Paul Homewood notes the region is cooling rapidly and it is not just surface cooling, it applies to the 700m depth that Argo buoys measure. Graphs thanks to Ole Humlum.
…
To give it some perspective that cooling is back to temperatures of about 20 years ago (see below). This is localized, not global, but still interesting (rather especially to our European friends).
The man-made aerosols prediction that bit the dust…
A paper by Robsom et al in the last couple of weeks said that the cooling trend was clear, started in 2005 and really shouldn’t have happened if man-made aerosols were controlling the North Atlantic.
“Here we show that since 2005 a large volume of the upper North Atlantic nOcean has cooled significantly by approximately 0.45 C.”
“The observed upper ocean cooling since 2005 is not consistent with the hypothesis that anthropogenic aerosols directly drive Atlantic temperatures12.”
…
So the climate models are wrong about the “aerosols” excuse which is used to explain any inconvenient non-warming phase. There are less aerosols over the North Atlantic now. This cooling really shouldn’t be happening. Looks like it’s cooling due to “internal variability” which is code for natural cycles that our models don’t understand. From Robson:
The Guardian are in hot pursuit of the nickel and dime Coal-Yeti.
Analysis of Peabody Energy court documents show company backed trade groups, lobbyists and thinktanks dubbed ‘heart and soul of climate denial’
The thing is, if Peabody was keeping the heart and soul of climate denial alive, it is now flat broke — it’s over for climate denial. No heart. No soul. Denial is dead! But can anyone spot the difference… ?
Poor Guardian schmucks. Peabody were funding people who write what they believe, so Peabody came and went and the same people are still writing what they believe. If climate skeptics were in it for the money, they’d be alarmists.
Yes, Do. Lets talk about the Funding
If climate skeptics were in it for the money, they’d be alarmists.
Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson repeat all the usual sacred incantations completely blind to the real money. At one point they are so stuck for “big money” they whip out a $10,000 figure, and in an article about Peabody, that’s not even from Peabody, but from Arch Coal. General Electric make $20 billion a year in profits from “renewables” — when is The Guardian going to expose their political donations or funding of “dozens” of extreme left wing front groups (to use their own lingo right back at them). Not to mention the other itsy bitsy enterprizes feeding off the scare called Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, and Panasonic, I could go on. Governments burn $70 billion a year subsidizing renewables, and global renewable energy investment reached $250 Billion last year, give or take a hundred billion (who cares)? It’s all part of a $1.5T climate change industry.
Whatever the influence of PeaBody is, it was nothing in comparison to the cashed up golden gravy train. Goldenberg and Bengtsson are the useful gullibles taking photos of mice while they ignore the Eleph….
Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.
Environmental campaigners said they had not known for certain that the company was funding an array of climate denial groups – and that the breadth of that funding took them by surprise.
After twenty years of non-stop propaganda denouncing Big-Coal and the massive industry of climate denial — environmental campaigners thought there would only be one dozen right, not two? Imagine their surprise.
“These groups collectively are the heart and soul of climate denial,” said Kert Davies, founder of the Climate Investigation Center, who has spent 20 years tracking funding for climate denial. “It’s the broadest list I have seen of one company funding so many nodes in the denial machine.”
The biggest mistake the coal companies made was not getting more serious and funding more skeptics.
Greedy Green Hubris gone wrong? It took months of bad choices to achieve this Gold-Star Moment in Bad Management:
Tasmania’s state-owned Hydro-electric power generator could face legal action for damages after admitting it cloud-seeded in or near water catchments the day before disastrous flooding, although heavy rain was forecast.
Tasmania shut their only fossil fuel power plant in August last year, and relied on renewable energy and one sole Basslink electricity cable to mainland Australia. The cable was supposed to be a back up supply but was bringing in 40% of Tasmania’s electricity, and it broke in December. But a green and greedy approach in Tasmania meant that the state had already run its dams down to 26% levels by selling too much electricity to the mainland at high “renewable” subsidized prices. That was a low level at the start of summer, normally a drier season in Tasmania. After the Basslink cable broke, the dam levels fell to a precipitous 13%, so fast that the green state had to bring in diesel generators just to keep the lights on. They also switched back on the Tamar Gas plant in late January. So much for being the “100% renewable” state.
When rain was forecast in June the hydro managers must have been delighted, but even faced with the forecasts they seeded clouds on June 5th as well. (Rivers were rising on June 4 and flood warnings were valid for many areas of Tasmania.) This was the same storm system that hit Sydney on its way to Tasmania, causing deaths and threatened houses. Flood damage and losses from that same system in Tasmania now amount to around $100 million. One man is still missing, feared drowned.
The Basslink cable is projected to be fixed before the end of June, and in Tasmania they already had the wettest May since 1958. Dam levels had been restored to 20%. They only had to wait a few more weeks.
Hydro Tasmania’s cloud-seeding plane was sent up on Sunday morning and seeded clouds with silver iodide to increase rainfall for an hour and 34 minutes, from 10.57am, despite the weather forecast.
The operation targeted the Upper Derwent catchment, an area that less than 24 hours later saw damaging floods which left one man missing, feared drowned at Ouse and caused major damage to property and stock.
