Climate Impacts

Straight Talk on Climate Science and Net Zero

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Michael Simpson of Sheffield University did the literature review and tells it like it is in his recent paper The Scientific Case Against Net Zero: Falsifying the Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis published at Journal of Sustainable Development (2024).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

The UK Net Zero by 2050 Policy was undemocratically adopted by the UK government in 2019. Yet the science of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ is well known and there is no reason to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), or nitrous oxide (N2O) because absorption of radiation is logarithmic. Adding to or removing these naturally occurring gases from the atmosphere will make little difference to the temperature or the climate. Water vapor (H2O) is claimed to be a much stronger ‘greenhouse gas’ than CO2, CH4 or N2O but cannot be regulated because it occurs naturally in vast quantities.

This work explores the established science and recent developments in scientific knowledge around Net Zero with a view to making a rational recommendation for policy makers. There is little scientific evidence to support the case for Net Zero and that greenhouse gases are unlikely to contribute to a ‘climate emergency’ at current or any likely future higher concentrations. There is a case against the adoption of Net Zero given the enormous costs associated with implementing the policy, and the fact it is unlikely to achieve reductions in average near surface global air temperature, regardless of whether Net Zero is fully implemented and adopted worldwide. Therefore, Net Zero does not pass the cost-benefit test. The recommended policy is to abandon Net Zero and do nothing about so-called ‘greenhouse gases’. [Topics are shown below with excerpted contents.]

1. Introduction

The argument for Net Zero is that the concentration of CO2 in air is increasing, some small portion of which may be due to human activities and that Net Zero will address this supposed ‘problem’. The underpinning consensus hypothesis is that the human emission of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ will increase concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere and thereby increase the global near surface atmospheric temperature by absorbance of infrared radiation leading to catastrophic changes in the weather. This leads to the idea that global temperatures should be limited to 2°C and preferably 1.5°C to avoid catastrophic climate change (Paris Climate Agreement, 2015).

A further hypothesis is that there are tipping points in the climate system which will result in positive feedback and a runaway heating of the planet’s atmosphere may occur (Schellnhuber & Turner, 2009; Washington et al., 2009; Levermann et al., 2009; Notz & Schellnhuber, 2009; Lenton et al., 2008; Dakos et al., 2009; Archer et al., 2009). Some of these tipping point assumptions are built into faulty climate models, the outputs of which are interpreted as facts or evidence by activists and politicians. However, output from computer models is not data, evidence or fact and is controversial (Jaworowski, 2007; Bastardi, 2018; Innis, 2008: p.30; Smith, 2021; Nieboer, 2021; Craig, 2021). Only empirical scientifically established facts should be considered so that cause and effect are clear.

From the point of view of physics, the atmosphere is an almost perfect example of a stable system (Coe, et al., 2021). The climate operates with negative feedback (Le Chatelier’s Principle) as do most natural systems with many degrees of freedom (Kärner, 2007; Lindzen et al., 2001 & 2022). The ocean acts as a heat sink, effectively controlling the air temperature. Recent global average surface temperatures remain relatively stable (Easterbrook, 2016; Moran, 2015; Morano, 2021; Marohasy, 2017; Ridley, 2010) or warming very slightly from other causes (Sangster, 2018) and the increase in temperature from 1880 through 2000 is statistically indistinguishable from 0°K (Frank, 2010; Statistics Norway, 2023) and is less than predicted by climate models (Fyfe, 2013). This shows the difference between the consensus view and established facts.

The results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations. In other words, our analysis indicates that with the current level of knowledge, it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to emissions of CO2. Dagsvik et al. 2024

The IPCC has produced six major assessment reports (AR1 to 6) and several special reports which report on a great deal of good science (Noting that the IPCC does not do any science itself but merely compiles literature reviews). The Summaries for Policy Makers (SPM) are followed by most politicians. Yet the SPM do not agree in large part with the scientific assessment by the IPCC reports and appear to exaggerate the role of CO2 and other ‘greenhouse gases’ in climate change. It appears that the SPM is written by governments and activists before  the scientific assessment is reached which is a questionable practice (Ball 2011, 2014 and 2016; Smith 2021).

Other organizations have produced reports of a similar nature and using a similar literature (e.g. Science and Public Policy Institute; The Heartland Institute; The Centre for the Study of CO2; CO2 Science; Global Warming Policy Foundation; Net Zero Watch; The Fraser Institute; CO2 Coalition) and arrived at completely different conclusions to the IPCC and the SPM (Idso et al., 2013a; Idso et al., 2013b; Idso et al., 2014; Idso et al., 2015a, 2015b; Happer, et al., 2022). There are also some web pages (e.g. Popular Technology) which list over a thousand mainstream journal papers casting doubt on the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as a source of climate change. For example, a recent report by the CO2 Coalition (2023) states clearly Net Zero regulations and actions are scientifically invalid because they:

  • “Fabricate data or omit data that contradict their conclusions.
  • Rely on computer models that do not work.
  • Rely on findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that are government opinions, not science.
  • Omit the extraordinary social benefits of CO2 and fossil fuels.
  • Omit the disastrous consequences of reducing fossil fuels and CO2 emissions to Net Zero.
  • Reject the science that demonstrates there is no risk of catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.

Net Zero, then, violates the tenets of the scientific method that for more than 300 years has underpinned the advancement of western civilization.” (CO2 Coalition, 2023; p. 1)

With such a strong scientific conviction the entire Net Zero agenda needs investigating. This paper reviews some of the important science which supports and undermines the Net Zero agenda.

2. Material Studied

A literature review was carried out on various topics related to greenhouse gases, climate change and the relevant scientific literature from the last 20 years in the areas of physics, chemistry, biology, paleoclimatology, geology etc. The method used was an evidence-based approach where several issues were critically evaluated based on fundamental knowledge of the science, emerging areas of scientific investigation and developments in scientific methods. The evidence-based approach is widely used (Green & Britten, 1998; Odom et al., 2005; Easterbrook, 2016; Pielke, 2014; IPCC, 2007a; IPCC 2007b; Field, 2012; IPCC 2014; McMillan & Shumacher, 2013).

Evidence-based research uses data to establish cause and effect relationships which are known to work and allows interventions which are therefore expected to be effective.

3. Greenhouse Gas Theory

The historical development of the greenhouse effect, early discussions and controversies are presented by Mudge (2012) and Strangeways (2011). The explanation of the greenhouse effect or greenhouse gas theory of climate change is given in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis (IPCC, 2007, p. 946):

“Greenhouse gases effectively absorb thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface, by the atmosphere itself due to some gases, and by clouds. Atmospheric radiation is emitted to all sides, including downward to the Earth’s surface. Thus, greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system. This is called the greenhouse effect.”

This is plausible but does not necessarily lead to global warming as radiation will be emitted at longer wavelengths in other areas of the electromagnetic spectrum where greenhouse gases do not absorb radiation potentially leading to an energy balance without increase in temperature. To further complicate matters the definition continues with the explanation:

“Thermal infrared radiation in the troposphere is strongly coupled to the temperature of the atmosphere at the altitude at which it is emitted. In the troposphere, the temperature generally decreases with height. Effectively, infrared radiation emitted to space originates from an altitude with a temperature of, on average, -19°C in balance with the net incoming solar radiation, whereas the Earth’s surface is kept at a much higher temperature of, on average, +14°C. An increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases leads to an increased infrared opacity of the atmosphere, and therefore to an effective radiation into space from a higher altitude at a lower temperature. This causes a radiative forcing that leads to an enhancement of the greenhouse effect, the so-called enhanced greenhouse effect.”

This sort of statement is not comprehensible to the average person, makes no sense scientifically and is immediately falsified by recent research (Seim and Olsen, 2020; Coe etal., 2021; Lange et al., 2022, Wijngaarden & Happer, 2019, 2020, 2021(a), 2021(b), 2022, Sheahen, 2021; Gerlich & Tscheuschner, 2009; Zhong & Haigh, 2013). It also contradicts the work of Gray (2015 and 2019) and others and has been heavily criticized (Plimer, 2009; Plimer, 2017; Carter, 2010).

3.1 The Falsifications of the Greenhouse Effect

There are numerous falsifications of the greenhouse gas theory (sometimes called ‘trace gas heating theory’, see Siddons in Ball, 2011, p.19), of global warming and/or climate change (Ball, 2011; Ball, 2014; Ball, 2016; Gerlich & Tscheuschner, 2009; Hertzberg et al, 2017; Allmendinger, 2017; Blaauw, 2017; Nikolov and Zeller, 2017).

Fundamental empirically derived physical laws place limits on any changes in the atmospheric temperature unless there is some strong external force (e.g. increased or decreased solar radiation). For example, the Ideal Gas Law, the Beer-Lambert Law, heat capacities, heat conduction etc., (Atkins & de Paula, 2014; Barrow, 1973; Daniels & Alberty, 1966) all place physical limits on the amount of warming or cooling one might see in the climate system given any changes to heat from the sun or other sources.

