2021. The video is at a speed of 4 months per second.

The video has four different views: global views centered on 0ยฐ longitude and 180ยฐE longitude, and polar views centered on 90ยฐN and -90ยฐN. Besides the persistent excess centered on China, there are some other intriguing features. At the beginning of the movie, there is a strange hot spot โ€œblobโ€ in the Pacific east of Japan, with a smaller region of CO2ย deficiency just to the south of the zone of excess. This smaller subsidiary blob later becomes a region of excess concentration. This is illustrated as a single frame in Fig. 6. Another strange transitory oceanic region of CO2ย release is shown in Fig. 7, which is centered in the N. Pacific south of Alaska.

Figure 6: Single frame of the low pass filtered detrended CO2ย data showing a region of excess CO2ย just west of Japan. Below the region of excess is a region of low concentration, which later becomes a region of excess CO2.

I have no idea what these โ€œblobsโ€ of gas represent. They do not correspond to important fishing zones, so I doubt that they are โ€œbiologicsโ€ in the sense that Seaman Jones explains in The Hunt for Red October. Although there are seamounts in these areas, as is true for much of the Pacific, these areas are not especially active either volcanically or seismically. The best guess I have this that some methane clathrates became liberated from the sea floor for some reason and then quickly oxidized to form CO2. The location and size of these emissions might be controlled by deep ocean currents. I welcome any suggestions as to the mechanism for these seemingly random releases of significant quantities of non-anthropogenic gas.

Figure 7: Single frame from detrended CO2ย data showing transitory zone of excess concentration in the N. Pacific south of Alaska.

Similar strange anomalies occur in the Arctic, well away from people and even significant plant growth of any kind. These can be seen in the North Pole projections of the detrended low pass filter video. Note that there are significant positive and negative anomalies near Svalbard and a very intense positive anomaly that pops up near Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Similar large-scale anomalies are totally absent in the Southern Ocean.

Other notable anomalies that I think I do have explanations for involve wildfires. Some of these are โ€œanthropogenicโ€ in the sense of fires being deliberately set for the purpose of clearing land for agriculture (e.g., the Amazon Basin), but many are likely purely natural. Areas of the eastern provinces of Canada as well as large parts of Siberia appear to be susceptible to significant wildfires. The large fire in British Columbia in 2017 is shown in Fig. 8. I can also almost convince myself that in the video, one can see the development of the large Greece and Balkans fires from 2021.

Thereโ€™s no real โ€œmoral to the storyโ€ here, other than the fact that natural variations in concentrations caused by plant growth and decay, almost totally in the Northern Hemisphere, completely swamp all other features. By detrending the data and putting it through a low pass filter it is possible to see more subtle details. The โ€œwell mixed gasโ€ carbon dioxide takes a while to get mixed and there are long term excesses and deficiencies throughout the planet. Barriers to the mixing appear to be the ITCZ and the Sahara Desert. Antarctica, the Southern Oceans, and to a lesser extent the Tibetan Plateau and high mountain ranges seem to act as CO2ย sinks, while most other variations on land tend to correlate with agricultural land use and large-scale hydrocarbon production.

Figure 8: CO2ย excess likely due to wildfires in British Columbia in 2017. Note that the same region shows up later as a negative anomaly, possibly due to new growth after the fires.

Wildfires are the likely cause of many large CO2 emissions, especially in the northern parts of the Northern Hemisphere. There are many transient positive and negative concentration anomalies in the Pacific and Arctic, and I have no explanation for them except they must be somehow related to degassing and absorption controlled by large scale ocean currents. As for large scale obviously anthropogenic emissions, China is the sore thumb. The Southern Hemisphere barely registers.

 

 

Appendix

This is a brief description of how I accessed the data, the steps used to put things into single georeferenced packages and what tools were used. This is for nerdy types who might want to tackle this sort of thing on their own.

I downloaded monthly data from the OCO-2 satellite, which covers the period from the beginning of 2015 until the first two months of 2022, just a bit over seven years. This forced me to learn something about how to handle NETCDF files, and with a little effort I was able to stitch the 86 spatial โ€œXCO2โ€ (molar fraction of CO2 of dry air) data arrays together to form a single 3-dimensional array, with the indices representing latitude, longitude and time.

Although daily data is available for OCO-2, I chose monthly data instead for a couple of reasons. One, the size of the downloaded data is a lot smaller, and two, there is complete data for every part of the Earth in the monthly datasets, while there is missing data from daily files. The downside is that gases in the atmosphere can travel quite large distances in the space of days or weeks, meaning that any patterns that might exist in the daily data could be hopelessly smeared out, obscuring any information about possible sources and sinks. I hope to show, however, that this is not the case, and we can definitely see spatial patterns for both CO2 sources and sinks.

I wanted to convert the OCO-2 data into a measure of the mass of CO2 per square meter so that I could get a better feel for how much C and CO2 we are talking about on a more human scale. This presented a little problem as I had to interpolate the OCO-2 data into the mid-points of their grid cells. The original data goes from -90ยฐN to 90ยฐN (361 latitude values), which is a bit awkward as the endpoints have zero area, so concentrations would be infinite. This is the classic fence post vs. fence rail problem, and it reduced the number of latitude values to 360. I shifted the longitude data, but I didnโ€™t have to decrease the number of points, because as Arkady Darrell says in Isaac Asimovโ€™s Second Foundation, โ€œa circle has no endโ€.

