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.
I am two dives behind, in explaining the collapse of some of the fields of Acropora spp. across the bay, at the Keppel Islands. And I am off again today, diving.
There have been phone calls, some about the Underwater Megafauna Competition, and others from those complaining about what I write โ though they have never got underwater themselves.
I am two dives behind, in explaining the collapse of some of the fields of Acropora spp. across the bay, at the Keppel Islands. And I am off again today, diving.
There have been phone calls, some about the Underwater Megafauna Competition, and others from those complaining about what I write โ though they have never got underwater themselves.
She phoned me, yesterday, and was insisting that if I believe that John Brewer Reef will recover from cyclone Kirrily, why have I made such a fuss about the cyclone damage. (I have a blog post about the damage from Tropical Cyclone Kirrily, that I wrote immediately after I visited, CLICK HERE. )
She did not want to acknowledge that many coral reefs up and down the Queensland coast are suffering right now, if not from cyclone damage from coral bleaching. The visibility is still good, particularly at this time of year and there is still so much coral but compared to last year โ there has been a collapse in coral cover at some key reef habitats across the northern, central and central Great Barrier Reef. It is a natural cycle.
I explained to her that if we are to understand the different natural phenomena that impact coral reefs sometimes very subtly, then we need to acknowledge the big and sometimes devastating events and accurately record them. I suggested that some of these may follow natural cycles, and that to be possible to forecast these cycles, first we need to have some record of them, and their impacts.
And I reiterated that it was unacceptable that the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) Long Term Monitoring Program (LTMP) that had recently undertaken yet another perimeter survey of John Brewer Reef, that the official record falsely indicated no change in coral cover since the cyclone.
The survey method was clearly not fit for purpose. Despite so much of the top of this reef being pummelled clean of coral by the cyclone, and whole sections of new growth including the massive plates that once overhung a wide crevasse being picked-up, flipped-over and now laying shattered about the reef perimeter โ officially there is no record of this, that officially there has been no change in coral cover. (I also have a blog post about this, how the official survey is a perimeter survey denying damage to key habitats, CLICK HERE.)
She was not from the right of politics not sceptical of catastrophic human-caused global warming at all โ rather she is from the left, and so wants to attribute any damage at the Great Barrier Reef to global warming. She wants me to acknowledge that any damage is incremental year-on-year that it is occurring slowly.
โDid I deny this?โ she asked?
โIt is not incremental,โ I replied. โRather it is cyclical I suggested. The bleaching at the bay across from where I live โ at the Keppel Islands โ the bleaching is catastrophic. We are fast approaching a total collapse in some fields of Acoropora spp. at places like Wreck Beach โ wrecked,โ I suggested.
โHow do you know this is not attributable to fossil fuel emissions?โ she asked.
I said, โIt was more likely a consequence of the 18.6-year lunar declination cycle that will affect sea levels and the tides.โ
I went on to explain that water temperatures may remain below the regional threshold for bleaching, but in places where wave action is insignificant 40 to 75 percent of the coral heads may bleach and go on to die. This was widely reported following the 2006 bleaching โ 18.6 years ago, the last summer of maximum lunar declination. Wave-washed sites, they are less likely to suffer damage, I explained.
She hung up. I think that was before I asked her to come diving with me.
First an example of how classical thought fallacies derail discussion from any search for meaning. H/T Jim Rose.
Then I took the liberty to change the discussion topic to climate change, by inserting typical claims heard in that context.
Below is a previous post taking a deeper dive into the fallacies that have plagued global warming/climate change for decades
Background Post Climatism is a Logic Fail
Two fallacies in particular ensure meaningless public discussion about climate โcrisisโ or โemergency.โ H/T to Terry Oldberg for comments and writings prompting me to post on this topic.
One corruption is the numerous times climate claims include fallacies of Equivocation. For instance, โclimate changeโ can mean all observed events in nature, but as defined by IPCC all are 100% caused by human activities.ย Similarly, forecasts from climate models are proclaimed to be โpredictionsโ of future disasters, but renamed โprojectionsโ in disclaimers against legal liability.ย And so on.
A second error in the argument is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, AKA Reification. This involves mistaking an abstraction for something tangible and real in time and space. We often see this in both spoken and written communications. It can take several forms:
โฆ Confusing a word with the thing to which it refers
โฆ Confusing an image with the reality it represents
โฆ Confusing an idea with something observed to be happening
Examples of Equivocation and Reification from the World of Climate Alarm
โSeeing the wildfires, floods and storms, Mother Nature is not happy with us failing to recognize the challenges facing us.โ โ Nancy Pelosi
Mother Natureโ is a philosophical construct and has no feelings about people.
โThis was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal โฆโ โ Barack Obama
The ocean and the planet do not respond to someone winning a political party nomination. Nor does a planet experience human sickness and healing.
โIf something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you, and climate change is one of those exceptions.โ โ Al Gore
The future is not knowable, and can only be a matter of speculation and opinion.
โThe planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue. โโ Malcolm Turnbull
Temperature is an intrinsic property of an object, so temperature of โthe planetโ cannot be measured. The likelihood of catastrophic consequences is unknowable. Humans are blamed as guilty by association.
โAnybody who doesnโt see the impact of climate change is really, and I would say, myopic. They donโt see the reality. Itโs so evident that we are destroying Mother Earth. โโ Juan Manuel Santos
โClimate changeโ is an abstraction anyone can fill with subjective content. Efforts to safeguard the environment are real, successful and ignored in the rush to alarm.
