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.
Sometimes a story gets buried not because editors conspire against it, but because the news cycle has room for only one crisis at a time. This year the big news has been the Iran war. But even accounting for competing headlines, the silence around a genuinely consequential development is telling.
And that is the story of India’s explicit rejection of the global net zero movement. India has walked away from its bid to host the COP33 UN climate conference, and the world’s climate press has treated it as a footnote rather than the signal it is.
India had spent years projecting a rising voice in the development of climate policy, and hosting a COP33 is the closest thing the bureaucracy has to a coronation. Then, quietly, without public explanation, India withdrew its offer. No press conference. No elaboration. Just a government stepping back from a role for which it auditioned for years.
The truth is India has run the numbers on the cost of a net zero energy transition for a population of 1.4 billion climbing out of poverty, and it does not like what it sees. The notion that India should shackle its economy by adhering to restrictive climate policies, while its people still grapple with energy deficits, is illogical and morally indefensible.
Data India Doesn’t Need a Summit to See
Furthermore, the narrative of a rapidly degrading Indian environment due to energy consumption is demonstrably false. India’s own environmental indicators do not support the apocalyptic framing of the climate obsessed.
For years, hydrologists and climate modelers have relied on Himalayan snowfall estimates to forecast water availability for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia’s most fertile Ganges plains. Their projections of a seriously drier India, it turns out, were wrong.
A team of researchers, including scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.K. Met Office, and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, used frozen high-altitude lakes as natural pressure sensors rather than relying on undersized conventional rain gauges. What they found was startling: In a single winter, the best available snowfall models had underestimated seasonal snow over the Lake Hampta area of Himachal Pradesh by 37%. The peer-reviewed study makes clear that conventional instruments have been missing large volumes of snow for decades.
Then there is the vegetation story, which cuts even harder against the doom narrative. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology modeled how India’s landscape would respond to a high-emissions future using the same family of computer models climate activists cite when warning of catastrophe.
The result was not desertification. It was the opposite. Gross primary production, a measure of how much carbon dioxide India’s forests, croplands, and other vegetation are absorbing, rose from roughly 729 grams of carbon per square meter annually in 1985 to about 830 by 2014 and is projected to nearly double to around 1,305 by the year 2100.
Layered onto that are the steady expansion of India’s forest cover over the past two decades and the recovering populations of endangered species such as tigers and Asiatic lions, successes resulting from conservation and habitat management rather than from decarbonization mandates.
All this means India has stopped outsourcing its environmental judgment to a U.N. process that treats every barrel of oil and every ton of coal as a moral affront, regardless of its benefit in lighting a clinic for children or powering a steel plant that employs thousands. A country that still has hundreds of millions of citizens without reliable access to electricity does not have the luxury of treating energy poverty as an acceptable trade-off for leadership in the climate industrial complex.
That is why India has expanded coal production and struck oil and gas deals with the United States and Persian Gulf producers. It has resisted binding emissions targets that would cap its own industrial growth, unwilling to commit to far-off targets for emission reductions. India’s relinquishment of COP33 hosting rights is perhaps the most visible expression of a strategic direction that has been building for years.
A country that the entire architecture of climate financing is supposedly built to help just declined to host the party. If climate summits worked as advertised, that would be unthinkable. But it is no longer, and pretending otherwise will not make the next withdrawal any less predictable.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
Every so often, the climate media machine spits out a headline so breathless you’d think the laws of physics had just been accidentally repealed by a badly-worded executive order. Case in point: bne IntelliNews in Germany recently told us that a “major ocean current in the Southern Hemisphere has reversed direction for the first time in recorded history,” and that climatologists are calling it a “catastrophic” tipping point. It also quotes a climatologist as saying “The stunning reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere confirms the global climate system has entered a catastrophic phase.”
