Climate Impacts

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.”

Acidification Alarmists Forced to Fake Findings

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The story of fake research findings was published at the journal Science entitled Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says.  Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

Finding against Danielle Dixson vindicates whistleblowers
who questioned high-profile work on ocean acidification

A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.

Danielle Dixson, asistant professor at the University of Delaware, will explore coral reefs off Belize over the next three years. Here, she is diving on a reef in the Indo-Pacific. Courtesy of Danielle Dixson Source: delaware online

Dixson is known as a highly successful scientist and fundraiser. She obtained her Ph.D. at James Cook University (JCU),  Townsville in Australia, in 2012; worked as a postdoc and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 4 years; and in 2015 started her own group at UD’s marine biology lab in Lewes, a small town on the Atlantic Coast. She received a $1.05 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2016 and currently has a $750,000 career grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She presented her research at a 2015 White House meeting and has often been featured in the media, including in a 2019 story in Science.

Together with one of her Ph.D. supervisors, JCU marine biologist Philip Munday, Dixson pioneered research into the effects on fish of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which cause the oceans to acidify. In a series of studies published since 2009 they showed that acidification can disorient fish, lead them to swim toward chemical cues emitted by their predators, and affect their hearing and vision. Dixson’s later work focused on coral reef ecology, the subject of her Science paper.

The colorful diversity of coral found at One Tree Island. The structure and diversity of coral we see today is already at risk of dissolution from ocean acidification. Kennedy Wolfe University of Sydney

Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.

The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.

Several former members of Dixson’s lab supported the whistleblowers’ request for an investigation. One of them, former postdoc Zara Cowan, was the first to identify the many duplications in the data file for the now-retracted Science paper. Another, former Ph.D. student Paul Leingang, first brought accusations against Dixson to university officials in January 2020. He left the lab soon after and joined the broader group of whistleblowers.

Leingang, who had been at Dixson’s lab since 2016, says he had become increasingly suspicious of her findings, in part because she usually collected her fluming data alone. In November 2019 he decided to secretly track some of Dixson’s activities. He supplied the investigation with detailed notes, chat conversations, and tweets by Dixson to show that she did not spend enough time on her fluming studies to collect the data she was jotting down in her lab notebooks.

The investigative panel found Leingang’s account convincing and singled him out for praise. “It is very difficult for a young scholar seeking a Ph.D. to challenge their advisor on ethical grounds,” the draft report says. “The Committee believes it took great bravery for him to come forward so explicitly. The same is true of the other members of the laboratory who backed the Complainant’s action.”

UD “did a decent investigation. I think it’s one of the first universities that we’ve seen actually do that,” says ecophysiologist Fredrik Jutfelt of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, one of the whistleblowers. “So that’s really encouraging.” But he and others in the group are disappointed that the committee appears to have looked at only seven of the 20 Dixson papers they had flagged as suspicious. They also had hoped UD would release the committee’s final report and detail any sanctions against Dixson. “That is a shame,” Jutfelt says.

Inventing Facts to Promote an Imaginary Crisis

Legacy and social media are awash with warnings about hydrocarbon emissions making the oceans acidic and threatening all ocean life from plankton up to whales.  For example:

Ocean acidification: A wake-up call in our waters – NOAA

Canada’s oceans are becoming more acidic – Pêches et Océans Canada

The Ocean Is Getting More Acidic—What That Actually Means– National Geographic

What Is Ocean Acidification? – NASA Climate Kids

Ocean acidification: why the Earth’s oceans are turning to acid – OA-ICC

Etc, etc., etc.

With the climatism hype far beyond any observations, marine biologists have stepped up to make an industry out of false evidence.  They are forced to do so because reality does not conform to their beliefs.  A good summary of acidification hoaxes comes from Jim Steele Un-refutable Evidence of Alarmists’ Ocean Acidification Misinformation in 3 Easy Lessons posted at WUWT.  Points covered include:

♦  The Undisputed Science

♦  The Dissolving Snail Shell Hoax

♦  The Reduced Calcification Hoax

More detail on the bogus fish behavior studies is also found at WUWT: James Cook University Researchers Refuted: “Ocean Acidification Does not Impair” Fish behaviour

A brief explanation debunking the notion of CO2 causing ocean “acidification” is here:

Background Post Shows Alarmist Claims Not Supported in IPCC WG1 References

Headlines Claim, But Details Deny

Update Sept. 9 Response to Brian Catt

Below I note that claimed %s of increasing acidity involve changes in parts per billion for H ion in water.  Further, the relation between atmospheric CO2 and ocean pH needs to be understood.

Figure 1: pH of ocean water and rain water versus concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Calculated with (20); Ocean alkalinity [A] = 2.3 × 10−3 M. Rain alkalinity [A] = 0. Temperature T = 25 C.

The source is Cohen and Happer (2015), where these conclusions are written:

This minimalist discussion already shows how hard it is to scare informed people with ocean acidification, but, alas, many people are not informed. For example:

• The oceans would be highly alkaline with a pH of about 11.4, similar to that of household ammonia, if there were no weak acids to buffer the alkalinity. Almost all of the buffering is provided by dissolved CO2, with very minor additional buffering from boric acid, silicic acid and other even less important species.

• As shown in Fig. 1, doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800 ppm only decreases the pH of ocean water from about 8.2 to 7.9. This is well within the day-night fluctuations that already occur because of photosynthesis by plankton and less than the pH decreases with depth that occur because of the biological pump and the dissolution of calcium carbonate precipitates below the lysocline.