The tools I used for this study were a moderately old laptop, the program RStudio, the R language, the MATLAB work-alike programming language Octave, GLE Graphics Layout Engine, the video editor Shotcut, and a very neat Java program provided by NASA called Panoply, which lets you make nice pictures and movies of NETCDF datasets.

Embedded Videos:

Raw data in ppmv: https://youtu.be/L1Dic2813zk

Raw ppm latitude averaged from 280 to 560 (pre-ind to x2): https://youtu.be/1fOvYYe9UyI

Model detrended low pass (residues) mass per sq. m.: https://youtu.be/IlNj4Vd-w0k

Model detrended mass and residues, low pass latitude averaged: https://youtu.be/LRXHuLqtTwc

References

IEA-EDGAR CO2, a component of the EDGAR (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research) Community GHG database version 7.0 (2022) including or based on data from IEA (2021) Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Energy, http://www.iea.org/statistics, as modified by the Joint Research Centre. (https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_ghg70).

KNMI Climate Explorer and Global Carbon Project, Friedlingstein et al, 2019, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019.

Lesley Ott, Brad Weir, OCO-2 GEOS Level 3 daily, 0.5ร—0.625 assimilated CO2 V10r, Greenbelt, MD, USA, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), Accessed: [Data Access Date], doi: 10.5067/Y9M4NM9MPCGH

Lesley Ott, Brad Weir, OCO-2 GEOS Level 3 monthly, 0.5ร—0.625 assimilated CO2 V10r, Greenbelt, MD, USA, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), Accessed: [Data Access Date], doi: 10.5067/BGFIODET3HZ8

Mauna Loa CO2 Data: Data processed by www.woodfortrees.org. Data from NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ Time series (esrl) from 1958.2 to 2023.12

Liu, C.J., Ilvesniemi, H., Kutsch, W., Ma, X.Q., Westman, C.J. and Kauppi, P., 2004. An estimate on the rainout of atmospheric CO_2. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 16(1), pp.86-89.

Panoply was developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. More information about Panoply is available at www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply.

No, CNN, Climate Change is Not Costing the U.S. Billions


By Linnea Lueken

CNN Business posted an article titled โ€œClimate change is costing the US $150 billion a year. Hereโ€™s what that looks like,โ€ which cites a recent government climate report to claim that global warming is causing an increase in costly weather disasters. This is false.

Data refutes the assertion that extreme weather is becoming more frequent or severe. As a result, climate change cannot be behind the rise in weather related damage. The real reason is a matter of demographics and economics, especially population growth and increased development in natural disaster-prone areas.

CNN claims that the United States experiences a weather event costing $1 billion in damage every three weeks, as opposed to โ€œ40 years ago, when extreme weather episodes that cost an inflation-adjusted $1 billion happened once every four months on average.โ€ This figure comes from the Biden administrationโ€™s recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) report.

What CNN neglects to mention in their effort to tie rising disaster costs to climate change is that property values โ€“ both in the form of objects like houses, cars, and home goods, as well as land values โ€“ have increased over time. This obviously contributes to the rising costs of damages, with or without inflation factored in. In addition, more people than ever before insure their property, under various government backed flood, disaster, and crop insurance programs.

Coastal development has increased over time as well, and the total number of people (and their possessions) has also increased in the United States, particularly in states like Florida, Texas, and California, which are prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, severe droughts, and wildfires, all of which damage property. (See figure below)

Figure 1: Graphic from Wikipedia showing states by population growth between 2010 and 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau 2018 Annual Estimate of the Resident Population. States with population growth greater than the United States as a whole are in dark green, states with population growth slower than the United States in light green, and states with declining populations in light red.

Floridaโ€™s population, for example, has nearly doubled since 1983, putting an additional 10 million people in harmโ€™s way when hurricanes strike there. Population and associated development has also increased in most other coastal locations and along attractive rivers and streams, meaning when hurricanes occur or rivers rise, more people are at ground zero for harm.

The Daily Caller interviewed University of Colorado professor and climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr., who explained plainly that โ€œ[t]here is no peer reviewed science that attributes any part of increasing disaster losses to changes in climate,โ€ says economic data is not a good metric for making claims about climate change, largely because of the economic conditions that change regardless of the weather.

CNN also says that the โ€œcost of extreme weather events is expected to grow in the near term with a projected rise in sea levels and temperatures,โ€ but this is more unsupported speculation. While it is true that sea levels have risen gradually since the end of the last glaciation, as discussed in Climate Realism post โ€œSorry, Washington Post, Climate Change Isnโ€™t Worsening Hurricanes, but Storm-Resilient Military Bases Make Sense,โ€ there is no evidence that sea level rise is making it so storms are more damaging. Also, as Climate Realism has pointed out many times, there is no data showing an increase in severe tropical cyclones.

