Another new paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters casts further doubt on the paradigm that says CO2 has historically been a temperature driver.
Evidence from southern California’s Lake Elsinore indicates today’s regional temperatures (18°C) are 4-5°C colder than a millennial-scale period between 29,000 to 26,000 years ago (29 to 26 ka), or during the last glacial.
At the time, temperatures reached amplitudes of 22-23°C while CO2 concentrations lingered around 200 ppm, or less than half today’s values.
During both the periods between 31 and 24 ka and 14 to 9 ka, temperatures also were found to have abruptly risen (and fallen) by more than 10°C within centuries. These temperature swings occurred with little or no change in the CO2 concentration.
Today we’ll take a look at March mean temperatures and their trend for some locations for which almost complete data are available from the Japan meteorology Agency.
Though March is only a single month, it is important because we often hear how spring is supposedly arriving earlier due to global warming, and as a result winters will get shorter before disappearing altogether, according to some alarmists “experts”.
The arrival of spring is also important because the length of the growing season depends on it.
No trend in Canada in 30 years
What follows first is the chart for March mean temperature for 9 stations scattered over Canada. These stations were selected because they are the very few that have almost complete data sets going back 3 decades.
As the chart for Canada shows, spring in reality is not arriving earlier and the country’s already short growing season has remained short for 30 years.
Ireland springs cooling
Next we look at Ireland, where the data were complete enough at 6 stations:
In Ireland the Northeast Atlantic island has seen its spring cooling since 1983, a total of 37 years. Moreover, the downward trend has even accelerated since the late 1990s.
Flat in France
Moving to continental western Europe in France, and looking at the JMA data from 6 stations scattered across the country, we have the following plot:
In Sweden we see that March has cooled off over the past 30 years, which points to the potentially bad news of shortening growing seasons there.
Although this is only a random sampling of data from the northern hemisphere, they show that the alarmist claims made by global warmists are more hype than they are reality.
A few days ago here we wrote about how a team of German scientists at the Munich-based ifo Institute released the results of a study that showed that Electric cars end up producing more CO2 than comparable diesel cars.
What follows is the press release in English issued by the ifo Institute:
=========================================================
Electric vehicles will barely help cut CO2 emissions in Germany over the coming years, as the introduction of electric vehicles does not necessarily lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions from road traffic. Natural gas combustion engines are the ideal technology for transitioning to vehicles powered by hydrogen or “green” methane in the long term.
Considering Germany’s current energy mix and the amount of energy used in battery production, the CO2 emissions of battery-electric vehicles are, in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine, and are otherwise much higher. This has been confirmed by a new study by Christoph Buchal, professor of physics at the University of Cologne; Hans-Dieter Karl, long-standing ifo energy expert; and Hans-Werner Sinn, former ifo president and professor emeritus at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The researchers carried out their detailed calculations using the concrete examples of a modern electric car and a modern diesel vehicle. In addition to CO2 emissions from battery production, they looked at alternative energy sources for electricity in order to calculate the impact electric vehicles have on CO2 emissions. They show that even with today’s technology, total emissions from a combustion engine powered by natural gas are already almost one-third lower than those of a diesel engine. “Over the long term, hydrogen-methane technology offers a further advantage: it allows surplus wind and solar power generated during peaks to be stored, and these surpluses will see a sharp increase as the share of this renewable energy grows,” Professor Buchal explains.
In their study, the authors criticize the fact that EU legislation allows electric vehicles to be included in calculations for fleet emissions with a value of “zero” CO2 emissions, as this suggests that electric vehicles do not generate any such emissions. The reality is that, in addition to the CO2 emissions generated in the production of electric vehicles, almost all EU countries generate significant CO2 emissions from charging the vehicles’ batteries using their national energy production mixes. The authors also take a critical view of the discussion about electric cars in Germany, which centers around battery-operated vehicles when other technologies also offer great potential: hydrogen-powered electric vehicles or vehicles with combustion engines powered by green methane, for instance. “Methane technology is ideal for the transition from natural gas vehicles with conventional engines to engines that will one day run on methane from CO2-free energy sources. This being the case, the German federal government should treat all technologies equally and promote hydrogen and methane solutions as well,” emphasizes Professor Sinn.
Publication (in German)
Buchal, Christoph, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn, “Kohlemotoren, Windmotoren und Dieselmotoren: Was zeigt die CO2-Bilanz?”, ifo Schnelldienst 72 (08), 2019 | Details | PDF Download
The Earth has been rapidly greening in recent decades, and CO2 fertilization may explain 70% of the trend (Zhu et al., 2016). A new study finds models have significantly underestimated the greening effect of rising CO2.
In recent years, carbon dioxide (CO2), an essential ingredient in plants’ food-making processes (photosynthesis), has been unscientifically cast as a villainous pollutant.
This colloquial development has been fomented by climate activists like Dr. Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist who routinely characterizes rising CO2 concentrations as “global warming pollution.”
CO2 characterized as the primary (70%) driver of Earth’s greening trends
Scientists who apparently lack the political agenda of activists like Mann write glowingly about the biosphere-enriching effects of rising CO2 concentrations.
Elevated CO2 is considered to be the primary driver of the observed global-scale greening in recent decades, especially in arid regions where soil water is in limited supply (Lu et al., 2016).
Satellite observations indicate that between 25 to 50% of the globe’s vegetated regions are greener today than in the 1980s, whereas less than 5% have sustained a browning trend (Zhu et al., 2016).