โClimate change, if unchecked, is an urgent threat to health, food supplies, biodiversity, and livelihoods across the globe.โ โ John F. Kerry
To the abstraction โClimate Changeโ is added abstract โthreatsโ and abstract means of โchecking Climate Change.โ
โClimate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism.โ -David King
Instances of people killed and injured by terrorists are reported daily and are a matter of record, while problems from Climate Change are hypothetical
Corollary: Reality is also that which doesnโt happen, no matter how much we expect it to.
Climate Models Are Built on Fallacies
A previous post Chameleon Climate Modelsdescribed the general issue of whether a model belongs on the bookshelf (theoretically useful) or whether it passes real world filters of relevance, thus qualifying as useful for policy considerations.
Following an interesting discussion on her blog, Dr. Judith Curry has written an important essay on the usefulness and limitations of climate models.
The paper was developed to respond to a request from a group of lawyers wondering how to regard claims based upon climate model outputs. The document is entitled Climate Models and is a great informative read for anyone. Some excerpts that struck me in italics with my bolds and added images.
Climate model development has followed a pathway mostly driven by scientific curiosity and computational limitations. GCMs were originally designed as a tool to help understand how the climate system works. GCMs are used by researchers to represent aspects of climate that are extremely difficult to observe, experiment with theories in a new way by enabling hitherto infeasible calculations, understand a complex system of equations that would otherwise be impenetrable, and explore the climate system to identify unexpected outcomes. As such, GCMs are an important element of climate research.
Climate models are useful tools for conducting scientific research to understand the climate system. However, the above points support the conclusion that current GCM climate models are not fit for the purpose of attributing the causes of 20th century warming or for predicting global or regional climate change on timescales of decades to centuries, with any high level of confidence. By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems.
It is this application of climate model results that fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models.
Evolution of state-of-the-art Climate Models from the mid 70s to the mid 00s. From IPCC (2007)
The actual equations used in the GCM computer codes are only approximations of the physical processes that occur in the climate system.
While some of these approximations are highly accurate, others are unavoidably crude. This is because the real processes they represent are either poorly understood or too complex to include in the model given the constraints of the computer system. Of the processes that are most important for climate change, parameterizations related to clouds and precipitation remain the most challenging, and are the greatest source of disagreement among different GCMs.
There are literally thousands of different choices made in the construction of a climate model (e.g. resolution, complexity of the submodels, parameterizations). Each different set of choices produces a different model having different sensitivities. Further, different modeling groups have different focal interests, e.g. long paleoclimate simulations, details of ocean circulations, nuances of the interactions between aerosol particles and clouds, the carbon cycle. These different interests focus their limited computational resources on a particular aspect of simulating the climate system, at the expense of others.
Overview of the structure of a state-of-the-art climate model. See Climate Models Explainedby R.G. Brown
Human-caused warming depends not only on how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, but also on how โsensitiveโ the climate is to the increased CO2. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global surface warming that occurs when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles. If climate sensitivity is high, then we can expect substantial warming in the coming century as emissions continue to increase. If climate sensitivity is low, then future warming will be substantially lower.
In GCMs, the equilibrium climate sensitivity is an โemergent propertyโ that is not directly calibrated or tuned.
While there has been some narrowing of the range of modeled climate sensitivities over time, models still can be made to yield a wide range of sensitivities by altering model parameterizations. Model versions can be rejected or not, subject to the modelersโ own preconceptions, expectations and biases of the outcome of equilibrium climate sensitivity calculation.
Further, the discrepancy between observational and climate model-based estimates of climate sensitivity is substantial and of significant importance to policymakers. Equilibrium climate sensitivity, and the level of uncertainty in its value, is a key input into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.
Variations in climate can be caused by external forcing, such as solar variations, volcanic eruptions or changes in atmospheric composition such as an increase in CO2. Climate can also change owing to internal processes within the climate system (internal variability). The best known example of internal climate variability is El Nino/La Nina. Modes of decadal to centennial to millennial internal variability arise from the slow circulations in the oceans. As such, the ocean serves as a โfly wheelโ on the climate system, storing and releasing heat on long timescales and acting to stabilize the climate. As a result of the time lags and storage of heat in the ocean, the climate system is never in equilibrium.
The combination of uncertainty in the transient climate response (sensitivity) and the uncertainties in the magnitude and phasing of the major modes in natural internal variability preclude an unambiguous separation of externally forced climate variations from natural internal climate variability. If the climate sensitivity is on the low end of the range of estimates, and natural internal variability is on the strong side of the distribution of climate models, different conclusions are drawn about the relative importance of human causes to the 20th century warming.
Figure 5.1. Comparative dynamics of the World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (ฮT), 1861-2000. The thin dashed line represents annual ฮT, the bold lineโits 13-year smoothing, and the line constructed from rectanglesโWFC (in millions of tons of nominal fuel) (Klyashtorin and Lyubushin, 2003). Source: Frolov et al. 2009
Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a theory in which the basic mechanism is well understood, but whose potential magnitude is highly uncertain.
What does the preceding analysis imply for IPCCโs โextremely likelyโ attribution of anthropogenically caused warming since 1950? Climate models infer that all of the warming since 1950 can be attributed to humans. However, there have been large magnitude variations in global/hemispheric climate on timescales of 30 years, which are the same duration as the late 20th century warming. The IPCC does not have convincing explanations for previous 30 year periods in the 20th century, notably the warming 1910-1945 and the grand hiatus 1945-1975. Further, there is a secular warming trend at least since 1800 (and possibly as long as 400 years) that cannot be explained by CO2, and is only partly explained by volcanic eruptions.
CO2 relation to Temperature is Inconsistent.
Summary
There is growing evidence that climate models are running too hot and that climate sensitivity to CO2 is on the lower end of the range provided by the IPCC. Nevertheless, these lower values of climate sensitivity are not accounted for in IPCC climate model projections of temperature at the end of the 21st century or in estimates of the impact on temperatures of reducing CO2 emissions.