Regarding the point on temperature, CNN does not elaborate on how higher temperatures will cause more costly damage, except that they say โ€œagricultural lossesโ€ and โ€œworker injuriesโ€ are counted among the NCA reportโ€™s damage calculations. This is nebulous at best, but crop production in the United States has beenย increasingย over the same period of modest warming, and worker injuries donโ€™t appear to be getting more common, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statisticsย data. (See figure below)

There has been no increase in heatwaves in the United States, either, with the most extreme recorded summer heat in U.S. history was during the 1930s, well before climate alarmists claim there was accelerated human-caused warming.

Weather and natural disasters certainly result in billions of dollars in cost each year, but using economic figures as proof of a climate catastrophe is misleading. Not only has extreme weather not become worse in the United States over time, but the NCA report and CNN both ignore myriad the other factors, like population growth and greater development, that result in higher damages costs now than in the past when extreme weather and other types of disasters strike.

The postย No, CNN, Climate Change is Not Costing the U.S. Billionsย appeared first onย ClimateRealism.

Natural Disasters Are Not Increasing โ€” Really

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen โ€” 1 December 2023

The fact that natural disasters are not increasing and not killing more people โ€“ due to climate change or any other fanciful cause โ€” has once more been firmly entered into the peer-reviewed literature in a new paper appearing in the journalย Environmental Hazards.ย ย 

The paper is Alimonti andย  Mariani (2023) titled:ย ย Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?

The abstract is available at the link on the title, but for the more-than-curious, the authors have supplied the Accepted Manuscript version and I have made it available in .doc format from the WUWT servers here.

As many know, Roger Pielke Jr. has been treating the world with this news,  regarding one type of disaster at a time, through his tweets on  X and his substack, The Honest Broker. For example, on U.S. Floods here.

And I have been writing specifically about the international disaster database known as EM-DAT here at WUWT. Starting in 2019 with โ€œHow Wrong Can One Article Beโ€, and followed over the last couple of years with โ€œEM-DAT Disaster Database Creating Data Disastersโ€ and then โ€œEM-DAT:  The International Disaster Databaseโ€. 

Gianluca Alimonti  [INFN & Universitร  degli Studi di Milano, Department of Physics, Milano, Italy]  and Luigi Mariani [Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics (DICATAM), Universitร  degli Studi di Brescia, Brescia, Italy]   undertake a serious study of the question of increasing natural disasters because, as they put it:

โ€œThe fear of global warming leading to an increase in natural disasters of meteorological origin (drought, extreme rain events, heat waves, landslides, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, etc.) with disruptive effects on human civilization, has recently taken hold. This stimulated the birth of datasets capable of collecting disastrous past events. For example, a dataset exists of the earthquakes that occurred in the distant past in Italy (INGV, n.d.) as well as a dataset of flood events and landslides (CNR, n.d.). International datasets have also been created that aggregate data related to natural disasters. One of these is EM-DAT, which was developed in 1988 by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED [CRED, n.d.]) of the Catholic University of Louvain with the aim of rationalizing decision making to ensure disaster preparedness, while also providing an objective base for vulnerability assessment and priority setting purposes.โ€    โ€” from the abstract of Alimonti & Mariani (2023) (A&M2023 hereafter)

The โ€œfear of global warmingโ€ mentioned has been repeatedly caused by various United Nations agencies and departments misrepresenting the EM-DAT data base to the world.  The first example, the 2020 report the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) titled โ€œThe human cost of disasters: an overview of the last 20 years (2000-2019)โ€, makes this statement:

โ€˜this report focuses primarily on the staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty yearsโ€™.

The UNDRR uses this graphic: โ€ฆwhich does not support their statement of increasing disasters, but rather shows disasters either constant or slightly declining.ย  The โ€œstaggering riseโ€ is meant to refer to comparing the data for 1980-1999 and 2000-2019.

The actual EM-DAT data looks like this:

Another report from the UNโ€™s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) titled โ€œ2021 The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food securityโ€  repeatedly makes the claims like โ€œDisasters steadily on the riseโ€.  FAO is using EM-DAT disaster data shown just above to make the false claim:

โ€œYet, are disasters truly becoming more frequent and dangerous or are we succumbing to perception bias?  Available data shows that increased disaster occurrence is indeed the new normal.  While, a quick short-run comparison with the preceding decade shows that there were relatively fewer disaster peak years in the 2010s, the overall level of occurrence remains at an all-time high. With the new millennium, disasters took a drastic leap in frequency and have continued to occur at a consistently high rate over the past 20 years.โ€œ

One of the worst exaggerations is from โ€œUN News โ€” Global perspective Human storiesโ€ websiteย with the headline:

The headline refers to the report โ€œAtlas of mortality and economic losses from weather, climate and water extremes (1970โ€“2019)โ€  from the UN-associated World Meteorological Organization.   The WMO must know it is not true, theyโ€™re the worldโ€™s weather man. 

The Main Stream Media is full of the constant drum-beat claims that disasters are more frequent, more dangerous, more deadly and storms worse. 

Butโ€ฆ.There is a problem.ย  Of which the UNDRR, FAO, WMO and EM-DAT itself,ย  were and are aware:

A&M 2023 does a yeomanโ€™s job of thoroughly investigating the one simple question:  

Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?