Every so often, the climate media machine spits out a headline so breathless you’d think the laws of physics had just been accidentally repealed by a badly-worded executive order. Case in point: bne IntelliNews in Germany recently told us that a “major ocean current in the Southern Hemisphere has reversed direction for the first time in recorded history,” and that climatologists are calling it a “catastrophic” tipping point. It also quotes a climatologist as saying “The stunning reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere confirms the global climate system has entered a catastrophic phase.”
The implication: pack your bags, the climate apocalypse is here, and don’t forget your floaties.
But as is so often the case, the devil isn’t just in the details—it’s in the words they didn’t mention. The article, like a magician with something up both sleeves, never links to the actual scientific study.
To start with, here’s the Southern Ocean Overturning Circulation (SMOC) that they are claiming has “reversed”.
Figure 1. Ocean currents around Antarctica. The Bottom Water descends from the edge of the continent and runs towards the Equator along the ocean floor. Above that, the Deep Water flows towards Antarctica, rises to the surface, and moves back toward the Equator. When it hits the Circumpolar Current it splits into the Intermediate Water and Mode Water. Not sure what a “reversal” of that would look like.
And when I got to the study, what do you know? The study doesn’t mention “tipping point,” “collapse,” “current reversal,” “Southern Ocean current” or even “overturning circulation.” The only “reversal” in the paper refers to satellites detecting a reversal in surface salinity trends from decreasing to increasing, not a reversal in the the direction of the Southern ocean’s most complex circulation shown above.
So what did the study actually say? Here’s the paper’s abstract:
“For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) has been freshening—an expected response to a warming climate. This freshening enhanced upper-ocean stratification, reducing the upward transport of subsurface heat and possibly contributing to sea ice expansion. It also limited the formation of open-ocean polynyas. Using satellite observations, we reveal a marked increase in surface salinity across the circumpolar Southern Ocean since 2015. This shift has weakened upper-ocean stratification, coinciding with a dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice coverage. Additionally, rising salinity facilitated the reemergence of the Maud Rise polynya in the Weddell Sea, a phenomenon last observed in the mid-1970s. Crucially, we demonstrate that satellites can now monitor these changes in real time, providing essential evidence of the Southern Ocean’s potential transition toward persistently reduced sea ice coverage.”
I love how in the very first line, the earlier freshening (decreased salinity) of the polar Southern Ocean is described as “an expected response to a warming climate”. This is to demonstrate how well they understand what happens as the Earth warms, they knew it was going to freshen …
… but then they failed to mention that the increase in salinity post-2015 is an unexpected change that was unforeseen by either climate numerologists or computer haruspicy. But to be sure, they’ll gladly tell us what the climate will be like in 2100 AD.
In any case, let’s translate the actual science: For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) was getting fresher—a little less salty—thanks to melting ice and increased precipitation, which the climate modelers assured us was exactly what a warming world would do. But then, around 2015, the trend did a U-turn. Suddenly, the surface started getting saltier, not fresher, and sea ice coverage dropped like a rock. The study’s main points? Satellites are now good enough to watch these swings in real time, and the ocean’s surface salinity is a lot more jumpy than either the models or the scientists predicted.
The media, meanwhile, went straight from “salinity trend reversal” to “ocean current reversal” to “climate system collapse.” It’s like watching a game of telephone played by people who skipped science class and majored in panic. But don’t worry, we’re assured it’s legit because bne IntelliNews said the study “was confirmed by Spanish marine scientists at El Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona”.
Discouragingly, it’s not just the media. Even the scientists at the aforementioned Spanish Ocean Sciences Institute managed to headline their press release “Major reversal in ocean circulation detected,”despite the fact that the study didn’t detect any such thing. Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study, even said:
“We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before. While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the SMOC [Southern Meridional Overturning Circulation] is not just weakening, but has reversed. This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.”
YIKES! EVERYONE PANIC!
Want to know the kicker? I mean, other than the fact that neither “reversal” nor “SMOC” are even mentioned in the study?