3.1.1 The Ideal Gas Law

PV = nRT (1)

The average near-surface temperature for planetary bodies with an atmosphere calculated from the Ideal Gas Law is in excellent agreement with measured values suggesting that the greenhouse effect is very small or non-existent (Table 1). It is thought that the residual temperature difference of 33K between the Stephan-Boltzmann black body effective temperature (255K) on Earth and the measured near-surface temperature (288K) is caused by adiabatic auto-compression (Allmendinger, 2017; Robert, 2018; Holmes 2017, 2018 and 2019). An alternative view of this is given by Lindzen (2022). There is no need for the ‘greenhouse effect’ to explain the near surface atmospheric temperature of planetary bodies with atmospheric pressures above 10kPa (Holmes, 2017). The ideal gas law is robust and works for all gases.

3.1.2 Measurement of Infrared Absorption of the Earth’s Atmosphere

It is now possible to calculate the effect of ‘greenhouse gases’ on the surface atmospheric temperature by (a) using laboratory experimental methods; (b) using the Hitran database (https://hitran.org/); (c) using satellite observations of outgoing radiation compared to Stephan-Boltzmann effective black body radiation and calculated values of temperature.

The near surface temperature and change in surface temperature can be calculated. The result is that climate sensitivity to doubling concentration of CO2 is (0.5°C) including 0.06°C from CH4 and 0.08°C from N2O which is so small as to be undetectable. Most of the temperature change has already occurred and increasing CO2, CH4, N2O concentrations will not lead to significant changes in air temperatures because absorption is logarithmic (Beer-Lambert Law of attenuation) – a law of diminishing returns.

Figure 1. Delta T vs CO2 concentration

The important point here is that the Ideal Gas Law, the logarithmic absorption of radiation and the theoretical calculations by Wijngaarden & Happer (2020 and 2021), Coe et al., (2021) based on the Beer-Lambert Law and the Stephan-Boltzmann Law show that there is an upper limit to the temperature change which can occur by adding ‘greenhouse gases’ to the atmosphere if the main source of incoming radiation (the Sun) does not change over time. The upper limit is ~0.81°C.

3.1.3 Other Falsifications

Many climatologists ignore the well-established ideas of the Ideal Gas Law, Kinetic Theory of Gases and Collision Theory which explain the interaction of gases in the atmosphere (Atkins & de Paula, 2014; Salby, 2012; Tec science). For example, it is difficult for CO2 to retain heat energy (by vibration, rotation, and translation) as there are 1034 collisions between air molecules per second per cubic meter of gas at a pressure of 1 atmosphere (~101.3kPa) and on each collision, energy is exchanged leading to a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (similar to a normal distribution) of molecular energies across all molecules in air (Tec science). The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution has been experimentally determined (Atkins & de Paula, 2014). Thus, the major components of air (nitrogen and oxygen) retain most of the energy, cause evaporation of water vapor by heat transfer (mainly by conduction and convection) and emit radiation at longer wavelengths. The small concentration of CO2 in air (circa 420ppmv) cannot account for large changes in the climate system which have occurred in the past (Wrightstone, 2017 and 2023; Ball, 2014). Plimer (2009 and 2017) presents a great deal of geological scientific evidence which covers paleoclimatology concluding that:

“There is no such thing as the greenhouse effect. The atmosphere behaves neither as a greenhouse nor as an insulating blanket preventing heat escaping from the Earth. Competing forces of evaporation, convection, precipitation, and radiation create an energy balance in the atmosphere.” (Plimer 2009: p.364).

Ball (2014) summarizes a great deal of the geological science:

“The most fundamental assumption in the theory that human CO2 is causing global warming and climate change is that an increase in CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. The problem is that every record of any duration for any period in the history of the Earth exactly the opposite relationship occurs temperature increase precedes CO2 increase. Despite that a massive deception has developed and continues.” Ball (2014: p. 1).

This statement agrees with many other scientists working in geology, earth sciences, physics and physical chemistry as can be seen in cited references in books (Easterbrook, 2016; Wrightstone 2017 and 2023; Plimer, 2009; Plimer 2017; Ball, 2014; Ball,2011; Ball, 2016; Carter, 2010; Koutsoyiannis et al, 2023 & 2024; Hodzic, and Kennedy, 2019). Easterbrook (2016) uses the evidence-based approach to climate science and concludes that:

“Because of the absence of any physical evidence that CO2 causes global warming, the main argument for CO2 as the cause of warming rests largely on computer modelling.”  Easterbrook (2016: p.5).

The results of the models are projected far into the future (circa 80 to 100years) where uncertainties are large, but projections can be used to demonstrate unrealistic but scary scenarios (Idso et al., 2015b). The literature that is used for the IPCC reports appears to be ‘cherry picked’ to agree with their paradigms that increasing CO2 concentrations leads to warming. They ignore the vast literature in climatology, atmospheric physics, solar physics, physics, physical chemistry, geology, biology and palaeoclimatology much of which contradicts the IPCC’s assessment in the summary for policymakers (SPM).

The objective of the IPCC was to find the human causes of climate change – not to look at all the causes of climate change which would be the sensible thing to do if the science were to be used to inform policy decisions. However, there is no experimental evidence for a significant anthropogenic component to climate change (Kaupinnen and Malmi, 2019) which leaves genuine scientists and citizens concerned about the role of the IPCC.

3.1.4 Anthropogenic CO2 and the Residence time of Carbon Dioxide in Air

There is a suggestion (IPCC) that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is different for anthropogenic CO2 and naturally occurring CO2. This breaks a fundamental scientific principle, the Principle of Equivalence. That is: if there is equivalence between two things, they have the same use, function, size, or value (Collins English Dictionary, online). Thus, CO2 is CO2 no matter where it comes from, and each molecule will behave physically and react chemically in the same way.

The figures above illustrate how exaggerated claims are made for CO2 based on the false assumption that CO2 resides in the atmosphere for long periods and can affect the climate. These results are enough to falsify the ideas of anthropogenic global warming caused by CO2 and shows how little human activity contributes to CO2 emissions and concentrations in air. The argument is clear, that if the fictitious greenhouse effect were real for CO2 the human contribution would have no measurable effect upon the climate in terms of global average surface temperature.

The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is between 3.0 and 4.1 years using the IPCC’s own data and not the supposed 100 years or 1000 years for anthropogenic CO2 suggested by the IPCC summaries for policy makers (Harde, 2017) which contravenes the Equivalence Principle (Berry, 2019).

“These results indicate that almost all of the observed change of CO2 during the industrial era followed, not from anthropogenic emission, but from changes of natural emission. The results are consistent with the observed lag of CO2 changes behind temperature changes (Humlum et al., 2013; Salby, 2013), a signature of cause and effect.” (Harde, 2017a: 25).

It is well-known that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is approximately 5 years (Boehmer-Christiansen, 2007: 1124; 1137; Kikuchi, 2010). Skrable et al., (2022), show that accumulated human CO2 is 11% of CO2 in air or ~46.84ppmv based on modelling studies. Berry (2020, 2021) uses the Principle of  Equivalence (which the IPCC violates by assuming different timescales for the uptake of natural and human CO2) and agrees with Harde (2017a) that human CO2 adds about 18ppmv to the concentration in air. These are physically extremely small concentrations of CO2 which suggest most CO2 arises from natural sources. It can be concluded that the IPCC models are wrong and human CO2 will have little effect on the temperature.

4. Conclusions

Like many other researchers it was assumed there was robust science behind the greenhouse gas theory and that Net Zero was essential to achieve, but after investigation it now appears that the greenhouse gas theory is questionable and has been successfully challenged for at least 100 years (Gerlich and Tscheuschner, 2009). Much better explanations for planetary near surface atmospheric temperatures are available based on robust, empirically derived scientific laws such as the Ideal Gas law.

Better assessments of the potential increase in temperature with doubling CO2 concentrations are available and the calculated increase is small ~0.5°C (Coe et al., 2021; van Wijngaarden & Happer, 2019, 2020 and 2021; Sheahen, 2021; Schildknecht, 2020) and will remain very small with increased CO2 concentration because the infrared CO2 absorption bands are almost saturated and absorption follows the logarithmic Beer-Lambert law (Figure 1). Much of the work using the Hitran database has been tested against satellite measurements of the outgoing radiation from the Earth’s atmosphere and the calculations are in almost perfect agreement (Sheahen, 2021).

This suggests that the physicists are correct in their assessment of the likely very small increase in atmospheric temperature and therefore there is a strong case against Net Zero as it will have no discernible effect on temperature and the cost of Net Zero is huge. Therefore, the Net Zero project does not pass the cost-benefit test (Montford, 2024b; NESO, 2024). That is the costs are disproportionately high for little or no benefit. Thus, the correct response to a non-problem is to do nothing. The monies being wasted on Net Zero should be spent for the benefit of citizens (e.g. education, health care, public health, water infrastructure, waste processing, economic prosperity etc.). There are many other pressing public health problems from burning fossil fuels which should be addressed (e.g. air pollution especially particulates and carbon monoxide).

Better calculations of the human contribution to atmospheric CO2 concentrations are available and it is small ~18ppmv (Skrable et al., 2022; Berry, 2020; Harde 2017a & 2017b; Harde, 2019; Harde 2014). The phase relation between temperature and CO2 concentration changes are now clearly understood; temperature increases are followed by increases in CO2 likely from outgassing from the ocean and increased biological activity (Davis , 2017; Hodzic and Kennedy, 2019; Humlum, 2013; Salby, 2012; Koutsoyiannis et al, 2023 & 2024).

“In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.” Alimonti etal. 2022: 111.