• As shown in Fig. 2, doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800 ppm only decreases the carbonate-ion concentration, [CO2−3], by about 30%. Ocean surface waters are already supersaturated by several hundred per cent for formation of CaCO3 crystals from Ca2+ and CO2−3. So scare stories about dissolving carbonate shells are nonsense.

• As shown in Fig. 7, the ocean has only absorbed 1/3 or less of the CO2 that it would eventually absorb when the concentrations of CO2 in the deep oceans came to equilibrium with surface concentrations. Effects like that of the biological pump and calcium carbonate dissolution below the lysocline allow the ocean to absorb substantially more than the amount that would be in chemical-equilibrium with the atmosphere.

• Over most of the Phanerozoic, the past 550 million years, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been measured in thousands of parts per million, and life flourished in both the oceans and on land. This is hardly surprising, given the relative insensitivity of ocean pH to large changes in CO2 concentrations that we have discussed above, and given the fact that the pH changes that do occur are small compared to the natural variations of ocean pH in space and time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antidote for Radiation Myopia

Posted on by Ron Clutz

On a previous post a reader queried me about my position.  Taking him to be serious, I prepared a reply with resources that can serve anyone wanting to understand radiative GHG theory and reality.  The key is to escape radiation myopia, that is focusing on radiative energy transfers in earth’s climate system to the exclusion of the other transfers.  Energy in our world moves by conduction, convection and phase changes of H2O in addition to radiation.  And not surprisingly at any place and time, the most active mode is the one with the least resistance.

The post triggering the question was this one:

The Original Sin of GHG Theory

My Reply to Questioner

Thanks for your response. Your inital question sounded trollish, but I take your comment seriously.

Firstly, you said “I’ve never seen anyone outside of the anti-GHG crowd ever talk about “back-radiation”. Actually references to that notion are readily found since it is the primary way global warming/ climate change is explained to the public. Some examples:

“However, GHGs, unlike other atmospheric gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, are opaque to outgoing infrared radiation. As the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere increases due to human-caused emissions, energy radiated from the surface becomes trapped in the atmosphere, unable to escape the planet. This energy returns to the surface, where it is reabsorbed.” UNEP

“Greenhouses gases are atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and water vapor (H2O) that absorb and re-radiate heat, which warms the lower atmosphere and Earth’s surface. This process of absorption and re-radiation of heat is called the greenhouse effect. Although greenhouse gases only make up a small percentage of the atmosphere, small changes in the amount of greenhouse gases can greatly alter the strength of the greenhouse effect, which in turn, affects the Earth’s average temperature and climate. UCBerkeley

“As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.’ ColumbiaU

The favored term now is “re-radiation” and it is central in the narrative everywhere, including among others, NASA, MIT and of course multiple UN agencies. So it is necessary to debunk the notion.

I know as well as you that back- or re-radiation is a caricature, and climate scientists make a different claim, namely raising the ERL which slows the cooling. That theory is also wrong for different empirical reasons. See:

Refresher: GHG Theory and the Tests It Fails

Secondly, the root issue is the abuse of Stefan-Boltzman law to create a fictious downward energy transfer, such as seen in energy balance cartoons, misleading and not funny. The equation calculates the transfer from the difference in temperature between two bodies in thermal contact, it does not attribute thermal radiation to each of them. Full explanation here:

Experimental Proof Nil Warming from GHGs

And regarding the failed energy balance diagrams:

Fatal Flaw in Earth Energy Balance Diagrams

For extra credit and insight, look at a Sabine Hosenfelder video to understand how current GHG theory goes astray. Link includes excerpts and critique.

Sabine’s Video Myopic on GHG Climate Role

Summary

“The Earth, a rocky sphere at a distance from the Sun of ~149.6 million kilometers, where the Solar irradiance comes in at 1361.7 W/m2, with a mean global albedo, mostly from clouds, of 0.3 and with an atmosphere surrounding it containing a gaseous mass held in place by the planet’s gravity, producing a surface pressure of ~1013 mb, with an ocean of H2O covering 71% of its surface and with a rotation time around its own axis of ~24h, boasts an average global surface temperature of +15°C (288K).

Why this specific temperature? Because, with an atmosphere weighing down upon us with the particular pressure that ours exerts, this is the temperature level the surface has to reach and stay at for the global convectional engine to be able to pull enough heat away fast enough from it to be able to balance the particular averaged out energy input from the Sun that we experience.

It’s that simple.”  E. M. Smith

 

See Also

New Wholistic Paradigm of Climate Change

 

Latest INM Climate Model Projections Triggered by Scenario Inputs

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The latest climate simulation from the Russian INM was published in April 2024: Simulation of climate changes in Northern Eurasia by two versions of the INM RAS Earth system model. The paper includes discussing how results are driven greatly by processing of cloud factors.  But first for context readers should be also aware of influences from scenario premises serving as model input, in this case  SSP3-7.0.

