The Weak Foundation of Calls for Climate Action

Because you say so.... How convincing....

You climate change true believers are something else!

 

You didn't explain why you think so thus another deflection to a published paper is made clear from you which seems to be your common denominator.

The IPCC has been wrong many times already thus lacks credibility.

 

She has nothing substantive to post which is why she post fallacies and empty claims a lot.

 

A fact that anyone can confirm by just looking out their window.

 

The RESEARCH (not, contrary to your false claims, opinion or blog) that you quoted (apparently without reading) said:
">R2 value of around 87 percent for a climate sensitivity (of TCR type) in the range of 0.6 K until 1.6 K per doubling of CO2"

That is a range that falls almost entirely below the IPCC's claimed minimum, and implies there is no reason to be concerned. (Personally, I predict that when climate sensitivity is finally established beyond any reasonable doubt, it will be less than the minimum value found by this paper.)

So do you need reading glasses, reading lessons, or just a willingness to read?

 

What if SLR acceleration is a transitory phenomenon?
Sea Level Rise Acceleration – An Alternative Hypothesis
Kip Hansen
Having analysed the NASA Sea Level readings over the last 4 years it has been concluded that the accelerations derived by Nerem et al. are a consequence of the methodology…

 

Representing a high-noise, self-evidently cyclical phenomenon with a quadratic?? And this passes for science??!?

 

This round-up can become a regular feature.
Climate Fact Check: August 2023 Edition
Guest Blogger
10 bogus climate claims from August 2023 debunked here. . . .

 

Arctic 2023 Refuses To Melt…German Scientists Blame “Unusual Weather Phenomenon”
By P Gosselin on 26. September 2023

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16 years of no decline
Arctic summer minimum sea ice extent refuses to drop further, surprising and frustrating the alarmist media.



Image: National Snow and Ice data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado.

Hat-tip: Klimanachrichten

German research vessel Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is currently underway again in the Arctic. where a decrease in sea ice had been expected there, or, probably more accurately said, hoped for.

But this year the minimum Arctic sea ice extent has turned out differently, as Germany’s widely viewed (climate-alarmist) Tagesschau news had to report:

In view of the extreme summer, the question arose in advance: Will the Arctic also see a new negative record in melting ice this year? This time, the Arctic has been spared. AWI director and expedition leader Antje Boetius tells Tagesschau that an unusual weather phenomenon prevented a record melt of Arctic sea ice this summer. According to Boetius, a sequence of low-pressure systems has led to an entirely different ice movement. The so-called transpolar drift, which describes the drifting of ice along certain routes, took a different course this year, she said. Ice from the Siberian region has been held together and compressed instead of drifting out and melting. For the AWI director, this shows that weather phenomena determine the development of sea ice, and that forecasting is more difficult than ever. The Arctic, with its sea ice and life, has been lucky once again, says the biologist. But things could go the other way. “If we are unlucky, if weather phenomena play unfavorably, we can also be affected by large ice-free parts much sooner than expected,” Boetius adds.”

We notice that when the opposite happens, e.g. heat, storms or more melt happens, then it’s all because of climate warming. But when it goes the other way, then it’s weather!

 

The extraordinary thing here is that these folks are "frustrated" that nature didn't do what they said it should... Staggering...

 

Veteran German Meteorologist: Arctic Showing “Significant Trend Towards More Ice!” Since 2007
By P Gosselin on 7. October 2023

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Retired German meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls writes at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) that the Arctic has stopped melting over the past years.

By Klaus-Eckart Puls



The above polynomial curve chart plots the Arctic sea ice minimum for each year since 1990. It has surprisingly started trending upwards.
THIS is how it is presented in the media (e.g. Germany’s polar ice minimum portal:

The Arctic sea ice minimum in 2023 was on September 19, according to the current status. The sea ice over the Arctic Ocean still covered 4.23 million square kilometers. Compared to the other 45 years since satellite measurements began, it is the sixth smallest. This was reported by … NSIDC .”

In other words: The absolute Arctic ice minimum in summer was 2007 – consequently 16 years ago; since then there is a significant trend towards more ice!

Greenland mass balance gaining

And also the Greenland ice has been increasing for several years, as the Danish Meteorological Institute documents annually in its Polar Portal:



Image: EIKE.


In the following graph from the DMI of October 4, 2023 we have:



There are some small areas with minor mass losses in the marginal areas of Greenland – on the other hand there are larger areas with mass increase.

In the mass balance over the years 1881-2010 (grey+black) and also 2022-2023 an increase is recognizable! Only in the summer months June-August there is the expected summer melting process, with subsequent mass increase above the zero line upwards.