This isn’t even the first time it’s happened. Check out the Abstract again. The study itself notes that the Maud Rise polynya—a big seasonal hole in the sea ice—was visible in the 1970s under similar conditions, and is currently visible again. But you wouldn’t know that from the headlines, which prefer to treat every wiggle in the data as a sign of imminent doom.
“You can believe half of what you read, a quarter of what you hear …
… and an eighth of what you say.”
Although for popular reports of climate science, you might want to divide by sixteen. The next time you see “catastrophic tipping point” in the news, do yourself a favor—find the actual study, read the abstract, and remember that in climate science, as in life, reality is usually a lot less dramatic than the press release.
My warmest wishes to everyone for crisp mountain mornings, or warm summer evenings, or sunlight far-reaching on the sea, the best of whatever you dream to you all,
w.
Yep. I’ll say it again: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your unclear claims as to what I said.
Much of the media’s playbook is straightforward: Push repeatedly a predetermined agenda. I was one of perhaps billions of people who fell for this tried-and-true method of mass deception. Even some of the most intelligent people came to fear a climate catastrophe on our beautiful blue planet.
Much of the media’s playbook is straightforward: Push repeatedly a predetermined agenda. I was one of perhaps billions of people who fell for this tried-and-true method of mass deception. Even some of the most intelligent people came to fear a climate catastrophe on our beautiful blue planet.
If you have found yourself among the deceived, be not discomfited by your error. Individuals are preoccupied with their lives and lack the time or proficiency to explore the complex nuances of climate science.
Most consumers of news are vulnerable to the work of clever writers quoting seemingly legitimate policymakers and scientists handpicked by the United Nations to convey apocalyptic information. Falling for the classic fallacy of Appeal to Authority is a common result. Statements are taken to be true just because someone in authority said so.
The public, weary of complexity, craves simple villains and saviors. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the perfect evildoer – a threat that can be taxed, regulated and rallied against. Meanwhile, policymakers revel in the power that a perpetual emergency bestows on them. The confusion of a crisis and the proclamations, ultimatums and deadlines that ensue alternately produce paralysis and panicked action.
But science doesn’t care whether the declarations come from Newton or Einstein or some 19th century monk fussing with the genetics of peas. It is only concerned with whether a theory can be proven through observations of the real world and confirmations of conclusions. And that is where the faux climate crisis falls flat on its face.
Climate science is not a monolith of precision. Despite the confident pronouncements of international panels, the mechanisms that govern temperature shifts are riddled with unknowns.
Temperature records have been heavily adjusted by gatekeeping agencies like NOAA. Moreover, these records often originate with thermometers in urbanized locations that are prone to artificial warming, whose precise effects have not been established. Furthermore, the modelers of future temperatures predict what the global temperature will be with an accuracy of one-tenth of a degree 80 years into the future, yet their meteorologist colleagues can’t achieve that precision from one day to the next.
There is also a methodological flaw: an over-reliance on models that peer into an uncertain future rather than test hypotheses against real-time data. Science thrives on observation and experimentation. Think of Pasteur culturing bacteria or Friar Mendel studying yellow and green peas.
However, popular climatology has inverted this process. Researchers backed by financiers looking for particular results build elaborate simulations based on assumptions about clouds, solar effects, and CO₂ and treat the outputs as gospel. When temperature trends stubbornly refuse to match projections, the response is to tweak the models rather than question their foundations.
The United Nations, for example, says that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions have caused global temperature to rise about 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1750. But this relies on data that has been adjusted, fabricated and influenced by human infrastructure.
It was also observed that the climate models used to justify forecasts of warming consistently fail to replicate observed temperature trajectories and patterns of sea ice coverage. Models predicted warming of up to 0.5 degree Celsius per decade, but satellite and ground data show an increase of just 0.1 to 0.13 degrees Celsius. Arctic sea ice, which was expected to shrink sharply, has instead stabilized since 2007.
“These models overplay CO2’s role,” says former Delaware state climatologist Dr. David Legates. “They don’t fit reality,”
Clouds remain a “wild card” in climate models because their formation and feedback effects are poorly represented in the computational frameworks that dominate policy discussions. Climatology must return to its empirical roots, prioritizing real-time observations over model prophecies.
Meanwhile, the public should be introduced to a happy truth: In the past few decades, most of Earth has greened. Plant coverage has grown by 18 million square kilometers, and the main cause is the increase in atmospheric CO2. Some villain, that carbon dioxide!
The real crisis lies in conflating political agendas with scientific truth. To those who claim that “the science is settled,” recall the words of physicist Richard Feynman: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Only by embracing skepticism and open discussion can we craft resilient policies – ones that allow the world to flourish without mortgaging the future to a dogmatic march toward energy poverty and a denial of human potential.
This commentary was first published at American Thinker on May 14, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
As the image suggests, the push for Net Zero burdens western nations, but benefits China and Russia in different ways. Russia pays lip service to the CO2 phobia, while its scientists and climate modelers know that any global warming will be modest and a boon to their high latitude country. Thus, any economic and military self-destruction by other powers increases Russia’s position and security.
As the image suggests, the push for Net Zero burdens western nations, but benefits China and Russia in different ways. Russia pays lip service to the CO2 phobia, while its scientists and climate modelers know that any global warming will be modest and a boon to their high latitude country. Thus, any economic and military self-destruction by other powers increases Russia’s position and security.
China’s gains from the Net Zero obsession have been greater and different. First of all, China is protected from emissions reductions and economic development there can proceed unimpeded.
Secondly, and more significantly China has bet the house to be the dominant global supplier of “Green” energy hardware like wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries. Their great success makes them vulnerable should the rest of the world realize these are impractical solutions for an imaginary problem. Walter Russell Mead explains in his article Trump Outsmarts China on Green Energy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
By dismantling the net-zero agenda, he ramps up economic pressure on Beijing
So much is happening so quickly in Washington these days that Donald Trump’s war on the green climate agenda has passed almost unnoticed. Steps like pulling out of the Paris Agreement, dropping electric-vehicle mandates, ending offshore leasing for wind projects, and fast-tracking fossil-fuel infrastructure would have dominated the news in quieter times.
But Mr. Trump’s climate policy matters for reasons that go beyond the climate debate. China has made Western climate policy a major focus of its economic strategy, and by pulling the rug out from under the global green agenda, the Trump administration is adding significantly to the economic pressure on Beijing.
Call it brilliant Chinese planning or gross Western incompetence, but the only real winner from the green agenda that Western governments have done so much to impose on the world is Beijing. Solar power cells, wind turbines, electric vehicles and the batteries that keep them moving: China has swiftly established dominance in one critical industry and supply chain after another.
This diagram shows the origin of the metals required for meeting the 2030 goals. The left side of the diagram shows the origin, based on today’s global production of metals. The right side shows the cumulative metal demand for wind and solar technologies until 2030. From study showing tonnage of Dutch demand only.
This was eminently foreseeable. The Chinese Communist Party’s economic planners in Beijing are the most effective technocrats the world has ever known, eclipsing the fumbling Soviet planners of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Give them a set of targets, a timetable and a list of technologies to promote, and they will coordinate state policy, banking subsidies and market forces to produce world-beating industries in record time.
China’s production capacity for these materials and components dwarfs the rest of the world – exceeding global demand in many cases. Source: James Kennedy https://us.docworkspace.com/d/sIAGK_NAjoOC-lAY
The European and American architects of the green transition were unintentionally creating a playing field ideally suited to China’s core strengths, and Beijing took full advantage.
But even the most brilliant planners make mistakes. China today is a combination of extraordinary economic and industrial success and monumental failure. The ruinous demographic consequences of its one-child policy, the explosive mix of financial and social pressures wrapped up in the real-estate bubble, and the excess industrial capacity resulting from decades of aggressive state planning loom ever larger over China’s future. Mr. Trump’s proposed upending of global climate policy would transform China’s drive to dominate the energy transition from a major win to an expensive misfire for Beijing.
