Blame climate change for fewer fires, shorter droughts, slower winds

Thanks to the Californian conflagration, Global Climate Superstition is here again to tell us that fires in coal plants cause fires in forests. Scientists, on the other hand, find that as emissions got higher there was a fall in wildfires globally, droughts didn’t get worse and winds have slowed.

The witchdoctors play on the Back in the days when people rowed their battleships to war, the megadroughts were really mega. Despite all the mechanization (or probably because of it) global biomass burning was lower in the last century than anytime since Julius Caesar.

If CO2 is the driving force behind fires apparently we need more of it.

When it comes to fire, temperature is not as important as wind speed, fuel load, and the density of arsonists.

Last we heard, winds were slowing globally at a rate of 0.5km/hour. The great Global Stilling can’t be bad for fires (though it can’t be good for wind farms). Perhaps a slightly slower wind is irrelevant. But then if half a kilometer per hour of wind doesn’t matter, why does half a degree of warming? Judging by the actual area burned by fires, not.

As Willis Eschenbach points out California is only warming […]

November 14th, 2018 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Global warming will weaken winds in the Northern Hemisphere, but speed them up downunder!

Now they tell us! Climate warming to weaken wind power in northern hemisphere, increase in Australia: study

After building 341,000 wind turbines, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, now climate modelers reveal that winds will decrease in the Northern Hemisphere!

Warming temperatures caused by climate change are set to weaken wind energy in the northern hemisphere, a study shows, lessening the amount of wind power produced for wind farms.

However the southern hemisphere would see a boost in wind, which could potentially turn north-eastern Australia into an attractive investment for energy companies.

Rush, invest your money now. The theory called polar amplification has the success rate of a coin toss. Buy a wind farm in NE Australia!

Luckily wind speeds are not also influenced by cloud cover, jet streams, oceans currents, forest growth, atmospheric tides, solar factors, magnetic fields, ozone levels, cosmic rays, or butterflies. Otherwise this study might be inadequate, uninformed guesswork being used to inform investment decisions!

Look out for Polar Amplifiers. Click to enlarge.

Key points: Atmosphere instability which creates wind changing in northern hemisphere North-east Australia could become an attractive investment for energy companies At present there is only one operational wind […]

December 14th, 2017 | Tags: , , | Category: Art, Atmosphere, Global Warming, Media-matters | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Carbon pollution rises and the world gets less windy…

Wind speeds have slowed since the sixties

God is playing a joke on wind investors:

The stilling: global wind speeds slowing since 1960

Known as ‘stilling’, it has only been discovered in the last decade. And while it may sound deceptively calm, it could be a vital, missing piece of the climate change puzzle and a serious threat to our societies.

While 0.5 kilometre per hour might barely seem enough to ruffle any feathers, he warns that prolonged stilling will have serious impacts.

‘There are serious implications of wind changes in areas like agriculture and hydrology, basically because of the influence of wind on evaporation,’ said Dr Azorin-Molina. ‘A declining trend in wind speed can impact long-term power generation, and weaker winds can also mean less dispersion of pollutants in big cities, exacerbating air quality problems and therefore impacting human health.’

Here’s a rare concept in science these days: Dr Azorin-Molina isn’t sure if this is natural or man-made. No doubt, climate modelers will coming up with the answer they didn’t predict, post hoc, any day now…

In idyll speculation, researchers wondered if perhaps humans built too many obstacles (which seems hard to believe […]

October 12th, 2017 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Do forests drive wind and bring rain? Is there a major man-made climate driver the models miss?

Clouds over Amazon forest (Rio Negro). Image NASA Earth Observatory.

What if winds were mainly driven by changes in water vapor, and those changes occurred commonly in air over forests? Forests would be the pumps that draw in moist air from over the oceans. Rather than assuming that forests grow where the rain falls, it would be more a case of rain falling where forests grow. When water vapor condenses it reduces the air pressure, which pulls in more dense air from over the ocean.

A new paper is causing a major stir. The paper is so controversial that many reviewers and editors said it should not be published. After two years of deliberations, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics decided it was too important not to discuss.

The physics is apparently quite convincing, the question is not whether it happens, but how strong the effect is. Climate models assume it is a small or non-existent factor. Graham Lloyd has done a good job describing both the paper and the reaction to it in The Australian.

Sheil says the key finding is that atmospheric pressure changes from moisture condensation are orders of magnitude greater than previously recognised. The paper concludes “condensation […]

February 2nd, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |