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Watch on SteynOnline or ADH TV
By Jo Nova
My appearance with the wonderful Mark Steyn Tuesday is playing at SteynOnline, or on the Australian ADH TV.
Mark was tickled with the idea from my article last week: The science is settled but we just found 19,000 new volcanoes. He also wanted to talk about The crime of talking to Tucker Carlson and the Red-pilling of Naomi Wolf. We discussed other major science surprises like the mass phytoplankton blooms that seed clouds. That was another rule breaking surprise just two months ago — that moment when researchers realized that all the toluene and benzene pollution over the Southern Ocean was actually not caused by humans at all, but by phytoplankton.
We discussed the odd coincidence of how all the places that are warming in Antarctica seem to lie over the top of a 91 volcanoes we only discovered a few years ago. As I said, we know the surface of the moon better than we know the depths of the ocean. Only three men have visited the Mariana Trench and it’s only 11 kilometers from the surface of Earth, but 12 men have walked on the moon.
— […]
…Hillier, J. K., and A. B. Watts (2007)
By Jo Nova
What would we know?
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:
“It’s just mind boggling.” More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered
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 […]
Squid, “surprise” are going to do well with climate change. (If only it was going to happen).
In the new post-CO2 world, corn and soy may become weeds, but squid may take over the oceans:
Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios, according to a new study published this week.
Dr Blake Spady, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU), led the study. He said squid live on the edge of their environmental oxygen limitations due to their energy-taxing swimming technique. They were expected to fare badly with more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the water, which makes it more acidic.
No academic could have guessed that squid would have evolved ways to control their own blood pH:
“Their blood is highly sensitive to changes in acidity, so we expected that future ocean acidification would negatively affect their aerobic performance,” said Dr Spady.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to more than 400 ppm today. Scientists project atmospheric CO2 — and by extension CO2 in […]
Image Erin Silversmith
Three amazing things in this story. One that solar cycles might influence the oceans to such an extent that jellyfish plagues are cycling in tune with the sun. Second is that the sun might control food for jellyfish on Earth somehow but have no effect on clouds, temperature or our climate (join the dots that expert climate models don’t). Third is that (briefly) there was actual scientific debate published on the ABC (even if only a few Australians were exposed to it). No one called anyone names, and both sides got to speak (albeit on different channels). Put it in your diary.
A couple of weeks ago on the ABC jellyfish were booming and it was because of climate change:
Jellyfish are causing mayhem as pollution, climate change see numbers boom
RN By Hong Jiang and Sasha Fegan for Late Night Live
…the brainless, spineless, eyeless, bloodless creatures are booming in numbers — and causing mayhem around the world.
Some scientists think jellyfish numbers are increasing as the climate changes — the creatures reproduce well in warmer waters.
Last year, Nick Kilvert of the ABC saw it as a […]
Third World Science with First World Funding
Is James Cook University a grants machine or a research institute?
James Cook University reviews ex-student’s ‘fishy’ findings, by Graham Lloyd, The Australian
Oona Lönnstedt has been prolific, writing alarming papers on microplastics, acidification, and reef degradation. But her work looks like a trainwreck. One paper has been withdrawn, in another it was “found that Lonnstedt did not have time to undertake the research she claimed.” She’s been found guilty of fabricating data on the microplastics study. Now Peter Ridd has pointed out that the photos of 50 Lionfish appear to contain a lot less than 50 fish. Images have been flipped, spun or “manipulated” so the same fish appears more than once.
James Cook has done what any ambitious, money-hungry grant troughing institute would do, a very slow investigation of allegedly corrupt behaviour and a very quick sacking of the honest researcher who threatens to expose them. Any respectable Science Minister would freeze all grants to James Cook until this situation was resolved and reversed.
Send your thoughts to The Hon Karen Andrews. Contact her here: karen.andrews.mp AT aph.gov.au. There is a crisis in Australian science. Who is going to […]
A map of the sea surface zone that has cooled since 1979 — from 56S – 72S . It’s a pretty big area. Click to enlarge.
For years the IPCC have said that warming would be amplified at the poles. They warned us things would heat up twice as fast, which would melt sea ice. The oceans surface in turn would switch from being reflective white to a dark absorbing deep blue. Enormous amounts of energy would then flow into the ocean instead of being reflected back out to space. The more it warmed, the more it would warm — unleashing a devastating feedback loop.