Background on CIMP Scenario  SSP3-7.0

A recent paper reveals peculiarities with this scenario.  Recognizing distinctiveness of SSP3-7.0 for use in impact assessments by Shiogama et al (2024).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Because recent mitigation efforts have made the upper-end scenario of the future GHG concentration (SSP5-8.5) highly unlikely, SSP3-7.0 has received attention as an alternative high-end scenario for impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) studies. However, the ‘distinctiveness’ of SSP3-7.0 may not be well-recognized by the IAV community. When the integrated assessment model (IAM) community developed the SSP-RCPs, they did not anticipate the limelight on SSP3-7.0 for IAV studies because SSP3-7.0 was the ‘distinctive’ scenario regarding to aerosol emissions (and land-use land cover changes). Aerosol emissions increase or change little in SSP3-7.0 due to the assumption of a lenient air quality policy, while they decrease in the other SSP-RCPs of CMIP6 and all the RCPs of CMIP5. This distinctive high-aerosol-emission design of SSP3-7.0 was intended to enable climate model (CM) researchers to investigate influences of extreme aerosol emissions on climate.

SSP3-7.0 Prescribes High Radiative Forcing

SSP3-7.0 Presumes High Aerosol Emissions

Aerosol Emissions refer to Black Carbon, Organic Carbon, SO2 and NOx.

•  Aerosol emissions increase or change little in SSP3-7.0 due to the assumption of a lenient air quality policy, while they decrease in the other SSP-RCPs of CMIP6 and all the RCPs of CMIP5.

• This distinctive high-aerosol-emission design of SSP3- 7.0 was intended to enable AerChemMIP to investigate the consequences of continued high levels of aerosol emissions on climate.

SSP3-7.0 Supposes Forestry Deprivation

• Decreases in forest area were also substantial in SSP3- 7.0, unlike in the other SSP-RCPs.
• This design enables LUMIP to analyse the climate influences of extreme land-use and land-cover changes.

SSP3-7.0 Projects High Population Growth in Poorer Nations

Global population (left) in billions and global gross domestic product (right) in trillion US dollars on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. Data from the SSP database; chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.

SSP3-7.0 Projects Growing Use of Coal Replacing Gas and Some Nuclear

My Summary:  Using this scenario presumes high CO2 Forcing (Wm2), high aerosol emissions and diminished forest area, as well as much greater population and coal consumption. Despite claims to the contrary, this is not a “middle of the road” scenario, and a strange choice for simulating future climate metrics due to wildly improbable assumptions.

How Two Versions of a Reasonable INM Climate Model Respond to SSP3-7.0

The preceding information regarding the input scenario provides a context for understanding the output projections from INMCM5 and INMCM6.  Simulation of climate changes in Northern Eurasia by two versions of the INM RAS Earth system model. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Introduction

The aim of this paper is the evaluation of climate changes during last several decades in the Northern Eurasia, densely populated region with the unprecedentedly rapid climate changes, using the INM RAS climate models. The novelty of this work lies in the comparison of model climate changes based on two versions of the same model INMCM5 and INMCM6, which differ in climate sensitivities ECS and TCR, with data from available observations and reanalyses. By excluding other factors that influence climate reproduction, such as different cores of GCM components, major discrepancies in description of physical process or numerical schemes, the assessment of ECS and TCR role in climate reproduction can be the exclusive focus. Also future climate projections for the middle and the end of 21st century in both model versions are given and compared.

After modification of physical parameterisations, in the model version INMCM6 ECS increased from 1.8K to 3.7K (Volodin, 2023), and TCR increased from 1.3K to 2.2K. Simulation of present-day climate by INMCM6 Earth system model is discussed in Volodin (2023). A notable increase in ECS and TCR is likely to cause a discrepancy in the simulation of climate changes during last decades and the simulation of future climate projections for the middle and the end of 21st century made by INMCM5 and INMCM6.

About 20% of the Earth’s land surface and 60% of the terrestrial land cover north of 40N refer to Northern Eurasia (Groisman et al, 2009). The Hoegh-Guldberg et al (2018) states that the topography and climate of the Eurasian region are varied, encompassing a sharply continental climate with distinct summer and winter seasons, the northern, frigid Arctic environment and the alpine climate on Scandinavia’s west coast. The Atlantic Ocean and the jet stream affect the climate of western Eurasia, whilst the Mediterranean region, with its hot summers, warm winters, and often dry spells, influences the climate of the southwest. Due to its location, the Eurasian region is vulnerable to a variety of climate-related natural disasters, including heatwaves, droughts, riverine floods, windstorms, and large-scale wildfires.

Historical Runs

One of the most important basic model experiments conducted within the CMIP project in order to control the model large-scale trends is piControl (Eyring et al, 2016). With 1850 as the reference year, PiControl experiment (Eyring et al, 2016) is conducted in conditions chosen to be typical of the period prior to the onset of large-scale industrialization. Perturbed state of the INMCM model at the end of the piControl is taken as the initial condition for historical runs. The historical experiment is conducted in the context of changing external natural and anthropogenic forcings. Prescribed time series include:

♦  greenhouse gases concentration,
♦  the solar spectrum and total solar irradiance,
♦  concentrations of volcanic sulfate aerosol in the stratosphere, and
♦  anthropogenic emissions of SO2, black, and organic carbon.

The ensemble of historical experiments consists of 10 members for each model version. The duration of each run is 165 model years from 1850 to 2014.