The climate modeling community has been focused on the response of the climate to increased human caused emissions, and the policy community accepts (either explicitly or implicitly) the results of the 21st century GCM simulations as actual predictions. Hence we donโt have a good understanding of the relative climate impacts of the above (natural factors) or their potential impacts on the evolution of the 21st century climate.
Footnote:
There are a series of posts here which apply reality filters to attest climate models. The first was Temperatures According to Climate Modelswhere both hindcasting and forecasting were seen to be flawed.
Global warming was supposed to open up Arctic region shipping routes, making the Northwest Passage easier and less risky to traverse. Per aย new study, the opposite has happened.
Global warming was supposed to open up Arctic region shipping routes, making the Northwest Passage easier and less risky to traverse. Per aย new study, the opposite has happened.
As we reported earlier this year, while a declining trend in Arctic sea ice was observed from the 1990s to 2007, there has been no trend reduction in Arctic sea ice since then. A 17-year pause.
It has long been a โcommon beliefโ that shipping through Canadaโs Northwest Passage would become โmore viableโ with a warming Arctic and a consequent reduction in sea ice impediments.
Observations trump beliefs, however.
The East Beaufort Sea has increasingly been generating sea ice โchoke pointsโ that have reduced the length of the shipping season from 27 weeks (half the year) during 2007-2011 down to 13 weeks (summer only) during 2017-2021. And, as scientists are now warning, โthe negative trend [in shipping season length] shows no sign of reversing.โ
The Great Green Hydrogen dream was killed by the dual impossibility paradox, it has no customers prepared to pay the Gucci level rates, and it canโt be made cheaper without using brown coal to which would mean it isnโt โgreenโ.
The irony! The only generator that can make affordable hydrogen is brown coal
The Great Green Hydrogen dream was killed by the dual impossibility paradox, it has no customers prepared to pay the Gucci level rates, and it canโt be made cheaper without using brown coal to which would mean it isnโt โgreenโ.
The irony is practically radioactive โ analysts admit Green Hydrogen is only economic if a company can get electricity at $30 to $40 per megawatt hour, which Australia had for decades, but blew away by adding โrenewablesโ. Like every other nation on Earth, the more unreliable wind and solar we added, the more expensive our electricity got. These days the only generator that still make electricity at that price now is old brown coal.
For years Australian average wholesale electricity prices were $30/MWh
Sure, for five minute bids, and with generous subsidies stolen from taxpayers, wind and solar can pretend to be cheaper, but it turns out that the hydrogen factories, like every other factory, arenโt efficient if they stop and start every time a cloud rolls over, or the wind ebbs. All the infrastructure and staff, and the insurance and loans are still sitting around clocking up the bills, while nothing gets done. And all the inflows and outflows need to be adjusted, and the temperatures held steady. It would have been obvious to any precocious ten year old that hydrogen plants needed reliable electricity, which means they needed galactic size batteries to fill in the gaps, and therefore an interstellar budget.
The truth is, no one really wants โGreenโ hydrogen, or green steel, except as a fashion accessory to brag about at Davos. But people might buy it if it was cheap, which it isnโt. The only way to make it cheaper is with brown coal, which means itโs isnโt green hydrogen, and so we find the nation has accidentally stepped into a Escher Puzzle where all staircases lead upwards and left and end right where they started except the bank balance goes phht with every cycle.
Letโs not underestimate the scale of this debacle
Andrew โTwiggyโ Forrest burned off $2 billion dollars (AU) on setting up his Green Dream Hydrogen energy plan which has just collapsed with the loss of 700 jobs. But bigger than that, the Australia Labor Government made it the centerpiece of its $2 billion Hydrogen Headstart program.
For more than two years, Fortescue has been full throttle trying to turn Forrestโs promise of converting green hydrogen into a commercial reality within years.
Instead, as the economics around surging electricity costs needed to produce green hydrogen sunk in, deadlines were pushed back and back. The mission changed, then there was a revolving door of executives.
Twiggy blames fossil fuels and the Russians:
โI am not giving up on hydrogen at all,โ Forrest tells The Australian.
โThe green electricity price just kept keeps heading north, and Itโs been dragged up by the fossil fuel price. Weโre not pivoting away. Weโre going upstream to get the green electrons at the right priceโ.
On the 7:30 Report he kept dodging the question of what this meant for Labors big Renewable Nation plan, which means it obvious isnโt good.
At one point he mentioned โthe warโ. As if somehow a war which limited gas supplies and drove up the price of coal โdragged up the priceโ of renewables. The truth was that the Ukrainian-Russian War and the death of the Nordstream Gas pipeline should have been the best thing that could happen to renewables. It was their golden market opportunity to fill the gap, but it only exposed how useless they are. When push came to shove, everyone wanted coal and gas, including the companies that make wind turbines and solar panels. The reason wind and solar went up in price was because wind power canโt make wind turbines, and solar power canโt make solar panels, and no one can afford to make batteries.
Matthew Rennie, a former EY partner who is now an independent adviser, said his firmโs analysis indicated that prices for power and electrolysers โ which use renewable power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen โ would need to be much cheaper to produce green hydrogen in Australia even at under $3 a kilogram.
He said power prices would need to be less than $40 a megawatt-hour and electrolyser costs would need to more than halve to produce hydrogen at that level โ still 50 per cent more expensive than the governmentโs $2 target for the gas to be competitive.
By Joe Kelly, Nick Evans and Rhiannoin Down, The Australian
Dr Finkel, said green hydrogen could replace coal as a chemical-ยญreducing agent in the production of iron, but acknowledged its viability was โhighly dependentโ on the costs of renewable electricity.