The cloud-seeding also was within about 10km of the Mersey-Forth catchment area, which also hours later experienced rapid and disastrous flooding that killed a woman and inundated dozens of homes at Latrobe.
One earlier report showed that cloud-seeding increased rainfall by 8% over a month in target areas. (Which is a difficult statistic to use to compare with the current situation).
The government owned Tasmanian Hydro defends itself:
“There were no flood warnings in effect for the Upper Derwent at the time of the flight,” a company statement said. “This area received a substantial, but not excessive, amount of rain after Sunday morning’s flight.
“Water in the (flooding) Ouse River came from the overtopping of Lake Augusta due to the flood event. Lake Augusta is not in the catchment targeted by Sunday’s cloud-seeding flight. Hydro Tasmania’s cloud-seeding program is currently on hold.”
To put this in some perspective, the current cost of $560 million is already well over twice the $230 million it cost to build the Tamer Valley gas station.
One thing is for sure, the short term money that Hydro Tasmania made between 2012 and 2014 will be completely and utterly dwarfed by the cost of this mess.
On May 12th Tasmania Hydro proudly announced they had been 100% renewable again for a whole week. They had turned off the gas and diesel and had to use hydro because some of the smaller dams were in danger of overflowing.
For info: Tasmania has about 500,000 people, and the Bass Strait that separates it from mainland Australia is 240km wide, 400km long and about 60m deep. It is notoriously wild, and infamous for disappearing ships. It is described as twice as wide and twice as rough as the English Channel.
h/t Marcus, David B, Robert for keeping me up to date.
Yet again, as the onion is peeled we find that at every stage the human influence is so small it is undetectable. Go with the data — humans are not even driving global CO2 levels. What does? — maybe ocean currents, phytoplankton, Australian deserts something else…
We need global anti-ENSO programs. Give us more money. Save the tradewinds!
Chinese Emissions? Take the emissions figures with a pound of salt. Carbon accounting is hopelessly inaccurate, China can’t be trusted, and everything else is a guess. How can we run a global market on figures so prone to corruption. Is China artificially elevating figures now so they can make cheap “reductions” in future, or are they underestimating figures to reduce the pressure on them to sign up? Could it be that they just can’t account due to the sheer difficulty of it in such a vast and varied economy?
Indian PM, Modi, has shaken hands and said nice phrases but India isn’t going to commit to Paris until they are ready (if ever). That’s a bit of a blow for the Paris agreement which has only 17 signatories of the 55 countries it needs. For the Paris agreement to come into effect it is also supposed to include countries that produce 55% of global emissions. Thanks to the GWPF for compiling some of the stories here.
There are two versions of reality out there in media-land. Some Media spins it as “success”:
And somewhere out there will be poor sods who aren’t paying attention, and think that India might actually reduce emissions. But instead of megatons of carbon, they’ll be getting a “jolt of momentum”. Did you feel it? Me neither.
WASHINGTON — India has agreed to work towards joining the Paris Agreement on climate change this year, India and the United States said on Tuesday, giving a jolt of momentum to the international fight to curb global warming.
But the hard word is “No” — it didn’t happen, won’t happen this year, and was below expectations:
The Whitehouse statement contains these telling lines and the misleading use of “similarly”:
The United States reaffirms its commitment to join the Agreement as soon as possible this year. India similarly has begun its processes to work toward this shared objective.
By which we can definitely say that India has not done nothing. They have written a memo.
It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story
The root problem, supposedly, is that skepticism is spreading. But the real reason is not the communication, it’s the message itself. It is a dead dog. It’s boring, repetitive, wrong, and the end of the world came and went already. Oh wolfitty-wolf.
So stop being unengaging:
Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse.
Engage people: set up a real debate, put some reputations on the line and watch the ratings sour. Let Professors pit their wits against skeptics. Toss in a live audience of engineers and geologists. (Hehe.)
Linguistic analysis found that the most recent IPCC report was less readable than seminal papers by Einstein.
Get with the game. The unreadableness is deliberate. Einstein wanted people to understand his papers.
… climate communication needs to engage people at a philosophical, sensory and feeling level. People need to be able to feel and touch the new climate reality; to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain and be helped to conceive their existence differently.
There are multimillion dollar Coke campaigns with less psychoanalytic depth than this. (The doggier the message, the harder the sell). When docs were selling penicillin they didn’t need to “explore unfamiliar emotional terrain”.
How much money is on this pyre?
Under the global Future Earth initiative, a team of around 60,000 scientists and social scientists has been assembled to understand and report on the physical, tangible dimensions of the problem. I argue we need 60,000 arts and humanities experts to focus upon the intangibles – the communication, engagement and meaning-making aspects of the problem.
Never waste a million when you can waste a billion, right?
Science-communication angst starts with the science. Get the science right and that will solve most of the communication problems.
Oh the truisms:
Humanity will never be able to defeat a threat it cannot perceive.
Exactly. Go ye Warrior, and fight the imperceptible threat…
It’s time that the warmists awoke,
To the fact that their cause is a joke,
As their art it appears,
Can make silk from sows’ears,
Having first bought a pig in a poke.
