Climate Science

Climate Crusade Is a Dead End

This post presents the main points and exhibits from Professor de Lange’s presentation February 26, 2025. Most images are self explanatory, with some excerpts in italics lightly edited from captions, and some added images as well. H/T Bud Bromley.

Prof. de Lange demonstrates that there is no credible climate crisis, and that there is much more to climate than CO2 alone. First, he addresses the discrepancy between satellite temperature measurements and results from climate models. Second, he shows the effect of even doubling the CO2 concentration has only minor effects, while it is in fact crucial to photosynthesis. Third, he shows that how the significant lack of experimental data on cloud composition now hampers progress in climate science. Fourth, he demonstrates that there is no convincing correlation between CO2 and temperature on a geological time scale. Fifth, he addresses global future energy supply, demonstrating that renewables are “unaffordables”, just as are untested technologies (batteries, hydrogen), and he concludes that the future has to be based on nuclear power.

1. Natural Science and Observations versus Models

2. Atmospheric Physics and Greenhouse Gases

Warm Surface of the earth can be viewed as a radiator in the infrared that radiates Intensity out Into the atmosphere, and again the flow of infrared energy is not interrupted. It is absorbed by the atmosphere and that’s where the clouds turn out to be extremely important. They delay the outgoing energy into the universe. In climate science we balance the yellow incoming solar energy in watts per square meter with the outgoing radiation from the surface and atmosphere. Some is reflected and some is absorbed and emitted as long wave radiation. The imbalance is shown at the bottom as ~1 W/m2, which is a small difference between two much larger energy flows showing hundreds of W/m2. If for any reason, there is a slight change in either the incoming or outgoing flows, the imbalance would change dramatically.

The fact that Greenhouse gases play very important role in absorbing infrared radiation in the atmosphere is already 150 years old. We shall see that dependence of the temperature of the earth due to greenhouse gases is not linear, the effect on temperature is logarithmic. This is seen in the graph on the left side.

On the horizontal scale we see the frequency scale expressed in common unit in physics in wave numbers. And here we see the continuous Blue Trace results from infrared radiation that would leave the warm surface of the planet if there were no atmosphere at all. The total surface under the blue trace depends on temperature to the fourth power, very temperature dependent.

We see the effect of atmosphere greenhouse gases represented by the black line, which is a bit lower than the blue Trace. The green line shows the where the black line would be, were there to be no CO2 in the atmosphere. The red line shows that there would be little difference from doubling CO2 from 400 ppm to 800 ppm.

The role of water vapor is terribly important. Water is the most important Greenhouse gas, but when we Go to clouds, he situation becomes much more complicated than in the absence of clouds. So clouds again are the Achilles heel of of climate Science. As I said an increase in CO2 leads to a little more warming but the increase is logarithmic. meaning less and Less warming at higher CO2 levels. Doubling CO2 leads to extra forcing of about 1 percent or about 3 watts per square meter. Since 1850 when temperature measurements really started since, the planet’s surface has warmed up by about 1°C. That is not very much, and the effect of CO2 can only be very much smaller.

3. Scattering in Clouds

The post referenced in the exhibit is Clauser’s Case: GHG Science Wrong, Clouds the Climate Thermostat

4. Is CO2 the only and most important culprit of ‘’disastrous’’ climate change, warming in particular?

5. Supplying Energy to a Growing World Population

Solar Activity Linked to Ocean Cycles

Posted on February 20 by Ron Clutz

Solar energy accumulates massively in the ocean and is variably released during circulation events.

Thanks to Franklin Isaac Ormaza-González alerting me to this paper Did Schwabe cycles 19–24 influence the ENSO events, PDO, and AMO indexes in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? by Ormaza-González, Espinoza-Celi and Roa-López, all from ESPOL Polytechnic University, Ecuador. Why is this important? Because warming in the modern era is closely tied to El Niño and La Niña events (ENSO). For example,

The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

As shown in the synopsis below, the paper analyzes multiple oceanic oscillations during the years 1954 to 2019 in order to compare with solar cycles of sunspots 19 through 24 occurring during that time frame. The title is stated as a question, and the conclusion provides this answer (in italics with my bolds).

Finally, did Schwabe cycles 19–24 influence the ENSO events, PDO, and AMO indexes in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? Yes, it has been found a wide range correlation coefficient from 0.100 to about 0.500 statistically significant (p < 0.05) with lag times from few months to over 2 years between the Schwabe cycles and the ocean indices chosen here. These results could be a potential source to improve predictive skills for the understanding of ENSO, PDO and AMO interannual and decadal fluctuations. Better predictive models are imperative given that El Niño or La Niña has vast impacts on lives, property, and economic activity around the globe, especially when dramatic peaks of El Niño occur. The new cycle 25 has started and could have a major oceanic swing follow suit, and the next El Niño would be in around 2023–2024 according to historical events and results presented here.

Given that the paper was drafted before submitting in February 2022, and publication in October that year, the forecast of a 2023-24 El Nino was confirmed in a remarkable way.

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

The cyan line represents SST anomalies in the Tropics and shows the major El Ninos, 2015-16, 2019-20 and 2023-24. Note all three events included pairs of major NH summer warming peaks. The synopsis below consists of excerpts in italics with my bolds to present the broad strokes of the analyses and findings. (Note: The paper includes detailed analyses and many references to supporting studies, and interested readers can access them by linking there.)

Context

The surface-subsurface layers of the ocean that interact with the lower atmosphere alternately release and absorb heat energy. The work of Zhou and Tung (2010) reported the impact of the TSI on global SST over 150 years, finding signals of cooling and warming SSTs at the valley and peak of the SS cycles. Schlesinger and Ramankutty (1994) report a global cycle of 65–70 years for SST that is affected by greenhouse anthropogenic gases, sulphate aerosols and/or El Niño events, but they did not imply any external forcing such as the SS. There have been other studies on how solar radiation variability could affect temperature; recently, Cheke et al. (2021) have studied those solar cycles of SS that would affect the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indexes.

There are well known oceanic events that show periodicity with low or high frequencies: 25–30 and 3–7 years, respectively. These include the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), as well as El Niño or La Niña. During El Niño events, the surface and subsurface lose energy to the atmosphere and the opposite occurs during La Niña; these events have a periodicity of 3–7 years. The Interdecadal oscillations have a series of impacts; e.g., the PDO gives rise to teleconnections between the tropic and mid-latitudes, and the effects include:

1) ocean heat content,
2) the lower and higher levels of the trophic chain including small pelagic fisheries (tuna and sardines);
3) biogeochemical air-sea CO2 fluxes;
4) the frequency of La Niña/El Niño.

The interactions between decadal oscillations PDO/IPO and AMO may also affect ocean heat content. All these low and high frequency oceanographic events have a direct impact on local, regional, and global climate patterns, and there is growing evidence from many studies that the driving source of energy is the sun.