Many researchers are addressing the ‘CO2 and climate change problem’ by suggesting decarbonization and other approaches such as Net Zero. CO2 is more than likely not the temperature control and has a very minor to negligible role in global warming (The Bruges Group, 2021; De Lange and Berkhout, 2024; Manheimer, 2022; Statistics Norway 2023; Lindzen and Happer, 2024; Lindzen, et al., 2024).

The scientific literature was examined and found to provide several alternative views concerning CO2 and the need for Net Zero. The objectives of this paper have been achieved and the conclusions can be briefly summarized:

  1. CO2 is a harmless highly beneficial rare trace gas essential for all life on Earth due to photosynthesis which produces simple sugars and carbohydrates in plants and a bi-product Oxygen (O2). CO2is therefore the basis of the entire food supply chain (see Biology or Botany textbooks or House, 2013). CO2 is close to an all-time low geologically (Wrightstone, 2017 and 2023) and controls on CO2 emissions and concentrations in air should be considered as very dangerous and expensive policy indeed. Net Zero is not necessary and should be abandoned.
  2. The greenhouse gas theory has been falsified (i.e. proven wrong) from several disciplines including paleoclimatology, geology, physics, and physical chemistry. CO2 cannot affect the climate in such small concentrations (~420ppmv or ~0.04%) and basing government policy on output from faulty climate models will prove to be very expensive and achieve nothing for the environment, public health, or the climate.

“There is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2 greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus, it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.” (Gerlich & Tscheuschner, 2009: 354).

  1. The oceans contain approximately 50 times as much CO2 as is currently present in the air (Easterbrook, 2016; Wrightstone, 2017 and 2023) and as such Henry’s Law will work to maintain the dynamic equilibrium concentration in air over the longer term as the ocean will absorb and outgas CO2(Atkins & de Paula, 2014). Net Zero will, therefore, achieve nothing for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. If the volcanic sources of CO2 are as Kamis (2021), the IPCC and others suggest many times the human contribution, then Net Zero will have no measurable effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Net Zero should, therefore, be abandoned.
  2. The contribution to greenhouse gases, especially CO2, attributable to humans is extremely small, almost negligible (~4.3% or ~18ppmv total accumulation) and half is absorbed by the ocean and biomass. Other naturally occurring so-called greenhouse gases are present in very small/negligible quantities (e.g. CH4, N2O). The systematic attempts to eliminate these trace gases from the atmosphere by reducing industrial output, reducing farming, eliminating fossil fuel use, and changing the way human civilization lives is totally unnecessary – again the ‘do-nothing strategy’ is strongly recommended.
  3. The sciences have been largely ignored by politicians and activists. There have been numerous failings of governments to take notice of scientific findings and they have succumbed to unnecessary pressure from activist groups (including the United Nations and the IPCC). Net Zero is just one example where costly efforts by governments will achieve nothing and not address the real problems of air pollution, public health, or economic well-being of citizens.

“There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world’s climate is in any way disturbed.” (Société de Calcul Mathématique SA, 2015:3).

  1. Circular reasoning is used by the climate modelers. That is, the fictitious greenhouse effect is built into the models such that when the parameter of CO2concentration is increased then the temperature output of the models increases, producing models which run relatively hot compared to natural variability. This reduces the so-called greenhouse effect to little more than a ‘fudge factor’ or ‘parameter’ within models which essentially gives you the answer that you set out to prove. This circular reasoning is hardly scientific enquiry and with data ‘homogenization’ and infilling of missing data begins to look rather peculiar. Climatologists need to recognize these issues, address the real reasons for climate change and offer genuine solutions to any real problems.
  2. The claim of consensus is completely unscientific in its approach (Idso et al, 2015a). Noting that 31,000 US scientists and engineers signed the petition protest (Robinson et al., 2007), recently 90 Italian scientists wrote an open letter to the Italian government (Crescenti et al., 2019), and 500 climatologists and scientists signed an open letter to the UN Secretary General (Berkhout, 2019). All explaining that CO2 is not the cause of climate change. There are thousands of academic papers and books questioning anthropogenic climate change with good data.

Many other concerned individuals have looked at the evidence for anthropogenic climate change based on CO2 and found it wanting (e.g. Davison, 2018; Rofe, 2018).

“If in fact ‘the science is settled’, it seems to be much more settled in the fact that there is no particular correlation between CO2 level and the earth’s temperature.” (Manheimer, 2022).

and

“If you assume the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are right about everything and use only their numbers in the calculation, you will arrive at the conclusion that we should do nothing about climate change!” (Field, 2013).

The academic literature in science offers numerous and far better explanations for climate change than the fictitious greenhouse effect. Researchers should recognize this fact and start to look at dealing with the real causes of climate change. Net Zero is an enormously expensive solution to a non-problem and has no obvious redeeming features. The Net Zero policy is not financially sustainable and should be abandoned.

 

 

 

False Premises for Hague Climate Reparations Hearing

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Public hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the request for an advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, December 2024 (Photo: International Court of Justice)

After one week of the hearing at International Court of Justice (ICJ) the thrust of the event is clear.  It is an attempt to redistribute wealth from nations who developed and prospered from basing their societies on hydrocarbons to other nations who have not done so as successfully.  The “victims” claim compensation because burning hydrocarbons caused global warming which will raise sea levels and flood island nations.  This is called “Climate Justice.”

The parties, including presumably the judges, take this premise without question, so the whole proceeding is based on PR without scientific foundation.

Recently green campaigners were warning that small Pacific islands would drown as sea levels rose. In 2019 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, for a Time magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet.” The accompanying article warned the island—and others like it—would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.

Earlier this year, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size. In fact, scientific literature has documented this for more than a decade. While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu and many other small islands is increasing.

These appeals were made previously by the Maldives and Fiji, who co-hosted the Madrid COP.  But stubborn facts undermine the credibility of the premise.

It is a widely accepted climate view—based on wild speculations from some op/ed writers and partisan politicians–is that average sea levels are increasing dangerously and rationalize an immediate governmental response. But as we shall demonstrate below, this perspective is simply not accurate.

There is a wide scientific consensus (based on satellite laser altimeter readings since 1993) that the rate of increase in overall sea levels has been approximately .12 inches per year.

To put that increase in perspective, the average sea level nine years from now (in 2029) is likely to be approximately one inch higher than it is now (2020). One inch is roughly the distance from the tip of your finger to the first knuckle. Even by the turn of the next century (in 2100), average ocean levels (at that rate of increase) should be only a foot or so higher than they are at present.

 

None of this sounds particularly alarming for the general society and little of it can justify any draconian regulations or costly infrastructure investments. The exception might be for very low- lying ocean communities or for properties (nuclear power plants) that, if flooded, would present a wide-ranging risk to the general population. But even here there is no reason for immediate panic. Since ocean levels are rising in small, discrete marginal increments, private and public decision makers would have reasonable amounts of time to prepare, adjust and invest (in flood abatement measures, etc.) if required.

But are sea levels actually rising at all? Empirical evidence of any substantial increases taken from land-based measurements has been ambiguous. This suggests to some scientists that laser and tidal-based measurements of ocean levels over time have not been particularly accurate.

For example, Professor Niles-Axel Morner (Stockholm University) is infamous in climate circles for arguing–based on his actual study of sea levels in the Fiji Islands–that “there are no traces of any present rise in sea levels; on the contrary, full stability.” And while Morner’s views are controversial, he has at least supplied peer reviewed empirical evidence to substantiate his nihilist position on the sea-level increase hypothesis.

The world has many important societal problems and only a limited amount of resources to address them. What we don’t need are overly dramatic climate-change claims that are unsubstantiated and arrive attached to expensive public policies that, if enacted, would fundamentally alter the foundations of our economic system.

See Also:

Fear Not For Fiji

Islands Adapting to Change: Tuvalu

 

Climate Lawfare Goes International

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Activists hope the opinion from the ICJ’s judges will have far-reaching legal consequences in the fight against climate change Image: Peter Dejong/AP Photo/picture alliance

DW reports on hearings underway at ICJ International Court of Justice in the Hague.  Overview of the proceedings in italics with my bolds. Vanuatu urges ICJ to recognise climate change harms

The outcome of the landmark case could lead to the
establishment of legal framework for holding countries
accountable in the fight against climate change.

Vanuatu, was the first of over 100 countries and organizations to present its views in the two-week proceedings seeking an advisory opinion from the World Court.

Handful of countries responsible for climate crisis World Court told

They demand that the failure to address climate change be declared a violation of international law. Arnold Kiel Loughman, attorney- general of the Vanuatu archipelago nation said that states have obligations to act with due diligence, to prevent significant harm to the environment, to reduce emissions, and to provide support to countries like his.

Aside from small island states and numerous Western and developing countries, the court will also hear from the world’s top two emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States. [More on those statements later on]

While activists are hopeful the outcome of the hearings will have far-reaching legal implications for violators, others are skeptical given that the UN’s highest court might take even years to implement.

Any decision will be non-binding because the court has no concrete means to enforce its rulings.

The hearings will continue until December 13. The court’s opinion is expected to be delivered in 2025.

Public hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the request for an advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, December 2024 (Photo: International Court of Justice)

Climate Home provides perspectives from the countries prospering from hydrocarbon energy in their article Big emitters accused of hiding behind climate treaties in international hearing.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The US, Saudi Arabia and others have pushed back against a global bid
to clarify states’ legal obligations to tackle climate change.