Summary:

The Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet are showing a trend towards ice growth.

 

Wait, what? "Polynomial"?? Why would anyone expect a polynomial to describe a phenomenon that has been chaotic-cyclical for its entire known history?

Not surprisingly to anyone who knows what "cyclical" means...

 

Cataloging the false claims.
Climate Fact Check: September 2023
Guest Blogger
10 bogus climate claims from September 2023 debunked here. . . .

 

Can extreme heat make parts of the Earth too hot for humans?
Andy May
15 Comments
In another “How the hell did this paper pass peer-review?” incident we find yet another PNAS absurdity by Daniel Vecellio and colleagues (Link), that is described by…

 

The Hill is Just Making Stuff Up Now About Climate Change, Fossil Fuels, and Insurance
ALARMIST MESSENGERS/CLAIMS OCTOBER 17, 2023

The Hill recently posted an article titled, “Climate change is still the top issue in the 2024 election,” written by William S. Becker, which makes a barrage of claims about climate change and public policy. The piece appears to be intended to encourage voters to hold climate issues as their top priority in the upcoming United States elections. His claims, including that scientists agree climate change is an existential crisis; most Americans hold climate change as a high priority; that fossil fuels receive undue federal subsidies; that rising insurance costs point towards the impact of climate change on property, are all false. . . .

 

Dr. Roy Spencer:
New paper submission: Urban heat island effects in U.S. summer temperatures, 1880-2015
October 19th, 2023
After years of dabbling in this issue, John Christy and I have finally submitted a paper to Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology entitled, “Urban Heat Island Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1880-2015“.

I feel pretty good about what we’ve done using the GHCN data. We demonstrate that, not only do the homogenized (“adjusted”) dataset not correct for the effect of the urban heat island (UHI) on temperature trends, the adjusted data appear to have even stronger UHI signatures than in the raw (unadjusted) data. This is true of both trends at stations (where there are nearby rural and non-rural stations… you can’t blindly average all of the stations in the U.S.), and it’s true of the spatial differences between closely-space stations in the same months and years.

The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localized UHI effects.

And the effect is much larger in urban locations. Out of 4 categories of urbanization based upon population density (0.1 to 10, 10-100, 100-1,000, and >1,000 persons per sq. km), the top 2 categories show the UHI temperature trend to be 57% of the reported homogenized GHCN temperature trend. So, as one might expect, a large part of urban (and even suburban) warming since 1895 is due to UHI effects. This impacts how we should be discussing recent “record hot” temperatures at cities. Some of those would likely not be records if UHI effects were taken into account.

Yet, those are the temperatures a majority of the population experiences. My point is, such increasing warmth cannot be wholly blamed on climate change.

One of the things I struggled with was how to deal with stations having sporadic records. I’ve always wondered if one could use year-over-year changes instead of the usual annual-cycle-an-anomaly calculations, and it turns out you can, and with extremely high accuracy. (John Christy says he did it many years ago for a sparse African temperature dataset). This greatly simplifies data processing, and you can use all stations that have at least 2 years of data.

Now to see if the peer review process deep-sixes the paper. I’m optimistic.

 

New Study From Norway a Rebuke To Climate Zealots
Issues & Insights

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A New Global Urban Heat Island Dataset: Global Grids of the Urban Heat Island Effect on Air Temperature, 1800-2023
November 3rd, 2023
As a follow-on to our paper submitted on a new method for calculating the multi-station average urban heat island (UHI) effect on air temperature, I’ve extended that initial U.S.-based study of summertime UHI effects to global land areas in all seasons and produced a global gridded dataset, currently covering the period 1800 to 2023 (every 10 years from 1800 to 1950, then yearly after 1950).

It is based upon over 13 million station-pair measurements of inter-station differences in GHCN station temperatures and population density over the period 1880-2023. I’ve computed the average UHI warming as a function of population density in seven latitude bands and four seasons in each latitude band. “Temperature” here is based upon the GHCN dataset monthly Tavg near-surface air temperature data (the average of daily Tmax and Tmin). I used the “adjusted” (homogenized, not “raw”) GHCN data because the UHI effect (curiously) is usually stronger in the adjusted data.

Since UHI effects on air temperature are mostly at night, the results I get using Tavg will overestimate the UHI effect on daily high temperatures and underestimate the effect on daily low temperatures.