The paper is a terrific read โ€“ it starts by examining the raw EM-DAT data, its data collection history and what claims EM-DAT itself makes for the data, which in its simplest form looks like this:

(numbered Figures 1 โ€“ 6 all from A&M 2023)

Without further consideration, this looks like an incredible rise in the number of disasters zooming up to 2000 and then leveling off at โ€œan all-time highโ€.   Alimonti and Muriani (hereafter A&M) use standard statistical techniques, coupled with the history of the dataset, to show that:  โ€œYes, that rise is literally โ€˜incredibleโ€™ โ€“ unbelievable.โ€ (My words โ€“ kh)

A&M use a standard piecewise regression method to discover break-points in the data set:

And, of course, the same results could have been accomplished using, as I did, my eye-ball method in my earlier essays or with paper-ruler-and-pen work.ย  But, A&M are nothing if not steady and methodical in working through the question being asked, checking and re-checking their own work:

Expand the investigation to a peripheral question, โ€œAre natural disaster causing more human deaths?โ€, a claim often made in the media as โ€œmore deadlyโ€, A&M prepared this graphic:

A&M wryly comment: โ€œDeaths caused by natural disasters since 1900 are shown in Figure 4 as accessory information: the decrease over the years is evident and is certainly not due to disasters decrease, but perhaps to a better prevention and defense capacity.โ€  Over the same time period, 1900 to 2020, human population quadrupled โ€“ from 2 billion to over 8 billion โ€“ which would have more reasonably skewed the chart in the other direction, quadrupling the deaths in parallel with population growth. [ population data source ]

To round out the investigation, based on the rather low threshold for including a disaster in the EM-DAT database (seeย Inclusion criteriaย here), A&M looked at numbers of disasters by increasing the death thresholds:

This view dispels the claims of โ€œmore and more deadly.โ€

I will show one more of the graphics from A&M 2023 that should be used to show that the claim by FAO that climate disasters are increasingly threatening food supplies worldwide:

In the paper, there is a note: โ€œThese crops were chosen because they represent the four main world agricultural commodities and account for about 64% of global caloric consumption (Gray et al., 2014).โ€

A&M conclude:

โ€œThe EM-DAT dataset of natural disasters has been analyzed by means of the piece-wise method of Tome and Miranda, and it has been concluded that the trend is not homogeneous over the whole 1900โ€“2022 series due to various factors, the main one being the growing reporting effectiveness. Therefore, before any trend analysis, the time series should be broken into sub-series: the most recent time interval, beginning in the first [22] years of the twenty-first century, shows a decreasing trend whose degree of realism is strengthened by the fact that the time series in the new century can be considered complete, given the increased effectiveness of the monitoring and reporting activities of natural disasters.โ€

โ€œโ€ฆthe authors are concerned about the misrepresentation of the natural disaster trend because such claims have been uncritically broadcast by many different media and by FAO itself, thereby deforming the perception of the public on the risk of natural disasters.โ€

โ€œMisinterpreting the trend of natural disasters is a very serious matter because exposes the world population to the risk of inconsistent policies at both a national and an international level, thereby wasting resources or diverting them from the resolution of much more concrete problems.โ€

# # # # #

Authorโ€™s Comment:

I couldnโ€™t agree more.  It will take decades to undo the damage caused by the almost-universal misinterpretation of the EM-DAT database by climate change activists and those who are under their thrall in the NGOs, international agencies, governments and, of course, intentionally in the mass media, spurred on by the Climate Crisis news cabals. (and here and here and more).

At the risk of being labeled a pessimist โ€“ I am, in my own opinion, a pragmatist โ€” all official bodies will continue to use the false claims made in the various UN-backed reports and parroted in the media.  The lie is just far more useful to them than the truth.

The facts about the EM-DAT data have been known for more than a decade โ€“ have been publicly acknowledged by EM-DAT, and written about both in the US and Europe โ€“ A&M are not the first to do so. 

But A&M 2023 is a solid piece of scientific research exposing the widespread misinterpretation and is published in an appropriate peer-reviewed international journal.  Hopefully it will make an impact.

As a reminder, an Accepted Manuscript version of A&M 2023 is available for download here.

Thanks for reading.

Snow a thing of the past? COP 28 meets reality.

Heavy snow and ice has frozen jets in Munich bound for Dubai’s global warming conference. Heavy snowfall has brought chaos to parts of southernย Germany, with air and rail traffic blocked in the Bavarian state capital of Munich.

https://twitter.com/vishu_sharma1/status/1730983193916919853?s=20

https://twitter.com/DisasterTrackHQ/status/1730958949417959635?s=20

Munich International (Germany) dealing with heavy snowfall as flights head for Dubaiโ€™s global warming conference.

ECIUโ€™s Disinformation Aboutย EVs

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

This weekโ€™s disinformation from the ECIU propaganda unit!

Ahead of the Governmentโ€™s Zero Emission Vehicle Mandateโ€™s being debated in Parliamentary committee tomorrow, Colin Walker, Head of Transport at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, said,

The Governmentโ€™s impact assessment for the ZEV mandate clearly states that, once you subtract the policyโ€™s costs from its economic benefits, the net benefit to the UK economy is ยฃ39bn [1], or around ยฃ1,400 per household.
Thatโ€™s because the ZEV mandate will accelerate the UKโ€™s uptake of EVs, and EVs are much cheaper to own and operate. Research by the ECIU has found that a Nissan Leaf, compared to a petrol equivalent, can save its owner over ยฃ1200 a year in fuel costs alone. [2]

To access these savings, most UK households will rely on the second-hand market โ€“ its where most of us buy our cars. And this is where the ZEV mandate will play a critical role โ€“ in driving up sales of new EVs, it will drive up the pace at which EVs arrive on the second hand market. Without it, the UKโ€™s drivers will be stuck driving slower and more expensive petrol cars for longerโ€.

https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2023/comment-zero-emissions-vehicle-mandate-will-be-a-net-benefit-to-uk-economy-government-data-shows

WOW!! The ZEV mandate must be wonderful to save us all ยฃ1400 each!