“…at Collaroy, heavy earth-moving equipment is standing by to prevent the huge seas from further undermining home units and a house which has been in danger for several days.”
Blame climate change, without blaming climate change
The climate scientists are telling us that there will be less of this type of winter storm. But all the other experts, planners, engineers — get their moment of glory in the media to tell us that climate change will make this worse. In such a way does a media marketing team (like, say, the ABC) convey the sense of alarm, even when their favourite experts are actually saying the opposite.
Such storms are typical at this time of year, with as many as eight such lows a year. … climate models estimate the number of such lows may decrease by 25 per cent or more by the end of the century, particularly in winter.
ABC 7:30 report didn’t have to ask if climate change caused this storm or flood, it just needed to find an expert of something to say “we get more of them”:
ASHISH SHARMA, SCHOOL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING, UNSW: The type of flooding that you’re seeing from this big East Coast low event is something you can expect to see much more of in a more localised, more regional type of setting, especially in the urban centres of the world.
TRACY BOWDEN: After analysing rainfall and temperature data across Australia’s East Coast, engineer Ashish Sharma and his team predict more frequent and dramatic flash flooding, but stormwater systems aren’t designed to cope with these changing rainfall patterns.
ASHISH SHARMA: If global temperatures continue to increase, then a warmer atmosphere will store more moisture and the storms will get more intense and they will get more concentrated in time and in space.
Sharma’s a rainfall and waterflow expert, and he may think he’s talking about town planning and stormwater drains, but he has the “right” quote, and it all meshes neatly for viewers. More floods, more storms, global warming. It’s a package.
Flash floods such as those experienced across the state will increasingly become the new normal as global warming continues, according to research published by the University of NSW in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
The study finds a link between changing air temperatures and intensified storms occurring across more localised spaces.
“As [global] warming proceeds, storms are shrinking in space and in time,” says the study’s co-author Conrad Wasko. “They are becoming more concentrated over a smaller area, and the rainfall is coming down more plentifully and with more intensity over a shorter period of time.”
Because so much of academia is trained to be politically correct it’s not hard for an activist journalist to seek out a secondary expert and get the quote they seek.
Roger Franklin points out that Sharma has his name on about $2.5m worth of climate grants. He is probably very genuine, surrounded by a groupthink bubble of 100%-like-minds at UNSW (with Andy Pitman, Steven Sherwood, Chris Turney etc). But while the ABC won’t invite any skeptic outside of a “peer reviewed” climate scientist to talk, they aren’t so fussy about getting engineers, or even a coastal planning professor (below) to add to the blur of “experts”.
Not long ago, when the land was parched, droughts were going to become the new normal. Apparently, whatever is is “going to be” the new normal already is the new normal by the time we hear about it on the ABC and Fairfax. Bravo the modeling-prophets.
There will apparently be less storms if the climate warms, and there’s no evidence that this is due to man-made climate change anyway, or that climate models have any ability to predict these storms. What we need are more climate modelers.
Hence the plea on big-government-media for more big-government-science makes perfect sense:
BARBARA NORMAN: …I might as well add to this, the pending sacking of CSIRO scientists who are providing the data to local councils who cannot afford that data in their own right.
If that data disappears with those scientists disappearing then councils will again be having to make decisions in an even greater vacuum.
Should this be a wake-up call to the CSIRO itself to stop some of those sackings of the climate scientists?
BARBARA NORMAN: Absolutely it should be a wake-up call. This is where we need the science…
The councils have been ignoring their own history for a hundred years (see photos above).
Reporters can spin ‘expert’ views,
Or some ‘warming’ effect that they choose,
To claim that a storm,
Is a new man-made norm,
Which then becomes M.S.M. news.
Massive storm across Australia’s East Coast — 3 dead, 3 missing. Nearly half a meter of rain fell on Wooli (469mm) in 24 hours. Record rain and flooding occurred in NSW, Victoria, and Tasmania. Sympathies to victims and their families.
Houses left hanging as gardens and a pool disappear.
[The Australian] Families whose multi-million-dollar Sydney homes were last night beginning to break away in another king tide could have faced fines of up to $250,000 if they even used sand bags to try to protect their properties.
Houses at Collaroy have been under threat since at least 1974 but the council has failed to build a sea wall or pump sand on to the beach because of environmental concerns and a belief that it was spending public money for the benefit of private landholders.
Or make that a million dollar fine:
Planning Minister Rob Stokes is proposing to increase fines to $1 million for residents who use sandbags to try to protect their properties as part of a new coastal management bill before parliament.
The council has been considering the issue of sea walls since at least 1992. A proposal in 2002 to build a sea wall was shelved after thousands of residents in the area protested. One concern was that sea walls could cause loss of sand.
Let’s get those priorities straight.
Landholders must pay for their own sea walls:
The council has now implemented a coastal zone management plan that allows for the building of sea walls, but only if land holders go through an exhaustive approval process and pay the full cost.
We would never expect ratepayers to build a private seawall. But all Australians should pay a carbon tax to change the global weather.
The ABC uses photos of reef bleaching on Flowerpot Rock in American Samoa in stories about the Great Barrier Reef.
The chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt says that activist groups are distorting surveys, maps and data to exaggerate the coral bleaching on the reef. The bleaching affects 22% of the reef and is mostly localized to the far northern section, which has good prospects of recovery.
Two reef groups are in conflict. One is Reichelt’s GBR Authority, and the other is a special “National Coral Bleaching Taskforce” run by a guy called Terry Hughes. The Australian media was overrun with stories last week about how a report was censored to hide the damage. What was under-reported was the conflict and the propaganda.
The real problem appears to be that yet another agency was set up to find a crisis, and their existence depends on finding one. The Taskforce was set up in October last year.
Dr Reichelt said the authority had withdrawn from a joint announcement on coral bleaching with Professor Hughes this week “because we didn’t think it told the whole story”. The taskforce said mass bleaching had killed 35 per cent of corals on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef.
Dr Reichelt said maps accompanying the research had been misleading, exaggerating the impact. “I don’t know whether it was a deliberate sleight of hand or lack of geographic knowledge but it certainly suits the purpose of the people who sent it out,” he said.
“This is a frightening enough story with the facts, you don’t need to dress them up. We don’t want to be seen as saying there is no problem out there but we do want people to understand there is a lot of the reef that is unscathed.”
Dr Reichelt said there had been widespread misinterpretation of how much of the reef had died.
“We’ve seen headlines stating that 93 per cent of the reef is practically dead,” he said.
“We’ve also seen reports that 35 per cent, or even 50 per cent, of the entire reef is now gone.
–Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The censored report apparently also said good things about Turnbull’s reef plan. Hard to believe the government would be in a rush to censor that.
How bad is the propaganda? So bad the ABC and Greenpeace use photos of coral in Samoa
We have the largest coral reef structure in the world, but sometimes the ABC can’t find a picture of bleaching from it, instead using an image from Samoa (top right). Greenpeace used the same trick. The Courier Mail reported that the ABC and Greenpeace were caught, the ABC apologized, and replaced the photo on one of their many pages, but 7 months later, the unlabelled Samoan image still appears on stories about Barrier Reef bleaching and on stories of mass coral bleaching. Looks like a billion dollars isn’t enough to pay for someone to do a 2 minute search at the ABC. Fact checking? Who cares?
Reefs do recover
The world was hotter during the Holocene optimum, yet somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived.
“…voters have swung considerably towards backing Brexit. 52 per cent of people surveyed said they were planning on voting for Britain to leave the European Union, compared to 48 per cent who are voting in. The ICM poll, carried out for the Guardian…”
Alternatively, the Opinium Survey“puts support for staying in the European Union down at 43 per cent, whilst backing for Leave has grown to 41 per cent, with experts saying the results “mask” a large swing to Brexit. They also unearthed evidence that undecided voters are abandoning the Europhile side in their droves amid a relentlessly negative, fearmongering campaign on behalf of Brussels.” It “will spark panic in the corridors of Westminster because it shows that Remain are haemorrhaging voters at a crucial time in the referendum campaign.”
The Australian Federal Election is only 4 weeks off, but is largely irrelevant, no matter who we vote for. But things are hot, hot, hot in both the UK and the US this year. Both polls are already having a seismic international effect. Can the UK free itself from the faceless UK EU bureaucrats, and the five presidents they can’t name and don’t vote for?
Here’s how a democracy becomes a technocracy: when the legislation decrees a government department edit is “truth” and threatens to jail anyone who disagrees. For a whole 3 months California’s Senate didn’t treat this bill like the democratic-leprosy that it is. Today it’s just been “moved to inactive” which means it is out of action for the moment — immediate threat over — but the fact that it was proposed and passed several Senate committee stages in California should rattle the bones of every freeman. A tyranny beckons.
There are already laws that stop people from profiting from lies and deception. They apply to everyone. Why do they need climate skeptic specific laws? Because the skeptics speak the truth.
This is nuclear stuff:
Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016, would have authorized prosecutors to sue fossil fuel companies, think tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.”
So close. Washington Post:
A landmark bill allowing for the prosecution of climate change dissent effectively died Thursday after the California Senate failed to take it up before the deadline.
Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016, would have authorized prosecutors to sue fossil fuel companies, think tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.”
The measure, which cleared two Senate committees, provided a four-year window in the statute of limitations on violations of the state’s Unfair Competition Law, allowing legal action to be brought until Jan. 1 on charges of climate change “fraud” extending back indefinitely.
Rather than being a law that applies to one and all, the bill starts by defining their “truths”, entrenching falsehoods, and an immature corrupted scientific field into legislation — hard to believe. If a government department was — banish the thought — wrong about something, this type of legislation would jail people for saying so — all hail the US EPA?
SEC. 2. (a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(1) There is broad scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming is occurring and changing the world’s climate patterns, and that the primary cause is the emission of greenhouse gases from the production and combustion of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas.
(2) The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) states that the buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases results in impacts that include the following:
(A) Changing temperature and precipitation patterns.
(B) Increases in ocean temperatures, sea level, and acidity.
(C) Melting of glaciers and sea ice.
(D) Changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events.
(E) Shifts in ecosystem characteristics, such as the length of the growing season, timing of flower blooms, and migration of birds.