Thus, whatever affects the solar irradiation falling on the surface of the oceans, including volcanic eruptions (Fang et al., 2020), and cloudiness for example, it would affect the gain or loss of heat content of the oceans. The cited works tried to find the physical reasons for these connections, but they remained unknown or difficult to explain.

The work reported here investigates how fluctuations of sunspots over time (1954–2019) may cross-correlate with low and high frequency oceanic events such as the sea surface temperature (SST), anomalies (SSTA), Oceanographic El Niño Index (ONI), Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI), Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) in the central and east equatorial Pacific Ocean; and PDO, as well as on the AMO in the North Pacific and Atlantic basins. The hypothesis is that even small variations of the TSI can be reflected in these tele-connected indexes.

Discussion

Fig. 1. Behaviour of monthly counts of SS, ONI, MEI, PDO and AMO. The Indexes start at t = 0, 12, 24 and 36 months (panels a, b, c, and d respectively). The SS series starts at t = 0 in the four panels. The left vertical axis gives the values for the Indexes, and SS counts at the right vertical scale. The end of each Schwabe cycle is marked by vertical dashed lines.

Maxima in the PDO, AMO, ONI, and MEI series were offset by 0, 12, 24 and 36 months (Fig. 1, panels a, b, c, and d respectively), with the SS series starts at t = 0 in the four panels. It has been reported that the lag times for responses of some Indexes to SS cycles (SS) are around 12–36 months (see fig. 1 of Hassan et al., 2016), and Fang et al. (2020) have reported that ENSO responds with a 2–3 years of lag time after a major volcanic eruption. From 1954 to the present time, each sunspot cycle from 19 to 24 has occurred with a period of around 11 years (Hathaway, 2015), which is slightly less than the 11.2 years reported by Dicke (1978). The highest SS activity is seen in cycle 19 with around 250 SS/month, followed by <150, and at cycle 21 around 200, before decreasing steadily over cycles 22 to 24 to just over 100 SS/month. Cycle 24 is the lowest contemporary value of SS activity that is comparable only to cycles 12–15 (around 1880–1930) and is the lowest in the last 200 years (Clette et al., 2014).

Fig. 12. Sunspots monthly counts curves per cycle. Red and blue lines represent El Niño and La Niña events. Note that Cycle 24 finished on December 2019 (National Weather Service, 2020).

The SSTA in El Niño 1 + 2 region cross-correlated with SS many times, especially during descending phases of all cycles except SS 22 with cc-ρ up 0.389 (SS 24) and main lag times from 5 to 13 months. The SS cycles (20 and 24) during cold phase PDO showed alternate cross-correlation reaching a maximum 0.389 and negative −0.314 (p < 0.05). During the ascending phase in El Niño 1 + 2 region (blue bars, Fig. 5a) the cc-ρ peaked at 0.393 (p < 0.05). In the cycles 19 and 24 the highest cc-ρ were found, −0.460 and 0.394 (p < 0.05) respectively. These coefficients coincided with the largest (over 2 years) and most intense (<−1.5C) La Niña during 1954–1955, and 2010–2012 (Fig. 12).

It must be noticed that during cycle 21 two big events El Niño (1983–1985) and La Niña (1984–1985) were registered as well as in cycles 23 and 24 with coefficients just around 0.2. The highest coefficients would mean an influence up to 21.2% and 15.5% of the SS on the SSTAs in El Niño 3.4 region. These results would suggest the cross-correlations are stronger in El Niño 3.4 region due to the less dispersing oceanographic-meteorological conditions than in El Niño 1 + 2 region. Also, these findings would suggest that during the cold phase of PDOs (see NOAA, 2016), the cc-ρ in El Niño 3.4 region tends to be higher, as the solar energy reaching the ocean surface increases as the cloudiness tends to decrease significantly during prolonged periods around or over in El Niño 3.4 region (Porch et al., 2006).

The sun cycle 19 is the most intense since the last 100 years, the contrary is the cycle 24 (NWS, 2021). In general, the ascending phase of the SS cycles takes a shorter time than descending phase, therefore the slope of the curve is steeper (Fig. 12); then the increasing change of the TSI influences in a clearer way the studied indexes. It seems that during the ascending phases, El Niño events are prone to develop as TSI increases (as well as UV radiation does, NWS, 2021), while during plunging SS phases, when the TSI tends to diminish (see Formula (1)), could lead to La Niña events, like the 2020–2022 occurrence (Ormaza-González, 2021).

Most of the La Niña events occur during the descending phase or just when approaching or leaving the valley or minimum SS counts (Fig. 12) when the TSI decreases and reaches the minimum (Scafetta et al., 2019). La Niña 2020–2022 is a good example, the lowest SS counts (<2 counts/months) occurred during extended periods when reaching the valley of the SS 24. The valley of SS 24 has had an extended period of close to 3 years, during which there have been weeks and months without sunspots, before the SS 25 started in December 2020.

The weakest sunspot cycle (SS 24) over the last 100 years (NWS, 2021) has had four La Niña events: 2007–2009, 2010–2012, 2016–2017, and 2020–2022 (Fig. 12), it is the only cycle with that number of La Niña events.

Conclusions

Over the studied period 1954–2019, sunspot numbers decreased from a monthly maximum between 225 (SS 21) to a minimum around 20–25 (SS 24). The SS 24 had 913 days without SS counts until December 2019 (Burud et al., 2021), being this cycle the weakest since 1755; and the SS 25 will probably be weaker than or like SS 24 (Ineson et al., 2014; Chowdhury et al., 2021; NASA, 2021a, NASA, 2021b). Thus, the Earth has been receiving slightly decreasing solar energy over this almost 7-decade period.

On the ocean surface the influence of sunspots could chiefly be due to UV energy fluctuation (Ineson et al., 2014) as this radiation penetrates down to 75–100 m depth in the water column (Smyth, 2011). van Loon et al. (2007) suggested that even though SS cycles produce weak changes on the Total Solar Irradiation (TSI) of about 0.07% (Gray et al., 2010), these can still produce decadal and millennial impacts on global thermohaline circulation (Bond et al., 2001; Gray et al., 2016).

The ONI Index showed to be poorly cross-correlated with cc-ρ values <0.100, only twice approached to −0.200. On the other hand, the MEI registered around ±0.200 through all cycles and predominant lag times within 12 months. The SOI showed cross-correlations with SS cycles (19–21, and) averaging a coefficient of 0.200 with lags times range of 9–34 months. The SOI temporal behaviour has also been associated with SS and it could enhance or affect the oceanographic Indexes of the equatorial Pacific (Higginson et al., 2004). [The Multivariate ENSO Index does not only consider the SST Anomaly but also sea-level pressure and other variables.]