SSP3-7.0 Scenario

Experiments are designed to simulate possible future pathways of climate evolution based on assumptions about human developments including: population, education, urbanization, gross domestic product (GDP), economic growth, rate of technological developments, greenhouse gas (GHG) and aerosol emissions, energy supply and demand, land-use changes, etc. (Riahi et al, 2016). Shared Socio-economic Pathways or “SSP” vary from very ambitious mitigation and increasing shift toward sustainable practices (SSP1) to fossil-fueled development (SSP5) (O’Neill et al, 2016).

Here we discuss climate changes for scenario SSP3-7.0 only, to avoid presentation large amount of information. The SSP3-7.0 scenario reflects the assumption on the high GHG emissions scenario and priority of regional security, leading to societies that are highly vulnerable to climate change, combined with relatively high forcing level (7.0 W/m2 in 2100). On this path, by the end of the century, average temperatures have risen by 3.0–5.5◦C above preindustrial values (Tebaldi et al, 2021). The ensembles of historical runs with INMCM5 and INMCM6 were prolonged for 2015-2100 using scenario SSP3-7.0.

Observational data and data processing

Model near surface temperature and specific humidity changes were compared with ERA5 reanalysis data (Hersbach et al, 2020), precipitation data were compared with data of GPCP (Adler et al, 2018), sea ice extent and volume data were compared with satellite obesrvational data NSIDC (Walsh et al, 2019) and the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) (Schweiger et al, 2011) respectively, land snow area was compared with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Data Record (NOAA CDR) of Snow Cover Extent (SCE) reanalysis (Robinson et al, 2012) based on the satellite observational dataset Estilow et al (2015). Following Khan et al (2024) Northern Eurasia is defined as land area lying within boundaries of 35N–75N, 20E–180E. Following IPCC 6th Assessment Report (Masson-Delmotte et al, 2021), the following time horizons are distinguished: the recent past (1995– 2014), near term (2021–2040), mid-term (2041–2060), and long term (2081–2100). To compare observed and model temperature and specific humidity changes in the recent past, data for years 1991–2020 were compared with data for years 1961–1990.

Near surface air temperature change

Fig. 1 Annual near surface air temperature change in Northern Eurasia with respect to 1995–2014 for INMCM6 (red), INMCM5 (blue) and ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al, 2020)(black), K. Orange and lightblue lines show ensemble spread.

Despite different ECS, both model versions show (Fig. 1) approximately the same warming over Northern Eurasia by 2010–2015, similar to observations. However, projections of Northern Eurasia temperature after year 2040 differ. By 2100, the difference in 2-m air temperature anomalies between two model versions reaches around 1.5 K. The greater value around 6.0 K is achieved by a model with higher sensitivity. This is consistent with Huusko et al (2021); Grose et al (2018); Forster et al (2013), which confirmed that future projections show a stronger relationship than historical ones between warming and climate sensitivity. In contrast to feedback strength, which is more important in forecasting future temperature change, historical warming is more associated with model forcing. Both INMCM5 and INMCM6 show distinct seasonal warming patterns. Poleward of about 55N the seasonal warming is more pronounced in winter than in summer (Fig. 2). That means the smaller amplitude of the seasonal temperature cycle in 1991– 2020 compared to 1961–1990. The same result was shown in Dwyer et al (2012) and Donohoe and Battisti (2013). The opposite situation is observed during the hemispheric summer, where stronger warming is observed over the Mediterranean region (Seager et al, 2014; Kr¨oner et al, 2017; Brogli et al, 2019), subtropics and midlatitudinal regions of the Pacific Ocean, leading to an amplification of the seasonal cycle. The spatial patterns of projected warming in winter and summer in model historical experiments for 1991-2020 relative to 1961-1990 are in a good agreement with ERA5 reanalysis data, although for ERA5 the absolute values of difference are greater.

East Atlantic/West Russia (EAWR) Index

The East Atlantic/West Russia (EAWR) pattern is one of the most prominent large-scale modes of climate variability, with centers of action on the Caspian Sea, North Sea, and northeast China. The EOF-analysis identifies the EAWR pattern as the tripole with different signs of pressure (or 500 hPa geopotential height) anomalies encompassing the aforementioned region.

In this study, East Atlantic/ West Russia (EAWR) index was calculated as the projection coefficient of monthly 500 hPa geopotential height anomalies to the second EOF of monthly reanalysis 500 hPa geopotential height anomalies over the region 20N–80N, 60W–140E.

Fig. 5 Time series of June-July-August 5-year mean East Atlantic/ West Russia (EAWR) index. Maximum and minimum of the model ensemble are shown as a dashed lines. INMCM6 and INMCM5 ensemble averaged indices are plotted as a red and blue solid lines, respectively.  The ERA5 (Hersbach et al, 2020) EAWR index is shown in green.

[Note: High EAWR index indicates low pressure and cooler over Western Russia, high pressure and warmer over Europe. Low EAWR index is the opposite–high pressure and warming over Western Russia, low pressure and cooling over Europe.]

East Atlantic/ West Russia (EAWR) index Time series of EAWR index can be seen in Fig. 5. Since the middle of 1990s the sign of EAWR index has changed from positive to negative according to reanalysis data. Both versions of the INMCM reproduce the change in the sign of EAWR index. Therefore, the corresponding climate change in the Mediterranean and West Russia regions should be expected. Actually, the difference in annual mean near-surface temperature and specific humidity between 2001–2020 and 1961–1990 shows warmer and wetter conditions spreading from the Eastern Mediterranean to European Russia both for INMCM6 and INMCM5 with the largest difference being observed for the new version of model.