He said the goal should be to start producing green hydrogen at about $2 a kilogram, โwhich would require the electricity that is used to make the hydrogen to be less than about $30 per megawatt hour โ which is very cheap.โ
The current average price on the wholesale national electricity market in the top two renewable states this month is $199 per megawatt hour (SA) and $214 in Tasmania. Even in Qld and NSW the prices are still $100 a megawatt hour more than they used to be.
Twiggy Forrest and Anthony Albanese believed their own fantasy propaganda. Twiggy was still talking tonight of โinfiniteโ energy in Australia from the sun and the wind, showing how little he cares about numbers that matter.
For the first time, the IPCCโs doctrine of CO2 as a โcontrol knobโ in our climate faces a serious challenger in the form of a comprehensive hypothesis about what drives climate and its shifts. โ This article is the fourth in a series evaluating this new hypothesis of natural climate variability, the so-called Winter Gate-keeper Hypothesis [WGH]. The basic concept of WGH is that natural variations in the polewards meridional transport of heat and moisture controls climate change.
The battle of climate hypotheses, Round 4: The Green-house Gas Forcer vs. TheWinter Gatekeeper
For the first time, the IPCCโs doctrine of CO2 as a โcontrol knobโ in our climate faces a serious challenger in the form of a comprehensive hypothesis about what drives climate and its shifts. โ This article is the fourth in a series evaluating this new hypothesis of natural climate variability, the so-called Winter Gate-keeper Hypothesis [WGH]. The basic concept of WGH is that natural variations in the polewards meridional transport of heat and moisture controls climate change.[1][2]
Alarmists, including the IPCC, love to speculate about tipping points. One of their favourites is that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), will shut down due to our emissions of greenhouse gases.[3][4]
The AMOC is an essential part of the global heat transport system. This is how bitterly cold the climate could get in parts of the North if it collapsed:[5]
Figure 1: Simulated outcome of an AMOC shutdown. Everything warms up significantly, except the North Atlantic and Northern Europe. Source: [7]
A collapsed AMOC would also lead to a host of knock-on effects due to โtele-connectionsโ.We are warned that a weakening of AMOC would have severe impacts and increase the risk of โcascading problemsโ for other major Earth systems, โsuch as the Antarctic ice sheet, tropical monsoon systems and Amazon rainforestโ.[6] Climate crise effects would occur in many other areas as well. Stormier weather, more floods, collapsed plankton production, and widespread oxygen death in the oceans (anoxia) are forecast, says the IPCC.[3] The issue of AMOCโs whereabouts is therefore of great interest.
The cold blob
The AMOC is like a giant conveyor belt of energy. It is primarily driven by the Denmark Strait overflow: warm and salty water from the northward extension of the Gulf Stream meets the cold ocean currents off south-east Greenland. There they sink to the bottom as a huge โwaterfallโ, with a drop of more than 3 000 meters (at the threshold of the Denmark Strait). The heavy, cold bottom water then flows south to the Southern Ocean, before turning north again.
A key part of the AMOC is the convection zone south of Iceland and Greenland, where we find the subpolar Atlantic gyre. The ocean current rotates counterclockwise around the so-called cold blob:
Figure 2. The thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic together with the surface water temperature trend from 1993 to 2021. Surrounding the cold spot with deep convection, the AMOC flows counterclockwise.
The cold blob is not only present at the surface but goes way down to the depths:[8]
Figure 3. Change in ocean heat for the top 2000 meters, from 1958-2023, [4] adapted from [8, fig 7]
The hypothesis that the AMOC is weakening is based on the existence of the cold blob as a long-term climate phenomenon in the North Atlantic, as the AMOC strength is strongly positively correlated with the cold blob temperature. A colder cold blob corresponds to a slower AMOC.[9][10]
The cold blob disappears!
However, it now appears that the feared slowdown of the AMOC isnโt happening at all. Deep-sea flow data show stable flows over the past 24 years. This was described in an article on WUWT, here.
Figure 4: Animation of North Atlantic surface temperatures, annual anomalies for 2013-2023 compared to the average for the period 1979-2010. Monthly data show that it is mainly during summer and fall that the cold blob has disappeared measured as an anomaly, while it is still present during spring. Data: ECMWF ERA5
However, if we look at the long-term development of the sea surface temperature in the area, we find no significant trend, but that the development shown in the animation is part of anย oscillation:
Figure 5. Sea surface temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic waters, (50N-65N; 50W-10W). Blue thick line is a Loess smooth. Climate shifts are marked with yellow, see a discussion of thoseย here. Data source: NOAA ERSST V5
The cold blob comes and goes in multidecadal cycles.ย The 30 years from 1965-1995 were particularly cold. And this is not only true for the surface water, but equally so at depth: even the heat content at depthย oscillatesย with the change in surface water temperature:
Figure 6. Heat content of deep water down to 1000 meters depth in the North Atlantic. The 1995-2005 climate shift is highlighted in yellow. Graph from the Met Office.
AMOC is known as a thermohaline circulation, where the word -haline means salt. AMOC is therefore not only about the transport of heat, but also about the transport of salt. The key to the circulation is the density of the water: the colder and saltier the water, the heavier it is. The saltiness comes from the AMOC passing through the tropics where evaporation is high, thus increasing the salinity in the Gulf Stream.
As the Gulf Stream (and its extension) flows northwards, cooling occurs by evaporation of the warm surface water and by heat being released to the colder surroundings. This increases salinity and thus the density of seawater in the area. Salinity determines the strength of the circulation: saltier water sinks faster to the bottom, thus driving it.
