Arctic Sea Ice Extent Accelerating Since 2012 …Ship Of Fools II Abandons Publicity Expedition

By on 18. September 2018

Schneefan (Snow Fan) at German skeptic site wobleibtdieerderwaermung.de here recently posted an overview of Arctic sea ice. This summer as well has Arctic sea ice refused to obey all the claims of melting.

Source: DMI plot sea ice cover.

Sea ice increase accelerating

The above chart shows August mean Arctic sea ice area in million square meters from 1979 to 2018 (red curve). There’s been a positive linear trend since 2007.

Moreover, the upward linear trend has even sharpened since 2012 (green lines) since Al Gore and Peter Wadhams made their absurd projections there would be an ice-free Arctic by now.

Kirye at KiryeNet here shows that current Arctic sea ice volume for mid September remains at the center of the pack, and thus no sign of short-term dwindling Arctic sea ice:

Chart: KiryeNet

The Northwest Passage this year as well was continuously blocked by ice and thus impassable for the entire year.

Yacht ignored warnings, got crushed

But some refused to believe the ice was not melting. For example German Yacht Online here reported how a crew on the yacht “Anahita” had ignored warnings of the Canadian Coast Guard and tried to cross the Passage. By late August the yacht ended up getting crushed by sea ice and sank within minutes. The 2-man crew was forced to escape on the ice by foot and were later airlifted to safety by helicopter.

According to Yacht online: “The ‘Anahita’ was one of a dozen other yachts on the way from the east to the west through the Northwest Passage. However this summer the sea ice in the Arctic remained tenacious.”

Ship of Fools II

Also a group of publicity seeking climate activists on Russian ice breaker/expedition ship ‘Akademik Ioffe’ were forced to move their starting point about 1000 km to the south to Kugaaruk. Just hours after starting on August 24, 2018, the vessel “ran aground on an uncharted shoal” and all passengers had to be rescued.

The trip was supposed to focus the world’s attention on global warming and “disappearing” Arctic sea ice. However, the expedition ended up being an embarrassment and ironically showed the opposite: the Arctic still had quite some ways to go before becoming ice-free.

Ioffe

The conditions the Northwest Passage Project crew were hoping for, but never became the case. Ice breaker/expedition ship Akademik Ioffe. Photo: The Northwest Passage Project

All passengers on the Akademik Ioffe were safely transferred to shore and returned home, the site informs.

“Uncharted geologic feature”

According to the website, the expedition was abandoned because the Akademik Ioffe needed repair after it had run aground and been refloated.

The expedition itself insisted the mission was not curtailed due to ice conditions and instead blamed “an uncharted geologic feature”. But why would a ship need to enter an uncharted area? Maybe because ice was blocking the usual route?

Today “Akademik Ioffe“ is back on the way to Les Mechins, Quebec from Kugaaruk and the expedition is postponed to summer 2019.

Chart: Marine Tracker.

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New Study: Sea Level Rise Doesn’t ‘Spell Doom’ – Little To No Loss Of Coastal Wetlands Projected By 2100

By on 17. September 2018

Another new false-alarm paper reveals that coastal wetlands may not only persist well into the 21st century despite present rates of sea level rise, but the coasts may expand and even prosper due to the natural ability for soil to “build up vertically by sediment accretion”.  

Headline/image source: Sciencenews.org

“Coasts are growing all over the world”

Two years ago, a ground-breaking paper was published in the journal Nature Climate Change indicating that the Earth’s shorelines have been growing overall since the mid-1980s (Donchyts et al., 2016).

In other words, because “coasts are growing all over the world”, there is more land area above sea level today than there was 30 years ago.

This conclusion has again been confirmed by a new paper (Luijendijk et al., 2018) that indicates only 24% of the world’s beach shorelines are eroding, whereas 76% of the world’s beach shorelines are either growing (28%) or stable (48%).

Supposedly “vulnerable” Pacific islands are expanding 

Hisabayashi et al., 2018 found that 15 of 28 studied atoll islands in the southwest Pacific grew in shoreline area during 2005 to 2015.

Kench et al., 2018 examined “101 islands in Tuvalu over the past four decades (1971–2014)”, a period in which local sea level has risen at twice the global average.  They found a “land area increase in eight of nine atolls.”

“Surprisingly, we show that all islands have changed and that the dominant mode of change has been island expansion, which has increased the land area of the nation. … Using remotely sensed data, change is analysed over the past four decades, a period when local sea level has risen at twice the global average [<2 mm/yr-1] (~3.90 ± 0.4 mm.yr−1). Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls.” (Kench et al., 2018)

Coastal marsh area has been stable or expanding

Kirwan et al., 2016 reported that coastal marshes and their “vulnerable” ecosystems are not only persisting despite present-day sea level rise, coastal marsh area has generally been stable or expanding.

In fact, it was claimed that sea level rise rates of 10-50 mm/yr (1 to 5 meters per century) during the 21st century would not be substantial enough to submerge the globe’s coastal marshes.

“Coastal marshes are considered to be among the most valuable and vulnerable ecosystems on Earth, where the imminent loss of ecosystem services is a feared consequence of sea level rise. However, we show with a meta-analysis that global measurements of marsh elevation change indicate that marshes are generally building at rates similar to or exceeding historical sea level rise, and that process-based models predict survival under a wide range of future sea level scenarios. We argue that marsh vulnerability tends to be overstated because assessment methods often fail to consider biophysical feedback processes known to accelerate soil building with sea level rise, and the potential for marshes to migrate inland. … In summary, dynamic models of marsh vertical accretion indicate that marshes will generally survive relative SLR rates of 10–50 mm yr−1 during the twenty-first century, depending on tidal range and suspended sediment availability.” (Kirwan et al., 2016)

Coastal wetlands may not be threatened by sea level rise

Adding yet another layer to the strengthening conclusion that global sea levels aren’t rising fast enough to “spell doom” to “vulnerable” coastal ecosystems and communities, Schuerch et al. (2018) find that the natural ability of coastal wetlands to “build up vertically by sediment accretion” could potentially lead to “wetland gains of up to 60 per cent of the current area“.

More and more, scientists are undercutting alarmist proclamations of catastrophic 21st century sea level rise brought on by anthropogenic global warming.

“Rising sea levels don’t have to spell doom for the world’s coastal wetlands. A new study suggests salt marshes and other wetlands could accumulate soil quickly enough to avoid becoming fully submerged — if humans are willing to give them a little elbow room. … The new study builds on previous work that suggests rising seas will increase sediment buildup in some parts of coastal wetlands. This increased sediment, as well as human adaptations to allow wetlands to move inland as the seas rise, could allow the coastal fringes to not only survive but to increase their global area by as much as 60 percent.” (Sciencenews press release for Schuerch et al., 2018)

“On the basis of our simulations, we find that, globally, rather than losses, wetland gains of up to 60 per cent of the current area are possible, if more than 37 per cent (our upper estimate for current accommodation space) of coastal wetlands have sufficient accommodation space, and sediment supply remains at present levels.”
“[M]ost large-scale assessments have overestimated the vulnerability of coastal wetlands to SLR [present-day sea level rise]. These differences highlight a major knowledge gap in our understanding of the responses of coastal wetland areas to global environmental change. It has been argued that the reason for the observed discrepancy is that large-scale assessments have so far failed to consider the well understood biophysical feedback mechanisms that are typically included in local-scale models. These mechanisms include the ability of coastal wetlands to build up vertically by sediment accretion, which is enhanced with increasing inundation heights and frequencies, triggered, for example, by accelerating SLR [present-day sea level rise], and which enables coastal wetlands to persist or even prosper with SLR [present-day sea level rise].”
“[W]e project that until 2100, the loss of global coastal wetland area will range between 0 and 30 per cent, assuming no further accommodation space in addition to current levels. Our simulations suggest that the resilience of global wetlands is primarily driven by the availability of accommodation space, which is strongly influenced by the building of anthropogenic infrastructure in the coastal zone and such infrastructure is expected to change over the twenty-first century. Rather than being an inevitable consequence of global sea-level rise, our findings indicate that large-scale loss of coastal wetlands might be avoidable, if sufficient additional accommodation space can be created through careful nature-based adaptation solutions to coastal management.”
“[O]ur calibrated model, which includes mangroves as well as tidal salt and freshwater marshes, correctly predicts observations of present-day vertical wetland change, obtained from large meta-datasets from all over the world (Crosby et al., 2016; Kirwan et al., 2016; Lovelock et al., 2015), for 78% of all coastal areas where data are currently available (N=46).”

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Wild Claims In Wake of Hurricane Florence…And The Media Bad Weather Exaggeration Awards

By on 16. September 2018

Scroll down to see some Media Bad Weather Exaggeration Award winners…

In the wake of Florence, climate ambulance chasers have been making wild exaggerations and claims.

WaPo Weirding

For example, the Washington Post editorial board claimed President Trump and climate change deniers were “complicit” in Florence because they play down humans role in increasing the risks our obstruction of addressing those risks.

Of course this is just the latest pathetic effort to criminalize climate science dissenters.

CNN fake news again

Meanwhile CNN even claimed there’s been a 40% increase in extreme storms since 1950, hat-tip Ryan Maue, who commented:

In a nutshell, climate alarmists will say anything, no matter how absurd, to make the junk science look real. It’s time to come to terms with the reality that the mainstream media often deceives the public.

Media silent on “complicit” in hurricane disintegration

If climate skeptics are complicit in Florence, then on the other side of the coin skeptics also have to be responsible for the hurricanes that fizzle out.

At Friday’s Daily Update, veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi posed a question to the climate ambulance chasers and folks at the Washington Post: “How come Florence didn’t intensify more? How come Isaac is falling apart at the heart of the hurricane season? […] How come everything is dying? There’s so much more than just simplistic arguments that are done for agendas.”

Media totally AWOL as Isaac and Joyce dissipate. Chart: Weatherbell Analytics.

Often things just don’t work out the way the alarmists would like them to. And so they need to resort to less than honest tactics to convey drama over to the audiences.

2018 Media Weather Exaggeration Award

Bad weather reporting has recently seen a series of blatant exaggerations aimed at making viewers think things are much worse than they really are.

This year’s 2018 Media Bad Weather Exaggeration Award has to go to Hurricane Florence reporter Mike Seidel below of The Weather Channel:

His projectile stunt also didn’t go very well.

Previous winners

And what follows are winners from previous years. Of course this is not to say that extreme weather can be taken lightly. But it would be nice if reporters stayed accurate. Their credibility is already pretty ruined and such antics don’t help.

One blooper comes from an MSNBC reporter covering the extreme conditions from tropical storm Hanna back in 2008:

 

What follows is my favorite, Hurricane Irene in 2011:

 

Next is Ryan Maue’s favorite — well, at least it’s one he brought up recently. In October, 2005, reporter Michelle Kosinski is using a canoe when a regular pair of rubber boots would have sufficed. Can we believe anything we see on our screens?

 

Right on par with Michelle Kozinski’s stagecraft is ABC’s Lucy Yang’s fake deep water after heavy rains in New Jersey, 2010:

 

It’s got to be frustrating when people totally ruin your dramatic story of danger and peril. The next video is of Hurricane Sandy in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 2012…CNN embarrassed again:

 

Finally, Anthony Watts presents here Anderson Cooper’s tactic used to fake deep flood water.

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Florence Water Vapor Weight Falling As Rain Over Carolinas DOUBLES The CO2 Man Emits Globally…In Entire Year!

By on 15. September 2018

Florence shows that atmospheric water vapor dwarfs human emissions of trace gas CO2.

To put some perspective on the scale of water vapor and trace gas CO2 in our atmosphere, let’s compare the two in terms of rainfall from Hurricane Florence alone over the Carolinas and surrounding area.

Surely with man’s fossil fuel profligacy, the emitted CO2 must by far outweigh the water vapor associated with a single storm.

18 trillion gallons of rain

According to hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue, some 18 trillion gallons of water vapor could fall as rain from Hurricane Florence over the Carolinas’ region:

To better imagine the scale of this, that’s roughly 2400 one-gallon milk jugs for every man, woman and child on the planet.

70 billion metric tonnes

18 trillion gallons is roughly 70 trillion kg of water mass, which is 70 billion metric tonnes of water vapor in the atmosphere which will end up getting dumped on a few states over a few days by Florence.

Double the weight of human CO2 emissions in one year

How does this compare to human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere?

Globally and ANNUALLY, man emits about 36 billion metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. That means the water vapor falling as rain over the Carolinas’ region from Florence is double the weight of CO2 man emits into the atmosphere in an entire YEAR.

Human CO2 amounts pales in comparison to the daily global water vapor variations the planet sees. Clearly water vapor dwarfs CO2 in the atmosphere. Claiming that CO2 is the main driver is as silly as claiming President Trump is complicit in creating Florence.

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Inconvenient!…Real Observed Data Demolish Alarmist Claims Of Strengthening, More Frequent Hurricanes

By on 14. September 2018

Nowadays the usual suspects are busily peddling the idea that Hurricane Florence’s intensity is due to climate change.

For example climate activist Stefan Rahmstorf of the alarmist Potsdam Institute blames Florence on global warming, telling the online Potsdamer Nachrichten (PNN) here: “In fact many of the strongest storms we have ever seen have occurred in the past years.”

Alarmist claims go down in flames

The German media and climate science establishment are out in full force implying recent hurricanes are mostly manmade and getting stronger and more frequent.

However, just as Kenneth Richard showed yesterday by presenting more than a dozen recent papers, when we look at the observed data, all these alarmist claims go down in flames.

Observed data refute alarmist/activist scientists

Firstly, climate ambulance chasing scientists, such as Messieurs Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coucou, like pretending storms are intensifying due to manmade global warming. Yet two days ago I tweeted a table showing that 75% of the most powerful hurricanes impacting the US actually happened before 1970, a time when CO2 was at supposedly safe levels:

Although some people may think Florence is a major hurricane, it in fact made landfall as a Category 1 storm only – a far cry from the Category 4 many were warning us about just days ago — e.g. Erik Holthaus.

Hurricane number and strength not up

Prof. Philip Klotzbach recently tweeted two charts depicting the number of US landfalling hurricanes (Category 1-5) and major hurricanes (Category 3-5). If you’re a climate alarmist, then you may want to first take a seat before reading further:

Source: Klotzbach et al 2018

According to Klotzbach, “Since 1900 neither observed CONUS [Continental United States] landfalling hurricane frequency nor intensity show significant trends, including the devastating 2017 season.”

An unprecedented major hurricane absence

What is unprecedented is the long 12-year period from 2005 to 2017 which saw not a single major hurricane hitting the US. This is probably the most devastating and frustrating fact for the global warming ambulance chasers. That’s a glaring statistic that’s impossible to alter.

Western North Pacific cyclone frequency down 25%

The story is much the same in the North Western Pacific, where the following chart shows us cyclone frequency has been much lower over the past two decades compared to the two decades prior.

Source: Zhao et al, 2018

And using the data from the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), skeptic blogger Kirye also tweeted that the number of typhoons being formed has declined modestly over the years:

Number of typhoons on the decline. Source: Kirye.

Hooligan storms

Cyclone bedwetters have even suggested that Florence’s odd track and stall at the Carolina coast is also a sign of climatatic weirding. Yet, weird storm tracks have always occurred and Florence is just run of the mill. For example, check out Typhoon Wayne back in 1986, which ran amok across the Western Pacific like a drunken hooligan:


Source: https://maps.wunderground.com/blog/

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New Science Says Hurricane Frequencies Are Declining, Yet U.S. Media Blame ‘Climate Deniers’ For Florence

By on 13. September 2018

The peer-reviewed scientific literature robustly affirms that land-falling hurricane frequencies and intensities have remained steady or declined in recent decades.  So have droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events.  But the editorial board of The Washington Post spurns this scientific evidence and inexplicably blames politicians and “those who deny” climate change for landfalling hurricanes and the associated damage. 

Image Source: The Washington Post 11/09/2018

It is well documented in the scientific literature that a cooler climate is associated with more weather extremes and hurricane activity, whereas a warmer climate leads to a reduction in weather extremes and hurricane activity.

“Recent review papers reported that many high-resolution global climate models consistently projected a reduction of global tropical cyclone (TC) frequency in a future warmer climate.“ (Sugi et al., 2015)
“Our work illustrates a major constraint on the large-scale global atmospheric engine: As the climate warms, the system may be unable to increase its total entropy production enough to offset the moistening inefficiencies associated with phase transitions. This suggests thatin a future climate, the global atmospheric circulation might comprise highly energetic storms due to explosive latent heat release, but in such a case, the constraint on work output identified here will result in fewer numbers of such [highly energetic storm] events. … On a warming Earth, the increase in perceptible water has been identified as a reason for the tropical overturning to slow down,  and studies over a wide range of climates suggest that global atmospheric motions are reduced in extremely warm climates.“  (Laliberté et al., 2015)
“Extratropical cyclones cause much of the high impact weather over the mid-latitudes. With increasing greenhouse gases, enhanced high-latitude warming will lead to weaker cyclone activity. Here we show that between 1979 and 2014, the number of strong cyclones in Northern Hemisphere in summer has decreased at a rate of 4% per decade, with even larger decrease found near northeastern North America.” (Chang et al., 2016)
“The impact of climate change is seen in slightly decreased intensities in landfalling cyclones.” (Perrie et al., 2010)

The Washington Post editorial board has apparently decided that contrarian scientific evidence is subservient to their political aims.

This way they can justify blaming out-of-favor politicians and those who “deny” climate change for the devastating consequences of an impending landfalling hurricane.

Below are several scientific papers published within the last year that do not seem to support the Post’s angle that says we can reduce hurricane landfall frequencies if only we can agree to believe, rather than deny, that humans are responsible.

“Downward Trend Since 1950” In Landfalling Hurricane Frequency/Intensity

Truchelut and Staeling, 2018 

“The extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season concluded an extended period of quiescent continental United States tropical cyclone landfall activity that began in 2006, commonly referred to as the landfall drought. We introduce an extended climatology of U.S. tropical cyclone activity based on accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) and use this data set to investigate variability and trends in landfall activity. The [hurricane landfall] drought years between 2006 and 2016 recorded an average value of total annual ACE [accumulated cyclone energy] over the U.S. that was less than 60% of the 1900–2017 average.”
“Scaling this landfall activity metric by basin-wide activity reveals a statistically significant downward trend since 1950, with the percentage of total Atlantic ACE expended over the continental U.S. at a series minimum during the recent drought period.”

Klotzbach et al., 2018

“Continental United States (CONUS) hurricane-related inflation-adjusted damage has increased significantly since 1900. However, since 1900 neither observed CONUS [Continental United States] landfalling hurricane frequency nor intensity show significant trends, including the devastating 2017 season.”

Zhang et al., 2018     

“Over the 1997–2014 period, the mean frequency of western North Pacific (WNP) tropical cyclones (TCs) was markedly lower (~18%) than the period 1980–1996. Here we show that these changes were driven by an intensification of the vertical wind shear in the southeastern/eastern WNP tied to the changes in the Walker circulation, which arose primarily in response to the enhanced sea surface temperature (SST) warming in the North Atlantic, while the SST anomalies associated with the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in the tropical Pacific and the anthropogenic forcing play only secondary roles.”

Zhao et al., 2018

“A vigorous debate has currently focused on the relationship between increasing TC [tropical cyclone] activity and increasing SST [sea surface temperatures] (Knutson et al. 2010). … [O]ver the WNP [Western North Pacific] basin,a significant decrease of TCF [tropical cyclone frequency] has been observed since 1998 (Liu and Chan 2013; Lin and Chan 2015; Zhao and Wang 2016). Global TCF [tropical cyclone frequency] has showed a similar reduction since the late 1990s (Maue 2011). Change of TCF over the past few decades does not appear to be consistent with changes in local SST. Observational analyses further pointed out that there is no significant correlation between the TCF [tropical cyclone frequency] and local SST [sea surface temperatures] over the WNP  [Western North Pacific] basin (Chan 2006; Yeh et al. 2010).”

Heller, 2017

“The hurricane analysis conducted by Burn and Palmer (2015) determined that hurricane activity was subdued during the [warm] Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) (~900-1350 CE) and became more produced during the [cold] Little Ice Age (LIA) (~1450-1850 CE), followed by a period of variability occurred between ~1850 and ~1900 before entering another subdued state during the industrial period (~1950-2000 CE). In general, the results of this study corroborate these findings.”
“[W]hile hurricane activity was greater during the LIA, it also had more frequent periods of drought compared to the MCA (Burn and Palmer 2014), suggesting that climate fluctuations were more pronounced in the LIA compared to the MCA. The changes in the diatom distribution and fluctuations in chl-a recorded in this study starting around 1350 also indicate that variations in climate have become more distinct during the LIA and from ~1850-1900. … [C]limate variability has increased following the onset of the Little Ice Age (~1450-1850 CE), however it is difficult to distinguish the impacts of recent anthropogenic climate warming on hurricane activity from those of natural Atlantic climate regimes, such as ENSO.”

Wellford et al., 2017

“Since the late 1800s, in contrast to much of the Southeastern USA, the Georgia coast has experienced infrequent hurricane landfalls, particularly in recent decades. As a result, coastal storm preparedness complacency appears to be rampant along the Georgia coastline. Both local and state governments were unprepared for shadow evacuation during Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The study described here includes an examination of temporal and spatial trends in hurricane landfall along the Georgia coast from 1750 to 2012. Since 1750, 18 of the 24 recorded hurricanes that made landfall along the Georgia coast occurred between 1801 and 1900, yet the hurricane intensities have declined since 1851.”

No Increasing Trend In Drought/Flood Frequency, Severity

Guo et al., 2018

“In drought-prone regions like Central Asia, drought monitoring studies are paramount to provide valuable information for drought risk mitigation. In this paper, the spatiotemporal drought characteristics in Central Asia are analyzed from 1966 to 2015 using the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) dataset. Central Asia showed an overall wetting trend with a switch to drying trend since 2003.”

Mangini et al., 2018

“The main objective of this paper is to detect the evidence of statistically significant flood trends across Europe using a high spatial resolution dataset. … Anticipated changes in flood frequency and magnitude due to enhanced greenhouse forcing are not generally evident at this time over large portions of the United States for several different measures of flood flows. … Thus, similarly to the main findings of Archfield et al. (2016) for the US, the picture of flood change in Europe is strongly heterogeneous and no general statements about uniform trends across the entire continent can be made.”

Zheng et al., 2018     

“For the extreme drought and flood events in total, more frequent of them occurred in the 1770s and 1790s, 1870s–1880s, 1900s–1920s and 1960s, among which the 1790s witnessed the highest frequency of extreme drought and flood events totally.”

Schedel, Jr. and Schedel, 2018    

“Flood events on the U.S. East Coast are not more severe or frequent than in the past. However, because of sea-level rise, these events are starting from a higher baseline height. Thus, the same severity of a flood event today reaches a greater absolute height than an identical flood would have reached 50 or 100 years ago.Based on current data, the good news is that the apparent worsening of flood events is due to a single, primary cause: sea level rise. Flood events are not getting stronger or occurring more frequently than in the past. They are instead starting from a higher point, allowing them to reach higher levels more often. The bad news is that sea-level rise will be a fact of life for many years into the future. Communities need to start now to make informed plans and decisions about how best to adapt.”

Valdés-Manzanilla, 2018

“This study presents a chronology of historical and measured flood events in the Papaloapan River basin of Mexico during 450 years. Twenty-eight historical floods were recorded during the period 1550–1948 [7 per century] on this river and one flood event (1969) in the instrumental era (1949–2000) [2 per century], of which 14 were extraordinary floods and only 15 were catastrophic ones. There were several flood-rich decades during 1860–1870, 1880–1890, 1920–1930 and 1940–1950. Wavelet analysis found a significant flooding periodicity of 58 years. The wavelet coherence analysis found that flooding had an in-phase relationship with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and also with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”

Dobrovolný et al., 2018

“The new MJJ precipitation reconstruction is restricted to inter-annual and inter-decadal variability, which is in line with our understanding of natural precipitation variability. Reconstruction reveals two long periods of low precipitation variability, in the 13th–14th centuries and 1630s–1850s. It also demonstrates that precipitation anomalies of larger amplitude and longer duration occurred in the earlier part of the last millennium than those found in the instrumental period. Negative trends in soil moisture content and gradual changes in annual precipitation distribution leading to higher extremity of precipitation regime may be responsible for the lower sensitivity of oaks to precipitation after the 1980s. The new reconstruction does not indicate any exceptional recent decline in MJJ precipitation.”

Extreme, Unstable Weather Decreases With Warming

Zou et al., 2018

“The Tibetan Plateau (TP), one of the world’s most sensitive areas to climate change, became significantly warmer during recent decades. Since 1960 (1980), storm (hail) days have been decreasing by 6.2%/decade (18.3%/decade) in the region.”
“Based on 53‐year continuous weather records at 48 TP stations and reanalysis data, we show here for the first time that the consistent decline of storm days is strongly related to a drier midtroposphere since 1960. Further analysis demonstrated that fewer hail days are driven by an elevation of the melting level (thermodynamically) and a weaker wind shear (dynamically) in a warming climate. These results imply that less storm and hail may occur over TP when climate warms.”

Zhang et al., 2017

“Based on continuous and coherent severe weather reports from over 500 manned stations, for the first time, this study shows a significant decreasing trend in severe weather occurrence across China during the past five decades. The total number of severe weather days that have either thunderstorm, hail and/or damaging wind decrease about 50% from 1961 to 2010. It is further shown that the reduction in severe weather occurrences correlates strongly with the weakening of East Asian summer monsoon which is the primary source of moisture and dynamic forcing conducive for warm-season severe weather over China.”

Chen et al., 2017

“Results indicate that the midlatitude summer cyclone activity over East Asia exhibits decadal changes in the period of 1979–2013 and is significantly weakened after early 1990s. …  Moreover, there is a close linkage between the weakening of cyclonic activity after the early 1990s and the nonuniform surface warming of the Eurasian continent.”
“Significant warming to the west of Mongolia tends to weaken the north–south temperature gradient and the atmospheric baroclinicity to its south and eventually can lead to weakening of the midlatitude cyclone activity over East Asia.”

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Trash Science Exposed: Journal Findings Refute Potsdam Institute’s Alarmist Gulf Stream Collapse Claims

By on 12. September 2018

Gulf Stream is doing fine: Potsdam Institute horror story suffers bitter setback

By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)

The horror scenario from the movie The Day After Tomorrow keeps getting presented as a real plausible scenario for our future: Falling salt content of the upper Gulf Stream due to melting ice flowing into the Arctic is slowing down the North Atlantic Current (NAC), and so doom and gloom is about to sweep across the North Atlantic.

However a team of researchers led by Carina Bringedal from the University of Bergen recently studied the northern end of the North Atlantic ocean circulation (Bringedal & Eldevik 2018). The result: the inflow of warm water and the overflow of denser deep water are in good sync. And since 1998 we do not see any long-term divergence of the sort we would expect to observe when adding more fresh water that would slow the “pump” down.

On shorter timescales the currents are influenced by the winds and the NAO. On longer timescales the currents are influenced by the AMOC.

In short: There’s no sign of a “collapsing Gulf Stream” due to the anthropogenic warming of the Arctic and the associated melting of the ice:

Figure 1: Transported water volume in the North Atlantic during the past 25 years. Chart: Bringedal & Eldevik 2018

Observed rainfall contradicts doom & gloom claims

In the published paper that concerns the doom and gloom forecasts related to the weakening Gulf Stream (Caesar et al. 2018), there’s a second reason that gets named: anthropogenic impacts are causing more rainfall over the North Atlantic.

Yet, the following chart shows this as well is not being observed:

Figure 2: Chart depicting rainfall in the North Atlantic over the past 35 years. Source: KNMI Climate Explorer. Data: NOAA.

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‘Die Welt’ Commentary: “Europe Can’t Bail Out The German Power Supply”…Calls Strategy “A Dangerous Miscalculation”

By on 11. September 2018

Germany has seriously overestimated how much its neighboring countries are able to help out in the event wind and solar energy fail to deliver, thus putting it’s power supply at risk.

One of Germany’s strategies for making its energy supply renewable is to rely on its neighbors to step up when green energies fail to deliver.

As the country adds more volatile wind and solar energy to the grid, Germany hopes that neighboring countries will cooperate in helping to stabilize the power grid in the event the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine — especially after the country shuts down its remaining nuclear power plants and starts to shut down old coal plants. Nuclear and coal power make up the lion’s share of Germany’s stable baseload power supply.

“A dangerous miscalculation”

However, it appears German officials have made a major miscalculation: citing a recent study, journalist Daniel Wetzel at Die Welt writes: “Europe cannot bail out the German power supply. This is so because “hardly a neighboring country has any remaining extra power plant capacity.” The Die Welt economics journalist then calls the German strategy “a dangerous miscalculation.”

In 2014 the German Ministry of Economics assumed the country could rely on 60 gigawatts of over-capacity in related adjacent markets in Europe, but it turns out that the figure was overstated by a factor of 3 to 4. Consequently on windless and sunless days, Germany could end up missing considerable amounts of power.

Wetzel writes:

As a result, soon all over Europe power stations with ‘secured power’ that can produce independently of current wind and sun conditions will be missing.”

He also adds that as every European country strives to add more wind and solar capacity, more of their baseload capacity plants are being shut down as well, which only makes the situation increasingly worse when sun and wind do not show up. The point is rapidly coming where there will not be sufficient baseload capacity to keep the grid stable.

One solution, Wetzel suggests, would be to install gas-fired power generators so that they could be fired up in times of low wind and solar output: “However, new gas-fired plants are being built nowhere because refinancing under the conditions of the Energiewende appears as being too risky,” Wetzel reports.

In a nutshell, as Europe expands its wind and solar capacity, more baseload capacity will be needed. But instead of adding it, Europe is reducing it, and thus making the supply and grid stability worse.

As for Germany, it is increasingly dawning on politicians that designing energy infrastructure is best left technical and electrical engineering experts, and not to climate -catastrophe obsessed politicians and green activists who seem to think such complex systems can be built up ad hoc as you go.

The price of this slipshod politicized approach could wind up being very painful in the midterm future.

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10 New Reconstructions Show Today’s Temperatures Still Among The Coldest Of The Last 10,000 Years

By on 10. September 2018

Even though CO2 concentrations hovered well below 300 ppm throughout most of the Holocene, newly published paleoclimate reconstructions affirm that today’s surface temperatures are only slightly warmer (if at all) than the coldest periods of the last 10,000 years.  This contradicts the perspective that temperatures rise in concert with CO2 concentrations.

 Bottom Graph Source: Rosenthal et al. (2013)

1. Even Past Cold Periods Were 0.5–1.5 °С Warmer Than Today

Nosova et al., 2018

“According to the present climate reconstruction, mid Holocene warming started only at 7,700 cal bp, with temperatures higher than now during the mid Holocene period. This warming was due to an increase in winter temperatures (1–5 °С higher than current), while summer temperatures remained relatively stable, with a July temperature<1 °С higher than now. … During the mid Holocene, two cold periods at 6,900–6,500 and at 5,300–5,000 cal bp were observed. Interestingly, during the cold periods, the temperatures exceeded the current ones by 0.5–1.5 °С.”
“The transition from the mid Holocene thermal maximum to the following period occurred without considerable climatic changes. The mean annual temperatures remained much higher than the current ones by 0.5–2.5 °С until 2,500 cal bp. Local maximum temperatures were observed at 4,800, 4,300, 3,500 and 2,900–2,700 cal bp. The present climatic reconstruction demonstrates a gradual cooling down to current levels at ca. 2,500 cal bp, and then followed by a new warming phase with up to 1–2 °С increase at approximately 1,500 cal bp.”

2. Only 3 Of 116 Holocene Temperature Anomaly Records Were Colder Than Today

Bajolle et al., 2018

“The mean annual temperature recorded at the closest meteorological station [La Sarre: 1961–1990] is 0.8 °C, with August temperature averages of 15.0 °C (1961–1990) and 15.4 °C (1981–2010). … During zone Lch1 (8500–5800 cal year BP), the average reconstructed temperature was 16.9 °C, with a decrease from 19 °C (maximum) to 17 °C at the end of the zone. In zone Lch-2 (ca. 5700–3500 cal year BP), temperatures had an average of 16.8 °C, with a decrease from 17.8 °C around 5200 cal year BP to 16.2 °C at 3400 cal year BP. Zone Lch-3 (ca. 3500–1200 cal year BP) started with inferences for high temperatures (19.3–18.5 °C), followed by a decrease to 16.8 °C between ca. 3000 and 2500 cal year BP. An increase (18.3 and 19.6 °C) was inferred for the period between 1800 and 1500 cal year BP. The average chironomid inferred temperature during Zone 3 was 17.9 °C. In the last zone (Lch-4), the temperatures decreased from ca. 17.5 °C at the beginning of the zone to 14.8 °C at the end of the zone. The average during this zone was 16.5 °C. The temperature anomalies show that throughout the whole record, only six of the inferences were colder than the climate normal of 15.4 °C and three were colder than today, with the climate normal of 15 °C (Fig. 4b). The average anomaly from 15 °C (2.10 °C) and from 15.4 °C (1.70 °C) for the whole record showed that the temperature inferences were generally, and significantly, warmer than today.”

3. New England (USA) Colder Now Than Nearly All Of The Last 11,000 Years

Oswald et al., 2018

4. Today’s Temperatures Still Just As Cold As The Global Little Ice Age

Coffinet et al., 2018

“This study represents the first detailed late Holocene quantitative air temperature reconstruction from the RVP [Rungwe Volcanic Province, southwestern Tanzania/East Africa] region. We identified a succession of cold/warm/cold events, largely in phase with the other regional East African climate records and with the cold periods identified worldwide by Wanner et al. (2011). This further supports that global scale processes may be the main drivers of the Holocene climatic variability. Moreover, warm conditions during the MCA [Medieval Climate Anomaly] followed by abrupt cooling during the LIA were observed at Kyambangunguru and elsewhere in East Africa suggesting that these two recent events occurred globally.”

5. Modern Temperatures -2.9°C Colder Than 7,000 Years Ago

Zhao et al., 2018

“According to the interpolation of meteorological data of the two nearest weather stations at Linxia (ca. 46 km away; MAT [mean annual temperature] = 7.3 °C) and Minhe (ca. 54 km away; MAT [mean annual temperature] = 8.3 °C)… In this study, we reconstructed mid-late Holocene climatic changes using GDGT distributions in a loess-paleosol sequence in the Lajia Ruins of the Neolithic Qijia Culture, Guanting Basin, in the southwestern end of the Chinese Loess Plateau. … MAT [mean annual temperature] decreased from 11.9 °C to 8.0 °C [today], during the past ca. 7000 yr, and a drastic decline in MAP [mean annual precipitation] (70 mm), accompanied by a 0.8 °C decline in MAT [mean annual temperature], occurred at 3800–3400 yr BP.”

6. Temperatures “7–9°C Higher Than Modern during The Early Holocene”

Zheng et al., 2018

“In this study we present a detailed GDGT data set covering the last 13,000 years from a peat sequence in the Changbai Mountain in NE China. The brGDGT-based temperature reconstruction from Gushantun peat indicates that mean annual air temperatures in NE China during the early Holocene were 5–7°C higher than today.  Furthermore, MAAT records from the Chinese Loess Plateau also suggested temperature maxima 7–9°C higher than modern during the early Holocene (Peterse et al., 2014; Gao et al., 2012; Jia et al., 2013). Consequently, we consider the temperatures obtained using the global peat calibration to be representative of climate in (NE) China. … The highest temperatures occurred between ca. 8 and 6.8 kyr BP, with occasional annual mean temperatures >8.0 ± 4.7°C, compared to the modern-day MAAT of ∼3°C.”

7. 1950-2015 Just 0.7°C Warmer Than Coldest Temps Of The Last 9,000 Years

Harning et al., 2018

“Iceland’s terrestrial HTM [Holocene Thermal Maximum] has previously been constrained to ~7.9 to 5.5 ka based on qualitative lake sediment proxies (Larsen et al., 2012; Geirsdottir et al., 2013), likely in association with progressive strengthening and warming of the Irminger Current (Castaneda et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2005; Olafsdottir et al., 2010). Numerical modeling experiments for Drangajokull suggest that peak air temperatures were 2.5 – 3°C warmer at this time relative to the 1961-1990 CE average (Anderson et al., 2018). … During the Little Ice Age (LIA, 1250-1850 CE), the Vestfirðir region entered the lowest multi centennial spring/summer temperature anomalies of the last 9 ka.  Based on recent numerical  modeling simulations, this anomaly is estimated to be 0.6-0.8°C below the 1950-2015 average on Vestfirðir (Anderson et al., 2018).”

8. 2004-2007 Temps Colder Than All But 3 Other Holocene Periods

Wang et al., 2018   

“The average RAN15-MAAT of 18.4°C over the most recent part of the record (<0.8 ka BP) [the last 800 years BP] overlaps with the range of MAATs, ca. 16.2°C to 18.7°C (av. 17.5°C) measured since 1952 at the nearest meteorological station (Yichang, located ca. 100 km away) and is very close to the av. MAAT of 18°C measured directly outside the cave by a temperature logger between 2004 and 2007 (Hu et al., 2008a). This agreement between reconstructed temperatures and instrumental measurements increases our confidence in the potential of the RAN15 proxy. RAN15-MAATs in HS4 vary from 16.5°C to 20.6°C (av. 19°C), during the last 9 ka BP, and broadly follow a long-term trend of declining temperatures in line with declining solar insolation at 30°N in July (Laskar et al., 2004). … Interestingly, the most recent 0.9 ka BP [900 years BP] is distinguished by greater variability with the highest (20.5°C) and lowest (16.5°C) RAN15-MAATs occurring consecutively at 0.6 ka BP [600 years BP] and 0.5 ka BP [500 years BP].” [Surface temperatures dropped by -4.0°C within ~100 years.]

9. 1952-2014 Temps 4.0 to 7.0 °C Colder Than 8,000 – 10,000 Years Ago

McFarlin et al., 2018

“(Greenland)  Early Holocene peak warmth has been quantified at only a few sites, and terrestrial sedimentary records of prior interglacials are exceptionally rare due to glacial erosion during the last glacial period. Here, we discuss findings from a lacustrine archive that records both the Holocene and the Last Interglacial (LIG) from Greenland, allowing for direct comparison between two interglacials. Sedimentary chironomid assemblages indicate peak July temperatures [Greenland] 4.0 to 7.0 °C warmer than modern during the Early Holocene maximum [10,000 to 8,000 years ago] in summer insolation. Chaoborus and chironomids in LIG sediments indicate July temperatures at least 5.5 to 8.5 °C warmer than modern.”

Modern Derived Temps 0.2°C Above Coldest Of Last 14,000 Years

Wu et al., 2018

“Summer temperatures (MJT) at Xingyun Lake in the late glacial were low, increased during the early Holocene, were highest during the middle Holocene, and then decreased during the late Holocene.The range of inferred values [for the Holocene] was 21.0°- 26.5°C. The pollen inferred temperature derived from surface samples (21.2°C), is close to the modern instrumental July temperature in Kunming (22°C), supporting the reliability of reconstructions from down-core pollen assemblages.”

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German Green Energy Debacle: “Self Deception”…Dependence On Coal “Cemented For Years To Come”!

By on 9. September 2018

Germany used to be regarded as a global leader in the transition to renewable green energies — especially wind and solar power — a project dubbed the “Energiewende”. But this is no longer the case. Germany has fallen behind to the rear of the pack.

Ironically the USA is leading the world in cutting back CO2!

Germany’s “self-deception”

The Düsseldorf-based daily Rheinische Post (RP) here writes that it’s time for Germany to “face inconvenient truths” concerning green energies and that pragmatic (and not ideological) action is needed.

The title of the commentary: “Self-deception in the green energy transition“

Green, cult-like dream now colliding with harsh reality

For years the German government, activists and alarmist scientists promised that green energies — foremost wind and sun — would be plentiful, cheap and clean. “Hooray!” the entire exclaimed in jubilation.

But today in its commentary the RP concedes that “the reality looks totally different” and that it is requiring “an enormous effort” just to keep the power grids stable as waves of unpredictable green power repeatedly surge into the power grid.

According to the RP, emergency power grid interventions by grid operators cost electricity consumers last year 1,4 billion euros. German households consequently pay 47% more for their power than the average EU.

Energiewende: “risky, inefficient and expensive”

And so what have German consumers gotten in return in terms of climate and CO2 emissions for all the extra pain? Nothing.

German CO2 emissions have stagnated (i.e. haven’t fallen at all). And according to the RP: “The German transition to green energy is in reality risky, inefficient and expensive.”

Energiewende “derailed”

The RP comments that highly ballyhooed headlines of new record amounts of green energy being produced don’t change a thing with respect to the failing green energy transition, and notes that although green energies made up 37% of the gross share of gross power consumption, these clean energies amounted only to a measly 13 percent of the entire German energy mix!

The RP asks: “How could the German flagship project have derailed in this way?”

German dependence on coal “cemented for years to come”

The main reason for the failure, the RP writes, was Germany’s panicked rush to exit nuclear power in the wake Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster amid a deeply-rooted, collective and decades-old German aversion to nuclear power. This lead to the German government shutting down half of its nuclear power plants overnight and diving blindly into a rapid, unplanned expansion of wind and solar power.

The decision, the RP writes, was driven by the aim to shut down nuclear power, and not to reduce CO2.

The result, the RP comments: “Unfortunately, both goals are in direct contradiction. The politically desired phase-out of nuclear power has cemented our [German] dependence on coal for years to come. Its share is still 42 percent.”

The RP then comments that if Germany were really serious about reducing CO2, the country would not shut down its remaining nuclear power plants, which produce no “greenhouse” gas emissions.

Green energies “a naive illusion”

The RP also writes Germany should reconsider its efforts “to demonize diesel engines”, which have considerably higher fuel efficiency than gasoline engines. The move to eliminate diesel engines will make CO2 reductions more difficult. The RP also notes that electric cars “are no alternative” in terms of CO2.

100% renewables “a naive illusion”

The RP calls the idea of covering all Germany’s energy needs through renewable energy “a naive illusion” and expects that the country will have to accept the fact that it will remain dependent on fossil fuels also over the long-term.

Also the collectively naive Germans in general need to get realistic and serious about what going 100% green entails. The RP comments:

Anyone who has solar cells mounted on the roof and then flies mindlessly to vacation on the Maldives, has not understood the problem.”

Public also opposes CCS

The RP finally comments on other possible technical solutions that could be employed to make the pain of having to go without fossil energies bearable, namely subsidizing CCS technology. However, a great number of Germans oppose that technology as well.

The way things are going, the RP suggests, Germany will never be able to meet its CO2 reductions targets.

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Get Ready For Insane Climate Ambulance Chasing Headlines: Global Warming Causing “Unprecedented Hurricane” Florence!

By on 8. September 2018

My daughter will be visiting Wilmington next week, and so Hurricane Florence has been very much on my mind.

Days ago, almost all weather models showed the cyclone curving out into the North Atlantic and going nowhere, but they’ve turned out to be wrong.