Fig. 6 Annual mean near surface temperature, K (left) and specific humidity, kg/kg (right) in 2001– 2020 with respect to 1961–1990 for INMCM6 (a,b) and INMCM5 (c,d).

Fig. 7 Annual precipitation change (% with respect to 1995–2014) in Northern Eurasia for INMCM6 (red), INMCM5 (blue) and GPCP analysis (Adler et al, 2018) (black). Orange and lightblue lines show ensemble spread.

Discussion and conclusions

Climate changes during the last several decades and possible climate changes until 2100 over Northern Eurasia simulated with climate models INMCM5 and INMCM6 are considered. Two model versions differ in parametrisations of cloudiness, aerosol scheme, land snow cover and atmospheric boundary layer, isopycnal diffusion discretisation and dissipation scheme of the horizontal components of velocity. These modifications in atmosphere and ocean blocks of the model have led to increase of ECS to 3.7 K and TCR to 2.2 K, mainly due to modification of cloudiness parameterisation.

Comparison of model data with available observations and reanalysis show that both models simulate observed recent temperature and precipitation changes consistently with observational datasets. The decrement of seasonal temperature cycle amplitude poleward of about 55N and its increase over the Mediterranean region, subtropics, and mid-latitudinal Pacific Ocean regions are two distinct seasonal warming patterns that are displayed by both INMCM5 and INMCM6. In the long-term perspective, the amplification of difference in projected warming during June-JulyAugust (JJA) and December-January-February (DJF) increases. Both versions of the INMCM reproduce the observed change in the sign of EAWR index from positive to negative in the middle of 1990s, that allows to expect correct reproduction of the corresponding climate change in the Mediterranean and West Russia regions.

Specifically, the enhanced precipitation in the North Eurasian region since the mid-1990s has led to increased specific humidity over the Eastern Mediterranean and European Russia, which is simulated by the INMCM5 and INMCM6 models. Both versions of model correctly reproduce the precipitation change and continue its increasing trend onwards.

Both model versions simulate similar temperature, precipitation, Arctic sea ice extent in 1990–2040 in spite of INMCM5 having much smaller ECS and TCR than INMCM6. However, INMCM5 and INMCM6 show differences in the long-term perspective reproduction of climate changes. After 2040, model INMCM6 simulated stronger warming, stronger precipitation change, stronger Arctic sea ice and land snow extent decrease than INMCM5.

My Comment

So both versions of the model replicate well the observed history.  And when fed the SSP3-7.0 inputs, both project a warmer, wetter world out to 2100; INMCM5 reaches 4.5C and INMCM6 gets to 6.0C.  The scenario achieves the desired high warming, and the cloud enhancements in version 6 amplify it.  I would like to see a similar experiment done with the actual medium scenario SSP2-4.5.

Climate Meltdown

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This video compiles interviews conducted by investigative journalist Alex Newman, with astrophysicists, atmospheric physicists, geophysicists, climate scientists, meteorologists, and other leading experts from around the world.   Together they share a simple message: the “climate change” movement is not about “saving the environment.” It is about control.

Below is a lightly edited transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.  AN refers to Alex Newman talking, Other initials refer to interviewees.

Climate Meltdown

The climate narrative is the pretext for reorganizing all of human society based on principles of manufactured scarcity and international tyrannical control. Governments, big corporations and even religious leaders are all marching In lockstep. And yet it’s all based on lies as the scientists you’re about to meet will demonstrate.

As the US moves away from fossil fuels and embraces green energy, enemy countries like China have nearly 1,000 more operational coal powerered plants worldwide as of July 2023. In the graph you can see the CCP is marching forward with coal and fossil fuels as the US moves towards green energy making us weak, vulnerable and pathetic when it comes to energy.

Manufacturing is man-made global warming, a threat to humanity according to left-wing Progressive politicians, influencers and businesses. But their solution to climate change is always the expansion of the size and scope of government at the loss of individual and personal sovereignty, and the taking of the American taxpayer dollars to spend endless amounts on fruitless idiotic climate plans and agendas that lower efficiency and raise the cost of energy.

For example Kamala Harris endlessly talks about why climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity.

“Well let me start by saying this climate change is the single greatest threat facing our world today. That’s why I am committed to passing a Green New Deal creating clean jobs and finally putting an end to fracking once and for all.”

“I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a a term they’ve coined called climate anxiety. Which is fear of the future and the unknown. And whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children; whether it makes sense for you aspiring to buy a home. Because what will this climate be. But because people voted we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like Environmental justice.”

But there’s another side to the story that is not often told. There are many scientists and experts that you will hear from in this video who claim that climatism or climate alarmism is nothing but a facade to increase the size and scope of government and to take away individual and personal sovereignty. And going from National sovereignty to giving power to entities like the United Nations, while taking billions of dollars from the American taxpayer. Investigative journalist Alex Newman has interviewed Senators, scientists and many more people on this very subject. In the following few interviews you’re about to see you’re going to hear the other side of the story, which Academia, Media and Hollywood have silenced, cancelled and destroyed. Please watch and share, and get this information out to your friends, neighbor, Pastor, co-workers and more.

Alex first caught up with Patrick Moore who’s one of the early founders of Greenpeace. That’s a non-governmental environmental organization (NGO) founded in Canada in the 1970s. Moore says in a shocking interview that the green new deal policies is a recipe for mass suicide. Check it out.