As the Arctic warmed, the merchants of doom were keen to tell us how how right they were and this was evidence of man-made warming. But in the Antarctic exactly the opposite trend was taking place.
Mike Jonas has done what the IPCC should have been doing — investigating the trends in the Sea Surface Temperature in the polar latitudes with satellite records. In the latitude band from 56 to 72 degrees south the oceans have cooled, not warmed. The models don’t even have the sign of the trend correct. At the latitudes where […]
This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.
Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.
….
No habitable island, none, got smaller:
The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk […]
Since 1984 humans have gushed forth 64% of our entire emissions from fossil fuels. (Fully 282,000 megatons of deplorable carbon “pollution”.)
During this time, satellite images show that 24% of our beaches shrank, while 28% grew. Thus we can say that thanks to the carbon apocalypse there are 3,660 sq kms more global beaches now than there were thirty years ago. Yes. It’s that bad.
The encroachment of beaches would mean there is less ocean for fishes. Thankfully sea levels have risen too, so it looks like it will all work out.
This study also produced a handy map of where the sandiest beaches are. Clearly Africa wins (unless you prefer rocks and cliffs).
h/t GWPF
Sandy beaches (yellow) versus Rocky beaches (black). Percentages indicate the proportion of sandy beaches. Source
Presumbly the paradox of how seas can rise unprecedentedly fast at the same time as beaches are growing will be explained through global currents shifting ominously due to rising CO2 levels. Either that, or the paradox and the study will vanish into a subterranean library — like the deeper Asthenosphere Archive, where they will be converted to magma.
Seriously, though, this study appears to be the first to […]
How much don’t we know?
Giant pairs of whirlpools travel across the ocean for months in a bizarre pair.
These large paired whirlpools, hundreds of kilometers across, travel eastward at something like 10-20cm per second. This is one pair crossing from Tasmania to NewZealand. This was there in our satellite data but “invisible” til recently. As David Evans says “I wonder what else we are observing but not seeing?”
The pair of whirlpools called Modon E travelling eastward from Tasmania to NZ.
The ocean becomes connected at two distant points as the Modon-E whirlpool pair travels from Tasmania to NZ in 2010-2011
In the mini-pool version, these rolling whirlpools are connected in a U shape under water.
Wow. PhysicsGirl shows how to make these by pushing a plate through the water, and adding food coloring. Switch on your science nerd, show the kids! (send me your photos :- ))
The two vortexes spin in opposite directions but are connected as a pair underwater. This was created by PhysicsGirl using a plate in a pool and two different food colorings.
Twin giant ocean whirlpools travel for months winding their way across oceans
Peter Dockrill reports on an interview […]
After human pumped out 90% of all the CO2 they’ve ever made, the oceans might be a whole fifth of a degree warmer, tops, in the last 60 years. So when water that was a whopping 5.5 degrees warmer rolled over some giant kelp, researchers got excited. (This is like 1,650 years of climate change right?!) But the kelp pretty much did nothing, and you might say that researchers were shocked the kelp coped:
Kelp beats the heat
They expected forests of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), known to be sensitive to such increases as well as to the resulting low-nutrient conditions, to respond quite rapidly to a rise in water temperature.
However, to the scientists’ surprise, that was not the case. The kelp, they discovered, was all right. Their findings appear in the journal Nature Communications.
“The response that we saw in kelp was really no different than what we’d seen in our temporal record,” explained lead author Daniel Reed, deputy director of UCSB’s Marine Science Institute (MSI). “The values were low but not necessarily lower than what we’d seen during cool-water years.”
A lot of other underwater things were not bothered either:
[…]
It’s a case of coal shrinking fish. Another remarkable discovery of modern seance.
There is a six degree variation across the surface of the North Sea but fish are shrinking because the water is warming by 0.05C per year?
Drew Creighton at the Sydney Morning Herald gets excited: Climate Change affects all levels of life. (By crikey, the banality! It would be legendary if a scientist found one form of life on Earth that wasn’t “affected” by temperature, clouds, frost, ice, storms or rain. How low is this bar?)
First a Prof somewhere notices fish are getting smaller:
Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies said while the study encompassed all ecosystems, his particular interest was the sea.
But which fish are shrinking exactly — “commercial fish” — could be a clue?