At a landmark legal hearing in The Hague this week, wealthy countries that are big emitters of planet-heating gases have used the Paris Agreement and other existing treaties on climate change to avoid additional pressure to step up their action to tackle global warming.

Their statements at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) sparked strong criticism from top climate diplomats and advocates who argue that international accords do not place limits on state accountability over climate change.

The two-week hearing is the culmination of years of campaigning by a group of law students from Pacific nations and diplomacy led by the island state of Vanuatu.

Their efforts resulted in a UN General Assembly resolution last year calling on the ICJ to provide an advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states to address climate change and the legal consequences if they fail to do so.

The ICJ says its advisory opinions are not binding. But experts stress that they clarify, rather than create, new law and will be referred to as authoritative documents in future climate litigation and during international climate negotiations.

In total, 98 states are giving oral submissions to the court, alongside a handful of institutions including the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Four days into the hearing, a clear divide is emerging between wealthy nations that are historically high emitters and vulnerable nations on the frontlines of climate change that have contributed little to planetary heating.

The event has seen powerful fossil-fuel producing countries – from the United States to Russia – resist what they regard as an attempt to force them to do more to rein in emissions and provide reparations to those suffering because of their carbon pollution.

On Wednesday, the United States – which does not fully recognise the authority of the ICJ – told the court that sufficient legal frameworks are already in place to deal with climate change.

Margaret Taylor, legal adviser to the US Department of State, described global warming as the “quintessential collective action problem” which the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement are carefully designed to deal with.

Those treaties, she said, embody “the clearest, most specific and most current expression of states’ consent to be bound by international law in respect of climate change” – and should therefore be the “primary framework” for determining their obligations.

Taylor told the court, on behalf of the US, that the Paris Agreement does not provide any legal standard against which to judge the adequacy of an NDC or to determine if a country is doing its fair share in global terms. Nor do states breach the agreement if they fail to achieve their NDCs, she added.

Many countries believe that legal obligations should not be limited to existing climate agreements and have asked the ICJ to consider a wide range of written and unwritten international law, including rules on transboundary harm, due diligence and the duty to cooperate and to prevent harm.

The relevance and scope of human rights in the context of climate change has also been hotly debated. States particularly disagree over the applicability of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in a 2022 resolution but has proved difficult to implement.

Mamadou Hébié, associate professor of international law at Leiden University, representing Burkina Faso at the ICJ, said the Paris Agreement does not create any exemption or derogation from the rest of international law.

Zachary Phillips, counsel for Antigua and Barbuda, said compliance with the Paris Agreement is “necessary but may not be sufficient” to comply with unwritten ‘customary’ international law, including the obligation to prevent harm.

Several of the world’s biggest economies – among those most reliant on fossil fuels – have contended this week, however, that they have no obligations beyond the Paris pact and the UNFCCC. Australia, for example, said these are “central instruments” for global cooperation while China appealed to the court to avoid “fragmenting” international climate law.

Wiebke Rückert, Germany’s director for public international law, said the Paris Agreement strikes a “careful balance” between legal and non-legal commitments and warned that attempts to change that could “seriously” endanger the willingness of states to participate in political processes.

Ghaida Bajbaa, from Saudi Arabia’s energy ministry, said the UNFCCC provides “no basis whatsoever” for the court to authorise limits to fossil fuel extraction and consumption.

This was echoed by Maksim Musikhin, director of the legal department of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who said the transition away from fossil fuels – agreed at COP28 in Dubai last year – is not a legal obligation but rather a political appeal.

Ashfaq Khalfan, climate justice director for Oxfam America, said it was “absurd” for the Biden administration to make arguments against clearer legal obligations on climate change given the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump, who has vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement for a second time when he takes office.

The ICJ hearing continues until December 13 in The Hague, with other big greenhouse gas emitters such as the UK still to speak.

 

 

IPCC Crusade Built on Science Mistakes

Posted on by Ron Clutz

“Mistake” definition (American Heritage Dictionary)

Noun

  1. An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness.
  2. A misconception or misunderstanding.

Five Major IPCC Science Mistakes

♦  Surface stations records have warmed mostly from urban heat sources, not IR-active gases.

♦  Solar climate forcing varies more than IPCC admits.

♦  Experiments show more CO2 does not make air warmer.

♦  On all time scales temperature changes lead and CO2 changes follow.

♦  IPCC climate models exclude natural climate factors to blame all warming on GHGs.

Mistakes on Temperature Records and Solar Forcing

The first two misconceptions are described in a recent paper by CERES (Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences).  My post below provides the details.

Overview of CERES Study

Our review suggests that the IPCC reports have inadequately accounted for two major scientific concerns when they were evaluating the causes of global warming since the 1850s:

1. The global temperature estimates used in the IPCC reports are contaminated by urban warming biases.
2.  The estimates of solar activity changes since the 1850s considered by the IPCC substantially downplayed a possible large role for the Sun.

We conclude that it is not scientifically valid for the IPCC to rule out the possibility that global warming might be mostly natural.

Fatal Flaw Discredits IPCC Science

By way of John Ray comes this Spectator Australia article A basic flaw in IPCC science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Detailed research is underway that threatens to undermine the foundations of the climate science promoted by the IPCC since its First Assessment Report in 1992. The research is re-examining the rural and urban temperature records in the Northern Hemisphere that are the foundation for the IPCC’s estimates of global warming since 1850. The research team has been led by Dr Willie Soon (a Malaysian solar astrophysicist associated with the Smithsonian Institute for many years) and two highly qualified Irish academics – Dr Michael Connolly and his son Dr Ronan Connolly. They have formed a climate research group CERES-SCIENCE. Their detailed research will be a challenge for the IPCC 7th Assessment Report due to be released in 2029 as their research results challenge the very foundations of IPCC science.

The climate warming trend published by the IPCC is a continually updated graph based on the temperature records of Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature stations dating from the mid 19th Century. The latest IPCC 2021 report uses data for the period 1850-2018. The IPCC’s selection of Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature records is not in question and is justifiable. The Northern Hemisphere records provide the best database for this period. The Southern Hemisphere land temperature records are not that extensive and are sparse for the 19th and early 20th Century. It is generally agreed that the urban temperature data is significantly warmer than the rural data in the same region because of an urban warming bias. This bias is due to night-time surface radiation of the daytime solar radiation absorbed by concrete and bitumen. Such radiation leads to higher urban night-time temperatures than say in the nearby countryside. The IPCC acknowledges such a warming bias but alleges the increased effect is only 10 per cent and therefore does not significantly distort its published global warming trend lines.


Since 2018, Dr Soon and his partners have analysed the data from rural and urban temperature recording stations in China, the USA, the Arctic, and Ireland. The number of stations with reliable temperature records in these areas increased from very few in the mid-19th Century to around 4,000 in the 1970s before decreasing to around 2,000 by the 1990s. The rural temperature recording stations with good records peaked at 400 and are presently around 200.

Their analysis of individual stations needs to account for any variation in their exposure to the Sun due to changes in their location, OR shadowing due to the construction of nearby buildings, OR nearby vegetation growth. The analysis of rural temperature stations is further complicated as over time many are encroached by nearby cities. Consequently, the data from such stations needs to be shifted at certain dates from the rural temperature database to either an intermediate database or to a full urban database. Consequently, an accurate analysis of the temperature records of each recording station is a time-consuming task.


This new analysis of 4,000 temperature recording stations in China, the USA, the Arctic, and Ireland shows a warming trend of 0.89ºC per century in the urban stations that is 1.61 times higher that a warming trend of 0.55ºC per century in the rural stations. This difference is far more significant than the 10 per cent divergence between urban and rural stations alleged in the IPCC reports; a divergence explained by a potential flaw in the IPCC’s methodology. The IPCC uses a technique called homogenisation that averages the rural and urban temperatures in a particular region. This method distorts the rural temperature records as over 75 per cent of the temperature records used in this homogenisation methodology are urban stations. So, a methodology that attempts to statistically identify and correct some biases that may be in the raw data, in effect, leads to an urban blending of the rural dataset. This result is biased as it downgrades the actual values of each rural temperature station. In contrast, Dr Soon and his coworkers avoided homogenisation so the temperature trends they identify for each rural region are accurate as the rural data are not distorted by the readings from nearby urban stations.


The rural temperature trend measured by this new research is 0.55ºC per century and it indicates the Earth has warmed 0.9ºC since 1850. In contrast, the urban temperature trend measured by this new research is 0.89ºC per century and indicates a much higher warming of 1.5ºC since 1850. Consequently, a distorted urban warming trend has been used by the IPCC to quantify the warming of the whole of the Earth since 1850. The exaggeration is significant as the urban temperature record database used by the IPCC only represents the temperatures on 3-4 per cent of the Earth’s land surface area; an area less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s total surface area. During the next few years, Dr Willie Soon and his research team are currently analysing the meta-history of 800 European temperature recording stations. When this is done their research will be based on very significant database of Northern Hemisphere rural and urban temperature records from China, the USA, the Arctic, Ireland, and Europe.