Bastardi saw it a week ago

Already a week ago veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi got into the act, and his hunch did not quite agree with the models. On September 1st he brought up the real possibility of Florence missing the turn to the north, and instead heading out to the US east coast. What follows is the chart Joe used on his September 2 Daily Update:

On September 2nd, Joe Bastardi warned Florence could head to the US east coast. Chart: Weatherbell.

Today we already know that Joe’s forecast of Gordon was accurate, and now we are seeing that his hunch of Florence missing the turn to the north was right on.

On his Daily Update of Wednesday, September 5, it was becoming clear Florence had little intention of turning northward as Joe’s chart tells us:

By September 5 Joe had already sniffed out the likely general track. – more than a week before Florence is forecast to strike the east coast. Chart: Weatherbell.

A day later at his Daily Update, on Thursday (September 6), ahead of everyone else, Joe showed Florence generating into a monster Category 4 storm and on a possible path to the Carolinas:

Chart: Weatherbell

Models can’t handle longer term forecasting – analogs needed

How does he do it? The veteran meteorologist not only uses models to make his forecasts, but relies heavily on analogs, i.e. similar recorded patterns having frequently occurred in the past. It’s happened before, and similar events can happen again.

His method often allows him to be days ahead of the purely mathematical models used by leading weather agencies, who find themselves constantly correcting them with every run. So today we wait with suspense to see Joe’s latest news on Florence’s projected track.

Models not in agreement

Though the latest forecasts from the different models are just about unanimous on Florence plowing into US coast (with still a small chance of curving out northward before reaching land) they are still in disagreement where the hurricane will strike the coast.

GFS model

Dr. Ryan Maue at Twitter informs the US GFS model has Florence landfalling on the coast of NORTH CAROLINA:

UKMET model

Ben Noll at Twitter reports that the latest UKMet model run shows Florence going much further south, making landfall near the Florida-Georgia border!

European model

Meanwhile this morning Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann points out that the European model has Florence aiming between the GFS and UKMet models. Again the models are purely mathematical computations and do not directly take analogues into consideration like Joe Bastardi does.

Also see Ben Noll’s recent tweet here.

So follow Joe Bastardi’s daily updates at Weatherbell for the latest refined projections. Joe often sides with the European model.

Keep in mind, as every meteorologist knows, weather is highly unpredictable, and so surprises can never be excluded.

Here come the climate ambulance chasers!

One thing is certain: the global warming ambulance chasers and fake CNN-type media will be making all sorts of hysterical claims once Florence hits the coast. Naturally, despite all their climate “expertise”, none of these climate doomsday prophesiers ever had a clue about what track Florence would follow days ago.

Yet they’ll be the first (after the fact) to claim they predicted this sort of thing all along, and blame it on manmade climate change. The reality is that hurricanes have been trending downward over the past 50 years.

Media will blare Florence’s unusual track “unprecedented!”

What’s interesting about Florence is its relatively high latitude start position. As Dr. Philip Klotzback mentioned at Twitter, in the past no hurricane at Florence’s position ever managed to make it to the US east coast. All of them have turned away and disappeared somewhere in the Atlantic:

Get ready for insane climate headlines

But Florence has managed to find its own track to the US east coast. So expect the global warming ambulance chasing scientists to call it “UNPRECEDENTED!” and say it must be because of human emissions of CO2! The media will accept it as Gospel Truth and go crazy with hysterical headlines. The USA Today here has already begun using the “unprecedented” label.

So what would Joe Bastardi, the person who was first to forecast the event, say about it? Joe will tell you it’s all natural, and not because of humans emitting some CO2 into the air.

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Alarmists Contradicted: Veteran Meteorologist And Data Show Central Europe Summers Getting Wetter

By on 7. September 2018

Long-term data show that Germany’s summers have gotten wetter over the past three decades, thus contradicting widespread media claims to increasing droughts over Central Europe.

Retired German meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls presents an analysis of Germany’s hot and dry summer this year at The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE).

This summer produced a number of blaring headlines which claimed the unusually warm and dry weather was an undeniable sign of things to come. Climate experts warn that summers in Germany will certainly get hotter and droughts will become increasingly common, along with episodes of heavy rainfall accompanied by destructive high water.

According Puls:

Climate alarmists and the compliant media have now predicted hot times and droughts – based a single summer – for the next 100 years and beyond [8]”

No trend towards droughts

However, the veteran meteorologist points out that weather services around the world and even the IPCC have yet to detect any real trends, especially for Central Europe, namely Germany:

Using data from the German DWD national weather service, a plot of summer precipitation in millimeters for Germany was and follows:

Summer precipitation in Germany: June, July andAugust 1881-2018.

For the summer of 2018, it is estimated that Germany will see a mean precipitation of 128 mm, which will be slightly above the 124 mm record low seen way back in 1911. Summer precipitation has in fact been trending upwards over the past 30 years.

The above chart shows that there has been no trend in precipitation for Germany since systematic measurements began in 1881.

Early summer a bit wetter

And when analyzing the data for the period known as early summer (May, June , July), then we see that there has been a slight long term increase in precipitation for Germany since 1881:

May-June-July precipitation in Germany. Chart by Klaus-Eckart Puls.

Klaus-Eckart Puls also cites the IPCC concerning global trends for drought: no trend [10]. According to the the IPCC:

There is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness“.

This summer Germany’s extreme drought intensity was more regional than national. Southern Germany for example, saw less extreme drought conditions, according to the data from the DWD.

To the south in Austria, the summer was also dry, but was only came in the Top 20 driest, according to the Austrian ZAMG national weather service.

In the Austria-wide evaluation (up to August 29, 2018) there was 20 to 25 percent less precipitation than the long-term average. This puts the result among the 20 driest summers in the since measurements began. […] At the top is undisputedly the summer of 1873 with 32 percent less precipitation than average.”

 

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Dr. Katharine Hayhoe Blocks Scientists Who Invite Her To Debate CO2’s Effect On Planetary Temperature

By on 6. September 2018

In yet another example of the squelching of scientific debate by those advocating for the position that dangerous anthropogenic global warming is a cosmic threat, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist, has been found twitter-blocking fellow scientists who have the audacity to ask her to support her views on the greenhouse effect.  

Image Source: https://twitter.com/NikolovScience

For over a year now, physical scientist Dr. Ned Nikolov has been enthusiastically debating anyone and everyone on his twitter page who wishes to challenge his conclusions on the mechanisms that set macro planetary temperatures.

Frequently referencing the comprehensive explanations found in their 2017 scientific paper, New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model (Nikolov and Zeller, 2017), Dr. Nikolov has garnered a reputation for responding openly and directly to each serious query or objection to his views.

Casual observers of his twitter page may notice that Nikolov does not shrink away from defending his theories.  He invites debate and challenges to his climate theories.

The intriguing empirical planetary temperature model he espouses is one of the featured presentations at this weekend’s Basic Science of a Changing Climate conference in Porto.

Image Source: Porto Conference 2018

In direct contrast to the openness to debating ideas and the scientific method, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who believes that up to 123% of climate change is caused by humans, has taken to twitter-blocking scientists like Dr. Nikolov.  Why?  Because he dared to ask her to discuss the basics of the greenhouse effect with him.

Hayhoe apparently finds it threatening to debate scientists who disagree with her about the role of greenhouse gases or human activity in climate change.

Is silencing those who challenge one’s views now accepted practice among climate scientists?  Apparently so.

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Science Nepotism Racket …Small, Closed Group Of Climate Scientists Caught Awarding Themselves Prizes And Money!

By on 5. September 2018

The latest in science scandals: a small, closed group of self-glorifying and like-minded climate scientists have been caught awarding each other prizes and money in a clear abuse of ethics.

If there were a prize for science nepotism, this year it would have to go to: RealClimate, namely the following scientists:

Stefan Rahmstorf
Katharine Hayhoe
Richard C. J. Somerville
Kevin E. Trenberth
Michael E. Mann
Gavin A. Schmidt

Science nepotism comes as no surprise to climate science critics and skeptics, who have long known that an exclusive inner circle of like-minded, wagon-circling climate scientists have been giving each other prizes and awards to pump their already inflated egos.

But thanks to Twitter member Schub, a glaring example of groupthink nepotism in action is presented here, The AGU Climate Science Communication Award:

Racket: giving each other prizes, and money

As Schub points out, many of the the Climate Communication Prize Committee members themselves are the winners of the “Climate Communication Prize”. In other words these scientists are giving each other prizes year after year.

Included with the Climate Communication Prize is a “monetary prize”, and so the scam is extra profitable for the cozy group of scientists.

Imagine a contest where one of the judges wins almost every year. It needs to be investigated if there’s not some sort of racket going on.

We’re dealing with some very serious ethical questions and possible abuse here.

2018 winner: RealClimate’s Michael E. Mann

This year (2018) the Science Communication Prize prize went to Michael E. Mann, which shows that you don’t necessarily need to be on the prize committee to win it. It’s enough to be a regular at Gavin Schmidt’s Real Climate.

Same structures used for peer review

The same modus operandi is often seen for publishing in academic climate science journals. The same small group of like-minded alarmist scientists have been accused of acting as gatekeepers to keep out dissenting science, while waving through papers the papers from their friends. This is why in climate science the process of quality control for publishing scientific results has come to be known as “pal-review”.

“Communication” prize winners blocking other opinions!

This small group of self-glorifying scientists is really quite exclusive, so much so that they block all dissenters at Twitter. For example as PhD scientist Ned Nikolov recently experienced:

Clearly within the nepotistic circle of the RealClimate scientists, the “climate communication prize” ironically goes to people who shut down communication, and not, for goodness sake, to those who would promote it through a desire to engage in open debate, such Ned Nikolov.

Grave ethical questions

And because the the prize involves the award of money, serious ethical violations, if not criminal, could be at play here. Again, this is clearly a case of the judges on a panel declaring themselves the winners, accepting the prize, and grabbing the cash.

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Software Expert: New York Times “Committing Massive Fraud” And Hiding All Temperature Data Before 1960!

By on 4. September 2018

A software engineering expert and leading blogger on climate analyzed the “How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born?” page by the New York Times and concludes it’s a “massive fraud”. Tony Heller’s Youtube video analysis so far has been viewed over 12,000 times since it came online two days ago.

Software engineering expert and publisher of the wildly popular Real Climate Science blog Tony Heller recently analyzed a web page by the New York Times that supposedly allows a reader to find out how much hotter his/her hometown is today than when he/she was born. Heller presents his findings in the following video:

In the video Heller exposes a number of grave and fatal infractions and says the New York Times page is fraught with deception. So massive are the transgressions that Heller concludes the page is “climate fraud”.

Data before 1960 “completely wrecks GW scam”

One example Heller cites is the starting point the New York Times uses for its data: 1960. The award-winning software expert asks why it starts only at 1960 when the US climate data goes way back to before 1900. Here Heller uncovers the reason: It’s because the weather in the US back in the early part of the 20th century was in fact much hotter than it is today, and the New York Times doesn’t want its readers to see it.