One could say that the AMOC circulates because the seawater in the North Atlantic is salty โ and the water is salty precisely because the northward volume transport of the AMOC is so large. But there is also a negative feedback lurking here: when we periodically get increased freshwater inflows into the North Atlantic, the circulation of the AMOC is negatively affected. Fresh water is supplied as meltwater from Greenland and also from the Arctic as ice export through the Fram Strait.
Also the salinity shows oscillations. Observations show large-scale freshening events in the area of the cold blob:
Figure 7. Changes in salinity in the North Atlantic deep water measured as a freshwater volume anomaly (LFC). The 1995-2005 climate shift is highlighted in yellow. Source: [11]
The liquid freshwater content (โLFCโ in figure 7) estimates demonstrate decade-long freshening events starting around 1965, 1980 and 2010. These events have been called โGreat Salinity Anomaliesโ. They appear to be a natural mode of Arctic/Atlantic Ocean variability that have occurred for at least the last century.[11]
Increasing the influx of fresh water (which is less dense than saltier water) lowers the salinity of the upper layers, leading to a cold, fresh, light upper layer once cooled by the atmosphere, i.e. the cold blob. As a result, the AMOC is weakened.
However, there is a time lag in this pattern. The rate of warm to cold transformation of water masses at high latitudes is found to lead the observed AMOC at 45โN by 5โ6 years and to drive its strong, ongoing recovery as now seen in the vanishing cold blob.[12]
The climate system is characterized by oscillations
Oscillations in the Atlantic part of the Northern hemisphere are not limited to the cold blob, or the AMOC. Corresponding variations have been observed in the Arctic sea-ice cover, in the air up to the stratosphere, and in various climate indexes. The long-term variations in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), or its close relative the Arctic oscillation, show similar turning points in their cumulatives. The oscillations of the cold blob and the NAO are e.g. closely linked on a multi-decadal scale.[9]
One example of these inter-dependent multi-decadal oscillations in the vicinity of the cold blob is the Arctic oscillationโs correspondence with the Arctic sea ice extent and solar cycle variations:
Figure 8. The Arctic Oscillation as a cumulative, detrended index over time is shown in blue (left scale, inverted). The sea ice extent at its minimum level in September in the Arctic is shown in brown (right scale, Mkm2). The minima of the 44-year solar cycle (2*22 years) are marked in yellow.[14] Ice extent is from satellite data from 1979, before that it is from the reconstruction in [15].
According to the WGH, these oscillations are linked to solar variations, and how they influence on the strength of the polar vortex, as well as the meridional transport (solar cycle variations are indicated with the yellow spots showing the solar cycle minima in figure 8). This is but one example. A whole range of similar oscillatory relationships are further described in figure 9 in the Appendix.
Summing up
According to the novel Winter Gate-keeper climate hypothesis, the main characteristic of the climate system is that it oscillates on different time scales. These oscillations control climate change via heat transport. The AMOC heat conveyor is a major part of the heat transport system that helps our climate to regulate itself.
The AMOC varies in irregular cycles. The cold blob is also a cyclical phenomenon in itself. This applies both to surface water temperature and salinity (Figures 5 and 7).
Advocates of climate tipping point events speculate that the climate functions as a quasi-linear system that reacts to radiative forcing coming from CO2 and other sources. The IPCC gives anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions the primary role in its speculations about AMOC developments, including suggested future tipping points.[3] The issue of natural variability is pertinent to all discussions on the AMOC, but remains unresolved.
Appendix: Multidecadal climate variability and meridional transport
Figure 9. Illustration of various multi-decadal oscillations and their connections with climate regimes and shifts. MT=Meridional transport. From figure 11.10 in [1].
a) Black line: Aleutian Lowโ Icelandic Low seesaw 25-year moving correlation as a proxy for polar vortex strength. Grey line: cumulative winter Arctic Oscillation index. b) Black line: 4.5-year average of the AMO index. Grey line: cumulative 1870โ 2020 detrended cold season (Novโ Apr average) NAO index. c) Cumulative Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO. 1870โ 2018 detrended annual average cumulative PDO index. Black dots mark the years 1925, 1946, 1976 and 1997 when PDO regime shifts took place. d) Black line: zonal atmospheric circulation index, cumulative anomaly. Grey line: 1900โ 2020 inverted detrended annual โ Length Of Day. e) Annual global surface average temperature, detrended. 10-year average. f) Dashed line: 8.2โ 16.6 years band-pass of the monthly mean total sunspot number. Grey line, 6.6โ 11 years band-pass of the monthly AMO index. Black line: inverted 20-year running correlation of the band-pass sunspot and AMO data. Black dots as in c, showing their position with respect to solar minima.
References
[1] Vinรณs, Javier, Climate of the Past, Present and Future: A scientific debate, 2nd ed., Critical Science Press, 2022.
[2] Vinรณs, Javier. Solving the Climate Puzzle: The Sunโs Surprising Role, Critical Science Press, 2023.