“We’re seeing decreased yields in fisheries, for example in the North Sea commercial fish have undergone reductions in body size, all of them, simultaneously.”
So how do we know this shrinkage is not due to bigger boats and the increased fish-and-chips factor?
He said the study factored in over-fishing and fisheries induced evolution and separated the […]
During the last ice age (and others before it) temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere would abruptly swing up and down by a hefty 3 – 6°C every 1,500 years or so. A new study using isotopes on the sea floor rather provocatively suggests that the Atlantic ocean circulation was to blame. Apparently it slowed almost to halt, and before the surface water cooled. It seems that when the Atlantic currents slow too far they stop bringing warmer water north from the equator and Southern Hemisphere, and thus the north ices over. During these super-cold periods the ice sheets spread down and cover much of North America, (and real estate in Australia costs a motza). Massive icebergs break off and drift, but apparently things took a lot longer to get cold in the Southern Hemisphere, and the north and south possibly got a bit out of whack cooling and warming in opposite phases. The researcher used the word “bipolar”.
The $64 trillion dollar question is if ocean currents cause climate change, what causes the ocean currents? The researchers don’t know. (Seems kind of important). Things stabilized out in the last 10,000 warm years. It looks like the wild swings don’t occur […]
Indo-pacific-warm-pool (IPWP) | NotricksZone
A very striking pattern of records is happening at the moment. Data is going “off the chart” on several factors at once. As well as record high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in Feb 2016, the water is far cooler than usual in the Indo Pacific, while there is increased water vapor and cloud all over the world’s oceans. But windspeeds are slow, slow, slow. It has the hallmarks of a very Big El Nino. Bigger by many measures than 1997-98.
The cooler Indo-Pacific
P Gosselin at NotricksZone has got some very interesting graphs about the ocean around the vast Western Pacific. Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt noticed that ARGO buoys are recording a very unusual cooling in the Indo-Pacific Western Pacific.
Is something fishy and odd going on there? Hard to say, but while the globe set a record last month, it is interesting to know that over the last couple of years temperatures have declined in the Western Pacific by a whole degree. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) covers 20N to 20S across a full quarter of the circumference of the Earth. According to Bosse and Vahrenholt it’s around “16 million cubic […]
…
A new nature paper shows how little we know about the oceans and the whole carbon cycle. A paper (with 64 names!) suggests that phytoplankton might be sucking out extra CO2 from the sky and dumping it in Davy Jones’ Locker at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
Who needs a global carbon market? Apparently plankton are doing it for free. And all those windmills just got a bit more pointless.
Lots of living things absorb carbon, but phytoplankton seem to be more important than the others. The best predictors of sinking carbon were viruses of certain cyanobacteria. Few of the “thousands of phytoplankton species have been studied in this way”.
Jo
PS: This fits with Tom Quirks paper on the 9Gt massive carbon bubble of 1990 and previous research that shows plankton sucks up twice as much carbon as we thought it did. We’re going to be hearing more about phytoplankton.
The ocean’s power to rein in carbon and protect the environment is vast but not well-understood.
But now, an international team of scientists has begun to illuminate how the ocean plucks carbon from the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, and […]
And you thought we’d heard it all. Not so, get out the plastic bags.
Seventy percent of the oxygen on Earth is made by phytoplankton, so the little critters do matter. A new study suggests that the phytoplankton pretty much fall apart if the worlds oceans heat by just six degrees. They stop making the good O2. We all die. Puppies, kittens, kids, and krill — it’s all over.
There are a couple of caveats — the study involves only binary phytoplankton (the kind made of zero’s and ones and which lives in hard discs at the University of Leicester). And the other one is that six degrees is an Awful Lot of Warming.
As best as we can tell (which is not very well) the oceans are warming at four hundreth of a degree per decade (give or take a lot). The all new Gee-Whizz Argo buoys are neat little robots, but the error bars are still a scandal, being somewhere from one tenth to one half a degree — ha-d-ha — too big to fit on the graph.( See all the white stuff — the errors are probably larger than that.)
Taking that single point of highly uncertain […]
It’s a disaster for fish and chip shops. Children won’t know what a sea-food restaurant is.
Our oceans are warming by 0.005 °C per year (if you believe a thermometer system with a 0.5 °C error). But fish that cope with five degrees of natural variation will apparently be devastated by an average rise of five thousands of a degree per year. Who knew?