(F) Increased threats to human health.
So “the legislature” firstly declares there is a broad scientific consensus, despite there being not one single study or even so much as an anonymous internet poll that demonstrates that. There is not even a consensus among climate scientists. Two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, aren’t they scientists? Oh-yessity, and their branch is the kind that doesn’t need a consensus. When was the last time a state legislated that Dept of Transport declares there is Conservation of Momentum? There is a good reason we don’t make laws about more complex phenomena — otherwise we’d have jailed people for saying that continents drift, eggs are healthy, and crash diets might stop diabetes.
The legislation has a few other little bombs — like retrospectively removing the statute of limitations:
An extraordinary bill in the California legislature, promoted as making it easier to sue fossil fuel companies over their involvements in public debate, would lift the four-year statute of limitations of the state’s already extremely liberal Unfair Competition Law, otherwise known as s. 17200 — and retrospectively, so as to revive decades’ worth of time-lapsed claims “with respect to scientific evidence regarding the existence, extent, or current or future impacts of anthropogenic induced anthropogenic-induced climate change.” Despite a 2004 round of voter-sponsored reform which curbed some of its worst applications, s. 17200 still enables what a California court called “legal shakedown” operations in which “ridiculously minor” violations serve as the predicate for automatic entitlement to damages, attorneys’ fees, and other relief.
If skeptics were profiting from lies, they would already be in jail.
It’s not dead. The legislation can be offered up as an amendment or a gut and pass (replace the contents of any bill moving thru the legislature) at the last minute and passed with little or no notice. I think this was a trial balloon to see how loud the pushback was going to be so that the democrat majority would know how devious they need to be to pass it. It is a targeted attack not only on the First Amendment, but anyone who would commit badthink. The totalitarian impulse runs strong among democrats these days and it is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better. Solution may end up being dusting off the Vigilance Committees of the California Gold Rush years. Cheers –
There’s a nuclear fusion reactor in the neighborhood that weighs 300,000 times more than Earth. It’s eight minutes away at the speed of light, has 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, and surrounds us with changing magnetic and electric fields while it rains down charged particles. Some years the Sun throws ten times as much extreme-UV our way as it does in other years. Virtually none of this is included in mainstream climate models.
The constant wind of charged particles blows at a million miles an hour — the flow waves and wiggles, shifting direction. The speed of the solar wind correlates with sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. The solar magnetic field reaches right to the edge of the solar system, but despite that size, it turns itself completely upside down every 11 years. Reconnecting magnetic field lines cause explosions in space, and we have barely started to collect data on this. During the magnetic cycle the sun changes color, though the changes are invisible to us. The spectrum rolls from more UV to more infra red, and each type of light has different effects. Unlike infra red, UV transforms oxygen into highly reactive ozone which creates warming in certain zones, sometimes high over the poles, sometimes more so over the equator. These warmer blobs expand and it’s possible that they shift the jet stream positions, which affects cloud formation and albedo. UV also reaches further into the oceans where it affects plankton, which in turn produce gases that seed denser clouds. Forests and plants on land also seed clouds and influence rain.
Running through all of this, and from a different direction, are cosmic rays which also appear to seed clouds. Their path through our atmosphere is also affected by the solar magnetic field.
Complicating things even further, the Sun may have a dual core — two dynamos operating in the north and south on cycles that are nearly but not quite in sync.
Years from now, people will gasp that the so called experts of the millennium thought the Sun could have little effect — apart from just shining light upon us.
The extra sunlight coming from a more active Sun appears to have a much larger effect than it should in the long run, but has no effect in the year that it occurs. Something is both neutralizing it in the short run, but amplifying it in the long term. David Evans lists below some different mechanisms, with references, for ways that the Sun could be controlling our cloud cover, or albedo. There are undoubtedly others that could be Force D, N or X. One factor is briefly “notching” out the effect of the small spike in solar light during the peak of a solar cycle (Force N). Paradoxically, some other factor appears to be at work throughout the cycle but is delayed by one solar cycle (Force D) — it works in the opposite direction to Force N.
We don’t know the mechanisms behind forces X, N, or D. In this post we canvas a few of the possibilities, but offer no opinion on which if any it might be.
Possibilities
Among others:
Solar stimulation of ozone via UV or energetic electron or particle precipitation — which changes the relative proportions of ozone and the relative heights of the tropopause at the poles and equator, which in turn affects the degree of north-south extent in the jet streams, which affects the amount of air mass mixing at boundaries of climate zones, which determines cloudiness and albedo (Wilde 2010 and 2015, Woollings, Lockwood, Masato, Bell, and Gray 2010 [1]).
Cosmic rays are suspected of encouraging cloud formation and thus affecting albedo, and are influenced by the Sun’s magnetic field, so they may be involved in force D. Cosmic rays decrease during TSI peaks, presumably decreasing clouds and albedo and warming the Earth’s surface, so they are not responsible for force N.