[5] Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, Ditlevsen, P., Ditlevsen, S., Nature 2023, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39810-w
[6] Overlooked possibility of a collapsed Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in warming climate, Liu and 3 co-authors, Science 2017, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1601666
[7] Exceeding 1.5ยฐC global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points, Armstrong McKay and 5 co-authors, Science 2022, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950
[9] North Atlantic Oscillation contributes to the subpolar North Atlantic cooling in the past century, Fan and 3 co-authors, Clim Dyn 2023, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06847-y
[11] Arctic freshwater impact on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: status and prospects, Thomas W. N. Haine, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0185
[12] Surface predictor of overturning circulation and heat content change in the subpolar North Atlantic, Desbruyรจres and 3 co-authors, EGU Ocean Science 2019, https://doi.org/10.5194/os-15-809-2019
[13] Coupled stratosphere-troposphere-Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and its importance for near-future climate projection, Omrani and 6 co-authors, Nature 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-022-00275-1
[14] Periodicities observed in the solar and geomagnetic indexes and in SABER thermospheric infrared power measurements, Nowak and 4 co-authors, Science 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jastp.2024.106234
[15] On assessment of the relationship between changes of sea ice extent and climate in the Arctic, Alekseev and 2 co-authors, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4550
Though touted as next generation energy sources, solar and wind technologies have been shoe-horned into electricity grids only through government fiat and subsidies. Their failure to be adopted freely by investors and consumers lies in the pathetic energy density of solar panels and wind turbines.
Though touted as next generation energy sources, solar and wind technologies have been shoe-horned into electricity grids only through government fiat and subsidies. Their failure to be adopted freely by investors and consumers lies in the pathetic energy density of solar panels and wind turbines.
Energy density is defined as the amount of energy stored in a given unit of mass or volume โ a metric that is critical in determining the viability of energy sources. It is typically measured in joules per kilogram (J/kg) for mass, or joules per cubic meter (J/mยณ) for volume. Often, the expression is in millions of joules, or megajoules (MJ).
Wood, which was widely used before the introduction of coal, has an energy density of just 16 MJ/kg. Societyโs ready adoption of fossil fuels stems from their significantly higher concentrations of energy: Coalโs is approximately 24 MJ/kg; oil, 45 MJ/kg; and natural gas, 55 MJ/kg. In an entirely different league, nuclear fuel, depending on the type, has an energy density of about 4 million MJ/kg and will certainly be used extensively as society progresses throughout the 21st century and into the next.
The lithium-ion battery is considered important to compensating for the appallingly poor reliability of wind and solar. However, most commercial scale batteries have an energy density of less than 1 MJ/kg, orders of magnitude less than wood.
Hydrogen, a supposedly futuristic fuel, has just a third of woodโs energy density.
As one would expect, solar and wind fall short in comparisons of power density, which is a measure of how much energy is produced. In terms of land use, solar and wind put out 5-20 and 2-3 watts per square meter of land area where a natural gas power plant generates 1,000 watts.
The superior potency of fossil fuels enabled a quantum leap in human productivity, fundamentally altering the trajectory of civilization. This characteristic allowed for the creation of compact, portable, and highly efficient energy systems powering everything from small engines to massive manufacturing complexes. Industrial processes requiring intense heat or large amounts of power in a short time could be accommodated.
Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture โ virtually every aspect of modern life โ were transformed. Cities grew larger and more complex, global trade expanded exponentially, and technological innovation accelerated at an unprecedented pace. Ultimately, the ability to generate large amounts of electricity on demand, coupled with the development of extensive distribution networks, brought power to billions of people, dramatically improving living standards across the globe.
Fossil fuels have been particularly crucial for energy-intensive industries such as steel and cement production. These sectors require not only large amounts of heat but also specific chemical properties that fossil fuels provide.
Energy and power density donโt tell the whole story. Relative abundance and ease of extraction and processing are important factors that make fossil fuels preferable to other sources.
Another is the capacity factor of a power plant, or the ratio of its actual output to its potential output if it were to operate continuously at full nameplate capacity. Coal-fired plants approach 50% capacity factor, and natural gas combined-cycle plants exceed 55%. Nuclear plants achieve an astounding 93% average capacity factor.
However, the capacity factors for wind and solar are less than 35% and 25%, respectively, due to their dependence on weather conditions and the amount of sunlight. This means wind and solar are not able to be turned on anytime their energy is needed. Nor are they able to adjust output quickly to changes in demand. In other words, they produce energy when resources are available rather than when they are needed.
Fossil fuels are vital, not just for enabling developing countries to scale up rapidly, but also for rich nations that need to sustain economic growth and continue to provide energy at an affordable price to industries and homes. Even Teslaโs Elon Musk uses an oil-derived fuel โ rocket-grade kerosene โ for the SpaceX Falcon rocket.
Calls to abandon coal, oil and natural gas would have society regress by hundreds of years when it is human nature to move forward โ even upward toward other worlds. It simply is not in our DNA to yield to such nonsense.
This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on July 16, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a masterโs degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K., and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, U.K.
A massive wind turbine blade shattered causing an extensive debris field that shut down beaches on tony Nantucket Island.
As workers in protective clothing resembling hazmat suits rushed to contain the damage, โthe federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said Wednesday that operations at Vineyard Wind have been suspended until it can be determined whether the โblade failureโ impacts other turbine blades on the development,โ according to The Associated Press.
Check out the photos above, which were taken by whale protection activist Mary Chalke.
The Vineyard Gazette reports that Vineyard Wind is โthe first approved and currently largest offshore wind energy project in the countryโฆ The Vineyard Wind turbines are over 800 feet tall, with blades as long as a football field. As of last month, Vineyard Wind had 10 turbines in operation, generating about 136 megawatts of power. About a dozen more were under construction. The turbines are manufactured by GE Vernova, and the company is responsible for them as they are initially installed.โ
Last month, America Electric Power filed suit against GE Vernova over quality and warranty concerns, alleging that โwithin only two to three years of commercial operation, the GE wind turbine generators have exhibited numerous material defects on major components and experienced several complete failures, at least one turbine blade liberation event, and other deficiencies.โ
Wind turbine blades are made from fiberglass, or fiber-reinforced plastic, and cannot be recycled. CFACT has yet to see any serious proposal as to what to do with the mountain of waste that will result when thousands of turbine blades reach the end of their useful lives in 10-20 years.