This then allows me to apply the GHCN-vs-population density relationships to global historical grids of population density (which extend back many centuries) for every month and every year since as early as I choose. The monthly resolution is meant to capture the seasonal effects on UHI (typically stronger in summer than winter). Since the population density dataset time resolution is every ten years (if I start in, say, 1800) and then it is yearly starting in 1950, I have produced the UHI dataset with the same yearly time resolution.

As an example of what one can do with the data, here is a global plot of the difference in July UHI warming between 1800 and 2023, where I have averaged the 1/12 deg spatial resolution data to 1/2 deg resolution for ease of plotting in Excel (I do not have a GIS system):


If I take the 100 locations with the largest amount of UHI warming between 1800 and 2023 and average their UHI temperatures together, I get the following:


Note that by 1800 there was 0.15 deg. C of average warming across these 100 cities since some of them are very old and already had large population densities by 1800. Also, these 100 “locations” are after averaging 1/12 deg. to 1/2 degree resolution, so each location is an average of 36 original resolution gridpoints. My point is that these are *large* heavily-urbanized locations, and the temperature signals would be stronger if I had used the 100 greatest UHI locations at original resolution.

Again, to summarize, these UHI estimates are not based upon temperature information specific to the year in question, but upon population density information for that year. The temperature information, which is spatial (differences between nearby stations), comes from global GHCN station data between 1880 and 2023. I then apply the GHCN-derived spatial relationships between population density and air temperature during 1880-2023 to those population density estimates in any year. The monthly time resolution is to capture the average seasonal variation in the UHI effect in the GHCN data (typically stronger in summer than winter); the population data does not have monthly time resolution.

In most latitude bands and seasons, the relationship is strongly nonlinear, so the UHI effect does not scale linearly with population density. The UHI effect increases rather rapidly with population above wilderness conditions, then much more slowly in urban conditions.

It must be remembered that these gridpoint estimates are based upon the average statistical relationships derived across thousands of stations in latitude bands; it is unknown how accurate they are for specific cities and towns. I don’t know yet how finely I can regionalize these regression-based estimates of the UHI effect, it requires a large number (many thousands) of station pairs to get good statistical signals. I can do the U.S. separately since it has so many stations, but I did not do that here. For now, we will see how the seven latitude bands work.

I’m making the dataset publicly available since there is too much data for me to investigate by myself. One could, for example, examine the growth over time of the UHI effect in specific metro regions, such as Houston, and compare that to NOAA’s actual temperature measurements in Houston, to get an estimate of how much of the reported warming trend is due to the UHI effect. But you would have to download my data files (which are rather large, about 117 MB for a single month and year, a total of 125 GB of data for all years and months). The location of the files is:

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/public/roy.spencer

You will be able to identify them by name.

The format is ASCII grid and is exactly the same as the HYDE version 3.3 population density files (available here) I used (ArcGIS format). Each file has six header records, then a grid of real numbers with dimension 4320 x 2160 (longitude x latitude, at 1/12 deg. resolution).

 

Hansen has presented more shoddy science to support dubious recommendations.

Hansen’s latest overheated global warming claims are based on poor science
Posted on November 6, 2023 by niclewis | 26 comments
James Hansen’s latest paper “Global warming in the pipeline” (Hansen et al. (2023)) has already been heavily criticized in a lengthy comment by Michael Mann, author of the original IPCC ‘hockey stick’. However Mann does not deal with Hansen’s surprisingly high (4.8°C) new estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)[1]. This ECS estimate is 60% above Hansen’s longstanding[2] previous estimate of 3°C. It is Hansen’s new, very high ECS estimate drives, in conjunction with various questionable subsidiary assumptions, his paper’s dire predictions of high global warming and its more extreme concluding policy recommendations, such as ‘solar radiation management’ geoengineering.

Continue reading →

 

Alarmist tub-thumping without evidence.

Hansen’s latest overheated global warming claims are based on poor science
Posted on November 6, 2023 by niclewis | 102 comments
James Hansen’s latest paper “Global warming in the pipeline” (Hansen et al. (2023)) has already been heavily criticized in a lengthy comment by Michael Mann, author of the original IPCC ‘hockey stick’. However Mann does not deal with Hansen’s surprisingly high (4.8°C) new estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)[1]. This ECS estimate is 60% above Hansen’s longstanding[2] previous estimate of 3°C. It is Hansen’s new, very high ECS estimate drives, in conjunction with various questionable subsidiary assumptions, his paper’s dire predictions of high global warming and its more extreme concluding policy recommendations, such as ‘solar radiation management’ geoengineering.