The MEI index could have been influenced from 7.3% up to 23%. The MEI correlated in all ascending and descending phases of SS cycles. The SOI had similar cross-correlation coherence to those oceanographic indexes during ascending and descending phases. These results would provide evidence on how SS affects the studied Indexes during the ascending/descending phases of their cycles. In some cycles, the impact will be stronger and in other weaker depending on intensity and behaviour in time of the cycle.

Finally, did Schwabe cycles 19–24 influence the ENSO events, PDO, and AMO indexes in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? Yes, it has been found a wide range correlation coefficient from 0.100 to about 0.500 statistically significant (p < 0.05) with lag times from few months to over 2 years between the Schwabe cycles and the ocean indices chosen here. These results could be a potential source to improve predictive skills for the understanding of ENSO, PDO and AMO interannual and decadal fluctuations. Better predictive models are imperative given that El Niño or La Niña has vast impacts on lives, property, and economic activity around the globe, especially when dramatic peaks of El Niño occur. The new cycle 25 has started and could have a major oceanic swing follow suit, and the next El Niño would be in around 2023–2024 according to historical events and results presented here.

Oceans Rapidly Cooling UAH January 2025

Posted on February 18 by Ron Clutz

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.

As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022 At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Now we have had an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2 and now dropping steadily.

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

mc_wh_gas_web20210423124932

January 2025 Ocean Leads Global Cooling

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995. Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into October, followed by cooling in November and December.

UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for January 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead of the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs Ocean Even Cooler December 2024. These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.

Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere. September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. In October, ocean and land temps in both NH and Tropics dropped, pulling the global anomaly down. As was the case in November and December, now in January there was cooling everywhere, strongest in all ocean anomalies.

Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for January 2025. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.

In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.

After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024. The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.95C in May, Since then all regions have cooled down sharply, Global anomaly dropping in January to 0.3C, as well as SH dropping down to 0.1C in January.

Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for January is below.

Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in August 2024, with a large drop in between. In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. December showed an upward rebound in SH and Tropics land temps, now offset by a dropping temps everywhere, pulling the Global land anomaly downward slightly.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.03, for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed

With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C. The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C. October went down to 0.7C, November and December dropped to 0.6C. January down to 0.46C.

The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.

Sun Rules Earth Climate

Posted on February 16 by Ron Clutz

On February 12, 2025, Tom Nelson conducted the above interview with solar physicist Valentina Zharkova: Grand solar minimum is underway. Below is my synopsis of lightly edited transcript excerpts from the closed captions along with key graphics in her presentation. H/T Chiefio

The full content of the video is:

Time line of segments:
0:00 – Introduction to Valentina
0:35 – Understanding the Solar Cycles
4:25 – Challenges In Measuring Sun
5:10 – Discovering The Background (magnetic fields)
6:00 – Analyzing Magnetic Waves
7:50 – Predicting Solar Activity
14;45 – Grand Solar Minimum
27:25 – Implications of the Grand Solar Minimum
37:55 – CO2 and Temperature Correlation
39:10 – Solar Cycles and Earth’s Temperature
42:45 – Solar Inertial Motion and Climate
48:30 – Future Climate Predictions
1:05:20 – Volcanic Activity and Climate
1:07:30 – Earth’s Magnetic Field
1:12:10 – Concluding Thoughts

Transcript Excerpts

Today we’re talking again about Grand solar minimum but I also speak about a little bit of solar radiation and verification of the new solar activity index we discovered with the existing one which is derived by average Sunspot number.

Understanding the Solar Cycle and Sunspots

The solar activity cycle is about 11 years and on the Sun it occurs that in the start of the cycle on the left image the sun has Southern polarity. And during the cycle this polarity slowly migrates in the opposite direction and so the next solar minimum you have polarity changed and this happens approximately every 11 years. so basically what is happening the the loops appear in the Solar surface and the occurring as the active region for forming coronal mass injections flares and different fluxes towards the Earth and other planets.

So in the past we were dealing with the sunspots. In the 18th century Wolff discovered that this Sunspot appears on this latitude 30° and migrates slowly towards the equator and basically this is the basic Solar activity index using daily average Sunspot numbers.

Why we love sunspots and why we support this for a couple of centuries is because sunspots actually are Roots which are embedded into the Photosphere (the surface layer of the Sun that gives off light). And we see them from outside with the naked eye but basically they are the places where magnetic Loops are embedded.

The problem with Sunspots is that we see only a few of them. Even with this Solar maximum there’s only a small part of the solar surface covered with them. Whatever we use to detect them, always the Sunspot index is defined by people manually. They agree from different observatories what number of sunspots which configuration Etc. So the Sunspot number changes during 11 year cycle.

Discovering The Background (magnetic fields)

So we decided to look at the background field in which these sunspots are embedded so on the top is the B is the background magnetic field measured at solar observatory in Stanford with orange. So you see clearly that the leading polarity of Sunspot always opposite to the polarity of the background magnetic field in that hemisphere. It was not only us who detected this it was others as well so it was very encouraging. We decided we can detect solar activity with much better accuracy.

The black curve is our summary modulus summary curve and the red is a sunspot number and you see that our a Vector summary Eigen vectors will represent this Solar, remembering that our index represents the magnetic field of the background Sun. In 2022 we added Cycle 24 and discovered that our curve still represents Sunspot index. At the bottom is the summary curve modulus summary curve cycle 25 where we are now, Here we see our prediction that the maximum will be actually year 23-24 and now there will be a very sharp drop of the activity, and we have two little Maxima before the minimum between cycle 25-26. Cycle 26 will be have very low amplitude, 70% lower than the previous two cycles.

So how it works. If you have two waves on the top two black waves which are running with the same amplitude but if the face difference is zero you have constructive interference. In the cycle 26 we can see the amplitudes are going opposite with the resulting amplitude becoming zero. This is what we observe on the sun and I teach my first year physics students how they interact. There’s no miracle, just basic physics of the waves and this effect called beat effect.

Implications of the Grand Solar Minimum

Now we come back to solar radiance and climate so first we now know that we entered into a grand solar minimum, the temperature started decreasing. But the problem with the grand solar minimum is that during previous Grand solar minimum, which was the Maunder minimum in 17th century, the Solar Radiance reduced by 3 watts per square meter approximately. But the temperature during Maunder minimum decreased approximately by one degree maximum.

Different investigations show slightly different variations but mostly they all reconstruct temperatures during and after the minimum to find where the surface temperature was reduced on the the globe. So this is what you see for Northern Hemisphere, this is Europe, very dark blue is reduction of temperature by one degree. And it is mostly all Europe, Russia and Siberia, and also all Northern America and Canada.