CFACT has actively challenged the Biden Administrationโs rush to transform Americaโs coasts into industrial wind turbine sites, focusing on the threat they pose to marine mammals, the power grid, and the economic hazards of mining rare earths and other materials in developing nations.
Our federal โwatchdogsโ should call a halt to wind turbine construction until the potential hazards they pose to the Jersey Shore, the Virginia coast, and the rest of our national waters are genuinely understood.
Beautiful Nantucket Island and neighboring Marthaโs Vineyard are the chosen summer playgrounds of Americaโs rich and famous, including Barack and Michelle Obama.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis quipped last night that the wealthy Left โsupport open borders allowing millions and millions of illegal aliens to pour into our country and to burden our communities, but just donโt send any to Marthaโs Vineyard then they get really upset.โ
Letโs see how the beautiful people, who have been so vociferous in pushing wind and solar on the rest of us, enjoy picking fiberglass shards out of their beach picnics.
Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2ยฐC and 5ยฐC respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero.
Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2ยฐC and 5ยฐC respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.
The siting situation is just as bad over the last 10 years where 81.5% are rated junk, while over the last five years, eight of the 13 newly-opened stations are Class 4 and 5. Only last year, Arthog No 2 was opened in Wales with a class rating of 4, and the year before another class 4 was sited at Neatishead. It is one thing to inherit a network, one of whose stations goes back to 1794, that has become corrupted, but serious questions must arise as to why the Met Office is planting measuring devices at sites that cannot provide a proper natural air temperature. Using these data to promote the Net Zero project by suggesting temperatures are rising faster than they are, while implausibly calculating warming down to one hundredths of a degree centigrade, risks the state-funded Met Office becoming a national joke.
Citizen journalist Ray Sanders is on the Met Office case and regularly contributes to Paul Homewoodโs online blog. He noted that Neatishead was sited just 19 months ago and asked why sites are being opened of such poor quality. He observed that โsomeone of a suspicious mind might think that they are deliberately adding these junk sites simply to make current U.K. temperatures artificially highโ.
The class rating system for temperature measuring stations is set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). It reflects both human and natural impacts on temperature measurements caused by nearby activities, buildings and other structures. Class 1 is pristine and in a โperfectโ world can be considered a โreferenceโ site, notes WMO. Barely 6% of the Met Office stations are Class 1. Class 4 sites are heavily corrupted by artificial temperature changing sources and come with WMO โuncertaintiesโ of 2ยฐC. Class 5 sites have โuncertaintiesโ of 5ยฐC and with no siting requirements could be located by the door of a blast furnace, or, as happens at airports, the super-heated exhausts of jet engines. Under ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014 (E), a Class 5 site โis a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide areaโ
Earlier this year the Daily Scepticexclusively revealed that nearly one in three (29.2%) of Met Office temperature stations were in junk Class 5. And astonishingly, 48.7% were in Class 4. Just 13.7% or a paltry 52 stations are in Classes 1 and 2, where no โuncertaintiesโ are set. The scientific scandal here is that the Met Office has known about the situation for years, but far from improving the network by careful siting of new stations, it appears to be intent on making it worse. To date, the Met Office has resisted giving a public explanation and the Net Zero-obsessed mainstream media have ignored the story. Instead, the legacy press has concentrated on promoting a diet of Met Office โrecordโ and daily high temperatures often set at the same heat-racked sites. โSpeaking truth to powerโ in this case has been replaced with acting as a helpful and unquestioning messenger for Met Office claims. As is usual in these cases, whether it be Covid cover-ups or a spaced-out U.S. Democrat President, mainstream media are nowhere to be seen, although the subject is widely discussed on social media.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed a week of these claimed highs and found the hottest day in the U.K. was set at Heathrow airport no fewer than five times. Every day, many of the same dud sites feature at the top of the local lists. In Scotland, the measuring stations at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Glasgow and Leuchars featured on four days out of seven. In England, Hull East Park was joined by Killowen on four days along with Usk, Durham and Pershore College on three.
Does the Met Office consider this is credible scientific information, presenting the same natural mini local heat spots as representative of the U.K. climate, or just Net Zero story telling? It is about time it provided an explanation.
Ray Sanders has been diligently researching the siting of Met Office stations. The situation at Neatishead clearly appals him since its recent siting was in a heavily-shaded location adjacent to a radar dome. Another new site in Kent is next to agricultural poly tunnels that change throughout the year. Others include sites in walled gardens deliberately intended to form micro climates of enhanced warmth, co-located with National Grid sub-stations, surrounded by newly-installed solar farms, in car parks and, โmost absurdly, in exceptionally close proximity to aircraftโ.
Aberdeen Dyce airport regularly records a regional high, and the photo above gives some clues as to why it does. Sanders comments that it is โstaggeringly difficultโ to understand how any rational meteorologist could defend the Dyce site. The square below the red marker is the temperature compound with what appears to be a nearby Airbus 320 with its engines pointing at the Stevenson Screen.
Chris Morrison is the Daily ScepticโsEnvironment Editor.
Hopes of a seamless transition to the clean fuel are crashing into economic reality
Hydrogen Storage In Renewable Energy
Hopes of a seamless transition to the clean fuel are crashing into economic reality
Andrew โTwiggyโ Forrest has been on something of a journey in recent years.
The Australian billionaire, best known for making his fortune in mining, underwent a Damascene conversion on climate change after having a near-death experience in 2016.
Since then Forrest has vowed to turn his industrial empire, Fortescue, into a green energy beacon โ chiefly by making big bets on green hydrogen. The Telegraph has the story.