The net-zero agenda, a set of targets and strategies by Western governments and climate diplomats to arrest global warming by limiting emissions, is the most audacious international effort in diplomatic history. It seeks to persuade or compel every country on the planet to make a transition to energy production that does not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The costs of the transition easily run into the trillions of dollars. The social and economic impact will transform everything from agriculture to manufacturing.
An enterprise this ambitious requires enduring political support. As time goes by, the costs of the energy transition inexorably rise, and opposition to the project grows as more interests are affected. Proponents understood this and counted on three factors to ensure that progress toward net zero continued even as opponents dug in their heels.
1. Blame Natural Disasters on CO2 Emissions
First, as the growing costs of climate change ricocheted through the economy (driving up insurance costs in disaster-prone areas, for example, as weather risks grew), more voters would support net-zero policies.
2. Green Industries Lobby to Protect Their Interests
Second, industries that had invested in climate-friendly technologies (like automobile makers investing billions in EV-producing factories) would lobby politicians to protect their investments by maintaining the regulations and subsidies that made them profitable.
3. Workers Wanting to protect their Green Jobs.
Third, as net-zero-friendly industries employed more workers, these beneficiaries of net-zero policies would support measures that protected their jobs.
Will those be enough to stop the rising wave of energy realism and loss of Net Zero faith?
Wright is now confirmed as US Secretary of EnergyEPA priorities Announced by Director Zeldin
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters died out in Taipei because of global warming. Instead it turns out the ocean there was much warmer and quite a lot higher.
So they sampled the heck out of this shell. They took so many data points they could figure out the seasonal swings from four years in a row in what was somewhere around 5,500 BC. Somehow even when CO2 levels were perfect, the water temperature swings around quite a lot. Neolithic people probably prayed for better weather, rolled some runes or read some tea leaves. These were early climate models and five thousand years later, seasonal models have not improved much.
Given that these oysters like to live 1 to 3m below the surface, the seas then must have been 1 to 3 meters above where they are now. Which gives us that awkward truth, yet again, that everywhere we look 7,000 years ago the seas were 1 – 2 meters higher than where they are today. Our seas are only rising at 1mm a year, (or 3mm if you believe the adjusted satellites). How could that be unless the natural world was much hotter, frying and expanding the oceans and melting the ice caps to some degree?
And indeed, current winter water temperatures around Taipei on our Catastrophe-Earth are 14–16oC but back 7,500 years ago researchers suggest the water in winter ranged from 15 to a shocking 23oC.
And if you’re wondering, the big oyster shell was not just carried there by some fisherman long ago — it was found in a muddy black silt clay layer that was more than 5-m thick and filled with other marine remnants above and below that. The researchers dated other things in that stack going back to about 10,000 years ago.
The researchers concluded as drily as possible “The disappearance of this type of oyster in Taiwan during the late Holocene should not be due to a warming trend.”
Indeed.
So yet again, we find something made the Earth a lot hotter 7,000 years ago, and yet the corals survived, the koalas managed and the extinction apocalypse never came. Sensible people would stop throwing money at the wind to control these natural swings that we can’t predict.
REFERENCE
Li H-C, Mii H-S, Liu T-K, et al. (2024) AMS 14C Dating and Stable Isotope Analysis on an 8 kyr Oyster Shell from Tapei Basin: Sea level and SST changes. Radiocarbon. Published online 2024:1-15. doi:10.1017/RDC.2023.117
Andrew Dessler @AndrewDessler Prof of Atmospheric Sciences & climate scientist @ Texas A&M; AGU and AAAS Fellow has been prognosticating on Twitter, talking up a model that predicts another 2C of warming by 2100 (0.25C/decade, twice the rate 2013-2023).
Andrew Dessler @AndrewDessler Prof of Atmospheric Sciences & climate scientist @ Texas A&M; AGU and AAAS Fellow has been prognosticating on Twitter, talking up a model that predicts another 2C of warming by 2100 (0.25C/decade, twice the rate 2013-2023).