So basically this is probably we are heading towards now. We have noticed the cold flashes from the drop of the temperature that occurred because drop of abundance of ozone created by solar ultraviolet light in the stratosphere. If the solar radiation is reduced, this layer abundance of ozone is reduced and it affects planetary atmospheric waves.

In the left image Globe the stable just stream flows somewhere in this path and separate middle latitude from the north Northern latitude, but when ozone layer is reduced it causes giant Wiggles in just stream shown in the right plot called wind from arctics can now penetrate to the southern latitudes as shown on the picture. It kicks off North Atlantic oscillation and balance between permanent low pressure system near Greenland and permanent high pressure system and the South into Negative PH. It was reported 24 years ago go and it works now.

We are trying now to say that the temperature will be increasing because the sun become closer to us but the sun is very humane it gives us this grand solar minimum for 30 years to sort out our understanding how the heating comes through and then prepare for the next stage of heating which come does no matter what we do on Earth; if we stop using fuels, we crawl to the caves and start using I don’t know what energy. All people will die still the temperature will increase, it doesn’t matter what we do.

So this prediction of the anthropogenic global warming people is not working. The temperature will be increasing no matter what we do with CO2 because the increase of the temperature comes from the solar inertial motion. So this my conclusion: We had this global warming–it is real; it is not caused by humans because human only contribute 6% maximum of all CO2. And CO2 is a very good gas because it is mostly absorbed by the plants and not by humans.

Global warming is caused by this Solar inertial motion and gravitation of large planets which drag the Sun from the center Body Center closer to the planets and this causes the increase of the temperature. And the temperature as I shown in my book will increase by 2.5-3° by 25-2600 years. This is the end of the story.

TN: Thank you it sounds like we’re due for some cooling between now and 2053 but warming in general between then and 2600. I’m curious, do you think we’re going to see the temperatures freeze over at all?

Yes, I’m confident it will be freezing from 2031 to 2042 for sure. This will be the worst period of cold air and cold temperature and not only temps. Rivers and the ponds will be freezing all right and other dramatic things that might happen. It’s going to be a lot harder to grow wheat in Canada for example, I would guess during that time absolutely. In 17th century people heated their houses with their own fireplaces, now we have central heating. If we don’t have electricity even our Central heating is not working, so you need to have the portable generators run from fossil fuel or have a wood stove in your house. At that time people grew up something in their Gardens, now people don’t know how to grow up anything, so it will be really really difficult.

No, Grist, MSN, et al: CO2 Is Not Making Oceans Boil

Posted on February 3 by Ron Clutz

The Climate Crisis media network is announcing a new claim that rising CO2 is causing recent ocean warming, proving it’s dangerous and must be curtailed. Examples in the last few days include these:

Finally, an answer to why Earth’s oceans have been on a record hot streak Grist

Ocean warming 4 times faster than in 1980s — and likely to accelerate in coming decades MSN

News spotlight: Fossil fuels behind extreme ocean temperatures, study says. Conservation International

Ocean temperature rise accelerating as greenhouse gas levels keep rising UK Natural History Museum

The surface of our oceans is now warming four times faster than it was in the late 1980s The Independent UK

Oceans Are Warming Four Times Faster as Earth Traps More Energy Bloomberg Law News

All this hype deriving from one study,
and ignoring the facts falsifying that narrative.

Fact: Historically, ocean natural oscillations drive observed global warming.

The long record of previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

Fact: Recent rise in SST was driven by ENSO and N. Atlantic Anomalies.

And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through December 2024. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024.

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.

Now in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.29C in 2024/01 to 0.66C as of 2024/12.

Fact: Empirical measurements show ocean warms the air, not the other way around.

One can read convoluted explanations about how rising CO2 in the atmosphere can cause land surface heating which is then transported over the ocean and causes higher SST. But the interface between ocean and air is well described and measured. Not surprisingly it is the warmer ocean water sending heat into the atmosphere, and not the other way around.

The graph displays measures of heat flux in the sub-tropics during a 21-day period in November. Shortwave solar energy shown above in green labeled radiative is stored in the upper 200 meters of the ocean. The upper panel shows the rise in SST (Sea Surface Temperature) due to net incoming energy. The yellow shows latent heat cooling the ocean, (lowering SST) and transferring heat upward, driving convection. [From An Investigation of Turbulent Heat Exchange in the Subtropics by James B. Edson]

As we see in the graphs ocean circulations change sea surface temperatures which then cause global land and sea temperatures to change. Thus, oceans make climate by making temperature changes.

Fact: On all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia, temperature changes first and CO2 changes follow.

Previously I have demonstrated that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels follow changes in Global Mean Temperatures (GMT) as shown by satellite measurements from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). That background post is included in the posting referenced later below.

My curiosity was piqued by the remarkable GMT spike starting in January 2023 and rising to a peak in April 2024, and then declining afterward. I also became aware that UAH has recalibrated their dataset due to a satellite drift that can no longer be corrected. The values since 2020 have shifted slightly in version 6.1, as shown in my recent report Ocean Leads Cooling UAH December 2024.

I tested the premise that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The chart above shows the two monthly datasets: CO2 levels in blue reported at Mauna Loa, and Global temperature anomalies in purple reported by UAHv6.1, both through December 2024. Would such a sharp increase in temperature be reflected in rising CO2 levels, according to the successful mathematical forecasting model? Would CO2 levels decline as temperatures dropped following the peak?

The answer is yes: that temperature spike resulted
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected.
And lower CO2 levels followed the temperature decline.

Above are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example December 2024 minus December 2023). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the recent CO2 upward spike and drop following the temperature spike and drop.

Summary

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.

12/2024 Update–As Temperature Changes, CO2 Follows

Left Coast Climate Delusion Ends in Flames

Posted on January 20 by Ron Clutz

Satellite images of wildfires burning in Southern California By NBC Staff • Published January 11, 2025

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in Wall Street Journal End of a Climate Delusion. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Amid California’s fires, voters wake up from the dream that green pork is a solution.

CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is rapidly and, for all practical purposes, uniformly distributed around the planet.

I may be stating the obvious but it needs to be pointed out. Voters and even political leaders are surprisingly poorly informed on this point. Emissions cuts in California don’t have any significant effect on California’s climate. They also have no global effect. California’s cuts are too small relative to the global whole; they also are largely illusory.

Emitting industries leave the state. They don’t stop emitting. If California imports Canadian hydro to charge its electric vehicles, consumers elsewhere have to burn more coal and gas. If Californians drive EVs, more gasoline is free to be burned by others, releasing more CO2 that influences climate change in California and everywhere else.

Green-energy subsidies do not reduce emissions. This will be news to millions of California voters. It contradicts a central tenet of state policy. It isn’t news to the actual enactors of these subsidies. A National Research Council study sponsored by congressional Democrats in 2008 concluded that such handouts were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases” and called for carbon taxes instead.

