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It’s a tortured headline in ScienceAlert
By Jo Nova
For the first time Antarctic ice core teams have got hold of ice that is 3 million years old and the results have confounded them
The way CO2 responds in ice cores is canon to “the faith” so this is more important than it seems at first glance. Believers are really struggling.
Three million years ago the world was warmer, and about to cool into the violent ice age cycles. The ice core experts were expecting to confirm that CO2 levels were about 400ppm, as other proxies had shown, and they thought that greenhouse gases might fall and lead the cooling shift. But instead of CO2 being at 400 parts per million, and then leading the cooling, the bubbles trapped in ice were only 250 parts per million to start with and they stayed constant through important temperature swings. Sacre Bleu! CO2 did not appear to have any role in causing the warmth that was, or the cooling that followed. And nor did methane. O’ the dilemma?
Some sacred cows have to be sacrificed. Either CO2 is not a major driver of climate change, or the ice cores are […]
By Jo Nova
NASA has finally studied the LandSat satellite images of vegetation down to 30 metre resolution and discovered with “unprecedented detail” that climate change is a good thing.
The northern boreal forests are the largest terrestrial biome in the world, and it’s warming faster than any other forest type, and loving it.
This is the catastrophe they’ve been warning us about…
Satellite record shows boreal forests expanded 12% and shifted north since 1985
What kind of pollution causes forest growth?
It’s time we got serious about the benefits of CO2.
The analysis revealed that boreal forests both grew in size and moved northward. The forests expanded by 0.844 million km² (a 12% increase) and shifted northward by 0.29° mean latitude, with gains concentrated between 64°N and 68°N. Their work also showcased the capacity of new growth to act as a carbon sink. Young boreal forests (up to 36 years) hold an estimated 1.1–5.9 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) with the potential to sequester an additional 2.3–3.8 Pg C if allowed to mature. Landsat’s long-time series of highly calibrated data allows researchers to study how ecosystems shift over decades, a crucial insight into our changing world.
[…]
By Jo Nova
If man made CO2 emissions have any effect at all on extinctions — it stops them happening
New research looked at 500 years worth of extinctions and concludes that species loss peaked about a century ago. Far from the rate accelerating as we pour carbon dioxide into the sky, fewer species are disappearing now than forty or fifty years ago.
Kristen Saban and John Wiens considered data on as many as two million species. They specifically analyzed some 912 plants and animals that became extinct in the last 500 years.
Many of the doom and gloom forecasts took extinction rates from long ago and extrapolated them mindlessly forward, as climate modelers are want to do.
Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows
EurekaAlert
“To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing,” said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University.
Humans have wiped out species, but mostly by bringing in rats, pigs and goats to isolated islands:
December 13th, 2025 | Tags: Biodiversity, Biology, Evidence, Extinction | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
Twelve thousand years ago sea levels around Africa rose much faster than today
It’s another totally solid, non-controversial paper that will never be mentioned in the media or by 50 shades of climate experts.
In extraordinary detail, Vecchi et al look at 347 datapoints up and down the west coast of Africa and find that, like everywhere else, sea levels were a blockbuster 125m lower at the depths of the ice age 25,000 years ago. Then seas rose in rapid bursts as the vast Laurentide and Eurasian ice sheets melted, until they finally stopped rising 8,000 years ago. It must have been twelve thousand years of mayhem for corals, mangroves and beach-side cave-dwellers.
In the northern Gulf of Guinea seas were recorded as rising at up to 25 mm per year about 12,000 years ago — eight times faster than anything we see today. And given the difficulty of knowing sea levels 15,000 years ago, there were probably many short episodes of faster shifts that got washed away, never to be recorded.
All our panic about the current crisis of a pitiful 3mm-a-year rise allegedly “due to man-made CO2” pales to nothing compared to what Monster Nature […]
Cyclone Yasa, Fiji | Photo from Copernicus Sentinel-3 imagery
By Jo Nova
The worst 53 cyclones that hit Fiji in the last 2,000 years were more common in the coldest times, not the warmest ones.
We are told cyclones and extreme storms will be more intense in a warmer world, will have stronger wind speeds, may retain their strength longer and do more damage, our homes will be uninsurable, and this is the new normal. But the evidence continues to grow that warm times are wonderful, and the last thing we want is a colder climate.