When challenged about this alarming rate of warming, he clarified for us.
Of course, if the central estimate is warming of 0.25C/decade, but cooling is instead a possibility, this means that the upper bound for warming is at least 0.5C/decade. I think this tells us all we need to know about the usefulness of climate models (and the sanity of the modellers).
I asked a question, no reply yet.
En-ROADS climate simulator has just produced a huge update. They now include climate damages in estimates of economic activity that drives emissions.
Underwater seamounts are one to four kilometer high mountains that mostly used to be a volcano. But under a kilometer of water they are hard to see, holy smoke, and we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Mariana, and it’s only 11km “away”.
Underwater seamounts are one to four kilometer high mountains that mostly used to be a volcano. But under a kilometer of water they are hard to see, holy smoke, and we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Mariana, and it’s only 11km “away”.
Most of these undersea volcanoes remain uncharted by sonar, and with only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped, it is impossible to know how many exist. Sometimes we only find out when a nuclear submarine runs into one:
New seamount maps could aid in studies of ecology, plate tectonics, and ocean mixing
Paul Voosen, Science
In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array.
Despite discovering nearly half the known underwater volcanoes just this week, we already knew 30 years ago that they had no effect on the climate. The climate modelers said so. They explained that all the unexplained warming was due to CO2. Hence, ipso ergo absurdum, underwater volcanoes “equals zero”.
The Pacific Ocean cycles are the largest driver of climate on Earth, but we *know* as only high priests can, that volcanoes we’ve never studied definitely had no role in it.
Thanks to the laws of Government-funded Monopoly Science, the same researchers who would never point that out are now finding reasons that underwater volcanoes might help explain climate change. Now they tell us! Apparently “wake vortices make seamounts the leading contributor to upward ocean mixing, and a central player in climate.” Who knows, they might be right, but where were they twenty years ago when we needed more scientists to point out how inadequate climate models were?
For each seamount example, (left) SRTM15+V2.3 mapped bathymetry, (center) the average Gaussian Model where [omega/h] = 2.4, (right) difference between the average Gaussian model and real data. The gray areas have no soundings.
Seamounts may play another roll in upwelling of nutrients. These researchers point out that the eddys and currents flowing around seamounts may sweep up nutrients to the surface which feed vast pools of phytoplankton.
From Science:
The “upwelling” was once thought to happen evenly across the ocean, driven by turbulent waves at boundaries between deep ocean layers of different densities. Now, researchers believe it is concentrated at seamounts and ridges. “There’s a zoo of interesting things that happen when you have topography,” says Brian Arbic, a physical oceanographer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
When ocean currents curl around seamounts, they create turbulent “wake vortices” that can provide the energy to push cold water up, says Jonathan Gula, a physical oceanographer at the University of Western Brittany. In unpublished research, Gula and co-authors have found that these wake vortices make seamounts the leading contributor to upward ocean mixing, and a central player in climate. Since the team relied on the old Scripps catalog, not the new one, the effect of the seamounts is probably even larger, Gula adds.
Curiously, it was only two months ago we realized in another study that all the benzene and toluene pollution over the vast Southern Ocean was not caused by humans but by phytoplankton blooms. The aerosols produced by microbes can seed clouds, which in turn cool the planet.
There’s a 10,000 kilometer ball of magma under the sea floor. We don’t even know all the volcanoes on the crust, let alone the changes in temperature that might drive currents, or influence natural cycles.
Even as late as 2018 only 20% of the seafloor had been mapped by ships (Mayer et al., 2018). There’s a lot more to come.
For those who are curious, TechTimes has more details on how they found so many volcanoes. It involves radar satellite data and some Gaussian interpretation:
They measured sea surface altitude changes caused by gravitational pull using radar satellite data, a phenomenon known as sea mounding. This method resulted in the discovery of 19,000 previously undiscovered seamounts.