Unfortunately, the incoming Obama administration quickly discovered it favored climate taxes only when Republicans were in charge. Backers would later engage in flagrant lying to promote Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, knowingly citing bogus predictions that its trillion-dollar spending profusion would reduce emissions.

A 2019 University of Oregon study had already revealed the empirical truth: Green energy doesn’t replace fossil fuels, it enables more energy consumption overall. That same year the EPA calculated that the potential emissions savings from subsidizing electric vehicles had been offset five times over by the pickup truck and SUV boom Team Obama facilitated to assure the success of its auto bailout.

American Association for the Advancement of Science study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.

Last year, the premier journal Science put a nail in the question: 96% of policies supported worldwide as “reducing” emissions failed to do so, consisting mostly of handouts to green-energy interests.

And yet certain Journal readers still assail me with the epithet “denier.” They confuse my criticism of Democratic hypocrisy with my imagined views on climate science. As I’ve written back to many, “Don’t think politicians haven’t figured this out about you. That’s why they can give us unsustainable corporate welfare boondoggles and call it climate policy.”

A CNN moderator Saturday urged viewers to vote in an online poll on whether the California disaster should be blamed on climate change or poor leadership. Notice the non sequitur: as if climate change is an excuse for not acting against fire risk.

By all means, let politicians proclaim a “climate crisis” or any other rhetorical flourish if it helps mobilize support for public actions that actually serve a useful purpose. But a prerevolutionary situation has been building in California for two decades, starting with the Third World blackouts in late 2000 not because of any shortage of power but because of large helpings of political cowardice.

A decision in 2019 authorized yet more Third World blackouts instead of reasonably shielding utilities from lawsuit risk over fires their power lines might be accused of contributing to. One result, predictably, has been a proliferation of backyard generators, which increase fire risk.

Californians are stuck adapting in the ways left open to them. Since 2017, half a million have fled Los Angeles County.

Two social technologies might help but the state has been intent on denying itself their advantages. One is a functioning insurance market. If you can’t afford the insurance, you can’t afford the house. Get ready, instead, for a torrent of federal and state money to help residents, some of them wealthy, rebuild in high-risk fire zones.

The other is a functioning market in water. Five gallons to produce a walnut probably isn’t tenable under any realistic system of water pricing. If water were properly valued, municipalities would also rapidly discover the logic of building aquifers to capture seasonal runoff. A thousand things would change if water were priced to flow to its most highly valued uses.

Here’s another concept: Climate change can exist and yet be an insignificant variable.

In Southern California’s Mediterranean climate, anytime 100-mile-an-hour winds start blowing embers toward densely packed housing developments, a conflagration is certain. The only answer then is to have the manpower and resources ready to put fires out as quickly as they start.

I’ve written repeatedly about climate and energy policies in the Western world being a colossal example of “sophisticated state failure,” in which attempts to address complex problems yield only a succession of boondoggles and economic crises. If California voters don’t wise up now, they never will.

Koonin: Reckless Claim of Climate Emergency

Posted on January 17 by Ron Clutz

Transcript

Hubris is a Greek word that means dangerously overconfident. Based on my research, hubris fairly describes our current response to the issue of climate change.

Here’s what many people believe:

One: The planet is warming catastrophically because of certain human behaviors.
Two: Thanks to powerful computers we can project what the climate will be like
20, 40, or even 100 years from now.
Three: That if we eliminate just one behavior, the burning of fossil fuels,
we can prevent the climate from changing for as long we like.

Each of these presumptions—together, the basis of our hubris regarding the changing climate—is either untrue or so far off the mark as to be useless.

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that, to paraphrase a line from the classic movie The Princess Bride, “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

For example, government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900.

Hurricane activity is no different than it was a century ago.

Floods have not increased across the globe over more than seventy years.

Source: Voice of International Affairs

Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago.

Why aren’t these reassuring facts better known?

Because the public gets its climate information almost exclusively from the media.

And from a media perspective, fear sells.

“Things aren’t that bad” doesn’t sell.

Very few people, and that includes journalists who report on climate news, read the actual science. I have. And what the data—the hard science—from the US government and UN Climate reports say is that… “things aren’t that bad.”

Nor does the public understand the questionable basis of all catastrophic climate change projections: computer modeling.

Projecting future climate is excruciatingly difficult. Yes, there are human influences, but the climate is complex. Anyone who says that climate models are “just physics” either doesn’t understand them or is being deliberately misleading. I should know: I wrote one of the first textbooks on computer modeling.

While modelers base their assumptions upon both fundamental physical laws and observations of the climate, there is still considerable judgment involved. And since different modelers will make different assumptions, results vary widely among different models.

Let’s just take one simple, but significant assumption modelers must make: the impact of clouds on the climate.

Natural fluctuations in the height and coverage of clouds have at least as much of an impact on the flows of sunlight and heat as do human influences. But how can we possibly know global cloud coverage say 10, let alone 50 years from now? Obviously, we can’t. But to create a climate model, we have to make assumptions. That’s a pretty shaky foundation on which to transform the world’s economy.

By the way, creating more accurate models isn’t getting any easier. In fact, the more we learn about the climate system, the more we realize how complex it is.

Rather than admit this complexity, the media, the politicians, and a good portion of the climate science community attribute every terrible storm, every flood, every major fire to “climate change.” Yes, we’ve always had these weather events in the past, the narrative goes, but somehow “climate change” is making everything “worse.”

Even if that were true, isn’t the relevant question, how much worse? Not to mention that “worse” is not exactly a scientific term. And how would we make it better? For the alarmists, that’s easy: we get rid of fossil fuels.

Not only is this impractical—we get over 80% of the world’s energy from fossil fuels—it’s not scientifically possible. That’s because CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere in a few days like, say, smog. It hangs around for a really long time.

About 60 percent of any CO2 that we emit today will remain in the atmosphere 20 years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.

In other words, it takes centuries for the excess carbon dioxide to vanish from the atmosphere. So, any partial reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase in human influences—not prevent it, let alone reverse it.

CO2 is not a knob that we can just turn down to fix everything. We don’t have that ability. To think that we do is… hubris.

Hubris leads to bad decisions. A little humility and
a little knowledge would lead to better ones.

I’m Steve Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Administration, and author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, for Prager University.