But as with all con-merchants, it pays to check the small print first.

Firstly, the Government Impact Assessment they quote covers the period 2024  to 2071! So that ยฃ1400 actually works out at just ยฃ30 a year. The amount is so tiny in overall terms that statistically it is meaningless.

But if we burrow deeper into the Impact Assessment we find that it is based on a set of very dodgy assumptions.

First off, the supposed benefits include ยฃ103bn in โ€œemissions savingsโ€ :

But nobody will be any better off economically just because we cut CO2 emissions. It is just a made up number to make the benefits look substantial.

Secondly the assessment uses unrealistically low price assumptions for EVs:

To claim that an EV will only cost ยฃ3100 more in 2025 simply does not reflect the current reality, which tells us that the price differential is at least ยฃ10000, even for small cars.

I certainly donโ€™t know what they might cost in ten or twenty years time, but neither does the Government or ECIU. But it is dishonest to pretend that people wonโ€™t be much worse off in the foreseeable future if they are forced to buy EVs.

We then come on to the second claim:

The link they give is wrong, as it takes us back to the Impact Assessment.

However their costs for petrol include fuel duty and VAT โ€“ the typical annual fuel bill including these taxes would be around ยฃ1400 for a small petrol engined car.

Take the taxes away, which is the true comparison, and fuels costs would drop to about ยฃ800. The saving with an EV would at best about ยฃ200, which plainly would not compensate for the higher purchase price.

But that saving would only apply to motorists with off street parking, and who never use public charging.

According to the RAC, anybody using a public charger the cost/mile would be double that of petrol, with fuel duty excluded.

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-car-public-charging-costs-rac-charge-watch/

Finally, the ECIU make a big claim about second hand EVs, which supposedly UK drivers are desperate to get their hands on:

Buyers of second hand cars tend to be relatively poor. And poorer people are less likely to have off street parking. So it is the less well off who will be hardest hit by the ZEV mandate, which will perforce lead to many fewer ICEs appearing in the second hand market in a few years time.

Cop28 will be a failure, like all the climate summits that came before it

Governments across the world are stepping back from their net zero promises because inflation, the cost of living, Ukraine, Gaza and other issues make it appear too costly politically.

Fromย The OilPrice.com

Byย Paul Dojman via CityAM

The Cop28 climate summit has opened in Dubai, yet it is already clear that the world is not on track to meet the climate change targets that governments set themselves in Paris in 2015. In strictly numerical terms therefore, Cop28 will be a failure, like all the climate summits that came before it. The likely response will be much wringing of hands and pointing of fingers as people conclude, once again, that mankind lacks the moral and political will to save the planet and itself. 

This is the wrong approach to climate change. The energy transition needed to combat global warming is not just a matter of will. It is a matter of technology. Technology holds the key to arresting climate change, and while we have a mountain to climb, the new technology required is coming on stream faster than most people realise. We need leaders to adopt a laser focus on technology and the policies needed to develop and deploy it as quickly as possible; we need leaders back in their home countries, trying to figure out how to create the environment for this technology to grow.

Governments across the world are stepping back from their net zero promises because inflation, the cost of living, Ukraine, Gaza and other issues make it appear too costly politically. Democratic politicians across the world are all making the same calculus: saving the planet will not get them re-elected. They cannot drop the pledge altogether so instead are adjusting the narrative and playing with the timeline.

Policymakers should instead focus on the tech. This means acknowledging that the current level of technology is insufficient to deliver enough carbon abatement in a way that enables an energy system that is affordable, secure and reliable, and therefore more technological progress is required to transition the energy system without unduly burdening consumers.

Look at the global spend: five years ago, $500bn a year was spent on clean energy while almost twice that โ€“ โ‚ฌ900bn โ€“ went on hydrocarbons. Investment in hydrocarbons has since stayed the same but spending on clean energies has mushroomed, reaching $1.2 trillion last year and expected to hit $1.8tn this year.This is still well short of the 5 trillion annual investment which the IMF says is needed, but the trajectory is good.

Once we understand that the critical determinant is how quickly technology can respond to the policy-induced shock of the energy transition, it becomes clear that the right response to the bad news expected from Dubai is to take stock of the available technology: do we have the technology to deliver a politically viable energy transition that is affordable, secure and sustainable? If not, what do we need? When might it be available, how quickly can it be deployed and scaled up,  what are the financial implications? What needs to change in public policy to better incentivise this shift?

The energy transition is thus not merely a matter of will. Whilst political will is necessary to drive and sustain any major policy shift, fundamentally the energy transition is a reengineering of the global economy. This transition is starkly different to any previous economic transformation: rather than the technology shocking the economy, with regulation seeking to catch up; the regulation to avoid climate change is shocking the global economy, and technology is the one playing catch-up. It would be a great tragedy if politicians abandoned climate goals just as technology catches up with policy.