AN: There’s a lot of talk now in the United States about this green new deal. I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to look at that, butwhat are your thoughts. Is this a good idea or are we in trouble or what’s the plan?

PML Well it’s a recipe for mass suicide. It’s just quite amazing that someone that is in government, actually elected to the government of the United States of America would propose that we eliminate all fossil fuels in 12 years. If we did that on a global level it would result in the decimation of the human population from some 7 billion down to who knows how few people. It would basically begin a process of cannibalization amongst the human species because the food could not be delivered to the stores in the middle of the cities anymore. How would this even work is just one point.

What bothers me the most is this: If you eliminated fossil fuels, every tree in the world would be cut for fuel. There’s no other source of heating and cooking once you eliminate fossil fuels. You can use animal dung if there were any animals left. But the animals would all die too, because first off they would all get eaten. Any that survived would be have to go wild because there’d be nobody left to look after them.

I mean it’s the most ridiculous scenario I’ve ever heard. People recognize when something is preposterous and I think that’s the best word for it. Well the best term for it is actually Mass Suicide. But why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth.

AN: We’re here at the Heartland institute’s climate conference in Orlando. I’m with Dr William Happer who is a professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University. For a time he served as adviser on climate issues to Donald Trump. Dr. Happer thank you so much for joining us today. Now one of the things you’re going to be addressing at this event is carbon taxes. Let’s start with your thoughts on that: Does the world need carbon taxes?

WH: No, of course the world doesn’t need a carbon tax. They’re talking about a CO2 tax and CO2 is actually good for the world. So people ought to be encouraged to make more of it.

AN: So why why do you think they’re pushing this idea of a CO2 tax if CO2 is good for the world?

WH: Well it’s a combination of people who’ve been badly misinformed; people who need to feel virtuous. They don’t believe in anything anymore so now they’ve got something to believe in, to save the planet. And then there’s the opportunists who are making a good living out of frightening everybody and sucking money out of the common man to push idiotic Energy Solutions on them. That makes everyone poorer and provides less reliable energy, less affordable energy. So there’s nothing good about it. It’s more of the same evil fanaticism that’s plagued mankind since we began.

AN: This conversation is with Dr. Richard Lindzen who is an American atmospheric physicist who is well known for his great work at Harvard and also at MIT. He talks about how scientists and the science institutionally has become hungry for power and politics, and how true science and true discovery has been trampled underfoot. How do you get more scientists to speak out because as you know the scientists who are saying that this is wrong are in a very small minority. How do you get other members of the scientific Community to come out and say something if if they know, or if they don’t know how do you get them to understand?

RL: Well I don’t know the answer answer to that. Because starting in the early ’90s, a young scientist could neither get promoted, published or funded if he said or did that. So if you wanted to get active scientists to go along it’s asking them to commit professional suicide. On the positive side there are a lot of modeling efforts that are showing it’s not a problem. But whether they can say that out loud is another story.

AN: Right before started this interview you were talking to Lord Monckton, who we just interviewed a moment ago. And you mentioned something I thought was hilarious. You said that science is the only thing that you could add a “the” in front of it, and it becomes the opposite. What did you mean by that?

RL: Well “the science” contradicts the whole notion of science, which is a mode of inquiry. “The science” is a mode of authority. Those are two very different things.

AN: So how did science go so awry? Any thoughts on this process: How did we get to where we are now in terms of the scientific Community?

RL: I think the vast majority of the public has no idea what science is and that certainly includes the political class. So as politicians, they know that people don’t give them a lot of authority. They see that people quote and trust sciencists, and so they think science is a source of authority that they would like to co-opt. But in doing so they show they have no idea what science is.

AN: We are standing here by the Baltic Sea in Stockholm with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner who is the retired head of the Paleo geophysics department and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. Also he was a sea level reviewer for the UNIPCC United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change back in 2000. Dr. Mörner thank you so much for being with us. Please tell us about this whole sea level issue. I just came from the COP 24 in Poland where over and over again we heard that our cities are going to be flooded. I’m from Miami and they say my city’s going to be flooded. Are we all doomed from sea levels changing?

NAM: Absolutely not. I mean there is no big rapid sea level rise going on today and there will not be. On the contrary if anything happens it’s sea will go down a little bit. But also there is nothing which is called Global sea level. it is different in different parts of the of the world.

In this interview Alex talks with Dr willly Soon who spent time as a researcher at the solar and Stellar physics division of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for astrophysics and is arguably maybe the best astrophysicist on the planet. Soon in this interview talks about the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is an outfit of the United Nations and how IPCC data on climate science is built.

AN: So you guys just published three papers in well established peer-reviewed journals. Before we get into the reaction of the papers, give us an overview what did you guys find and how does that differ from say the narrative that the media and the United Nations are promoting.

WS: We are Scientists so we we set out to seek the truth and nothing but the truth. So it’s been puzzling to everyone, I would say every scientist on this topic wonders what are the best thermometer data to use if you want to study temperature change. And then if you want to study what is causing the climate to change, you want to know what are the best solar activity estimates.

So it turns out that IPCC has been wrong and biased for 30 years, that’s the kindest word I can use. And they’ve been in some sense hoodwinking everyone.