But on Wednesday the businessman was forced to press pause on the dream as it crashed into economic reality.
Fortescue, which still makes most of its money from mining iron ore, is now slowing work on green hydrogen projects and has dropped a target to produce 15m tons by 2030, blaming high costs and weak demand.
It is the latest sign of a wobble over hydrogen, a so-called superfuel that has been championed as a solution to decarbonise everything from transport and heavy industry to home heating and power generation.
Across the West, politicians have pledged to meet ambitious climate targets partly through developing different sources of the fuel, such as โblueโ hydrogen made from natural gas, and โgreenโ hydrogen derived through electrolysis of water.
Collectively, they have pledged to produce millions of tonnes of hydrogen in the coming decades โ despite there being no proven path to doing so commercially.
On the same day that Forrest pulled back, the European Union was told that its plan to make and import 10m metric tons of green hydrogen by the end of this decade was unrealistic as well โ despite the bloc making โฌ18.8bn (ยฃ15.8bn) available for a slew of projects.
The European Court of Auditors dismissed the target as one based on โpolitical willโ rather than concrete data, and said it had been partly spurred on by lobbyists.
While Brussels wants to have 40 gigawatts (Gw) of electrolyser capacity by 2030, it is only on track to add 5Gw at the moment, according to the court.
Meanwhile, hydrogen heating trials have been cancelled in the UK owing to a lack of supply, while Franceโs Engie and Norwayโs Statkraft have delayed green hydrogen production plans.
Michael Liebreich, an independent energy consultant who recently called for a โresetโ of expectations for hydrogen, warns that the industry is suffering from โmissing trillionsโ.
โThe underlying problem is that while all these hopes and dreams for hydrogen have been peddled, the economics just do not stack up,โ he says.
โFrom an engineering perspective, you can do all the things that everyone is talking about โ every single thing.
โThe problem is, you canโt pay for it. And the amount that is missing is not a small amount. It turns very quickly into trillions of dollars that are simply not there.โ
Politicians including Boris Johnson have previously praised hydrogen as a potential like-for-like replacement for natural gas because it emits no carbon dioxide when burned.
The idea has obvious appeal: why dig up our natural gas pipelines and throw out our boilers and gas stoves, replacing them with wind farms and expensive electric heat pumps, if we can just pump hydrogen through the existing gas network instead?
But the reality has proved more complicated than this, says Liebreich.
The first issue is simple physics: converting other things into hydrogen is energy-intensive and means the final product, by definition, ends up being more expensive than the things you used to make it.
This means it is costly to make. And producing hydrogen in very large quantities would mean building more wind turbines, solar farms and electricity pylons to power the necessary electrolysers, on top of those you need for generating power โ at a cost of many hundreds of billions of pounds.
For this reason, Greg Jackson, the boss of Octopus Energy, a proponent of heat pumps, has compared using hydrogen for home heating to โflushing the toilet with champagneโ.
Hydrogen is also highly explosive and more leaky than natural gas โ making its transportation difficult and expensive.
โEngineers can solve some of these problems, and at the end of the day we do lots of inefficient things already โ an internal combustion engine in a car is only 20pc efficient,โ says Liebreich.
โBut the physics of hydrogen has cost implications right the way throughout the chain. It hits you in the production, it hits you in the transportation, it hits you in the storage and then it also hits you in the usage of hydrogen because it is bulky and dangerous.โ
At the moment, the case for subsidising green hydrogen in many countries rests on a hope that costs can eventually be driven down to $1 (77p) per kilogram.
This is the goal of subsidies of up to $3 per kilogram lavished on energy companies by Joe Bidenโs Inflation Reduction Act in the US.
But because of its physical limitations, there is no certainty prices will ever reach this ultimate goal, Liebreich has argued, with developers needing to spread their costs out over 10 to 15 years. And even if it comes down to $2 per kilogram, that still leaves huge unaddressed costs when scaled up to tens of millions of tons.
In the UK, the Government announced ยฃ2bn worth of subsidies for 11 projects last year with a total capacity of 125 megawatts and an average strike price of ยฃ241 per megawatt hour.
Hinkley Point C, the 3.3Gw nuclear power plant being built in Somerset, received a strike price of ยฃ92.50 per megawatt hour.
โPeople say thereโs an experience curve,โ Liebreich says. โThat argument absolutely applies to the electrolysers, which will probably get very cheap โฆ but [the majority of the cost comes from] the electricity and compressors, and pumps, and tanks, and heat exchangers, and substations โ all that basic engineering.โ
As the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee comes to a close, we look at the climate and energy platform of the party. Do they differ from Trumpโs first-term agenda? What is the stance of VP candidate J.D. Vance on the topic considering Trump has tapped Vance to carry his MAGA agenda forward? To talk about all this โ plus the Crazy Climate News of the Week โ we have as our guest Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com who was a member of the EPA Transition Team for the first Trump presidency. What of that agenda was implemented? What wasnโt and why?
As the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee comes to a close, we look at the climate and energy platform of the party. Do they differ from Trumpโs first-term agenda? What is the stance of VP candidate J.D. Vance on the topic considering Trump has tapped Vance to carry his MAGA agenda forward? To talk about all this โ plus the Crazy Climate News of the Week โ we have as our guest Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com who was a member of the EPA Transition Team for the first Trump presidency. What of that agenda was implemented? What wasnโt and why? And if Trump is elected again, will he take a more-aggressive approach? And does the reversal of the Chevron Doctrine that gave agencies like the EPA enormous unchecked power factor in here at all?
At 1 p.m. ET, tune in LIVE for the stream with The Heartland Instituteโs Jim Lakely, Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, and Linnea Lueken. Join the chat and weโll try to answer your questions on the air.
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