Addendum Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) Climate Science

Professors Lindzen, Happer and Koonin CO2 Coalition Paper April 2024

I. THERE WILL BE DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE POOR, PEOPLE WORLDWIDE, FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE WEST IF FOSSIL FUELS, CO2 AND OTHER GHG EMISSIONS ARE REDUCED TO “NET ZERO”

A. CO2 is Essential to Our Food, and Thus to Life on Earth
B. More CO2, Including CO2 from Fossil Fuels, Produces More Food.
C. More CO2 Increases Food in Drought-Stricken Areas.
D. Greenhouse Gases Prevent Us from Freezing to Death
E. Enormous Social Benefits of Fossil Fuels
F. “Net Zeroing” Fossil Fuels Will Cause Massive Human Starvation by Eliminating Nitrogen Fertilizer

II. THE IPCC IS GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED AND THUS ONLY ISSUES GOVERNMENT OPINIONS, NOT SCIENCE

III. SCIENCE DEMONSTRATES FOSSIL FUELS, CO2 AND OTHER GHGs WILL NOT CAUSE CATASTROPHIC GLOBAL WARMING AND EXTREME WEATHER

A. Reliable Science is Based on Validating Theoretical Predictions With Observations, Not Consensus, Peer Review, Government Opinion or Cherry-Picked or Falsified Data
B. The Models Predicting Catastrophic Warming and Extreme Weather Fail the Key Scientific Test: They Do Not Work, and Would Never Be Used in Science.
C. 600 Million Years of CO2 and Temperature Data Contradict the Theory That High Levels of CO2 Will Cause Catastrophic Global Warming.
D. Atmospheric CO2 Is Now “Heavily Saturated,” Which in Physics Means More CO2 Will Have Little Warming Effect.
E. The Theory Extreme Weather is Caused by Fossil Fuels, CO2 and Other GHGs is Contradicted by the Scientific Method and Thus is Scientifically Invalid

How Cold Will NH Be In 2025?

Posted on January 16 by Ron Clutz

https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1879602851175129229

Ryan Maue @RyanMaue
Starting to wonder what’s going on.

During next 2-weeks, extreme cold over Northern Hemisphere continents may be enough to return global temperatures to the 1991-2020 climatological mean temporarily erasing the last 5-years of global warming.

Climatists Deny Natural Warming Factors

Good Reasons to Distrust Climatists

Posted on January 14 by Ron Clutz

The most recent case of climatists’ bad behavior is the retraction of a peer-reviewed paper analyzing the properties of CO2 as an IR active gas, concluding that additional levels of atmospheric CO2 will have negligible effect on temperatures. From the Daily Sceptic:

Another important paper taking issue with the ‘settled’ climate narrative has been cancelled following a report in the Daily Sceptic and subsequent reposts that went viral across social media. The paper discussed the atmospheric ‘saturation’ of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and argued that higher levels will not cause temperatures to rise. The work was led by the widely-published Polish scientist Dr. Jan Kubicki and appeared on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website in December 2023. The paper has been widely discussed on social media since April 2024 when the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings. Interest is growing in the saturation hypothesis not least because it provides a coherent explanation for why life and the biosphere grew and often thrived for 600 million years despite much higher atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. Alas for control freaks, it also destroys the science backing for the Net Zero fantasy.

Below are some comments responding to a Quora question, text in italics with my bolds and added images:

What are some reasons why some people do not believe in climate change or global warming despite scientific evidence? Is there any additional information that could help us understand their perspective?

Answer from Mike Jonas, M.A. in Mathematics, Oxford University, UK,

Good scientists do not lie and cheat to protect their science, they are happy to discuss their evidence and their findings, and they always understand that everything needs to be replicable and verifiable.

When Climategate erupted on the scene, and the climate scientists behind the man-made global warming narrative were found to have lied and cheated, all honest scientists thought that would be the end of it. Instead, what happened was that those climate scientists closed ranks and carried on, supported by a massive amount of government (ie, the public’s) money. One of the first things they did was to deflect Climategate by saying the emails involved had been hacked so should be ignored, but some of the people involved confirmed that all of the emails really were genuine.

It has been about 15 years since Climategate, and study after study has shown virtually all of the components of the man-made global warming narrative to be incorrect, even that none of the computer models used by the IPCC are fit for purpose,

And yet they maintained their closed ranks,
and the government money kept pouring in.

Did you know that the IPCC does not do any research (please do check that, on their web page About – IPCC they state “The IPCC does not conduct its own research”). It is, as its name says, an inter-governmental organisation, and it is run by and for governments. They say lots of persuasive sciency things, but the simple fact is that they cherry-pick and corrupt the science to achieve their ends. Regrettably, almost all the scientific societies are on the gravy train too. This is part of what the highly respected physicist Professor Hal Lewis said in his resignation letter to the American Physical Society (APS):

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge?
It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

If you want to find out more about this “greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud”, the website Watts Up With That? is a good place to start (the fraudsters absolutely hate it), and it links to many other good websites. It has the full text of Hal Lewis’ resignation letter at:

Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society – an important moment in science history

Answer from Susannah Moyer

It’s curious that climate science is the rare scientific field where dissenting scientists, those with contrarian views, are unwelcome and even ostracized.

There are some well known climate scientists that have doubts about the role of CO2 and man made global warming as it pertains to global temperature. They have raised the issue that computer generated prediction models have been inaccurate in predicting temperature patterns because the modeling requires assumptions that have not been shown to be accurate.

Here is a contrarian view from climate scientists who have published climate research results in Nature, which is no small feat:

McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

It is not a known fact by how much the Earth’s atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.

For instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing that the actual global temperature trend was “one-quarter of the magnitude of climate model results.” As the nearby graph shows, the disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.

“Consensus” science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

Another questioner, Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

Firstly, even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

Climate Science Is Not Settled

Another group questioning what some consider “settled science”:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris;
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting;
Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University;
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society;
Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences;
William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton;
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.;
William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology;
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT;
James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University;
Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences;
Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne;
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator;
Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service;
Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society (APS), from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue?

There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question
“cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Happer: Cloud Radiation Matters, CO2 Not So Much (2025)

Posted on January 13 by Ron Clutz

This month van Wijngaarden and Happer published a new paper Radiation Transport in Clouds.

Last year William Happer spoke on Radiation Transfer in Clouds at the EIKE conference, and the video is above. For those preferring to read, below is a transcript from the closed captions along with some key exhibits. I left out the most technical section in the latter part of the presentation. Text in italics with my bolds.

William Happer: Radiation Transfer in Clouds

People have been looking at Clouds for a very long time in in a quantitative way. This is one of the first quantitative studies done about 1800. And this is John Leslie, a Scottish physicist who built this gadget. He called it an Aethrioscope, but basically it was designed to figure out how effective the sky was in causing Frost. If you live in Scotland you worry about Frost. So it consisted of two glass bulbs with a very thin capillary attachment between them. And there was a little column of alcohol here.