There aren’t many long records of cyclones in the South Pacific, which hasn’t stopped climate experts blaming cars and burgers for horrible storms. But even though life on Earth depends upon understanding our climate, it’s only now, after 40 years of panic, that finally that researchers have studied things like pebble layers, shell fragments, and coral rubble in Fiji to find out what has happened there in the past. Yanan Li and others drilled cores to find debris pushed 120m into the mangroves by the worst of the worst tropical cyclones. Handily, they also had two bad storms recorded in the last […]
Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner
By Jo Nova
Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.
Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.
At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out.
Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t […]
The Red Sea
By Jo Nova
Corals around the world stopped growing in 2000BC and the pause lasted two thousand years before they returned like the Phoenix.
Each polyp might be fragile, but coral ecosystems are the couch-grass of the oceans.
A new paper rather puts the man-made panic about corals into perspective.
The most terrible events that could happen to corals have already happened, and the corals appear able to bide their time for two thousand years and return in all their glory.
The worst thing for the worlds corals is not rising seas but falling ones.
We panic over the odd bit of bleaching here and there, but it’s nothing compared to mother nature. The shallow edges of the oceans of the world are savage places. And the best place to study this mayhem is the Red Sea. Not only is it hot, but long, thin, deep, and it’s tectonically active too. In the depths of the last ice age, it was cut off from the Indian Ocean and the salinity rose to a death defying 47% at the Southern end, and 57% in the north. For thousands of years, the Red Sea was pickled.
When […]
By Jo Nova
All that stuff about a 1 in 100 year flood, they have no idea
It turns out the worst flood on the Rhine was not in 2024 but in 1374. On the Severn, in England the worst year for “climate change” was 250 BC. Obviously neither of them were due to man-made oil and gas.
A thousand news headlines have said modern floods were unprecedented, or were 1 in 1000 year events, or were caused by “climate change” and they were all based on just 120 years of data (or less), and they were all wrong.
For some reason, even though climate change is the most important thing on Earth, hardly any researchers were looking for evidence of long term extreme flood events. When researchers finally studied the sediments left at many sites — they found evidence that many ancient floods were just as bad or even worse. At least 12 times, ancient peak river flows were bigger than anything we’ve seen in the instrumental record. (And they’re just the ancient floods we know about, imagine if we put more scientists looking into fluvial sediments?).
The only thing unprecedented about modern floods is the gall of scientists […]
By Jo Nova
Cold is the Catastrophe
A hotter world might not be so horrible. Back in the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago, rivers flowed in the middle of the Sahara desert, and they were filled with fish. The photo above is what remains of Takarkori Lake today. If only climate change could bring back the fish?
While we were distracted in 2020, researchers published a paper about an trove of bones and body parts they had dug out of a cave in Southwest Libya, which is roughly the middle of the Sahara today. Surprisingly they found 17,551 bones, and even more surprisingly, 80% of them were from fish.
The people who dined there were catching tilapia and clariid catfish, and sometimes the odd mud turtle, mollusc and a crocodile or two. The lake (pictured above) is about 6 kilometers from the cave (below), and all the bones appear to be human refuse. It’s kind of the ultimate archaeological FOGO dump.
Somehow, this restaurant that stayed open for 6,000 years left behind layer after layer of undisturbed dining history. Gradually, over thousands of years the diners ate less fish, and more beef, goat and mutton.
Amazingly, 17,000 bits of […]
By Jo Nova
For some reason our long climate proxies work for hundreds of years but always seem to stop working just before the man-made catastrophe appears. It seems to me that if a coral-tree-clam-sediment thermometer worked in 1393, it should work in 2020. It’s not like Earth has run out of trees, mud, pollen or corals.
So here we are again, this time with a new Fijian coral that runs 627 years continuously from 1380 to 1997. And the experts have to slap “an instrumental record” on for the last twenty years to find the catastrophe. The actual single coral core shows the water of Fiji was the same or even slightly warmer in the Medieval warm period as it was in the 1990s. There’s no sign at all, in 600 years of this coral, that man-made carbon dioxide has had any effect at all on the water around Fiji.
The new data comes from a coral core drilled in 1999, which explains why it suddenly stops. It does not explain why the world is about to end, but worried scientists waited 25 years to assess the coral core.