With their research, the team found that seamounts have a base-to-height ratio that is linearly related to their height, which means that their shapes are scale invariant. They used a mathematical model called a Gaussian function to calculate this characteristic shape and found that it can be used to accurately estimate the height of small seamounts.
h/t Eduard
REFERENCE
Hillier, J. K., and A. B. Watts (2007), Global distribution of seamounts from ship-track bathymetry data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L13304, doi:10.1029/2007GL029874.
Julie Gevorgian et al, Global Distribution and Morphology of Small Seamounts, Earth and Space Science (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2022EA002331 Earth and Space Science, the new seamount catalog
An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.
New NOAA STAR Satellite system gets a major correction and suddenly agrees with UAH satellites, not RSS
An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.
The warming trend in the troposphere was only half of what the expert models predicted. From the paper:
Santer et al. (2021) reported that the multi-model averages for the TTT trends from CMIP5 and CMIP6 were 0.28–0.29 K/decade during 1979–2019. The total TTT trend found in this study was only one-half of the climate model simulations during the same period.
The authors admit that this has strong implications for the models, and supports a paper by skeptics Ross McKitrick and John Christy: Ross McKitrick replied in the Financial Post:
An important new study on climate change came out recently…
Zou’s team notes that their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other observations” because the atmosphere has warmed at half the average rate predicted by climate models over the same period. They also note that their findings are “consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020),” namely that climate models have a pervasive global warming bias.
Zou et al from NOAA is a bit of a blockbuster. Certainly a surprise. Skeptics have long favoured the original UAH satellite data set that consistently showed far less warming than climate models and for good reasons (see below) — especially because UAH agreed with 28 million weather balloons. A second satellite set called RSS gradually showed warmer trends than UAH did. A third satellite set was collected by NOAA and called STAR and it agreed with RSS — at least until a few weeks ago. Now suddenly it’s been re-worked thoroughly and the trend is almost identical to the UAH one.
He quotes Zou et al who are agreeing that their results support the skeptics
This is consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020) for a slightly shorter period (1979–2014). Possible reasons for the observation-model differences in trends may include climate model biases in responding to external forcings (McKitrick & Christy, 2020), deficiencies in the post-millennium external forcings used in model simulations (Santer, Fyfe, et al., 2017), phase mismatch in natural internal climate variability (Po-Chedley et al., 2021; Suárez-Gutiérrez et al., 2017), and possible residual errors in satellite data sets.
Pielke Jnr: Read that again, especially the last sentence. [They] are suggesting the possibility that either observations of global warming are flawed, that climate models are flawed, or maybe both. These possibilities would — if true — be very scientifically important.
Here’s now different the satellite datasets were in 2018
UAH was called the outlier, but all the other datasets used similar methods to RSS. They all continued to use a satellite called NOAA-14 even though its calibration was drifting. They also used similar strategies for diurnal drift adjustments. In Roy Spencer’s words “ Thus, NOAA and UW are, to a first approximation, slightly altered versions of the RSS dataset.”
Figure 2. A comparison of warming trends from 1979 to 2015 for the radiosonde data and the three global satellites. from Roy Spencer (Christy et al 2018)
Ross McKitrick explains the history of these differing satellite temperature sets. This is a battle that’s been waging for thirty years.
[John] Christy and his co-author, Roy Spencer, invented the original method of deriving temperatures from microwave radiation measurements collected by NOAA satellites in orbit since 1979. Their achievement earned them numerous accolades, but also attracted controversy because their satellite record didn’t show any warming. About 20 years ago scientists at Remote Sensing Systems in California found a small error in their algorithm that, once corrected, did yield a warming trend.
Christy and Spencer incorporated the RSS correction, but the two teams subsequently differed on other questions, such as how to correct for the positional drift of the satellites, which changes the time of day when instruments take their readings over each location. The RSS team used a climate model to develop the correction while the UAH team used an empirical method, leading to slightly different results. Another question was how to merge records when one satellite is taken out of service and replaced by another. Incorrect splicing can introduce spurious warming or cooling.