Earth’s oceans vary from 0 – 30° C. Warm and cold currents wander, eddy currents swirl. Very little of the ocean’s surface is actually at the exact “average” temperature. In any one spot, temperatures can be a full five degrees above or below average (as in this NOAA graph, below).
The sea surface temperature varies by up to five degrees from average every day
Humans may well be changing global fish stocks, but why toss in the unscientific advertising for “climate change”? As for the acidification scare, ocean pH changes on a daily basis, and hundreds of studies show that marine life might even benefit from a slight increase in “acidification”.
ScienceDaily
Seafood supply altered by climate change
The global supply of seafood is set to change substantially and many people will not […]
A new study suggests that the Pacific ocean near Peru was two degrees warmer 10,000 years ago.[1]
The current rate of warming (as estimated by ARGO buoys in the last ten years) is 0.005C per year. So we are only 400 years away from achieving the same kind of warming the Mesopotamian Farmers did.
Of course this could be just a localized warm patch, except that an earlier study showed that waters draining out of the Pacific to the Indian Ocean were also much hotter during the same era.[2]
The present time is on the left. Graph A shows temperature proxy from Antarctic ice cores, graph B shows 0-150m depth ocean temperature in black
9.1 out of 10 based on 36 ratings […]
UPDATED: Ross McKitrick’s PDF file has some minor changes.
The Pause has been unfound, not with new data, but with new adjustments in one odd dataset.
The awkward “Pause” in global temperatures shows up in every major dataset. It’s the reality that conflicts with nearly every major climate model. But it’s there in the Hadley records of land surface and ocean, it shows up in the Hadley sea surface measurements, it’s there in NCDC, GISS, and of course in the satellite data of RSS, and UAH, and it shows up in the best data we have on the ocean, the ARGO buoys. It’s quite the challenge to unfind it!
(Thanks to Ross McKitrick for the individual graphs)
To find global warming in the last 15 years, we need to ignore all that and use sea surface data blended from boats randomly trekking through shipping lanes with buckets and from ocean buoys (and that’s not ARGO buoys). But even that isn’t enough, that original data needs to be adjusted, and where sea ice gets in the way, gap-filled from sparse land data (as you would right?). Then we need to accept a lower-than-usual significance test, and carefully […]
The oceans contain 90% of the heat energy on the surface of the Earth, which makes it “kinda important”. There are claims that the missing heat went into ocean temperatures, which are allegedly warming by five thousandths of a degree per year (which is still a lot less than the models predicted). The ARGO array of 3,000 ocean buoys deployed from mid-2003 is a vast improvement on the occasional sampling from ships that preceded it, but each single thermometer measures a vast 200,000 cubic kilometers of ocean.
The original Argo Science Report had an expected temperature sensor uncertainty of 0.005C. But it’s just not possible to measure the ocean temperature that accurately. Each thermometer may be accurate in a laboratory to 0.005C, but thermal noise in the ocean is an impossible beast. The four-kilometer-deep swirling mass of eddies varies from 0C – 30C. It is not a well mixed swimming pool at one temperature, being measured 3,000 times simultaneously — the statistics are entirely dissimilar.
I went looking for papers on error estimates and found Hadfield 2007.
The Hadfield study compared the new ARGO robotic buoys to other ways of measuring ocean temperatures in a slice across the North Atlantic. […]
Is this the way the backdown plays out? The endless warming becomes cooling, and man-made change becomes natural cycles one paper at a time? The press releases still talk of “change”! No mention that natural cycles could have been the cause of past warming, and that skeptics have been saying this for years.
Figure 3 | Sea-level circulation index, the NAO and the AMO on multidecadaltimescales. Shown are the accumulated sea-level index (blue), which isrepresentative of subpolar heat content evolution, the accumulated NAO (red,dashed) and the AMO (black). The heat content proxy and the accumulatedNAO have been normalized. All timeseries have been 7-year low-pass filtered.The accumulated sea-level index and accumulated NAO have been detrended.
This Nature paper will be tricky to feed into the “Panic Now!” scenario. It’s still climate change, but it’s a half a degree of cooling that might be headed your way if you live around the northern Atlantic.
UPDATE: A quick summary of the paper. McCarthy et al created a circulation index (blue line, fig 3) which appears to lead the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, black line) by two years. The sea level index is generated by comparing sea levels north and south of […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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