This new research has unveiled another flaw in the IPCC‘s temperature narrative as trend lines in its revised temperature datasets are different from those published by the IPCC. For example, the rural records now show a marked warming trend in the 1930s and 1940s while there is only a slight warming trend in the IPCC dataset. The most significant difference is the existence of a marked cooling period in the rural dataset for the 1960s and 1970s that is almost absent in the IPCC’s urban dataset. This later divergence upsets the common narrative that rising carbon dioxide levels control modern warming trends. For, if carbon dioxide levels are the driver of modern warming, how can a higher rate of increasing carbon dioxide levels exist within a cooling period in the 1960s and 1970s while a lower increasing rate of carbon dioxide levels coincides with an earlier warming interval in the 1930s and 1940s? Or, in other words, how can carbon dioxide levels increasing at 1.7 parts per million per decade cause a distinct warming period in the 1930s and 1940s while a larger increasing rate of 10.63 parts per million per decade is associated with a distinct cooling period in the 1960s and 1970s! Consequently, the research of Willie Soon and his coworkers is discrediting, not only the higher rate of global warming trends specified in IPCC Reports, but also the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels explain modern warming trends; a lynchpin of IPCC science for the last 25 years.

Willie Soon and his coworkers maintain that climate scientists need to consider other possible explanations for recent global warming. Willie Soon and his coworkers point to the Sun, but the IPCC maintains that variations in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) are over eons and not over shorter periods such as the last few centuries. For that reason, the IPCC point to changes in greenhouse gases as the most obvious explanation for global warming since 1850. In contrast, Willie Soon and his coworkers maintain there can be short-term changes in solar activity and, for example, refer to a period of no sunspot activity that coincided with the Little Ice Age in the 17th Century. They also point out there is still no agreed average figure for Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) despite 30 years of measurements taken by various satellites. Consequently, they contend research in this area is not settled.

The CERES-SCIENCE research project pioneered by Dr Willie Soon and the father-son Connolly team has questioned the validity of the high global warming trends for the 1850-present period that have been published by the IPCC since its first report in 1992. The research also queries the IPCC narrative that rising greenhouse gas concentrations, particularly carbon dioxide, are the primary driver of global warming since 1850. That narrative has been the foundation of IPCC climate science for the last 40 years. It will be interesting to see how the IPCC’s 7th Assessment Report in 2029 treats this new research that questions the very basis of IPCC’s climate science.

The paper is The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. 

Abstract

A statistical analysis was applied to Northern Hemisphere land surface temperatures (1850–2018) to try to identify the main drivers of the observed warming since the mid-19th century. Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century. This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.

Three main climatic drivers were considered, following the approaches adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent 6th Assessment Report (AR6): two natural forcings (solar and volcanic) and the composite “all anthropogenic forcings combined” time series recommended by IPCC AR6. The volcanic time series was that recommended by IPCC AR6. Two alternative solar forcing datasets were contrasted. One was the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) time series that was recommended by IPCC AR6. The other TSI time series was apparently overlooked by IPCC AR6. It was found that altering the temperature estimate and/or the choice of solar forcing dataset resulted in very different conclusions as to the primary drivers of the observed warming.

Our analysis focused on the Northern Hemispheric land component of global surface temperatures since this is the most data-rich component. It reveals that important challenges remain for the broader detection and attribution problem of global warming: (1) urbanization bias remains a substantial problem for the global land temperature data; (2) it is still unclear which (if any) of the many TSI time series in the literature are accurate estimates of past TSI; (3) the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination. Suggestions for how these scientific challenges might be resolved are offered.

Mistake on CO2 Warming Effect

Thomas Allmendinger is a Swiss physicist educated at Zurich ETH whose practical experience is in the fields of radiology and elemental particles physics.  His complete biography is here.

His independent research and experimental analyses of greenhouse gas (GHG) theory over the last decade led to several published studies, including the latest summation The Real Origin of Climate Change and the Feasibilities of Its Mitigation, 2023, at Atmospheric and Climate Sciences journal. The paper is a thorough and detailed discussion of which I provide here the abstract and the excerpt describing the experiment.  Excerpts are in italics with my bolds and added images. Full post is Experimental Proof Nil Warming from GHGs.

Abstract

The actual treatise represents a synopsis of six important previous contributions of the author, concerning atmospheric physics and climate change. Since this issue is influenced by politics like no other, and since the greenhouse-doctrine with CO2 as the culprit in climate change is predominant, the respective theory has to be outlined, revealing its flaws and inconsistencies.

But beyond that, the author’s own contributions are focused and deeply discussed. The most eminent one concerns the discovery of the absorption of thermal radiation by gases, leading to warming-up, and implying a thermal radiation of gases which depends on their pressure. This delivers the final evidence that trace gases such as CO2 don’t have any influence on the behaviour of the atmosphere, and thus on climate.

But the most useful contribution concerns the method which enables to determine the solar absorption coefficient βs of coloured opaque plates. It delivers the foundations for modifying materials with respect to their capability of climate mitigation. Thereby, the main influence is due to the colouring, in particular of roofs which should be painted, preferably light-brown (not white, from aesthetic reasons).

It must be clear that such a drive for brightening-up the World would be the only chance of mitigating the climate, whereas the greenhouse doctrine, related to CO2, has to be abandoned. However, a global climate model with forecasts cannot be aspired to since this problem is too complex, and since several climate zones exist.

4. Thermal Gas Absorption Measurements

If the warming-up behaviour of gases has to be determined by temperature measurements, interference by the walls of the gas vessel should be regarded since they exhibit a significantly higher heat capacity than the gas does, which implicates a slower warming-up rate. Since solid materials absorb thermal radiation stronger than gases do, the risk exists that the walls of the vessel are directly warmed up by the radiation, and that they subsequently transfer the heat to the gas. And finally, even the thin glass-walls of the thermometers may disturb the measurements by absorbing thermal radiation.

By these reasons, quadratic tubes with a relatively large profile (20 cm) were used which consisted of 3 cm thick plates from Styrofoam, and which were covered at the ends by thin plastic foils. In order to measure the temperature course along the tube, mercury-thermometers were mounted at three positions (beneath, in the middle, and atop) whose tips were covered with aluminum foils. The test gases were supplied from steel cylinders being equipped with reducing valves. They were introduced by a connecter during approx. one hour, because the tube was not gastight and not enough consistent for an evacuation. The filling process was monitored by means of a hygrometer since the air, which had to be replaced, was slightly humid. Afterwards, the tube was optimized by attaching adhesive foils and thin aluminum foils (see Figure 13). The equipment and the results are reported in [21].

Figure 13. Solar-tube, adjustable to the sun [21].

The initial measurements were made outdoor with twin-tubes in the presence of solar light. One tube was filled with air, and the other one with carbon-dioxide. Thereby, the temperature increased within a few minutes by approx. ten degrees till constant limiting temperatures were attained, namely simultaneously at all positions. Surprisingly, this was the case in both tubes, thus also in the tube which was filled with ambient air. Already this result delivered the proof that the greenhouse theory cannot be true. Moreover, it gave rise to investigate the phenomenon more thoroughly by means of artificial, better defined light.

Figure 14. Heat-radiation tube with IR-spot [21].

Accordingly, the subsequent experiments were made using IR-spots with wattages of 50 W, 100 W and 150W which are normally employed for terraria (Figure 14). Particularly the IR-spot with 150 W lead to a considerably higher temperature increase of the included gas than it was the case when sunlight was applied, since its ratio of thermal radiation was higher. Thereby, variable impacts such as the nature of the gas could be evaluated.

Due to the results with IR-spots at different gases (air, carbon-dioxide, the noble gases argon, neon and helium), essential knowledge could be gained. In each case, the irradiated gas warmed up until a stable limiting temperature was attained. Analogously to the case of irradiated coloured solid plates, the temperature increased until the equilibrium state was attained where the heat absorption rate was identically equal with the heat emission rate.

Figure 15. Time/temperature-curves for different gases [21] (150 W-spot, medium thermometer-position).

As evident from the diagram in Figure 15, the initial observation made with sunlight was approved that pure carbon-dioxide was warmed up almost to the same degree as air does (whereby ambient air only scarcely differed from a 4:1 mixture between nitrogen and oxygen). Moreover, noble gases absorb thermal radiation, too. As subsequently outlined, a theoretical explanation could be found thereto.

Conclusion

Finally, the theoretically suggested dependency of the atmospheric thermal radiation intensity on the atmospheric pressure could be empirically verified by measurements at different altitudes, namely in Glattbrugg (430 m above sea level and on the top of the Furka-pass (2430 m above sea level), both in Switzerland, delivering a so-called atmospheric emission constant A ≈ 22 W·m−2•bar−1•K−0.5. It explained the altitude-paradox of the atmospheric temperature and delivered the definitive evidence that the atmospheric behavior, and thus the climate, does not depend on trace gases such as CO2. However, the atmosphere thermally reradiates indeed, leading to something similar to a Greenhouse effect. But this effect is solely due to the atmospheric pressure.