Many liken the energy transition to putting a man on the moon, but the analogy is false. The moon shot was a one-off effort to make first-of-its-kind technology that could be rapidly developed to deliver the political goal โ€“ of American pre-eminence in space exploration โ€“ at any cost and with very high levels of risk. The energy transition, however, requires adopting new technology, globally and at scale, and reliably integrating it with existing energy systems, which will fundamentally transform those systems and the wider global economy.

A range of technologies to unlock the energy transition are on the way. The Chancellor in the Autumn Statement announced an ambitious plan to cut delays to grid connections for renewables. Meanwhile, the European Commission is on its way to a decisive policy shift too, with for example the incoming EU Grid Action Plan, supporting the roll out of renewables within an integrated and efficient electricity grid.

This technology revolution offers a brighter future for our energy system, and indeed in the longer term, energy costs and energy security. Post-Cop28 policy everywhere must incentivise the development and scaling up of solutions to the obstacles that have hindered the energy transition to date. The public mood may be sceptical, but the momentum of technological change is unstoppable. As they leave Dubai, politicians should put their weight behind the latter and not be scared into inaction by the former.

Greta Thunbergโ€™s climate crusade is heading for defeat | Michael Shellenberger interview

โ€œGreta Thunberg is an end stage product of the climate religion. As renewables come into crisis everywhere in the world because of local community opposition to the land use impacts, as well as the high associated costs, the bloom is coming off the rose for climate activists.โ€

Michael Shellenberger is an environmentalist, author, and advocate for pragmatic solutions to climate change. He joins Steven Edginton to talk about the โ€˜religionโ€™ of climate change for this weekโ€™s Off Script podcast. Watch the full interview above, or listen on your podcast app by searching โ€œOff Scriptโ€.

Green Bloodbath: The tire industry is fleeing Germany

Tyre manufacturer Michelin has announced the closure of three plants in Germany. More than 1,500 employees are affected. Previously, Goodyear had announced the end of Fulda.

Main entrance to Michelin’s Karlsruhe, Germany, factory.

German tire manufacturers Michelin and Goodyear have announced that they will close several plants in Germany, which will result in over 2,500 employees losing their jobs, reportsย Blackout News.

These decisions have a significant impact on the affected regions and the employees (auto-motor-und-sport: 29.11.23)

Michelin closes three German plants by 2025: Over 1,500 jobs at risk

Michelin has surprisingly announced that production at three German plants will be discontinued by 2025. The affected locations are Karlsruhe, Homburg and Trier.

Michelin describes this as a “restructuring of the sites in Germany”. The main reasons for these measures are high inflation and the sharp rise in production costs in Germany.

In particular, the price of natural gas in industry has doubled since 2015, and the cost of electricity has risen by 51 percent.

The decision affects not only production, but also personnel, as Michelin plans to lay off 122 employees in the customer contact center for Germany, Austria and Switzerland and relocate this department to Poland. The passenger car tyre plant in Bad Kreuznach will remain unaffected for the time being.

Michelin closes three German plants by 2025: More than 1,500 jobs threatened. Goodyear announces plant closures in Germany: More than 1,000 jobs in Fulda threatened

A total of 1,532 employees are affected by the factory closures at Michelin. The Mining, Chemical and Energy Industrial Union (IGBCE) has already announced opposition to Michelin’s plans, stressing that it will not abandon the sites. The union expects Michelin to deliver on its promise to put people at the centre and to remain in dialogue.

Goodyear announces plant closures in Germany: More than 1,000 jobs in Fulda threatened

Goodyear had already announced on November 16 that it would discontinue production at two German plants. This decision is particularly painful for the Fulda plant, which has been producing tires for about 120 years and will now close in 2025. 1,050 employees in Fulda will lose their jobs as a result.

The production of Fulda tyres will continue, if at all, in another country. In addition to Fulda, Goodyear will also close the Fรผrstendwalde site in Brandenburg by 2027. Goodyear has announced that it will reduce production costs per tire by an average of three dollars over the next five years.

The main reasons for these plant closures are increased energy and production costs in Germany as well as growing competition from low-cost suppliers from the Far East, especially China. These decisions have a significant impact on both the affected employees and local communities. The IGBCE union has announced that it will oppose these decisions, but is expected to have limited influence.

Michelin also announced 1,400 job cutsย in the United Statesย last month. Another German site, in Bamberg, was closed in 2019.

While America Pursues Renewables, Worldwide Expansion Is Underway for Nuclear Generated Electricity

Sweden, China, India, Russia, and others are changing from occasional electricity from renewables to fossil-free electricity from nuclear that is continuous and uninterruptible.

Byย Ronald Stein, P.E.

American political leaders such as President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom continue โ€œto dream the impossible dreamโ€ that intermittent electricity from wind and solar can run the world while countries such as Sweden, China, India, and Russia are changing from occasional electricity by renewables to electricity from nuclear that is continuous, uninterruptible, and fossil-free.