The bulbs were full of air, and so if one bulb got a little bit warmer it would force the alcohol up through the capillary. If this one got colder it would suck the alcohol up. So he set this device out under the clear sky. And he described that the sensibility of the instrument is very striking. For the liquor incessantly falls and rises in the stem with every passing cloud. in fine weather the aethrioscope will seldom indicate a frigorific impression of less than 30 or more than 80 millesimal degrees. He’s talking about how high this column of alcohol would go up and down if the sky became overclouded. it may be reduced to as low as 15 refers to how much the sky cools or even five degrees when the congregated vapours hover over the hilly tracks. We don’t speak English that way anymore but I I love it.

The point was that even in 1800 Leslie and his colleagues knew very well that clouds have an enormous effect on the cooling of the earth. And of course anyone who has a garden knows that if you have a clear calm night you’re likely to get Frost and lose your crops. So this was a quantitative study of that.

Now it’s important to remember that if you go out today the atmosphere is full of two types of radiation. There’s sunlight which you can see and then there is the thermal radiation that’s generated by greenhouse gases, by clouds and by the surface of the Earth. You can’t see thermal radiation but you you can feel it if it’s intense enough by its warming effect. And these curves practically don’t overlap so we’re really dealing with two completely different types of radiation.

There’s sunlight which scatters very nicely and off of not only clouds but molecules; it’s the blue sky the Rayleigh scattering. Then there’s the thermal radiation which actually doesn’t scatter at all on molecules so greenhouse gases are very good at absorbing thermal radiation but they don’t scatter it. But clouds scatter thermal radiation and plotted here is the probability that you will find Photon of sunlight between you know log of its wavelength and the log of in this interval of the wavelength scale.

Since Leslie’s day two types of instruments have been developed to do what he did more precisely. One of them is called a pyranometer and this is designed to measure sunlight coming down onto the Earth on a day like this. So you put this instrument out there and it would read the flux of sunlight coming down. It’s designed to see sunlight coming in every direction so it doesn’t matter which angle the sun is shining; it’s uh calibrated to see them all.

Let me show you a measurement by a pyranometer. This is a actually a curve from a sales brochure of a company that will sell you one of these devices. It’s comparing two types of detectors and as you can see they’re very good you can hardly tell the difference. The point is that if you look on a clear day with no clouds you see sunlight beginning to increase at dawn it peaks at noon and it goes down to zero and there’s no sunlight at night. So half of the day over most of the Earth there’s no sunlight in the in the atmosphere.

Here’s a day with clouds, it’s just a few days later shown by days of the year going across. You can see every time a cloud goes by the intensity hitting the ground goes down. With a little clear sky it goes up, then down up and so on. On average at this particular day you get a lot less sunlight than you did on the clear day.

But you know nature is surprising. Einstein had this wonderful quote: God is subtle but he’s not malicious. He meant that nature does all of sorts of things you don’t expect, and so let me show you what happens on a partly cloudy day. Here so this is data taken near Munich. The blue curve is the measurement and the red curve is is the intensity on the ground if there were no clouds. This is a partly cloudy day and you can see there are brief periods when the sunlight is much brighter on the detector on a cloudy day than it is on the clear day. And that’s because coming through clouds you get focusing from the edges of the cloud pointing down toward your detector. That means somewhere else there’s less radiation reaching the ground. But this is rather surprising to most people. I was very surprised to learn about it but it just shows that the actual details of climate are a lot more subtle than you might think.

We know that visible light only happens during the daytime and stops at night. There’s a second type of important radiation which is the thermal radiation which is measured by a similar device. You have a silicon window that passes infrared, which is below the band gap of silicon, so it passes through it as though transparent. Then there’s some interference filters here to give you further discrimination against sunlight. So sunlight practically doesn’t go through this at all, so they call it solar solar blind since it doesn’t see the Sun.

But it sees thermal radiation very clearly with a big difference between this device and the sunlight sensing device I showed you. Because actually most of the time this is radiating up not down. Out in the open air this detector normally gets colder than the body of the instrument. And so it’s carefully calibrated for you to compare the balance of down coming radiation with the upcoming radiation. Upcoming is normally greater than down coming.

I’ll show you some measurements of the downwelling flux here; these are actually in Greenland in Thule and these are are watts per square meter on the vertical axis here. The first thing to notice is that the radiation continues day and night you can you if you look at the output of the pyrgeometer you can’t tell whether it’s day or night because the atmosphere is just as bright at night as it is during the day. However, the big difference is clouds: on a cloudy day you get a lot more downwelling radiation than you do on a clear day. Here’s a a near a full day of clear weather there’s another several days of clear weather. Then suddenly it gets cloudy. Radiation rises because the bottoms of the clouds are relatively warm at least compared to the clear sky. I think if you put the numbers In, this cloud bottom is around 5° Centigrade so it was fairly low Cloud. it was summertime in Greenland and this compares to about minus 5° for the clear sky.

So there’s a lot of data out there and there really is downwelling radiation there no no question about that you measure it routinely. And now you can do the same thing looking down from satellites so this is a picture that I downloaded a few weeks ago to get ready for this talk from Princeton and it was from Princeton at 6 PM so it was already dark in Europe. So this is a picture of the Earth from a geosynchronous satellite that’s parked over Ecuador. You are looking down on the Western Hemisphere and this is a filtered image of the Earth in Blue Light at 47 micrometers. So it’s a nice blue color not so different from the sky and it’s dark where the sun has set. There’s still a fair amount of sunlight over the United States and the further west.

Here is exactly the same time and from the same satellite the infrared radiation coming up at 10.3 which is right in the middle of the infrared window where there’s not much Greenhouse gas absorption; there’s a little bit from water vapor but very little, trivial from CO2.

As you can see, you can’t tell which side is night and which side is day. So even though the sun has set over here it is still glowing nice and bright. There’s sort of a pesky difference here because what you’re looking at here is reflected sunlight over the intertropical Convergence Zone. There are lots of high clouds that have been pushed up by the convection in the tropics and uh so this means more visible light here. You’re looking at emission of the cloud top so this is less thermal light so white here means less light, white there means more light so you have to calibrate your thinking. to

But the Striking thing about all of this: if you can see the Earth is covered with clouds, you have to look hard to find a a clear spot of the earth. Roughly half of the earth maybe is clear at any given time but most of it’s covered with clouds. So if anything governs the climate it is clouds and and so that’s one of the reasons I admire so much the work that Svensmark and Nir Shaviv have done. Because they’re focusing on the most important mechanism of the earth: it’s not Greenhouse Gases, it’s Clouds. You can see that here.

Now this is a single frequency let me show you what happens if you look down from a satellite and do look at the Spectrum. This is the spectrum of light coming up over the Sahara Desert measured from a satellite. And so here is the infrared window; there’s the 10.3 microns I mentioned in the previous slide it’s it’s a clear region. So radiation in this region can get up from the surface of the Sahara right up to outer space.