Solar stimulation of plankton — which produce aerosols that affect clouds (McCoy, et al., 2015 [2])
Meteoritic dust influences albedo, depositing particles large enough to reflect and scatter light but small enough to persist in the stratosphere for months. Meteor rates vary inversely with sunspot numbers (Ellyet, 1977 [3]), so, like cosmic rays, they might explain force D but not force N. The dust contains minerals that catalyze plankton growth (see previous point). (This possibility suggested by Peter Sinclair, a reader of this blog, and there will be a blog post by Peter on this soon.)
The interplanetary electric field affects cloud cover (Voiculescu, Usoskin, and Condurache-Bota, 2013 [4]).
Asymmetries in the motion of the Sun about the center of mass of solar system are correlated with deviations in the Earth’s length of day (LOD). The time rate of change of the LOD correlates with the phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation, while deviations of the LOD from its long term trend correlate with the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (Wilson 2011 [8]). These ocean oscillations are correlated with decadal changes in surface temperature, so may be responsible for or related to force D.
The Jovian planets may influence solar activity (Sharp 2013 [5], Wilson 2013 [6], McCracken, Beer, and Steinhilber 2014 [7]) and might also be responsible for changes in force X/D half of a full solar cycle afterwards.
Or there may be solar influences which are not yet explained, e.g. Stober 2010. Force X/D may involve combinations of the factors above.
Possible Clue to Force X/D?
There is a faint chance that the Nimbus-7/ERB measurements of TSI from 1979 to 1993 may have inadvertently measured (some aspect of) force X/D. These TSI measurements are notable both for being the earliest and for disagreeing with later TSI measurements by being notably higher. Nimbus-7/ERB measured or emphasized different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as higher energy UV.
Figure 1: TSI data from late 1978, when satellite observations started. “Instrument offsets are unresolved calibration differences, much of which are due to internal instrument scatter” Source.
Yoshimura (1996 [9]) found that the ERB-TSI lagged the sunspots by 10.3 years (pp. 606–7). Force X/D lags sunspots by that duration, so perhaps the difference between whatever Nimbus-7/ERB measured and what later TSI instruments measured is related to force X/D.
Yoshimura concluded (p. 601): “We argue that the time lags between the TSI and magnetic field variations demand us to consider the influences of the Sun on the Earth and on the space environment through two channels which are physically linked together but their variations may not necessarily be in phase in time. One channel is through the irradiance variations and the other is through the magnetic field variations. Time evolution of a phenomenon on the Earth that is influenced by the Sun can be in phase as well as out of phase with the solar magnetic cycle if this phenomenon is mainly caused by the irradiance variations of the Sun”.
(The Yoshimura paper was drawn to our attention by SunSword, a reader on this blog.)
The process is the punishment. Agents of the Big-government Blob have access to a bottomless pit of lawyers. They can not only afford endless trials, for them it’s an advantage. Drag it out, wear opponents down, exhaust their coffers. And while the case is ever-pending and never-ending it’s already a win for the accuser — silencing critics, and endorsing celebrity “victim-status”. When the defendants witnesses are older and wiser, there’s another dark advantage too — vale Bob Carter.
What they cannot afford though is discovery.
So they can’t afford to sue a guy like Mark Steyn.
As Steyn says: “It is particularly absurd that an interlocutory ruling on a piece of legislation intended to expedite cases has now taken over two years and counting.”
What is Mann hiding?
— Jo
Mark Steyn Files For Expedited Hearing in Mann v. Steyn, et al
Washington, DC — Today, Mark Steyn requested that the Superior Court of the District of Columbia expedite the hearing and lift the stay of discovery in the case of Michael Mann v. Steyn, et al. It has been two years since the case was referred to the Appellate Court, where it is remains in limbo.
Mr. Steyn has asked the court to move forward with the case as material witnesses for the defense have passed away since the referral.
“Something needed to be done to jumpstart this case, a case that threatens the most fundamental First Amendment freedoms. The case was brought in mid-2012. It is now four years later and the appeals from defendants’ special motions to dismiss have not been decided, nor has discovery proceeded,” stated Dan Kornstein, Steyn’s lawyer. “The passage of time since the appeal was argued in this case a year and a half ago while a stay of proceedings was in effect at the trial level has stalled a case whose very existence chills freedom of speech. To correct this situation and get the case moving, Mark Steyn filed this request to ask the trial court to lift the stay of proceedings even while the appeal is pending. We hope the trial judge grants the request.”
Mr. Steyn’s request is in line with case law, as cited in the amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the defendants, stating that SLAPP laws exist “to remedy the ‘nationally recognized problem’ of abusive lawsuits against speech on public issues by providing defendants ‘with substantive rights to expeditiously and economically dispense of litigation’ that qualified as a SLAPP – in other words, to nip such lawsuits in the bud.” Furthermore, “[T]he special motion to dismiss must generally be granted prior to discovery, D.C. Code § 16-5502(c)(1), ‘[t]o ensure [that] a defendant is not subject to the expensive and time consuming discovery that is often used in a SLAPP as a means to prevent or punish.’”
Nature ties itself in knots here, and reveals a lot more than they probably meant too, but mostly about themselves rather than about Antarctica. If it’s correct, the implications from this study are pretty big, not that the study will tell you that. The term “Global warming” is tossed under a bus, along with almost all the Antarctic man-made scares of the last two decades. The political nature of Nature is on full display.