The climate modelers have been seeking some kind of endorsement of their models from satellites for decades, but the gap has grown wider instead of narrowing. STAR was a lifeline for the modelers, now it’s not:
In the end the two series were similar but RSS has consistently exhibited more warming than UAH. Then a little more than a decade ago, the group at NOAA headed by Zou produced a new data product called STAR (Satellite Applications and Research). They used the same underlying microwave retrievals but produced a temperature record showing much more warming than either UAH or RSS, as well as all the weather balloon records. It came close to validating the climate models, although in my paper with Christy we included the STAR data in the satellite average and the models still ran too hot. Nonetheless it was possible to point to the coolest of the models and compare them to the STAR data and find a match, which was a lifeline for those arguing that climate models are within the uncertainty range of the data.
Satellite show the models are wrong:
This below is the graph in McKitrick and Christy (2020) that the new STAR analysis essentially supports. The best tropospherein the world are running too hot, predicting a lot of warming that isn’t happening.
They overdo the warming in the lower troposphere and in the mid-troposphere in the tropics and all over the globe. After 40 years and massive emissions of CO2 the models are wrong. The modelers don’t know what drives the climate.
I explained why UAH was scientifically much more respectable than RSS
Five reasons UAH is different to RSS
UAH agrees with millions of calibrated weather balloons released around the world. RSS now agrees more with surface data from equipment placed near airports, concrete, airconditioners and which is itself wildly adjusted.
In the latest adjustments UAH uses empirical comparisons from satellites that aren’t affected by diurnal drift to estimate the errors of those that are. RSS starts with model estimates instead.
Two particular satellites disagree with each other (NOAA-14 and 15). The UAH team remove the one they think is incorrect. RSS keeps both inconsistent measurements.
Diurnal drift probably created artificial warming in the RSS set prior to 2002, but created artificial cooling after that. The new version of RSS keeps the warming error before 2002, but fixes the error after then. The upshot is a warmer overall trend.
UAH uses a more advanced method with three channels. RSS is still using the original method Roy Spencer and JohnChristy developed with only one channel (which is viewed from three angles).
The latest corrections by Zou 2023 were intricate and involved. This is just one eye candy graph of many (below). But we get some idea of how many satellites were involved in the last 40 years. In this case the adjustments were different over land and ocean for each satellite.
Figure 5: Inter-satellite difference time series for satellite pairs between those from TIROS-N to RTMT after the frequency adjustment for (a) over the global ocean and (b) over the global land. Zou et al
It’s a testament to the work of John Christy and Roy Spencer that the new detailed corrections suggest they were probably mostly right all along — despite the immense pressure on them to “find” results and adjustments like the other teams.
It’s a credit to Zou et al and the team at NOAA for publishing what appears to be conclusion that they might have preferred to ignore. Though they do suggest that the warming has accellerated lately:
Remarkably, the total tropospheric trends during the latest half period were nearly doubled the earlier half period over the global ocean.
But there is more discussion from Ross McKitrick at Judith Curry’s site on why the claimed “recent acceleration” in this paper is short term, not significant and dependent on picking the right break point.
In sum, based on a preliminary analysis the new NOAA data do not support a claim that warming in the troposphere has undergone a statistically-significant change in trend. The Global and Tropical TTT series show no support for the claim. The Global MT series appears to show support but only if the break data is placed in a specific interval in the early part of the last decade, and more recently the tests do not support acceleration. Finally, all of these results are biased towards finding evidence of a trend break due to the treatment of g. Robust critical values could be generated, which I might get to someday if no one else does it first.
REFERENCES
Christy, J. R., Spencer R.W., Braswell W.D. & Junod, R. (2018) Examination of space-based bulk atmospheric temperatures used in climate research, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 39:11, 3580-3607, DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2018.1444293 [ResearchGate]
McKitrick, R., & Christy, J. R. (2020). Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers. Earth and Space Science, 7(9), e2020EA001281. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020ea001281
You must be logged in to post a comment.