With regards to reliable electricity,ย Swedenย has said their electricity policy goal is โ€œchanged from 100% renewable to 100% fossil-freeโ€. The Swedish government unveiled a roadmap which envisages the construction of new nuclear generating capacity equivalent to at least two large-scale reactors by 2035. Swedenย plans โ€˜massiveโ€™ย expansion of new nuclear generated electricity by 2045.

The Swedish agreement also said necessary regulations should be developed to create the conditions for the construction and operation of small modular reactors (SMRs) to service smaller communities. In addition, the permitting process for nuclear power plants must be shortened.

Elsewhere, about 60 nuclear power reactors are currently being constructed in 15 countries, notably China, India, and Russia. Together, China and Russia account for 70 percent of new nuclear plants.

America continues its pursuit of reducing crude oil usage, in favor of wind and solar generated electricity. In addition, the โ€œAmerican renewables dreamโ€œ would mean sacrificing an estimated 6,000 useful products that rely on by-products manufactured from crude oil โ€“ products that range from asphalt for highways to fertilizers, cosmetics, synthetic rubber, medicines and medical devices, cleaning products, plastics, so many more.

Without fuels and without products now based on crude oil, we would be unable to operate the international and military airports that now accommodate a large number of the  more than 20,000 commercial aircraftand a large number of the more than 50,000 military aircraft, as well as many of the more than50,000 merchant ships.

Without the fuels and products now based on oil, the world would see the elimination of all militaries and space programs as the world reverts to the pre-1800โ€™s when civilization existed without oil!

The billions who live on this planet without the benefits of those products made from the petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil have provided are also the poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable humans on the planet.

For any electricity generation method, whether itโ€™s coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind turbines, or solar panels, the most reliable are those that can generate continuous and uninterruptible electricity year-round to support hospitals, industry, militaries, electronics, and communications.

The nameplate rated capacity of renewables is very misleading as the generated electricity is intermittent and unreliable. Wind facilities only generate their stated output about 30-40 percent of the time.  Solar units typically only kick in 25 percent of their purported โ€œcapacity factor.โ€ That means backup electricity  from coal, natural gas, and nuclear generating plants must be provided for the other 60-75 percent of the time that wind and solar are napping.

To the electrical engineer, the available wind and solar farms operational data shows that, it is not possible for wind and solar electricity to ever displace dispatchable, reliable generation of continuous uninterruptable electricity supplying the base load demand. In this regard, the proposal by some policymakers to replace major coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear power stations with a fleet of nameplate rated wind and solar farms that are dormant most of the time is not technically achievable, thus โ€œthey dream the impossible dreamโ€.

Further, the minerals and components of renewable electricity from wind and solar are typically garnered overseas in developing countries, chiefly in China, Africa, and Latin America. What this means is that it will be on the backs of poor Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics to provide the low-cost, cheap labor that will drive a โ€œGreen revolutionโ€ โ€“ to include any potential child and slave labor as well as extensive environmental degradation to โ€œtheirโ€ country, as discussed in detail in the Pulitzer Prize Nominated book โ€œClean Energy Exploitations โ€“ Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energyโ€.

As for the environmental credentials of โ€œclean electricityโ€, governmental leaders need to look at the trail of environmental and human damage from the beginning to the end of the life of batteries, turbines, and solar panels. The cleanliness of โ€œcleanโ€ electricity is one of the Big Lies of our time. Wind and solar electricity are not cheap or energy-efficient, after considering the energy required for mining, transporting, processing, construction, and disposal of the hardware at the end of the line.

Then we have the oxymoron situation, where policymakers are not yet cognizant that everything that โ€œneedsโ€ electricity is made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil, from the light bulb to the iPhone, defibrillator, etc., etc.! Thus, renewables are not displacing the need for crude oil.

Policymakers need to have a plan to be able to support the materialistic demands of the eight billion on this globe for all the products, infrastructures, and electricity that exist today that did not exist a few hundred years ago. Efforts to cease the use of crude oil, without a planned replacement, could be the greatest threat to civilizationโ€™s demands of the eight billion on this planet.

The so-called fossil fuel industry enables people to live lives of ease and comfort that were inconceivable for the masses before the 1800โ€™s. The products and fuels manufactured from crude oil are the basis of modern life, providing thousands of products that are ubiquitous in modern society. These include items that we use practically every minute of the day from putting on our makeup and cleaning our teeth to undergoing medical treatment. Imagine the pharmaceutical industry without petrochemical products.

If we want to deliver continuous, uninterruptible, and emission-free electricity at scale, and at a low cost for millions of electricity consumers, to support the materialistic demands that did not exist a few short centuries ago, that pace will have to move to a warp speed timeline, like that in Sweden, China, India, andย Russia with their focus on electricity from nuclear generation.

Ronald Stein, P.E.

Ronald Stein is an internationally published columnist and energy consultant, and a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute.

This article originally appeared atย Heartland

New Antarctic All-Time Cold Record Flies in the Face of Media Reporting

By Anthony Watts

It has been a busy year at the bottom of the world, from hot to cold with climate change in the middle of it all for the blame by media. For example, The Washington Post story Antarctic โ€œHeat Waveโ€ piece on Concordia Station back in March of 2022.