Mistake on Warming Prior to CO2 Rising

Changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperatures on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia. Since CO2 is the lagging variable, it cannot logically be the cause of temperature, the leading variable. It is folly to imagine that by reducing human emissions of CO2, we can change global temperatures, which are obviously driven by other factors.  Most recent post on this:

10/2024 Update Recent Warming Spike Drives Rise in CO2

Mistake on Models Bias Against Natural Factors

Figure 1. Anthropic and natural contributions. (a) Locked scaling factors, weak Pre Industrial Climate Anomalies (PCA). (b) Free scaling, strong PCA

In  2009, the iconic email from the Climategate leak included a comment by Phil Jones about the “trick” used by Michael Mann to “hide the decline,” in his Hockey Stick graph, referring to tree proxy temperatures  cooling rather than warming in modern times.  Now we have an important paper demonstrating that climate models insist on man-made global warming only by hiding the incline of natural warming in Pre-Industrial times.  The paper is From Behavioral Climate Models and Millennial Data to AGW Reassessment by Philippe de Larminat.  H/T No Tricks Zone. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

Context. The so called AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming), is based on thousands of climate simulations indicating that human activity is virtually solely responsible for the recent global warming. The climate models used are derived from the meteorological models used for short-term predictions. They are based on the fundamental and empirical physical laws that govern the myriad of atmospheric and oceanic cells integrated by the finite element technique. Numerical approximations, empiricism and the inherent chaos in fluid circulations make these models questionable for validating the anthropogenic principle, given the accuracy required (better than one per thousand) in determining the Earth energy balance.

Aims and methods. The purpose is to quantify and simulate behavioral models of weak complexity, without referring to predefined parameters of the underlying physical laws, but relying exclusively on generally accepted historical and paleoclimate series.

Results. These models perform global temperature simulations that are consistent with those from the more complex physical models. However, the repartition of contributions in the present warming depends strongly on the retained temperature reconstructions, in particular the magnitudes of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It also depends on the level of the solar activity series. It results from these observations and climate reconstructions that the anthropogenic principle only holds for climate profiles assuming almost no PCA neither significant variations in solar activity. Otherwise, it reduces to a weak principle where global warming is not only the result of human activity, but is largely due to solar activity.  Full post is here:

Climate Models Hide the Paleo Incline

Alberta: “CO2 Gas of Life, Not Pollutant!” Media Outrage Ensues

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Actually I discovered this news by way of Desmog whose report was in the spirit of Greta’s reaction to disbelief in CO2 hysteria.  Alberta Conservatives Pass Climate Denial Resolution 12 to Celebrate CO2 Pollution.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

UCP pledges to abandon the province’s net zero targets,
and remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant.

UCP members voted in favor of a resolution to “recognize the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta’s prosperity.” Credit: Danielle Paradis [Participants numbered over 6000]

Alberta’s United Conservative Party has passed a resolution to rebrand carbon dioxide — the chief gas whose overabundance in Earth’s atmosphere is causing the climate emergency — in a brazen display of climate science denial that harkens back to the 1990s fossil fuel industry playbook.

Resolution 12, which falls under the “environmental stewardship and emissions reduction” area of the policy discussion, will “recognize the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta’s prosperity.” 

In approving the resolution, the UCP resolved to abandon the province’s net zero targets, remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant, and further “recognize that CO2 is a foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”

“We must prioritize policies that protect our economy and our way of life. CO2 is an essential nutrient for mass, driving growth and boosting plant production. According to the CO2 Coalition, higher CO2 levels have led to healthier crops and improved food security worldwide,” said a UCP member speaking in favour of the policy who cited the notorious CO2 Coalition. 

The resolution passed by a wide majority. 

Background

I searched in vain for any news report citing reasons favoring such a resolution.  Instead, the journalists repeated the activist mantras, like lemmings impervious to any POV not proscribed by the canon.  Before getting into that content, let’s remember that this political party is faithful to its constituents.

In 2015 Canadians were asked for their candid views of global warming/climate change.  The two principle questions were:

1. “From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past four decades?”

2. [If yes, solid evidence] “Is the earth getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels or mostly because of natural patterns in the earth’s environment?”

The responses were quite diverse, to the pollsters’ surprise, yet Trudeau claimed the results justified his push for a carbon tax and other measures to regulate and reduce CO2 emissions.  Buried in the supporting documents, and ignored by him and the media was this finding:

This process did determine a survey result about the size of the population who believes warming is happening and mostly caused by humans.  Everything else is subject to interpretation, including how much is due to land use, urbanization or fossil fuel emissions.  The solid finding is displayed in the diagram above.  Yes, the map shows I am living in a hotbed of global warming believers around Montreal; well, it is 55%, as high as it gets in Canada. Yet Trudeau went on to impose his anti-hydrocarbon agenda despite most of the nation opposed to the idea. More to the point, that dark blue province in the west is none other than Alberta.  Clearly, their common sense skepticism of climate alarm is not a recent position. [For more on that survey see Uncensored: Canadians View Global Warming]

The Offenses Taken by Warmists from Alberta’s Resolve

1. Media reports repeated the claim that CO2 is a pollutant because it has caused rising temperatures.  For example, from Desmog:

Carbon dioxide is the gas principally responsible for exacerbating the greenhouse effect, the consequence of which is global warming. Whereas carbon is a foundational building block of life on Earth, carbon dioxide is an asphyxiating gas whose atmospheric proportions are so high they’re disrupting the normal function of the carbon cycle.

That reference to “greenhouse effect” ignores the fact that changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperatures on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia. Since CO2 is the lagging variable, it cannot logically be the cause of temperature, the leading variable. It is folly to imagine that by reducing human emissions of CO2, we can change global temperatures, which are obviously driven by other factors. [See Mid 2024 More Proof Temp Changes Drive CO2 Changes]

It also exaggerates the importance of the trace gas CO2 upon planetary heat transfers dominated by H2O.

The asphyxiating  label denies scientific knowledge about the properties of CO2 in our environment.

2. Advocates also disputed that CO2 is the “gas of life”, claiming that CO2 diminishes rather than enriches plant life.  For example, again from Desmog:

In the “rationale” section of the resolution, the United Conservative Party document argues that “CO2 is a nutrient foundational to all life on Earth.”

While plants need both light and carbon dioxide to thrive, the over-supply of CO2 in recent decades is leading to plants being deprived of their nutrients. One biologist was quoted in a 2017 Politico article describing this as akin to “the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history,” and that injection is diluting the nutrients in the food supply.

Firstly, there is no doubt more CO2 is good for plants.  That’s why operators of greenhouses for growing them add CO2 up to three or four times our present 420 ppm.

Experiments have confirmed the botanical principle of limiting factors. At present concentrations, rising CO2 always increases plant productivity unless another factor is sub-optimal and constrains growth. The researchers, aided and abetted by the media are spinning this to say more CO2 is not good for plants. In reality, the lack of phosphorus or other nutrients is not the fault of CO2, and will not be enhanced by somehow reducing CO2. [See CO2 Destroys Food Nutrition! Not.]

3. And media reports added the fear of extreme weather events, attributing them to CO2 emissions.  Again from Desmog:

As the principal driver of the climate crisis and global warming, increasing CO2 levels will exacerbate droughts, wildfires, and floods, among other disasters, in turn resulting in loss of life and major disruptions to global supply chains. The consequent economic disturbances and their aftereffects will worsen the affordability crisis and result in increasingly negative economic outcomes for all, not just Albertans. Rather than stimulate Alberta’s agricultural sector, climate change will destroy it, and the evidence this is already happening is quite clear.

This is again the doomsday litany that rising CO2 will destroy life as we know it.  None of the data support that narrative.  Just one of many examples of facts vs. fears is the above showing how droughts and flooding have always happened.  These events are within the past range of variability and have not increased with rising CO2.  Rather than show more such graphs, this video is a brief realistic summary of our climate circumstances.

Summary

Albertans are wise and courageous to take their position, and have many experts who share their understanding.

 

Arctic Ice In Perspective 2024

Posted on by Ron Clutz

With Arctic ice melting season winding down, warmists again stoked fears about ice disappearing in the North. In fact, the pattern of Arctic ice seen in historical perspective is not alarming. People are over-thinking and over-analyzing Arctic Ice extents, and getting wrapped around the axle (or should I say axis).  So let’s keep it simple and we can all readily understand what is happening up North.

I have noticed at some other blogs people complain about my monthly Arctic ice updates focusing on extents starting in 2007. This post will show why that time period is entirely reasonable as a subject for analysis. I will use the ever popular NOAA dataset derived from satellite passive microwave sensors.  It sometimes understates the ice extents, but everyone refers to it and it is complete from 1981 to present.  Here’s what NOAA reports (in M km2):

We are frequently told that only the March maximums and the September minimums matter, since the other months are only transitional between the two.  So the graph above shows the mean ice extent, averaging the two months March and September.  The data comes from Sea Ice Index (SII).

If I were adding this to the Ice House of Mirrors, the name would be The X-Ray Ice Mirror, because it looks into the structure of the time series.   For even more clarity and simplicity, here is the table:

NOAA NH Annual Average Ice Extents (in M km2).  Sea Ice Index v3.0 (here)

Year Average Change Rate of Change
1981 11.385    
1997 11.077 -0.308 -0.019 per year
2007 9.405 -1.672 -0.167 per year
2024 9.626  +0.221 +0.013 per year

The satellites involve rocket science, but this does not.  There was a small loss of ice extent over the first 16 years, then a dramatic downturn for 10 years, 9 times the rate as before. That was followed by the current 17-year plateau with a slight gain comparable to the beginning loss.  All the fuss is over that middle period, and we know what caused it.  A lot of multi-year ice was flushed out through the Fram Strait, leaving behind more easily melted younger ice. The effects from that natural occurrence bottomed out in 2007.