Notice that the units on these scales are very different; over the Sahara the top unit is 200, 150 over the Mediterranean and it’s only 60 over the South Pole. But at least the Mediterranean and the Sahara are roughly similar so the right side here these three curves on the right are observations from satellites and the three curves on the left are are calculations modeling that we’ve done. The point here is that you can hardly tell the difference between a model calculation and observed radiation.

So it’s really straightforward to calculate radiation transfer. If someone quotes you a number in watts per square centimeter you should take it seriously; that probably a good number. If they tell you a temperature you don’t know what to make about it. Because there’s a big step between going from watts per square centimeter to a temperature change. All the mischief in the whole climate business is going from watts per square centimeter to to Centigrade or Kelvin.

Now I will say just a few words about clear sky because that is the simplest. Then we’ll get on to clouds, the topic of this talk. This is a calculation with the same codes that I showed you in the previous slide which as you saw work very well. It’s worth spending a little time because this is the famous Planck curve that was the birth of quantum mechanics. There is Max Planck who figured out what the formula for that curve is and why it is that way. This is what the Earth would radiate at 15° Centigrade if there were no greenhouse gases. You would get this beautiful smooth curve the Planck curve. If you actually look at the Earth from the satellites you get a raggedy jaggedy black curve. We like to call that the Schwarzchild curve because Carl Schwarzchild was the person who showed how to do that calculation. Tragically he died during World War I, a Big Big loss to science.

There are two colored curves that I want to draw your attention. The green curve is is what Earth would radiate to space if you took away all the CO2 so it only differs from the black curve you know in the CO2 band here this is the bending band of CO2 which is the main greenhouse effect of CO2. There’s a little additional effect here which is the asymmetric stretch but it it doesn’t contribute very much. Then here is a red curve and that’s what happens if you double CO2.

So notice the huge asymmetry. If taking all 400 parts per million of CO2 away from the atmosphere causes this enormous change 30 watts per square meter, the difference between this green 307 and and the black 277, that’s 30 watts per square meter. But if you double CO2 you practically don’t make any change. This is the famous saturation of CO2. At the levels we have now doubling CO2, a 100% Increase of CO2 only changes the radiation to space by 3 watts per square meter. The difference between 274 for the red curve and 277 for the curve for today. So it’s a tiny amount: for 100% increase in CO2 a 1% decrease of radiation to space.

That allows you to estimate the feedback-free climate sensitivity in your head. I’ll talk you through the feedback-free climate free sensitivity. So doubling CO2 is a 1% decrease of radiation to space. If that happens then the Earth will start to warm up. But it will radiate as the fourth power of the temperature. So temperature starts to rise but if you’ve got a fourth power, the temperature only has to rise by one-quarter of a percent absolute temperature. So a 1% forcing in watts per square centimeter is a one-quarter percent of temperature in Kelvin. Since the ambient Kelvin temperature is about 300 Kelvin (actually a little less) a quarter of that is 75 Kelvin. So the feedback free equilibrium climate sensitivity is less than 1 Degree. It’s 0.75 Centigrade. It’s a number you can do in your head.

So when you hear about 3 centigrade instead of .75 C that’s a factor of four, all of which is positive feedback. So how is there really that much positive feedback? Because most feedbacks in nature are negative. The famous Le Chatelier principle which says that if you perturb a system it reacts in a way to to dampen the perturbation not increase it. There are a few positive feedback systems that we’re familiar with for example High explosives have positive feedback. So if the earth’s climate were like other positive feedback systems, all of them are highly explosive, it would have exploded a long time ago. But the climate has never done that, so the empirical observational evidence from geology is that the climate is like any other feedback system it’s probably negative Okay so I leave that thought with you and and let me stress again:

This is clear skies no clouds; if you add clouds all this does is
suppress the effects of changes of the greenhouse gas.

So now let’s talk about clouds and the theory of clouds, since we’ve already seen clouds are very important. Here is the formidable equation of transfer which has been around since Schwarzchild’s day. So some of the symbols here relate to the intensity, another represents scattering. If you have a thermal radiation on a greenhouse gas where it comes in and immediately is absorbed, there’s no scattering at all. If you hit a cloud particle it will scatter this way or that way, or some maybe even backwards.

So all of that’s described by this integral so you’ve got incoming light at One Direction and you’ve got outgoing light at a second Direction. And then at the same time you’ve got thermal radiation so the warm particles of the cloud are are emitting radiation creating photons which are coming out and and increasing the Earth glow the and this is represented by two parameters. Even a single cloud particle has an albedo, this is is the fraction of radiation that hits the cloud that is scattered as opposed to absorbed and being converted to heat. It’s a very important parameter for visible light and white clouds, typically 99% of the encounters are scattered. But for thermal radiation it’s much less. So water scatters thermal radiation only half as efficiently as shorter wavelengths.

The big problem is that in spite of all the billions of dollars that we have spent, these things which should be known and and would have been known if there hadn’t been this crazy fixation on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. And so we’ve neglected working on these areas that are really important as opposed to the trivial effects of greenhouse gases. Attenuation in a cloud is both scattering and absorption. Of course you have to solve these equations for every different frequency of the light because especially for molecules, there’s a strong frequency dependence.

In summary, let me show you this photo which was taken by Harrison Schmitt who was a friend of mine on one of the first moonshots. It was taken in December and looking at this you can see that they were south of Madagascar when the photograph was taken. You can see it was Winter because here the Intertropical Convergence Zone is quite a bit south of the Equator; it’s moved Way South of India and Saudi Arabia. By good luck they had the sun behind them so they had the whole earth Irradiated.

There’s a lot of information there and and again let me draw your attention to how much of the Earth is covered with clouds. So only very small parts of the Earth can actually be directly affected by greenhouse gases, of the order of half. The takeaway message is that clouds and water vapor are much more important than greenhouse gases for earth’s climate. The second point is the reason they’re much more important: doubling CO2 as I indicated in the middle of the talk only causes a 1% difference of radiation to space. It is a very tiny effect because of saturation. You know people like to say that’s not so, but you can’t really argue that one, even the IPCC gets the same numbers that we do.

And you also know that covering half of the sky with clouds will decrease solar heating by 50%. So for clouds it’s one to one, for greenhouse gases it’s a 100 to one. If you really want to affect the climate, you want to do something to the clouds. You will have a very hard time making any difference with Net Zero with CO2 if you are alarmed about the warmings that have happened.

So one would hope that with all the money that we’ve spent trying to turn CO2 into a demon that some good science has come out of it. From my point of view this is a small part of it, this scattering theory that I think will be here a long time after the craze over greenhouse gases has gone away. I hope there will be other things too. You can point to the better instrumentation that we’ve got, satellite instrumentation as well as ground instrumentation. So that’s been a good investment of money. But the money we’ve spent on supercomputers and modeling has been completely wasted in my view.

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