Or this one by The Business Standard: Researchers found the most intense heat wave ever registered- in Antarctica,  Or Vox which claimed, Itโ€™s even hot in Antarctica, where itโ€™s winter

Here is a collection of some facts about the issue that the media will never tell you.

From Frits Buningh on LinkedIn

Houston โ€“ We have a new All-Time Cold Record for Western Antarctica: August 2023!

Contrary to what 97% of the Journalists plus John Kerry, the Special Envoy for Climate related Propaganda for the United States of America are saying about the immanent โ€œMeltingโ€ of all of Western Antarctica and the devastating Sea Level Rise that it will cause, who are quoting 3 % of the โ€œScientistsโ€ according to the Seminal Study Numbers provided by Cook et. all (2013), it looks like maybe Western Antarctica is not being subjected to 3 or 4 times the โ€œWarmingโ€ that is taking place everywhere else on โ€œPlanet Aโ€, that of course is โ€œPlanet Earthโ€. According to this article, https://www.westarctica.wiki/index.php

โ€œIn recent years the station has recorded a warming trend, with warming fastest in its winter and spring. This location, in the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth.โ€

Not so fast, says the Data on the ground in Antarctica.

According to the Data provided by Ohio State University:
https://polarmet.osu.edu/datasets/Byrd_recon/

And the AMRDC depository at the University of Wisconsin at Madison:
https://amrdcdata.ssec.wisc.edu/

Upon which the table included here is based, it does look like there is a NEW All-Time Cold Record in 2023 for Western Antarcticaโ€™s Byrd Station.

August 1983:      -42.5 C
August 198:1      -43.0 C
August 1978:      -43.7 C
September 1986: -44.7 C
August 2023:     -45.54 C

An All-Time Ever Record Cold Month since at least 1957? Maybe so! Stand by for the Copernicus Institute of Europe as well as the Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine, to hold a joint news conference later today to make the announcement official. Greta from Sweden, will be on hand to serve refreshments for the Journalists who are going to show up for that one? The NYT, WAPO and Jake Tapper form CNN have all been given a heads up that this is coming down the pike. Look for their reporting, especially from Kasha Patel, who brought us the โ€œHeat Waveโ€ piece on Concordia Station back in March of 2022. https://lnkd.in/eWtfvc2b

From SnowBrains:

The Concordia Research Station in Antarctica recorded a provisional low temperature of -117.76ยบF (-83.2ยบC) on July 25, marking the worldโ€™s lowest temperature in six years.ย The figure, still subject to official validation, was shared by Italyโ€™s Antarctic Meteo-Climatological Observatory, along with data from the nearby Dome C II Automatic Weather Station, which also registered sub 112ยบF (-80ยบC) temperatures on July 24 and 25.

Jennifer Marohasy is feeling chill in Mawson Station, Antarctica.

(reposted from her Facebook page)

Last month (June 2023), Antarctica was reported as โ€˜hotโ€™ in various publications including Vox.com. Yet the average maximum temperature for Mawson was minus 12.6 degrees Celsius, which is not quite as cold as the long-term June average for all years since 1954 which is minus 13.5 C. When the June maximum temperatures for Mawson are ranked highest to lowest, June 2023 comes in as the 29th hottest, and 42nd coldest โ€“ suggesting temperatures in Antarctica were not particularly newsworthy and rather cold.

Yet the tabloids, and fashionable, are claiming June 2023 as hot โ€“ even in Antarctica. It is all nonsense.

Some of these claims have their origin in the University of Maineโ€™s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations. So, they represent a re-modeled average. Indeed, there is not a single place where anyone, can measure the average temperature of the Earth โ€“ or Antarctica. Rather, when it is announced that it is the hottest it has ever been, reference is made to a statistic.

This average temperature is necessarily a number that has been derived from other numbers. There will perhaps have been some measuring done here and there, and then some adjusting, and then some adding up and some adjusting again. This is how it is with the calculation of regional and global average temperatures โ€“ whether from satellites, tree rings, ice cores, or thermometers. To be sure, every year we are told it is getting hotter, and back in the late 1980s, this was achieved for the globally averaged thermometer record by dropping out some of the colder weather stations. This had the effect of increasing the overall average global temperature, at a time when temperatures at many individual sites were dipping somewhat.

Those who have followed the politics of measuring temperatures may also remember the infamous line in the Climategate emails, whereby the globally averaged temperatures based on tree rings, which also show a decline after 1980, are โ€˜correctedโ€™ by substituting the globally averaged temperature from thermometer records โ€“ never mind that the dip in that record had already been โ€˜correctedโ€™ by removing data from a great many high latitude Canadian and Russian weather stations.

Drawing from this sordid history of calculating global and regional temperatures, I can think of a large number of ways that the University of Maineโ€™s Climate Reanalyzer could possibly generate a higher-than-average temperature for Antarctica and especially the Earth.

Indeed, the larger the geographic area covered, the more opportunity for creative accounting, for which corporates using similar techniques would go to jail, while climate scientists are more usually promoted.

For more information on how temperatures are measured at Mawson, you can download the relevant chapter from Climate Change: The Facts 2020, that is here: https://climatechangethefacts.org.au/โ€ฆ/no-evidence-ofโ€ฆ/

The postย New Antarctic All-Time Cold Record Flies in the Face of Media Reportingย appeared first onย ClimateRealism.