Continue reading →

 

Global temperature targets have no scientific basis.
Wrong, USA Today, a 1.5℃ Temperature Rise Is Not a Scientifically Established Climate Threshold
DECEMBER 4, 2023

As part of its COP 28 climate conference coverage USA Today ran an article claiming that preventing a 1.5℃ rise in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels is a necessary climate threshold to prevent all manner of climate disasters. This is false. Both the 1.5℃ and 2.0℃ thresholds set in the Paris climate agreement in 2015, were established by politicians for political reasons. There is no scientific evidence that surpassing the 1.5℃ or even the 2.0℃ politically established threshold will result in worsening extreme weather events. Indeed, there is some evidence that the 1.5℃ threshold has already been surpassed with no discernable impact on weather extremes. . . . .

 

It would be better to miss the climate target.
From Now To 2100 Emission Reduction Policy Costs Greatly Exceed Any Net Benefit From Averted Warming
By Kenneth Richard on 14. December 2023

The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.
A new comprehensive analysis (Tol, 2023) weighs the cost-benefit of meeting Paris Accord emission policy targets to keep global warming in check, or under 2°C.

The analysis reveals that even in the best case scenarios (that assume emission reduction policies fully meet their avoided-warming targets), as well as in the worst case scenarios (that assume “constant vulnerability” to global-warming-induced climate disasters and widespread economic austerity), the tens of trillions of USD costs associated with moving away from fossil fuel consumption to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 (4.8% of GDP) still outweigh the net benefit losses (3.0% of GDP) in 2100.

“The central estimate of the costs of climate policy, unrealistically assuming least-cost implementation, is 3.8–5.6% of GDP in 2100. The central estimate of the benefits of climate policy, unrealistically assuming high no-policy emissions and constant vulnerability, is 2.8–3.2% of GDP.”

There is a nearly 10 times worse cost versus benefit if we only consider the net impact of best- and worst-case-scenario emissions reduction policies through 2050, which is the year it is assumed the world economy will have reached net-zero targets if all goes according to plan.

“In 2050, the year of net-zero, the best estimate of the benefits of the 1.5∘C target are about 0.5% of GDP while the costs are almost 5%.”

Of course, if the more realistic outcomes with regard to achieving emissions reduction targets eventuate, and if the global warming on tap for failing to achieve these targets is not as exaggeratedly hot as models assume (e.g., 5°C warming by 2100), the net costs of climate “action” exceed the benefits of avoided warming two-, three- and even four-fold.

Simply put, the “Paris targets do not pass the cost-benefit test.”



Image Source: Tol, 2023

 

We all need to stop breathing.
New Study Now Claims We Humans Heat The Atmosphere Just By Exhaling
By Kenneth Richard on 18. December 2023

“Where hydrocarbon chains (food types) are consumed by humans and turned into CH4 [methane] … global warming potential is no longer neutral, and human respiration has a net warming effect on the atmosphere.” – Prada et al., 2023


Image Source pexels.com (stock photo)
According to a new study, humans “contribute to global warming” by exhaling greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide 16 times per minute.

“Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming. These emissions from humans are not well understood and are rarely quantified in global greenhouse gas inventories.”

Like bovine populations, humans are referred to as “methane producers” (MPs), respiring and burping this potent greenhouse gas simply by existing. (Concerns about methane’s global warming potential are so significant that New Zealand is imposing a “methane tax” on the nation’s cows, as these MP animals are heating up the planet with their burps.)

The MP determination for humans unfortunately includes some culturally controversial claims (that could be interpreted as racist or sexist). The authors of this study claim that Africans are reported to more likely to warm the Earth with their breath and burps than other ethnic groups, and that women (38%) are more likely than men (25%) to be MPs too.

“It has been reported in previous studies that region of birth or ethnicity is a strong indicator of the likelihood to be an MP, with African populations much more likely to be MPs than Asian populations.”

“The results reported in this study are consistent with most previous studies that found a higher percentage of MPs in females (38%) when compared to males (25%).”

Humans also add CO2 – another greenhouse gas – to the air each time we exhale, and thus our breath’s CO2 emissions “contribute to global warming” too. An average of ~44,000 ppm CO2 exits our mouths as we breathe, eliciting a “net warming effect on the atmosphere.”

Perhaps, in due time, there will be a “breathing tax” policy initiative imposed on offending humans.



Image Source: Dawson et al., 2023

 

More and more of this stuff reminds me of the hilariously deadpan Journal of Irreproducible Results. How can anyone take it seriously?

 

Another bogus prediction now forgotten.
Whatever happened to the Siberian permafrost “tipping point” from 2005?
Anthony Watts
It seems like yet another climate doomsday prediction has failed to materialize. The goalposts have been moved into the future, again. . . . .