This time Nature claims it has found the cause of the Antarctic pause. Apparently this now finally resolves yet another conundrum (fantastic, what!) that was, as usual, not called a conundrum until it was solved. Another secret problem fixed. Where was the press release telling us there was a problem?
Those who said there was a conundrum were just deniers. It’s right there in the press release, paragraph two:
The study resolves a scientific conundrum, and an inconsistent pattern of warming often seized on by climate deniers.
Which rather begs the question: If there was a conundrum then the skeptics who pointed it out were not deniers, but correct. And if there was no conundrum, and deniers were denying something, then this is not a new finding at all. Alternately perhaps some researchers “knew” the answer they were going to find, and the other researchers, who can’t see the future, are deniers?
Is Nature reporting a discovery, or issuing a political press release?
The use of “denier” in a science paper has a price. How, I wonder, does Nature define homo sapiens climate denier? — Bipedal primates who deny the sky?
Researchers now throw global warming under the bus?
“When we hear the term ‘global warming,’ we think of warming everywhere at the same rate,” Armour said. “We are moving away from this idea of global warming and more toward the idea of regional patterns of warming, which are strongly shaped by ocean currents.”
Look out for the death of the “global warming” term, and the rise of regional warming scares. Reality bites again.
The miracle of deep ocean currents?
Perhaps the paper has some teeth to it, but it’s not obvious in the press release. They appear to be announcing discoveries from text books. It’s been known for years that the deepest oceans take about 1000 years to turn over. So it is entirely expected that the water around Antarctica is old and cold.
The circumpolar current and deep ocean circulation has been known for years (as in this old popular map).
Deep, old water explains why Antarctic Ocean hasn’t warmed
The waters surrounding Antarctica may be one of the last places to experience human-driven climate change. New research from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that ocean currents explain why the seawater has stayed at roughly the same temperature while most of the rest of the planet has warmed.
Apparently climate modelers didn’t know basic ocean circulation and thought the heat would just mix downward — yes, even I am a bit amazed at this next para:
“The old idea was that heat taken up at the surface would just mix downward, and that’s the reason for the slow warming,” Armour said. “But the observations show that heat is actually being carried away from Antarctica, northward along the surface.”
Really – that was the old idea?
Look out here: It will take centuries for us to run out of cold ocean…
The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so distant, that it will take centuries before the water reaching the surface has experienced modern global warming.
Follow the implications — this is going to keep going. Antarctica will be fine for centuries? There’s no rapid sea level rise coming and no imminent destruction of the shelf? Forget all the images of penguins dying from global warming which is regional not-warming in Antarctica. So were all the papers blaming “global warming” for Antarctic icebergs, starving penguins, and collapsing ice shelves all wrong in attributing them to man-made warming which won’t arrive there for centuries? Could be.
Observations and climate models show that the unique currents around Antarctica continually pull deep, centuries-old water up to the surface — seawater that last touched Earth’s atmosphere before the machine age, and has never experienced fossil fuel-related climate change. The paper is published May 30 in Nature Geoscience.
“With rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,” said lead author Kyle Armour, a UW assistant professor of oceanography and of atmospheric sciences. “We show that it’s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.”
Gale-force westerly winds that constantly whip around Antarctica act to push surface water north, continually drawing up water from below. The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so distant, that it will take centuries before the water reaching the surface has experienced modern global warming.
Ocean circulation is fairly textbook stuff, hardly a new discovery. The image below is from a post in 2010 where William Kininmonth explained the importance of our ocean circulation. Surface water pushes north.
…
And we’re back to “modeled discoveries”. Call it simulated science?
Someone put dye into a climate model? That’s got to be bad.
In the Atlantic, the northward flow of the ocean’s surface continues all the way to the Arctic. The study used dyes in model simulations to show that seawater that has experienced the most climate change tends to clump up around the North Pole. This is another reason why the Arctic’s ocean and sea ice are bearing the brunt of global warming, while Antarctica is largely oblivious.
Seems the real deniers were the ones who denied the Antarctic Pause, and the failure of the climate models.
All the modelers said CO2 would amplify the warming at both poles. The models were wrong.
REFERENCE / Peer reviewed political flyer
Emily R. Newsom et al. Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport. Nature Geoscience, May 2016 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2731
The Top Ten solar companies don’t pay any dividends
Shell Chief Executive Ben van Beurden says he is wary of switching completely to renewables as it may threaten the very survival of the company.
Amazing that the oil and gas giant Shell got its shareholders to vote on whether they should put their profits towards becoming a 100% renewables corporation.
Major investors have been applying pressure on Shell to increase focus on renewables in order to mitigate climate change risks.
97 percent of Shell shareholders at its annual meeting on Tuesday rejected a resolution to invest profits from fossil fuels to become a renewable energy company. The Anglo-Dutch firm had previously said it was against the proposal.
So despite twenty years of relentless spin that “Clean Green Energy” is the future, 97% of investors know it isn’t.
Oil and gas companies have come increasingly under the spotlight particularly after the COP21 agreement in Paris at the end of last year and its reinforced goal to limit global carbon emissions.