AN: There was a poll released several months ago by AP-NORC Center for public affairs research. They found that less than half of Americans even believe that human activity is causing climate change. About a third are willing to pay even a single additional Dollar on their electric bill each month to deal with climate change With the very real Prospect of Trump coming back to the White House in 2024, how is the US government planning to make credible commitments on funding and on these other issues that you guys are talking about.

Senator Coons who chairs that committee: That was part of why I spoke to both the structure of the Inflation Reduction Act which has directed tens of billions of dollars already to construction projects in predominantly red States or politically conservative States. And to the way that we’ve been able to get out of my subcommittee and pass through the full committee an additional billion and a half dollars in investment in combating climate change predominantly in the global South with an overwhelming bipartisan margin.

So am I suggesting that were the former president to be our next president everything would be fine?
Not at all. But I’m saying there is a broad enough and deep enough support for continuing Investments to combat climate change and for the inflation reduction act, and bipartisan infrastructure law in particular, that we will continue we’ll continue to move forward regardless.

AN: A lot of this environmental question I think depends on a very flawed fundamental presupposition. It depends on the idea that carbon dioxide is pollution. And after interviewing hundreds of scientists including many who’ve worked for the UNIPCC, many of the leading scientists in the world, I would argue that the notion that CO2 is pollution is absolutely Preposterous. We exhale about two pounds of it every single day. The the proportion of greenhouse gases made up of human CO2 emissions is a fraction of a fraction of 1%. The idea that those are going to destroy the planet or change the temperature of the earth is frankly in my opinion totally ludicrous. But from a totalitarian perspective if you can convince people that CO2 is pollution, there’s no human activity that doesn’t result in CO2 emissions. That includes living, includes dying, turning on a light switch.

If we submit to the idea that CO2 is pollution, then every single aspect of your life comes under the regulatory control of the people who claim to be saving us from pollution. When they do these Environmental Studies they say your CO2 footprint will be smaller if you eat bugs or you do this or that, or you drive an electric car. That doesn’t show anything about whether that’s going to benefit the environment or not.

In fact CO2 has actually been very beneficial for the environment. In interviewing Trump’s climate adviser Dr William Happer, physics professor at Princeton University, he said the Earth is starving for more CO2. And since we’ve had a little bit of an increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 100 years or so plants have gotten much Greener, agricultural yields have improved.

II think we need to also talk about the fundamental presupposition here: Is CO2 really pollution? if it’s not then all these alleged environmental benefits are completely fictional.

 

 

Mid August 2024 Normal Arctic Ice Melt in Progress

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

The graph above shows Mid July to Mid August daily ice extents for 2024 compared to 18 year averages, and some years of note.

The black line shows on average Arctic ice extents during this period decline 2.4M km2 down to 5.8M Km2 by day 229.  2024 tracked somewhat lower than the 18-year average in late July, then in August drew near to average before slipping into deficit the last 5 days. In the end, 2024 is presently close to 2023 and 2007, ~200k km2 below the 18 year MASIE average.

Remarkably, SII is showing much larger deficits to average than MASIE does. This period began with SII having a gap of 400k km2 less ice extent than MASIE, then increased that deficit as high as 700k km2, before reporting a gap of 537k km2 on day 229, a difference of half a Wadham. The effect will be for SII to report much lower monthly averages for ice extents during July and August, prior to the annual minimum occurring in September.

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 229 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 2024229 Day 229 Ave 2024-Ave. 2007229 2024-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 5623262 5828731 -205469 5673531 -50270
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 591190 698788 -107598 767181 -175991
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 554701 425156 129544 253092 301609
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 641562 535416 106146 154536 487026
 (4) Laptev_Sea 268971 240911 28059 284910 -15939
 (5) Kara_Sea 14414 96702 -82288 201203 -186789
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 21833 -21833 17229 -17229
 (7) Greenland_Sea 120478 216573 -96095 310070 -189591
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 46366 53298 -6932 75105 -28739
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 319281 399712 -80431 382407 -63126
 (10) Hudson_Bay 33319 58874 -25555 89354 -56034
 (11) Central_Arctic 3031923 3080445 -48523 3137188.82 -105266

The overall deficit to average is 205k km2, (3.5%).  The major deficits are in  Beaufort, Kara, Greenland Sea and CAA (Canadian Archipelago), partly offset by surpluses in Chukchi and East Siberian.

For more on the differences between MASIE and SII see this post:

Support MASIE Arctic Ice Dataset

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.

There is no charge for content on this site, nor for subscribers to receive email notifications of postings.

 

This Summer Celebrate Our Warm Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Legacy and social media keep up a constant drumbeat of warnings about a degree or two of planetary warming without any historical context for considering the significance of the alternative.  A poem of Robert Frost comes to mind as some applicable wisdom:

The diagram at the top shows how grateful we should be for living in today’s climate instead of a glacial icehouse. (H/T Raymond Inauen)  For most of its history Earth has been frozen rather than the mostly green place it is today.  And the reference is to the extent of the North American ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

For further context consider that geologists refer to our time as a “Severe Icehouse World”, among the various conditions in earth’s history, as diagramed by paleo climatologist Christopher Scotese. Referring to the Global Mean Temperatures, it appears after many decades, we are slowly rising to “Icehouse World”, which would seem to be a good thing.

Instead of fear mongering over a bit of warming, we should celebrate our good fortune, and do our best for humanity and the biosphere.  Matthew Ridley takes it from there in a previous post. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Background from previous post The Goodness of Global Warming

LAI refers to Leaf Area Index.