The following chart shows the percentage of days above 90°F for all temperature stations in the US:

Image cropped here.

According to Heller: “No wonder the New York Times pretends there’s no data before 1960. It completely wrecks their global warming scam.”

Going back further — for example to the 1930s — would show readers that it was in fact hotter in the US back then than it is today. That’s the last thing the New York Times wants its readers to know.

New York Times claims are opposite of reality

The New York Times page informs readers how many 90°+F days your hometown saw when you were born, and how many you can expect today and in the future. So Heller uses the example of Mt. Vernon, Illinois (2:30 mark) as an illustration. For Mt. Vernon, the New York Times claims we saw about 30 days of 90°F or higher back in 1960, and that today one could expect 41 such hot days.

But when Heller compared the New York Times claim to the real recorded data, he found the Times results were in fact completely wrong.

Chart source here.

The results show “the exact opposite of what the New York Times is claiming”, says Heller. Today Mt. Vernon, Illinois, sees only about 16 hot days a year, and not the 41 the New York Times claims we should be seeing now.

New York Times data “fake”

The New York Times also claims that the trend of more hot days in Mt. Vernon will continue upwards. The following is a blow-up of a part of a chart presented by Heller, with arrows added to compare the real and New York Times trends:

Chart cropped here.

Heller says: “The first thing to notice is the New York Times data from 1960 to the present is fake.”

“Massive fraud”…”want to deceive readers”

The veteran software engineer and data analysts believes: “Now it becomes obvious why the New York Times is hiding all temperatures before 1960 – because it was really hot back then. If they start at 1960, they can kind of pretend that the number of 90° days is going up. The New York Times is committing massive fraud.”

Heller adds that the the people at the Times “show no interest in telling the truth.” and “want to deceive its readers.”

No correlation between hot days and atmospheric CO2

Heller also presents a scatter diagram depicting the number of 90°+F days in the US vs atmospheric CO2 concentration:

The chart above shows that the number of hot days has decreased instead of increasing, i.e. no correlation with CO2.

Heller also points out that the number of 100°F days occurring in September in the US has also declined, but the New York Times doesn’t want the readers to know about that as well.

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The Arctic Climate Has Now Stabilized – Ice Sheet, Glacier, Sea Ice Losses Are Decelerating, Reversing

By on 3. September 2018

An accumulating collection of “headlines” taken from the 2018 scientific literature is indicating the Arctic region is no longer experiencing accelerated mass ice sheet/glacier loss, warming, or sea ice declines.

Image Source: Climate4you

I. Ice Sheet/Glacier Mass Loss Decelerating, Stabilizing

• “Notable Absence” Of Recent Acceleration In Ice Sheet Loss

Lemos et al., 2018

“We have presented a new, high temporal resolution record of ice velocity evolution for four important, high discharge marine-based glaciers in Greenland, updated to the present day (October 2014 to February 2017). … At J1 […], the average seasonal variability in ice speed was 400 m yr−1 during 2009–2011, increasing by more than a factor of 3, to 1400 m yr−1 between 2012 and 2013 and then diminishing to 750 m yr−1 between 2015 and 2017.”
“Turning to the longer term evolution of JI (Fig. 5; time series location shown in Fig. 1), fitting a linear trend to the data suggests an annual acceleration since 2009 of ∼ 218 m yr−1 at Jif, diminishing inland to ∼ 128 m yr−2 at J1, and ∼ 102 m yr−2 at J2. Although this provides a simple characterization of the longer-term evolution in ice speed, it is clear from our time series that computing a linear trend does not capture the full decadal-scale variability in ice velocity. In particular, we note that much of the acceleration occurred between 2011 and 2013 (Fig. 5b and c), and since then there has been a notable absence of multi-annual acceleration as earlier records suggest (Joughin et al., 2014). Computing trends in ice velocity since 2012 near the glacier terminus (Jif), for example, shows a modest decline in speed of 321 m yr−2 over the 5-year period (Fig. 5b).”
“The calving front position migration has been suggested as the trigger to the stresses regimes variations and consequently the main driver to the JI velocity fluctuations (Joughin et al., 2008a, b, 2012, 2014; Bondzio et al., 2017). After a successive and gradually increased rate of ice front retreat until 2012 (Fig. 5a), the JI grounding line is now located on a higher bed location (Joughin et al., 2012; An et al., 2017). This may be acting to stabilize the grounding line, and in turn contribute to the glacier deceleration, although the main cause remains to be determined and further investigations is necessary.”

• Glaciers “Stable…Since 2001” – More Mass Lost Before 1949

An et al., 2018

“A Century of Stability of Avannarleq and Kujalleq Glaciers, West Greenland … We digitize the summer ice front positions using aerial photos from 1964 (Carbonnell & Bauer, 1968) and Landsat imagery spanning 1976 to 2017. AVA did not retreat at a significant level (150–200 m) during the entire time period (Figure 1). KUJ advanced and retreated over a region about 2.5 km wide. At midrange in the 1960s to 1970s, the ice front advanced in the 1980s, remained at an advanced position in the 1990s, and retreated by 1.5 km from 1997 to 2001. The ice front of KUJ has remained stable within ±300 m since 2001. On the longer term, AVA has not migrated more than 100 m since 1903, while KUJ retreated by 2 km in 1851–1949, followed by stable conditions in 1949–1961, and a readvance of 700 m in 1961–1964 (Weidick, 1968).”
“High-resolution airborne gravity acquired at a low aircraft speed, with low ground clearance, combined with novel multibeam echo sounding data of the fjord helps resolve the bed topography and ice thickness of major outlet glaciers flowing into the ice-chocked Torssukatak Fjord in central West Greenland. The results explain the exceptional stability of two large glaciers over the last 1.5 century, despite the presence of warmer ocean waters in the fjord since the mid-1990s, because the glaciers are protected from the ocean by sills at the end of deep (700 m) fjords. The retreat of these glaciers from the deep fjords to the sills precedes year 1851.”

• Glacier “Currently Advancing…Stable/Advancing Since 1950”

Kelley et al., 2018

“In this study, we reconstruct the timing and pattern of middle- and late-Holocene GrIS [Greenland Ice Sheet] margin fluctuations at two locations, ~190 km apart, in central West Greenland using radiocarbon-dated sediment cores from proglacial-threshold lakes. Our results demonstrate that deglaciation occurs at both sites during the early Holocene, with the ice sheet remaining in a smaller-than-present ice margin configuration until ~500 years ago when it readvanced into lake catchments at both sites.”
“Historical and remote-sensing records indicate that Nordenskiöld Gletscher has been stable or advancing since AD 1950 (Weidick, 1968, 1994). This evidence, in addition to the lack of a moraine or trimline marking the culmination of the late-Holocene advance fronting the ice margin, as occurs across much of the region, infers that the system is at or is still advancing to its late Holocene maximum extent.”
“We note the difference between the ice margin locations on the laterals versus the terminus relative to the late-Holocene maximum position and attribute this to deepening of the glacial trough as described by Kaplan et al. (2009). In fact, observations at the terminus of Nordenskiöld Gletscher in 2013 documented that the terminus is currently advancing onto living tundra.”

• “Slight Deceleration” Of Ice Flow Velocity During 1968-2014

Tong et al., 2018

“Glaciers and ice streams drain the ice from the ice sheets to the ice shelves, and contribute to global sea-level changes. Therefore, ice velocity is an essential parameter for the assessment of mass balance. … The results show that the estimated velocity obtained by the use of the proposed method is superior to the other methods, and the long-term series of ice velocity measurements shows that the ice velocity in the Amery Ice Shelf has hardly changed over the past 45 years (1968–2014). We conclude that the ice flow velocity of the Amery Ice Shelf has showed a slight deceleration over the past 45 years.”

II. Warming Trend Paused/Reversed To Cooling

• Warming Hiatus Since 2005 At An Arctic-Representative Site

Ding et al., 2018

“[W]e find that there was a warming hiatus/slowdown since 2005 at Ny-Ålesund. Additionally, the variation of air temperature lags by 8–9 years, which implies that the warming hiatus probably exists in the Arctic but lags behind, globally. This phenomenon is not an isolated instance, An et al. [2017] reported that the warming rate above 4000 m of the Tibetan Plateau has been slowing since the mid-2000s. In the Antarctic Peninsula, the slowdown of the increasing temperature trend was also found after 1998/1999, however, the reason is attributed to local phenomena, such as the deepening of Amundsen Sea Low and not due to the global hiatus [Turner et al., 2016].”
“From the correlation analysis, we found Ny-Ålesund could represent most Arctic areas, especially the Atlantic-Arctic sector.”
“Especially air temperature, the record of Ny-Ålesund can capture the variation of surface temperature over most of [the] Arctic.”
“The oscillations of atmospheric dynamic systems, the methods of energy transport from low to high latitudes, and feedback mechanisms of the Arctic on climate change may contribute to the warming hiatus.”
“[C]limate changes in polar areas remain difficult to predict, which indicates that the underlying mechanisms of polar amplification remain uncertain and debatable.”

• “Marked Cooling” Since 2000

Suvorov and Kitov, 2018

“The authors examined the variability of activity of modern glaciation and variation of natural conditions of the periglacial zone on climate and on dendrochronological data. Results of larch and Siberian stone pine growth data were revealed at the higher border of forest communities. It is believed that the temperature could be 3.5 °C warmer at the Holocene optimum than at the present time(Vaganov and Shiyatov 2005).”
“Since 2000, there has been growth of trees instability associated with a decrease in average monthly summer temperatures. …  Since the beginning of 2000, decrease in summer temperatures was marked.”

• “A Cooling Is Observed During The Last 15 Years”

Westergaard-Nielsen et al., 2018

“Here we quantify trends in satellite-derived land surface temperatures and modelled air temperatures, validated against observations, across the entire ice-free Greenland. … Warming trends observed from 1986–2016 across the ice-free Greenland is mainly related to warming in the 1990’s. The most recent and detailed trends based on MODIS (2001–2015) shows contrasting trends across Greenland, and if any general trend it is mostly a cooling. The MODIS dataset provides a unique detailed picture of spatiotemporally distributed changes during the last 15 years.”
“Figure 3 shows that on an annual basis, less than 36% of the ice-free Greenland has experienced a significant trend and, if any, a cooling is observed during the last 15 years (<0.15 °C change per year).”

• Temps “4.9, 5.8, and 4.4°C Cooler” During 2010s Than 1990s

Kwon et al., 2018

“We monitored 1,378 nests of western sandpipers, semipalmated sandpipers, and red‐necked phalaropes at a subarctic site during 1993–1996 and 2010–2014. … We found an unexpected long‐term cooling trend during the early part of the breeding season. Three species delayed clutch initiation by 5 days in the 2010s relative to the 1990s.”
“A cooling trend occurred during the prelaying windows of all species, resulting in daily mean temperatures that averaged 4.9, 5.8, and 4.4°C cooler during the 2010s than the 1990s for western sandpiper, semipalmated sandpiper, and red‐necked phalaropes, respectively.”