The CEO knows exactly how much money solar energy makes:
Van Beurden said all the top 10 solar companies in the world represent $14bn in capital employed and invested $5 billion in solar energy last year, but none had so far paid any dividends.
With no grip on numbers, Green activists will push into fantasy land every time.
Trump vows to cancel the Paris climate deal, stop funding UN global warming programs and save the coal industry.
Gotta love these plans. No wonder the big-government fans are apoplectic over Donald Trump as he paints targets on their most sacred cows.
In Australia Bill Shorten, potential Prime Minister, called Trump: “Barking Mad.” Shorten, showing his diplomatic talent, was burning goodwill with a potential US president and 45% of voters in the largest economy in the world and our most important strategic ally.
Below, the Trump plans this week: to use cheap energy; to stop trying to change the weather, and finish feeding faceless foreign bureaucracies.
Trump: “We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement,” he said.
Trump slammed both rivals in his speech, saying their policies would kill jobs and force the United States “to be begging for oil again” from Middle East producers.
Trump said slashing regulation would help the United States achieve energy independence and reduce America’s reliance on Middle Eastern producers. “Imagine a world in which oil cartels will no longer use energy as a weapon,” he said.
In addition to his pledge to pull out of the Paris climate deal, Trump promised to only work with “environmentalists whose only agenda is protecting nature” and to “focus on real environmental challenges, not the phony ones”.
It’s always the same. A new paper adds one more magical fine-tuning-cog to the models and promises “more accurate predictions”. There are a million small cogs we can add and it takes years to show they don’t deliver. These wheels can spin forever. The real climate machine has a whole extra exhaust pipe to which the models are blind.
Conventional models assume increasing atmospheric CO2 warms the surface, then apply the feedbacks to the surface warming. But if feedbacks start up in the atmosphere instead, everything changes.
The assumption (bolded below) is the problem —
There are many processes which affect the surface climate: changes to the sun’s activity, to the cloud cover, precipitation patterns, or soil water content to name just a few. Currently climate scientists relate these processes by looking at how much they change the energy budget, described by perturbations in the radiative forcing. The existing assumption is that if a given process introduces a certain radiative forcing, then there will always be the same response in the surface air temperature. However, this assumption doesn’t hold for the temperature response on climatological scales because it neglects variations in the effective heat capacity of the atmosphere.
They are still focused on the effect of any and every “radiative forcing” on the surface of Earth. All “forcings” are not the same. It seems so banal — 2 extra watts in the upper trop is not the same as 2 watts on the surface. If the forcing occurs ten kilometers up, then feedbacks up there are what matter first. But this whole class of feedbacks don’t even exist in the GCM’s. If the extra energy just reroutes to space direct from the upper troposphere, who cares how thick the boundary-layer is?
The river of energy wants to flow to cold space. That’s “downhill”. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It provides a path (call it a pipe) to space. Why wouldn’t energy take the shortcut?
The SafeGuard legislation appears to be a shapeshiftin tool — it can be a minor fine to hit a few companies ($1.8 million) that have increased their output, or it’s a trading scheme that covers half the Australian economy. It all depends on the “cap” that’s set.
Mr Hunt yesterday rejected claims a “secret” emissions trading scheme had been buried in the Coalition’s policies, which have been roundly criticised by environment groups as too little, too late. Mr Hunt said there were clear reasons why the Coalition “safeguards mechanisms” could not be considered a carbon trading scheme.
The clear reason it’s not an ETS?
“Our policy is not budgeted to raise a single dollar of revenue. By contrast, Labor’s carbon tax raised more than $15 billion in just two years. This was a major hit on the economy and increased electricity prices.” Mr Hunt said in a letter to The Australian.
Since when was a market defined by the tax revenue it pays? Hunt doesn’t know the difference between taxing and trading. Gillard also said she gave back the revenue when she implemented a carbon tax– it was “revenue neutral”, remember?
In a fake market, the government creates and controls the trading entirely: through arbitrary rules it decides who pays and who gets the revenue. An ETS is therefore a strange creature that is simultaneously both a tax and a trade — whether or not it raises “revenue” or is “revenue neutral”.
Hunt’s new creature is a payment forced by law, for no product or service other than not being stuck in jail — that makes it a tax. Some entities can pay their tax by trading fiat-credits with other entities — that makes it a trading scheme.
He [Hunt] said the Coalition’s safeguard mechanism provided for individual caps rather than an economy-wide cap as proposed by the ALP.
The Labor scheme applied to the whole economy, the Coalition scheme only applies to half of Australia’s emissions (half the economy). The difference is only in degree. Tricky Mr Hunt.
Mr Hunt said reports that emissions quotas for individual firms would decline from 2017 were incorrect, as were claims that firms would automatically be able to sell emissions permits they did not use.
If the quotas won’t decline, why wasn’t that put that in the legislation? There’s a reason…
Hunt doesn’t seem to know what a market is:
“No credits will be generated outside the existing Emissions Reduction Fund crediting scheme.”
So it’s not a market if only 150 companies controlling half of our economy take part?
Here’s the Safeguard legislation in October 2015. The phrase Australian carbon credit unit appears only once in 71 (2).
No wonder so many people missed it. Tricky.
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