As noted in other posts here, warming comes and goes and a cooling period may now be ensuing. See No Global Warming, Chilly January Land and Sea.  Matt Ridley provides a concise and clear argument to celebrate any warming that comes to our world in his Spiked article Why global warming is good for us.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet.

Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm?

The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that.

The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife.

But because good news is no news, green pressure groups and environmental correspondents in the media prefer to ignore global greening. Astonishingly, it merited no mentions on the BBC’s recent Green Planet series, despite the name. Or, if it is mentioned, the media point to studies suggesting greening may soon cease. These studies are based on questionable models, not data (because data show the effect continuing at the same pace). On the very few occasions when the BBC has mentioned global greening it is always accompanied by a health warning in case any viewer might glimpse a silver lining to climate change – for example, ‘extra foliage helps slow climate change, but researchers warn this will be offset by rising temperatures’.

Another bit of good news is on deaths. We’re against them, right? A recent study shows that rising temperatures have resulted in half a million fewer deaths in Britain over the past two decades. That is because cold weather kills about ’20 times as many people as hot weather’, according to the study, which analyses ‘over 74million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries’. This is especially true in a temperate place like Britain, where summer days are rarely hot enough to kill. So global warming and the unrelated phenomenon of urban warming relative to rural areas, caused by the retention of heat by buildings plus energy use, are both preventing premature deaths on a huge scale.

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models.
Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.  Source John Christy

 

Summer temperatures in the US are changing at half the rate of winter temperatures and daytimes are warming 20 per cent slower than nighttimes. A similar pattern is seen in most countries. Tropical nations are mostly experiencing very slow, almost undetectable daytime warming (outside cities), while Arctic nations are seeing quite rapid change, especially in winter and at night. Alarmists love to talk about polar amplification of average climate change, but they usually omit its inevitable flip side: that tropical temperatures (where most poor people live) are changing more slowly than the average.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little.

 

Indeed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) repeatedly confirms, there is no clear pattern of storms growing in either frequency or ferocity, droughts are decreasing slightly and floods are getting worse only where land-use changes (like deforestation or building houses on flood plains) create a problem. Globally, deaths from droughts, floods and storms are down by about 98 per cent over the past 100 years – not because weather is less dangerous but because shelter, transport and communication (which are mostly the products of the fossil-fuel economy) have dramatically improved people’s ability to survive such natural disasters.

The effect of today’s warming (and greening) on farming is, on average, positive: crops can be grown farther north and for longer seasons and rainfall is slightly heavier in dry regions. We are feeding over seven billion people today much more easily than we fed three billion in the 1960s, and from a similar acreage of farmland. Global cereal production is on course to break its record this year, for the sixth time in 10 years.

Nature, too, will do generally better in a warming world. There are more species in warmer climates, so more new birds and insects are arriving to breed in southern England than are disappearing from northern Scotland. Warmer means wetter, too: 9,000 years ago, when the climate was warmer than today, the Sahara was green. Alarmists like to imply that concern about climate change goes hand in hand with concern about nature generally. But this is belied by the evidence. Climate policies often harm wildlife: biofuels compete for land with agriculture, eroding the benefits of improved agricultural productivity and increasing pressure on wild land; wind farms kill birds and bats; and the reckless planting of alien sitka spruce trees turns diverse moorland into dark monoculture.

Meanwhile, real environmental issues are ignored or neglected because of the obsession with climate. With the help of local volunteers I have been fighting to protect the red squirrel in Northumberland for years. The government does literally nothing to help us, while it pours money into grants for studying the most far-fetched and minuscule possible climate-change impacts. Invasive alien species are the main cause of species extinction worldwide (like grey squirrels driving the red to the margins), whereas climate change has yet to be shown to have caused a single species to die out altogether anywhere.

Source: Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png Author: SVG version by Albert Mestre

Of course, climate change does and will bring problems as well as benefits. Rapid sea-level rise could be catastrophic. But whereas the sea level shot up between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising by about 60 metres in two millennia, or roughly three metres per century, today the change is nine times slower: three millimetres a year, or a foot per century, and with not much sign of acceleration. Countries like the Netherlands and Vietnam show that it is possible to gain land from the sea even in a world where sea levels are rising. The land area of the planet is actually increasing, not shrinking, thanks to siltation and reclamation.

Environmentalists don’t get donations or invitations to appear on the telly if they say moderate things. To stand up and pronounce that ‘climate change is real and needs to be tackled, but it’s not happening very fast and other environmental issues are more urgent’ would be about as popular as an MP in Oliver Cromwell’s parliament declaring, ‘The evidence for God is looking a bit weak, and I’m not so very sure that fornication really is a sin’. And I speak as someone who has made several speeches on climate in parliament.

No wonder we don’t hear about the good news on climate change.

 

 

July 2024 the Hottest Ever? Not So Fast!

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 July 2024 Weather History at Montréal–Mirabel International Airport  The story about July 2024 is evident below in charts and graphs from this site.  There’s a map that allows you to find your locale.

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

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

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

Woah!  Most of the month 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, there were sixteen days when it rained, including five 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 July temperatures in my locale.

There you have it before your eyes. Mostly warm days for the
peak summer month, with exactly one brief hot afternoon.
Otherwise comfortable and cool, and a couple of hot
afternoons in first week of August.

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.”