• Cooling During 1997-2016 Driven By The Arctic Oscillation

Mallory et al., 2018

“The AO [Arctic Oscillation] has positive and negative phases that infuence broad weather patterns across the northern hemisphere (Thompson et al. 2000). For example, during the positive phase of the AO, atmospheric pressure over the Arctic is lower than average, which tends to result in warmer and wetter winters in northern regions as warmer air is able to move further north (Thompson et al. 2000; Aanes et al. 2002).”
“From 1988 to 1996, the summer intensity of the AO was largely in the positive phase, with a mean value of 0.207 (± 0.135 SE), and this was a period of population stability or growth for each of the three herds that we examined here. In contrast, from 1997 to 2016 the summer AO has remained largely in the negative phase [cooling], with a mean value of − 0.154 (± 0.077 SE).”

• Summer Temperature “Cooling In The Past 200 Years”

Levy et al., 2018

“The three historical moraine crests indicate that there were at least three ice-margin stillstands or advances during historical time. Summer temperature records from North lake (Axford et al. 2013) and Lake N3 (Thomas et al. 2016) broadly register cooling in the past 200 years in western Greenland, which likely influenced the advance to the historical moraines.”

• Surface Temperatures Show No Net Warming In 80+ Years

Mikkelsen et al., 2018

III. Sea Ice Loss Has Paused, Stabilized

As indicated first by Swart et al. (2015), there was “a 7-year period of near-zero trend in September Arctic sea-ice extent, as observed between 2007 and 2013”.

Extending this non-trend another 4 years, there has been no detectable trend in September Arctic sea ice during 2007-2017.

Image Source (top): NSIDC

• Sea Ice Thickening During 2006-2016

Ronkainen et al., 2018

“In our study, we quantify the interannual variability of sea ice thickness in the Bay of Bothnia during the years 2003-2016.”

• Mean Sea-Ice Thickness Greater Today Than 1955

Rösel et al., 2018

“We present a continuous time series of in situ measurements from the N‐ICE2015 expedition from January to June 2015 in the Arctic Basin north of Svalbard, comprising snow buoy and ice mass balance buoy data and local and regional data gained from electromagnetic induction (EM) surveys and snow probe measurements from four distinct drifts. The observed mean snow depth of 0.53 m for April to early June [2015] is 73% above the average value of 0.30 m from historical [1955, 1970s] and recent observations in this region, covering the years 1955–2017.”
“The modal total ice and snow thicknesses, of 1.6 and 1.7 m [2015] measured with ground‐based EM and airborne EM measurements in April, May, and June 2015, respectively, lie below the [1970s] values ranging from 1.8 to 2.7 m, reported in historical observations from the same region and time of year [but well above the sea-ice thickness values of 0.94 m for 1955].”

• Warm/Cold Stanzas – 2007-2013 “Extensive Sea Ice”

Stabeno et al., 2018     

“From 2007 to 2013, the southeastern Bering Sea was dominated by extensive sea ice and below-average ocean temperatures. In 2014 there was a shift to reduced sea ice on the southern shelf and above-average ocean temperatures. These conditions continued in 2015 and 2016. … Historically, the dominant parameters controlling sea-ice extent are winds and air temperature, with the persistence of frigid, northerly winds in winter and spring resulting in extensive ice. After mid-March 2014 and 2016 there were no cold northerly or northeasterly winds. Cold northerly winds persisted into mid-April in 2015, but did not result in extensive sea ice south of 58°N. The apparent mechanism that helped limit ice on the southeastern shelf was the strong advection of warm water from the Gulf of Alaska through Unimak Pass. This pattern has been uncommon, occurring in only one other year (2003) in a 37-year record of estimated transport through Unimak Pass.”
“During years with no sea ice on the southern shelf (e.g. 2001–2005, 2014–2016), the depth-averaged temperature there was correlated to the previous summers ocean temperature. … This latest string of three warm years apparently ended this year (2017). In March, sea ice had covered M4, and the ice edge was near or at M2 on 13 March 2017, but by June 2017 the depth-averaged temperatures at M2 were average, indicating that ocean temperature near M2 in 2017 (like the 2006 transition between the previous warm and cold stanzas) will likely be average. With this end of a warm stanza, questions arise. Will the Bering Sea continue in a pattern of warm/cold stanzas?”

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“Vegawatts” Now Getting Fed Into Energy Grid… German Power Utility Now Offering “Vegan” Electricity And Gas!

By on 2. September 2018

A German power utility now offers “vegan power” and “vegan gas” to consumers who wish to buy energy that is green, sustainable and whose production and use are gentle to animals.

German energy company now offering vegan energy to consumers. Credit: www.pixabay.com. CC0 Public Domain.

Many of us are familiar with the strict aspects of the vegan diet, which calls on humans to refrain from eating any type of animal-based products such as meat, eggs, dairy and so on.

Also vegans are careful not to buy or use any type of product made from animals, such as leather.

The protection and welfare of animals are the top priorities of veganism. Many claim health benefits as well, but this is hotly disputed, e.g. see here and here.According German DLF public radio, a power provider in Ludwigshafen Germany now offers electricity and gas to vegans that do not cause harm to animals.

Hat-tip: EIKE here.

Free of “bird strikes”

Vegawatt offers the so-called “vegan energy” to consumers nationwide. The company is a subsidiary of the Technische Werke Ludwigshafen AG –a German energy utility. According to the Vegawatt’s website, the power is: “100% solar electricity: environmentally friendly, sustainable and free of bird strikes.”

Sorry, no wind power please

Not surprisingly vegan power from Vegawatt is not allowed to be generated by wind turbines because of bird and bat strikes. Moreover, the destruction of forests to allow the construction of wind parks destroy homes for animals.

According to the DLF, nuclear power, coal power and electricity from biogas plants are unacceptable to vegans as well. Also hydroelectric power is not okay because of fish-kill. The DLF broadcasting wonders: “Are there enough fish ladders?”

Only certain sources of solar power

The only energy that remains which can qualify as vegan power is solar generated electricity. But here not all solar generation systems are certifiable as “vegan”, writes the DLF. For example solar parks built on fields do not qualify because they adversely impact habitats of wild animals.

Solar energy from panels installed on barns are acceptable, but only if the housed animals are “free range” and not kept on an industrial scale of any kind. It’s probably safe to assume that these free-range pasture animals must also later never be slaughtered or milked for the purpose of satiating the appetites of the carnivorous humans.

Also the solar panels probably also need to be installed on buildings that are built to be sustainable, and are not connected to any non-sustainable activity.

Broad market acceptance

According to DLF broadcasting, Vegawatt power has found broad acceptance, especially among the vegan culture, which “can take on partially sectarian characteristics”, says a spokesperson for parent company TWL Energie Deutschland GmbH.

Vegan gas in short supply

Vegawatt also offers “vegan gas”, the DLF reports. But the gas also must be of strictly controlled origins. For example, biogas produced through the fermentation of corn grown as industrial monoculture is not permitted to be given the “vegan” label.

Real vegan gas is currently made from sugar beet residue from sugar beet presses. The sugar beet residue is waste which cannot be used as fertilizer or as feed for animals.

DLF reports: “Since the raw materials for biogas production must also be completely free of animal raw materials, Vegawatt can currently only offer small amounts of vegan gas.”

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German (Real) Environmentalists Outraged Over Killed Protected Red Kites, Move To Have Wind Park Shut Down!

By on 1. September 2018

When it comes to protecting endangered species and the environment, civil projects have to take a back seat, and often rightfully so.

However, if there’s the chance or hope that the climate could be rescued by industrial wind turbines from a change that exists only in climate models, then for climate activists it’s okay to wipe out natural habitats to install them.

Recently WDR German Public Broadcasting showed a report “Dead Birds Due To Wind Turbines”.

Tote Milane unter Windrad

Hier scheint ein Streit um Windräder zu eskalieren: In Brilon werfen Windkraftgegner dem Anlagen-Betreiber vor, gegen artenschutzrechtliche Auflagen verstoßen zu haben. Zwei tote Rotmilane sind entdeckt worden, berichten Zeugen. Der Betreiber wehrt sich. Die Kadaver seien absichtlich unter eine Anlage gelegt worden. Jetzt werden Juristen entscheiden!

Gepostet von WDR Lokalzeit Südwestfalen am Montag, 20. August 2018

Film image of endangered red kite killed by German wind turbine. Image/footage by WDR.

The widespread environmental damage that wind parks have on Germany’s wildlife and natural landscape is a most inconvenient topic and reality that German fake greens and climate activists refuse to acknowledge.

Dead birds under turbines

Recently in June in southern North Rhine Westphalia, an endangered red kite predatory bird was found dead under a wind turbine. A tragic incident, as June is the period when adult birds raise their young ones in nests. With the mother dead, the young simply die, according to game warden and resident, Reinhold Knippschild.

The WDR report also reports of another killed red kite found under a wind turbine on August 6. Now police are investigating.

Excessive deforestation

One reason the red kites are getting killed by turbines is because of the extremely large areas around the turbines that have been deforested. The red kites have their gaze fixed downward in their search for prey and so get struck by the turbine blades. Critics say the amount of deforestation around the wind parks is excessive and so violates the regulations.

They are now suing in court to have the turbines shut down.

However, wind park investor Brilon GmbH & Co. disputes this claim, and say the area complies to the requirements. Wind energy proponents then even accused anti-wind activists of placing the dead red kite under the turbine in question. The accusation has sparked a huge backlash from the wind energy opponents.

The wind parks do comply to regulations

The real point, the activists say, is that the species protection regulations simply were not adhered to, birds are being killed, and so the turbines must be shut down. The activists say they’ve already succeeded in getting another wind park shut down due to non-compliance to the regulations.

The WDR reporter states that the Brilon wind park opponents are dead serious in their effort to get the park shut down.

With two dead endangered red kites in 2 months, shutting down the wind park should be just a formality.

Another turbine goes up in flames

Meanwhile in northwestern Germany, another wind turbine has been destroyed by fire arising from a technical fault. Good thing it was not located in the middle of one of Germany’s tinderbox dry forests we’ve seen this year.

 

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Media Claims Of More Heat Waves Refuted By Multiple Recent Studies, Longterm Data

By on 31. August 2018

No longterm trend in heatwaves in North America

By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)

The playbook is well-known: After a drought, heat wave or flood occurs, journalists and climate alarmists fall all over themselves in the race to issue shrill warnings that this is only the beginning and that it is known that evil climate change is behind it.

This summer of 2018 we experienced again a Central European heat wave. However the usual alarmists failed again to provide any solid statistics on the frequency of heat waves during the last 100 and 1000 years.