Kwok et al say this about the Variability of Fram Strait ice flux:

The average winter area flux over the 18-year record (1978–1996) is 670,000 km2, ;7% of the area of the Arctic Ocean. The winter area flux ranges from a minimum of 450,000 km2 in 1984 to a maximum of 906,000 km2 in 1995. . .The average winter volume flux over the winters of October 1990 through May 1995 is 1745 km3 ranging from a low of 1375 km3 in the 1990 flux to a high of 2791 km3 in 1994.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261010602/download

Conclusion:

Some complain it is too soon to say Arctic Ice is recovering, or that 2007 is a true change point.  The same people were quick to jump on a declining period after 1996 as evidence of a “Death Spiral.”

Footnote:

No one knows what will happen to Arctic ice.

Except maybe the polar bears.

And they are not talking.

Except, of course, to the admen from Coca-Cola

 

Alarmists Attack IPCC Not Linking Disasters to CO2

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Chris Morrison reports on the flap over Climate Crisis™ media tactics in his Daily Sceptic article Climate Activists Frustrated by IPCC’s Refusal to Link Extreme Weather With Carbon Emissions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions. But for those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “such headlines can be difficult to make sense of”, observes the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke. In a hard-hitting attack on the pseudo-scientific industry of weather attribution, he states:

“neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and“ certain claims of attribution”.

Pielke argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. “Climate science is not, or at least should not serve as a proxy for political tribes,” he cautions. But of course it is. The Net Zero fantasy is a collectivist national and supra-national agenda that increasingly relies on demonising bad weather. With global temperatures rising at most only 0.1°C a decade, laughter can only be general and side-splitting when IPCC boss Jim Skea claims that British summers will be 6°C hotter in less than 50 years. Two extended temperature pauses since 2000 have not helped the cause of global boiling. In addition there are increasing doubts about the reliability of temperature recordings by many meteorological organisations that seem unable to properly account for massive urban heat corruptions.

The big problem for ‘far Left’ climate extremists is that event attribution is a form, in Pielke’s words, of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends and is not always subject to peer review. As the BBC and other media outlets can attest, the work is “generally promoted via press release”. It has been developed in response to the failure of the IPCC to detect and attribute most types of extreme weather including drought, flooding, storms and wildfires to human involvement, notes Pielke. Worse, the IPCC can find little sign of human involvement going forward to 2100.

Scientists cannot answer directly whether particular events are
caused by climate change since extremes occur naturally.

Meanwhile the IPCC is somewhat dismissive about weather attribution, or as Pielke terms it, “weather attribution alchemy”. It notes: “The usefulness or applicability of available extreme event attribution methods for assessing climate-related risks remains subject to debate.” The IPCC is a biased body full of climate alarmists, but its inability to attribute single events to humans is obviously highly irritating and somewhat inconvenient for activists and their media counterparts.

Dr. Friederike Otto speaking with reporter at Oxford.

Dr. Friederike Otto runs World Weather Attribution (WWA) out of Imperial College London and is a frequent presence on the BBC. WWA is behind many of the immediate attributions of bad weather to human causes and its motives are clear. As Dr. Otto has noted: “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Otto is clear that the main function of such studies, part-funded by Net Zero-supporting billionaires and heavily pushed by aligned mainstream media, is to support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. She explains this strategy in detail in the interview, ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation‘.

The inability of the IPCC to attribute bad weather to humans has been viewed by climate advocates as “politically problematic”, continues Pielke. He notes the work of climate activists Elizabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes who are worried that the lack of attribution “conveys the impression that we just do not know, which feeds into uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness, and the general tendency of humans to discount threats that are not imminent”.

Perish the thought that there should be uncertainty, doubt
or incompleteness in the settled world of climate science.

It is of course different from all other branches of science in that all its opinions are right and consequently there is no need for the unhelpful process of constant inquiry and experiment. It need hardly be added that no doubt exists at the BBC, where former Radio 4 Today Editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists. Recalling when the late Nigel Lawson suggested there had been no increase in extreme weather, Sands noted: “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim.” These days, Sands enthused, attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.

For her part, Otto is keen to crack down on the heretics. She was at the forefront of the recent notorious retraction of a paper in a Springer Nature journal that stated there was no evidence that the climate was breaking down. Written by four Italian scientists and led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, they argued that a climate emergency was not supported by the data. Otto, who had previously worked in the Oxford School of Geography for 10 years, claimed the scientists were not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly saying it should never have been published,” she demanded.

A recent scientific study has confirmed that natural and climate-related disasters are declining during the 21st century. Getty Images/iStcokphoto

Declining Weather Disasters Prove Doomsters Wrong (Alimonti et al.)

Benny Peiser makes the case in his NY Post article Despite climate-change hysterics, weather disasters have decreased.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A recent scientific study has confirmed what climate realists have been highlighting for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.

In a paper published this year in one of the world’s leading journals on environmental hazards, Italian scientists Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani analyzed the number and temporal trends of natural disasters reported since 1900.

A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.

Based on the best available data, the two scientists concluded the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend [of natural disasters] to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of events.”

The researchers emphasized that their conclusion “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by UN bodies which predict an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming.”

“Our analyses strongly refute this assertion,” they wrote.

For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Red Cross have claimed that climate-related disasters are escalating.

Floods lead a near doubling of disaster events from 1980 to 1999 compared to 2000 to 2019, according to a report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

“Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s,” the WMO reported in 2021.

Disaster and weather officials affiliated with the UN claim this dramatic rise is due to global warming: The changing climate, they say, is making weather disasters stronger and more frequent.

Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States.

The increased frequency of heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events prove the negative impact of a warming world, according to various UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations.

Yet, as the actual data used by these organizations reveals, the last 20 years have in fact seen a significant decline in such events.

It turns out that climate alarmists have based their claims on a highly misleading comparison of disaster data of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries.

By their tally, the period from 1980 to 2000 saw about 4,200 natural disasters —with the number increasing sharply, to more than 8,000, during the first 20 years of this century.

This conclusion, however, is fatally flawed: It fails to take into account the huge increase in the global reporting of disasters engendered by the invention and rapid global dissemination of new communication technologies since the 1980s.

The arrival of the internet and other new communication tools has undoubtedly accelerated the reporting of disasters from all corners of the world — events that were significantly underreported in earlier decades.

As well, the number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has fallen steadily over the past 120 years — from 500,000 deaths per decade in the early 20th century down to less than 50,000 per decade in the last ten years.

And, contrary to claims by NGOs and government officials, climate-related disaster losses have also declined as a percentage of global GDP during the last 30 years — from about 0.25% of GDP in 1990 to less than 0.20% in 2023.

The study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been pointing out for a long time: Climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite warming temperatures.

International agencies and the news media have hyped climate disasters for far too long, while ignoring the factual downward trend.

”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” as the saying goes.  UN agencies and NGOs have been misleading the public for years. It’s past time for the truth to win out.

Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.

See also

Our Weather Extremes Are Customary in History

Figure27: Annual count of EF3 and above tornadoes in the US, 1950–2021. Source: Source: NOAA/NCEI.106, 107

 

Fatal Flaw Discredits IPCC Science

Posted on by Ron Clutz

By way of John Ray comes this Spectator Australia article A basic flaw in IPCC science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Detailed research is underway that threatens to undermine the foundations of the climate science promoted by the IPCC since its First Assessment Report in 1992. The research is re-examining the rural and urban temperature records in the Northern Hemisphere that are the foundation for the IPCC’s estimates of global warming since 1850. The research team has been led by Dr Willie Soon (a Malaysian solar astrophysicist associated with the Smithsonian Institute for many years) and two highly qualified Irish academics – Dr Michael Connolly and his son Dr Ronan Connolly. They have formed a climate research group CERES-SCIENCE. Their detailed research will be a challenge for the IPCC 7th Assessment Report due to be released in 2029 as their research results challenge the very foundations of IPCC science.

The climate warming trend published by the IPCC is a continually updated graph based on the temperature records of Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature stations dating from the mid 19th Century. The latest IPCC 2021 report uses data for the period 1850-2018. The IPCC’s selection of Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature records is not in question and is justifiable. The Northern Hemisphere records provide the best database for this period. The Southern Hemisphere land temperature records are not that extensive and are sparse for the 19th and early 20th Century. It is generally agreed that the urban temperature data is significantly warmer than the rural data in the same region because of an urban warming bias. This bias is due to night-time surface radiation of the daytime solar radiation absorbed by concrete and bitumen. Such radiation leads to higher urban night-time temperatures than say in the nearby countryside. The IPCC acknowledges such a warming bias but alleges the increased effect is only 10 per cent and therefore does not significantly distort its published global warming trend lines.


Since 2018, Dr Soon and his partners have analysed the data from rural and urban temperature recording stations in China, the USA, the Arctic, and Ireland. The number of stations with reliable temperature records in these areas increased from very few in the mid-19th Century to around 4,000 in the 1970s before decreasing to around 2,000 by the 1990s. The rural temperature recording stations with good records peaked at 400 and are presently around 200.

Their analysis of individual stations needs to account for any variation in their exposure to the Sun due to changes in their location, OR shadowing due to the construction of nearby buildings, OR nearby vegetation growth. The analysis of rural temperature stations is further complicated as over time many are encroached by nearby cities. Consequently, the data from such stations needs to be shifted at certain dates from the rural temperature database to either an intermediate database or to a full urban database. Consequently, an accurate analysis of the temperature records of each recording station is a time-consuming task.