The apocalypse is upon us, but no one can […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper (like so many before it) shows that the sea started warming half a century before the first coal fired power plant was ever built, demonstrating yet again, the skeptics are right, and CO2 is irrelevant. Despite that, the world’s supposedly top science journal lauded it in excitement because it showed the world had warmed “more than we thought”, and somehow, in their brains, ipso delerium, all warming was caused by man-made CO2 even if it occurred when there were no flights, no cars, and no electricity.
Life in 1820 was the ultimate “Net Zero” world: literally every flight was grounded and all petrol stations were closed for 80 years yet the world warmed.
Absurdly, evangelistic headlines decreed the world was “hotter than we thought”, had breached 1.5C earlier than we thought and three hundred year old sea sponges were telling us to hurry up and install solar panels. The point that the geniuses who are 99% certain didn’t know how hot the 1800s were until last week isn’t exactly inspiring. But the political activists at Nature felt that breaching the Paris Agreement (before it was even made) was big news and said so in […]
By Jo Nova
The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant
So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?
Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?
Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]
Image by Hoeneisen from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?
Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:
New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’
During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world […]
By Jo Nova h/t Cohenite
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 […]
After a thousand headlines told us Climate Change would make deserts grow, a new study suggests it won’t. It’s a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there’s the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.
Looks a bit different?
The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that’s the old predictions which are based only on “atmospheric data” like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.
Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.
Deserts were expanding until experts got a better model.
The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.
The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many […]
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.
Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.
Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.
Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”
Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]
Here’s one for all the history-deniers from 1885
Mr N Bartley understood Australias climate 134 years ago better than some climate scientists appear to now.
After the fire came the floods, Feb 2020.
Even then Australia already had a century-long rolling cycle of floods, fires and droughts. One natural disaster after another back when CO2 levels were perfect.
These go back to the earliest dates of European settlement. Wherever Captain Flinders landed in 1782 — 1792 he found “found traces of drought and bush fires invariably”. In 1839, the drought was so bad that fish “putrefied” in the big Murrumbidgee River even though there was not one coal fired power plant on Earth.
The author laments that the droughts “become forgotten in the flood intervals.”
In the modern Wifi era humans can forget even faster.
Below is my summary list of the events described in the story.
Below that, the full letter. From The Queenslander, Sept 19th, 1885.
*Since Captain Flinders was born in 1774 I assume those dates were wrong and he wasn’t commanding a ship when he was 8 years old. Any other suggestions welcome.(thanks Gee Aye, SteveD, James West and Peter Fitzroy)
(1795 onwards?)* […]
Here’s the anti-witchdoctor kit for bushfires and “climate change”
Hi to all the new readers. Keep these graphs handy…
To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark. Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire. Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.
The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought. A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it. Simple yes? El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.
So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what […]
Fires in Spring? It’s normal for fires to peak in Spring in NSW
Greg Mullins is a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner and a councillor on the Climate Council, he implies in the Sydney Morning Herald that this is abnormal and that fires are starting earlier:
If anyone tells you, “This is part of a normal cycle” or “We’ve had fires like this before”, smile politely and walk away, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
In NSW, our worst fire years were almost always during an El Nino event, and major property losses generally occurred from late November to February. Based on more than a century of weather observations our official fire danger season is legislated from October 1 to March 31. During the 2000s though, major fires have regularly started in August and September, and sometimes go through to April.
This year, by the beginning of November, we had already lost about as many homes as during the disastrous 2001-2002 bushfire season. We’ve now eclipsed 1994 fire losses.
Mosomoso: The fire season in NSW is spring — this is not early, this is “late season”
For those […]
That’s it: It was 4% cloudier in 1985, then roughly the same after 2000 — that’s the Pause and the Cause
A new paper in Russian, by OM Pokrovsky, shows that global cloud cover decreased markedly from 1986 to 2000. This is a very large decline in terms of the planetary atmosphere. Pokrovsky uses ISCCP satellite data (the “International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project” — a US program). It’s the best cloud data there is. The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”. [IPCC, 2007]
Clouds cover two-thirds of the Earths surface, reflecting around 30% of the total energy from the Sun back to space. A small change in cloud cover can easily warm or cool the planet, like a giant pop-up shade-sail.
This, on its own, explains all the warming that occurred from 1986 – 2000. It explains the pause. We don’t know why clouds decreased, but we know it wasn’t due to CO2, which kept rising relentlessly year after year, and even faster after the turn of the century.
Something else is driving cloud formation, or […]
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