Here we are glad to help out by presenting the latest results on heat wave trend in North America. Let’s begin with a spring heat wave in the USA in 2012 which was examined by Dole & Hoerling (2014) within a long-term context. The authors see a purely natural cause behind the unusual heat:

The Making of an Extreme Event: Putting the Pieces Together
We examine how physical factors spanning climate and weather contributed to record warmth over the central and eastern United States in March 2012, when daily temperature anomalies at many locations exceeded 20°C. Over this region, approximately 1°C warming in March temperatures has occurred since 1901. This long-term regional warming is an order of magnitude smaller than temperature anomalies observed during the event, indicating that most of the extreme warmth must be explained by other factors. Several lines of evidence strongly implicate natural variations as the primary cause for the extreme event. The 2012 temperature anomalies had a close analog in an exceptionally warm U.S. March occurring over 100 years earlier, providing observational evidence that an extreme event similar to March 2012 could be produced through natural variability alone. Coupled model forecasts and simulations forced by observed sea surface temperatures (SSTs) show that forcing from anomalous SSTs increased the probability of extreme warm temperatures in March 2012 above that anticipated from the long-term warming trend. In addition, forcing associated with a strong Madden–Julian oscillation further increased the probability for extreme U.S. warmth and provided important additional predictive information on the timing and spatial pattern of temperature anomalies. The results indicate that the superposition of a strong natural variation similar to March 1910 on longterm warming of the magnitude observed would be sufficient to account for the record warm March 2012 U.S. temperatures. We conclude that the extreme warmth over the central and eastern United States in March 2012 resulted primarily from natural climate and weather variability— a substantial fraction of which was predictable.”

Also it’s worth looking back at the last 100 years when it comes to summertime heat waves. In the 1930s in the USA many heat waves occurred, as the official USHCN data show, for example articles by Judith Curry, Tony Heller, John Christy, Anthony Watts). Thus today is not any more extreme than the past was. Kunkel et al. 2014 describe:

Is the monthly temperature climate of the United States becoming more extreme?
A new data set of monthly temperatures, adjusted for detected inhomogeneities, was used to examine whether the monthly temperature climate of the U.S. has become more extreme. During the past two to three decades, there has been a shift toward more frequent very warm months, but less frequent very cold months. Thus, overall the monthly temperature climate has not become more extreme. Midtwentieth century including the 1930s was an earlier period of frequent very warm months, a result of very warm daytime temperatures, while nighttime temperatures were not unusual. Regionally, there is a lack of century‐scale warming in the southeast U.S. annually and in parts of the central U.S. in the summer, characterized by lack of daytime warming while there has been nighttime warming. Compared to the earlier midcentury warm period, recent decades have been more (less) extreme in the summer (winter) in the west while Midwest summers have been less extreme.”

Also so-called flash droughts in the USA have been on the retreat as well, as Mo & Lettenmaier 2015 show:

Heat wave flash droughts in decline
Flash drought is a term that was popularized during rapidly evolving droughts in the Central U.S. in 2012 that were associated with heat waves. We posit that there are two kinds of flash droughts, and we will focus on heat wave flash droughts, of which the 2012 events were typical. We find, based on an analysis of temperature observations and model‐reconstructed soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration from 1916 to 2013, that heat wave flash droughts in the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) are most likely to occur over the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest during the growing season. We also find that the number of such events across the CONUS has been decreasing over the last century but rebounded after 2011. The long‐term downward trends appear to be associated with generally increasing trends in SM resulting from increasing trends in precipitation over the areas where heat wave flash droughts are most likely to occur.”

Summertime extreme temperatures have also fallen across the US Midwest, and this is attributable to agriculture – so suggests a study by Mueller et al. 2016:

Cooling of US Midwest summer temperature extremes from cropland intensification
High temperature extremes during the growing season can reduce agricultural production. At the same time, agricultural practices can modify temperatures by altering the surface energy budget. Here we identify centennial trends towards more favourable growing conditions in the US Midwest, including cooler summer temperature extremes and increased precipitation, and investigate the origins of these shifts. Statistically significant correspondence is found between the cooling pattern and trends in cropland intensification, as well as with trends towards greater irrigated land over a small subset of the domain. Land conversion to cropland, often considered an important influence on historical temperatures, is not significantly associated with cooling. We suggest that agricultural intensification increases the potential for evapotranspiration, leading to cooler temperatures and contributing to increased precipitation. The tendency for greater evapotranspiration on hotter days is consistent with our finding that cooling trends are greatest for the highest temperature percentiles. Temperatures over rainfed croplands show no cooling trend during drought conditions, consistent with evapotranspiration requiring adequate soil moisture, and implying that modern drought events feature greater warming as baseline cooler temperatures revert to historically high extremes.”

Leary et al. 2015 also point out that in Florida there isn’t enough data currently to even discern a trend to describe heat waves. That’s quite strange: Models precisely predicted that heat waves would become stronger , yet the fundamentals still are hot adequately known. What follows is an excerpt from the publication:

This study highlights challenges in creating a general methodology to identify periods of extreme heat for Florida….For future studies, it is recommended to use a spatio-temporal model to impute missing values, leading to more precise estimates of percentiles and more accurate identification of heat waves.”

Scannell et al. 2016 analyzed heat waves in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, so-called marine heatwaves. Here as well they were unable to find a trend for the last decades:

Frequency of marine heatwaves in the North Atlantic and North Pacific since 1950
Extreme and large‐scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed marine heatwaves, and these have been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. This paper examines the intensity, duration, and frequency of positive sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans over the period 1950–2014 using an objective definition for marine heatwaves based on their probability of occurrence. Small‐area anomalies occur more frequently than large‐area anomalies, and this relationship can be characterized by a power law distribution. The relative frequency of large‐ versus small‐area anomalies, represented by the power law slope parameter, is modulated by basin‐scale modes of natural climate variability and anthropogenic warming. Findings suggest that the probability of marine heatwaves is a trade‐off between size, intensity, and duration and that region specific variability modulates the frequency of these events.”

And here you will find the related press release issued by the University of Washington.

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Scientists Now Assert Natural Mechanisms Have Driven The Recent Retreat Of The Greenland Ice Sheet

By on 30. August 2018

Scientists are increasingly concluding that changes in low level cloud cover, not CO2, are what govern the surface radiation budget in the polar regions, driving and determining the retreat of the ice sheets. 

Image Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3363

It is considered “established science” that  “the greenhouse effect of clouds may be larger than that resulting from a hundredfold increase of the C02 concentration of the atmosphere” (Ramanathan et al., 1989, 1,647 citations to date).

Indeed, satellite observations indicate that the Earth’s “radiation budget changes are caused by changes in tropical mean cloudiness” (Wielicki et al., 2002), not CO2 concentration changes.

Consequently, scientists have increasingly concluded that the driving mechanism that has governed and determined the melt of the polar ice sheets during recent decades has been the natural decadal-scale changes in cloud cover.

Hofer et al., 2017

Decreasing cloud cover drives the recent

mass loss on the Greenland Ice Sheet

“The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has been losing mass at an accelerating rate since the mid-1990s. … We show, using satellite data and climate model output, that the abrupt reduction in surface mass balance since about 1995 can be attributed largely to a coincident trend of decreasing summer cloud cover enhancing the melt-albedo feedback. Satellite observations show that, from 1995 to 2009, summer cloud cover decreased by 0.9 ± 0.3% per year. Model output indicates that the GrIS summer melt increases by 27 ± 13 gigatons (Gt) per percent reduction in summer cloud cover, principally because of the impact of increased shortwave radiation over the low albedo ablation zone. The observed reduction in cloud cover is strongly correlated with a state shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation promoting anticyclonic conditions in summer and suggests that the enhanced surface mass loss from the GrIS is driven by synoptic-scale changes in Arctic-wide atmospheric circulation. … Th[e] strong correlation between summertime NAO index and the MAR-based cloud cover could be used to forecast whether the observed reduction in cloud cover during summer, and the associated increase in GrIS melt, is likely to continue.”

“[Our results] also indicate that the sudden decline in Greenland’s (surface) mass balance is not primarily a direct response to the local increase in atmospheric temperature, because anomalies in downwelling longwave radiation have contributed less energy to the increase in melt of the GrIS than SWD [summertime shortwave forcing] anomalies. This is contradictory to previous analyses that have focused on the increase in temperature as the main cause of GrIS melting (15, 16), as well as on the longwave warming effect of clouds (10). Climate warming is instead altering large-scale circulation patterns.”

Wu et al., 2018

“The radiative effect of clouds has attracted increasing attention; for example, it was found that decreasing cloud cover drives the recent loss of mass from the Greenland ice sheet by enhancing the melt-albedo feedback (Hofer et al., 2017). Thus, enhanced albedo effect from increasing cloud cover in southwest China during the early Holocene could have caused a reduction in summer temperature. …  From 1960 to 2005, total cloud cover decreased over southwest China, including Yunnan Province (Zhang et al., 2011b) … [as] summer temperature increased [1961-2007] (Liu et al., 2010). This negative relationship between cloud cover and summer temperature was also found in India during the period 1931-2002 (Roy and Balling, 2005).”

Perovich, 2018

“The surface radiation budget of the Arctic Ocean plays a central role in summer ice melt and is governed by clouds and surface albedo. … Longwave and shortwave radiation are primary drivers in the surface heat budget during summer melt (Persson et al., 2002). The surface radiative balance consists of contributions from incoming shortwave radiation, reflected shortwave radiation, incoming longwave radiation, and outgoing longwave radiation. Clouds have a major impact on both incoming longwave and shortwave radiative fluxes. … Future impacts on net radiative balances will depend on both ice and cloud conditions. As the sea ice cover evolves towards more first year ice, greater melt pond coverage, and more open water, the area-averaged albedo will be less than the break-even albedo for much of the summer. This implies less melting under cloudy conditions than sunny. However, the net radiative balance will still likely be less under sunny skies at the beginning of the melt season in May and early June.”

Nicolas et al., 2017

“During the short Antarctic summer, strong onshore winds may by themselves raise the ice sheet’s surface temperature (Ts) up to the melting point(through exchange of sensible heat), especially at low elevations. However, Ts [surface temperature] is ultimately controlled by the full surface energy budget (SEB), being the net of radiative (short- and longwave) and turbulent (sensible and latent) heat fluxes. Clouds exert an important influence on the SEB by modulating the radiative fluxes, primarily by enhancing downwelling longwave radiation and attenuating incoming solar radiation. In particular, low-level liquid-bearing clouds can have a determinant role in either causing or prolonging melting conditions over ice sheets.”

Scott et al., 2017   

“Clouds are an essential parameter of the surface energy budget influencing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) response to atmospheric warming and net contribution to global sea level rise.  … Owing to perennial high-albedo snow and ice cover, cloud infrared emission dominates over cloud solar reflection and absorption leading to a positive net all-wave cloud radiative effect (CRE) at the surface … The annual-mean CRE [cloud radiative effect] at the WAIS [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] surface is 34 W m−2, representing a significant cloud-induced warming of the ice sheet. … In summer, clouds warm the WAIS by 26 W m−2, on average, despite maximum offsetting shortwave CRE.”

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