This new analysis of 4,000 temperature recording stations in China, the USA, the Arctic, and Ireland shows a warming trend of 0.89ºC per century in the urban stations that is 1.61 times higher that a warming trend of 0.55ºC per century in the rural stations. This difference is far more significant than the 10 per cent divergence between urban and rural stations alleged in the IPCC reports; a divergence explained by a potential flaw in the IPCC’s methodology. The IPCC uses a technique called homogenisation that averages the rural and urban temperatures in a particular region. This method distorts the rural temperature records as over 75 per cent of the temperature records used in this homogenisation methodology are urban stations. So, a methodology that attempts to statistically identify and correct some biases that may be in the raw data, in effect, leads to an urban blending of the rural dataset. This result is biased as it downgrades the actual values of each rural temperature station. In contrast, Dr Soon and his coworkers avoided homogenisation so the temperature trends they identify for each rural region are accurate as the rural data are not distorted by the readings from nearby urban stations.


The rural temperature trend measured by this new research is 0.55ºC per century and it indicates the Earth has warmed 0.9ºC since 1850. In contrast, the urban temperature trend measured by this new research is 0.89ºC per century and indicates a much higher warming of 1.5ºC since 1850. Consequently, a distorted urban warming trend has been used by the IPCC to quantify the warming of the whole of the Earth since 1850. The exaggeration is significant as the urban temperature record database used by the IPCC only represents the temperatures on 3-4 per cent of the Earth’s land surface area; an area less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s total surface area. During the next few years, Dr Willie Soon and his research team are currently analysing the meta-history of 800 European temperature recording stations. When this is done their research will be based on very significant database of Northern Hemisphere rural and urban temperature records from China, the USA, the Arctic, Ireland, and Europe.

This new research has unveiled another flaw in the IPCC‘s temperature narrative as trend lines in its revised temperature datasets are different from those published by the IPCC. For example, the rural records now show a marked warming trend in the 1930s and 1940s while there is only a slight warming trend in the IPCC dataset. The most significant difference is the existence of a marked cooling period in the rural dataset for the 1960s and 1970s that is almost absent in the IPCC’s urban dataset. This later divergence upsets the common narrative that rising carbon dioxide levels control modern warming trends. For, if carbon dioxide levels are the driver of modern warming, how can a higher rate of increasing carbon dioxide levels exist within a cooling period in the 1960s and 1970s while a lower increasing rate of carbon dioxide levels coincides with an earlier warming interval in the 1930s and 1940s? Or, in other words, how can carbon dioxide levels increasing at 1.7 parts per million per decade cause a distinct warming period in the 1930s and 1940s while a larger increasing rate of 10.63 parts per million per decade is associated with a distinct cooling period in the 1960s and 1970s! Consequently, the research of Willie Soon and his coworkers is discrediting, not only the higher rate of global warming trends specified in IPCC Reports, but also the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels explain modern warming trends; a lynchpin of IPCC science for the last 25 years.

Willie Soon and his coworkers maintain that climate scientists need to consider other possible explanations for recent global warming. Willie Soon and his coworkers point to the Sun, but the IPCC maintains that variations in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) are over eons and not over shorter periods such as the last few centuries. For that reason, the IPCC point to changes in greenhouse gases as the most obvious explanation for global warming since 1850. In contrast, Willie Soon and his coworkers maintain there can be short-term changes in solar activity and, for example, refer to a period of no sunspot activity that coincided with the Little Ice Age in the 17th Century. They also point out there is still no agreed average figure for Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) despite 30 years of measurements taken by various satellites. Consequently, they contend research in this area is not settled.

The CERES-SCIENCE research project pioneered by Dr Willie Soon and the father-son Connolly team has questioned the validity of the high global warming trends for the 1850-present period that have been published by the IPCC since its first report in 1992. The research also queries the IPCC narrative that rising greenhouse gas concentrations, particularly carbon dioxide, are the primary driver of global warming since 1850. That narrative has been the foundation of IPCC climate science for the last 40 years. It will be interesting to see how the IPCC’s 7th Assessment Report in 2029 treats this new research that questions the very basis of IPCC’s climate science.

The paper is The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. 

Abstract

A statistical analysis was applied to Northern Hemisphere land surface temperatures (1850–2018) to try to identify the main drivers of the observed warming since the mid-19th century. Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century. This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.

Three main climatic drivers were considered, following the approaches adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent 6th Assessment Report (AR6): two natural forcings (solar and volcanic) and the composite “all anthropogenic forcings combined” time series recommended by IPCC AR6. The volcanic time series was that recommended by IPCC AR6. Two alternative solar forcing datasets were contrasted. One was the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) time series that was recommended by IPCC AR6. The other TSI time series was apparently overlooked by IPCC AR6. It was found that altering the temperature estimate and/or the choice of solar forcing dataset resulted in very different conclusions as to the primary drivers of the observed warming.

Our analysis focused on the Northern Hemispheric land component of global surface temperatures since this is the most data-rich component. It reveals that important challenges remain for the broader detection and attribution problem of global warming: (1) urbanization bias remains a substantial problem for the global land temperature data; (2) it is still unclear which (if any) of the many TSI time series in the literature are accurate estimates of past TSI; (3) the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination. Suggestions for how these scientific challenges might be resolved are offered.

2024 Arctic Ice Beats 2007 by Half a Wadham

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The graph above shows September daily ice extents for 2024 compared to 18 year averages, and some years of note. Day 260 has been the lowest daily ice extent on average for the last 18 years.

The black line shows on average Arctic ice extents during September decline 358k km2 down to 4.5M Km2 by day 260. The average increase from now on is 490k km2 up to 5.0M km2 end of September.  2024  tracked a little lower than the 18-year average in the second week reaching a low of 4.49M km2 on day 255, before going above average on day 260. 

SII was reporting deficits as high as 0.5M km2 (half a Wadham) compared to  MASIE early in September.  For some reason, that dataset has not been updated for the last five days.  2023 bottomed out at 4.1M while 2007 daily minimum hit 4.0M, ended ~ 0.5M km2 in deficit to average and 535k km2 less than MASIE on day 260.  2020 ice on day 260 was ~740k km2 in deficit to average.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post UAH June 2024: Oceans Lead Cool Down.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update.

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_levelThe table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 260 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2007. At this point in the year, Bering and Okhotsk seas are open water and thus dropped from the table.

Region 2024260 Day 260 ave 2024-Ave. 2007260 2024-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 4581327 4524401 56926 4045776 535551
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 304967 491931 -186963 481384 -176416
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 360456 167361 193095 22527 337929
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 353456 252958 100498 311 353145
 (4) Laptev_Sea 160792 135574 25218 235869 -75076
 (5) Kara_Sea 0 31612 -31612 44067 -44067
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 14610 -14610 7420 -7420
 (7) Greenland_Sea 165965 191196 -25230 333181 -167216
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 53126 29745 23381 26703 26423
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 228869 274428 -45559 225526 3344
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1692 4595 -2903 2270 -578
 (11) Central_Arctic 2950861 2929452 21409 2665243.87 285617

The overall surplus to average is 57k km2, (1.3%).  The major deficit is in Beaufort, offset by large surpluses in Chukchi and East Siberian seas. 

bathymetric_map_arctic_ocean

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring ice and snow extents.

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Data Say Summer 2024 Not So Hot

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For sure you’ve seen the headlines declaring 2024 likely to be the Hottest year ever.  If you’re like me, your response is: That’s not the way it’s going down where I live.  Fortunately there is a website that allows anyone to check their personal experience with the weather station data nearby.  weatherspark.com provides data summaries for you to judge what’s going on in weather history where you live.  In my case a modern weather station is a few miles away Summer 2024 Weather History at Montréal–Mirabel International Airport  The story about Summer 2024 is evident below in charts and graphs from this site.  There’s a map that allows you to find your locale.

The daily average high (red line) and low (blue line) temperature, with 25th to 75th and 10th to 90th percentile bands. The thin dotted lines are the corresponding average perceived temperatures.

First, consider above the norms for Summer from the period 1980 to 2016.

Then, there’s Summer 2024 compared to the normal observations.

The daily range of reported temperatures (gray bars) and 24-hour highs (red ticks) and lows (blue ticks), placed over the daily average high (faint red line) and low (faint blue line) temperature, with 25th to 75th and 10th to 90th percentile bands.

The graph shows Summer had some warm days, some cool days and overall was pretty normal.  But since climate is more than temperature, consider cloudiness.

Wow!  Most of the summer was cloudy, which in summer means blocking the warming sun from hitting the surface.   And with all those clouds, let’s look at precipitation:

So, in the observations out of 92 summer days, there were 56 days when it rained, including 11 days of thunderstorms with heavy rainfall. Given what we know about the hydrology cycles, that means a lot of heat removed upward from the surface.

So the implications for Summer temperatures in my locale.

There you have it before your eyes. Mostly warm days for the
three summer months, with exactly eleven hot afternoons (>30°C).
Otherwise comfortable and cool, and no hot
afternoons in September.

Summary:

Claims of hottest this or that month or year are based on averages of averages of temperatures, which in principle is an intrinsic quality and distinctive to a locale.  The claim involves selecting some places and time periods where warming appears, while ignoring other places where it has been cooling.

Remember:  They want you to panic.  Before doing so, check out what the data says in your neck of the woods.  For example, NOAA declared that “July 2024 was the warmest ever recorded for the globe.”