Models underestimate the greening effects of elevated CO2 by 60%
In a new study published in Nature Communications, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology’s Alexander J. Winkler and colleagues find that the 120 ppm increase in CO2 concentration since 1850 “has resulted in enhanced GPP [Gross Primary Productivity, photosynthesis] due to its [CO2’s] radiative and physiological effects.”
Updating trends in satellite-observed GPP enhancement, Winkler et al. (2019) cite a statistically significant 52% greening trend during 1981-2016, outpacing the observed changes in browning (12%) by more than a factor of 4.
The key finding of their study, though, is that Earth system models have been categorically underestimating CO2’s critical role in enhancing GPP.
The physiological effects of elevated CO2 in invigorating photosynthesis processes (greening) was found to be 60% higher than previous estimates, leading the authors to conclude:
“Our central finding is, the effect of ambient CO2 concentrations on terrestrial photosynthesis is larger than previously thought.”
Yesterday I wrote here how some scientists misrepresent the observed data concerning Greenland ice melt in order to get the alarming results they want. There we see that Greenland has been melting, but recently much more slowly than what we are often led to believe.
Looking at the latest Greenland ice volume data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), we see that currently the ice volume is below normal, but well within the range of the past 17 years:
Data source: Danish Meteorological Institute. Chart by Kirye.
Also Tony Heller at Real Science here plotted Arctic ice volume for the past 12 years in succession. Here’s how all the media-claimed rapid Arctic melting really looks like:
Surprise! Arctic sea ice hasn’t been melting at all. Instead it has been gaining in mass 12 years now. This is quite embarrassing to the global warming alarmists. And, believe it or not, things might even get a whole lot more embarrassing when we look at natural cycles.
Natural oceanic cycles behind the trend?
Likely natural oceanic cycles, possibly with a link to solar activity, have inconveniently reversed the trend.
At a recent Weatherbell Saturday Summary, 40-year veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi brought up the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) factor. Bastardi shows how in 2005 the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were above normal, and they led to melting ice.
But today the picture has flipped to colder than normal North Atlantic SSTs, which naturally put the brakes on melting, or even reverse the trend and cause ice mass to increase just as it has done over the past 12 years.
“Don’t be surprised over what happens in 10 – 15 years”
Joe noted in the video:
It’s funny. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, this whole missive about Arctic ice and hurricanes – don’t be surprised over what happens over the next 10 to 15 years. […] We are now cooling in the Northwest Atlantic.”
When Greenland ice melt data are correctly presented, Greenland it has in fact decelerated recently, thus contradicting alarmist claims by a new paper’s authors.
Already in January 2019 a very peculiar scientific publication on the allegedly increasing glacier melt had been a topic here on Die Kalte Sonne under the title ‘Faktenwäsche’? (fact laundering?,) which came to a very different result.
Result: From the diagrams A to D by Bevis et al. (2019) it can be deduced that, contrary to the predicted trend, the loss of Greenland ice mass has decreased considerably since 2013.”
There a peculiar time axis jump in diagram “D” to support the alarmist statement in question had become apparent:
“In diagram ‘D’ it is also noticeable that the residuals are shown on a shortened time scale only until mid-2014, instead of showing the complete data set until mid-2015.”
The questionable depiction looks like this, paying particular attention to the black arrows between illustrations (B) and (D) in the area of the time axis of (B):
We also stated at the time: “The residuals in diagram “D” are therefore missing for a whole year, although the corresponding data for the period from mid-2014 to mid-2015 have already been shown in diagram “B”. This circumstance was compensated for by stretching the time axis in diagram “D” to the time axis of diagram “B” and marking the time jump between the two diagrams of about one year with black arrows.”
It is a very peculiar situation when an erroneous and highly manipulative image is released for non-commercial reproduction, but no changes are allowed to display it correctly. Today, however, modern software offers functions with which such problems can be overcome, for example with an overlay over the unchanged original image.
If one scales the time axis of the residuals (D) to that of the ice loss curve (B) and adds the missing data in a separate overlay, there is no “pause” for the period 2013/2014, but rather a clear mass increase since 2013 for the glacier ice, which is supposedly melting more and more.
Figure: Overlay of the authors diagram plus original diagram (D) from Fig. 1 of Bevis et al. (2019) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806562116 (Merely changing the format never creates a derivative). Note: The red bordered overlay is an own work of the author, which shows the data missing from diagram (B) of Bevis et al. (2019) but only graphically.
The arbitrary shortening of a comparative time series while simultaneously stretching the relevant time scale, from which a decisive argumentative conclusion is then derived, is no coincidental technical oversight. It is clearly a targeted data manipulation to support an alarming statement, which, if the underlying data had been correctly presented, would show the opposite:
No more alarm: the ice melt on Greenland has slowed significantly since 2013.
Conclusion: The well-known “illi omnia experti” from Caesar’s “De bello Gallico” does not mean that all the experts mentioned there were experts, but rather that they merely tried everything. And this is exactly the same with the climate policy “experts”, as they as well are doing everything they can to help a global climate religion achieve a breakthrough. So they are not climate scientists at all, but climate climate religious missionaries – and they are cleverly misusing the credibility of science as a vehicle for spreading their climate ideology. Modern natural sciences, of all things, were once an essential instrument of the Enlightenment, which finally freed us from a strictly religious absolutism.
Germany’s Stuttgarter Zeitung here reports that electric cars are in fact pretty bad for the climate, it turns out. So, once activists are done banning fossil fuel powered vehicles, then electric ones will soon follow.
According to a new German study, electric cars have “significantly higher CO2 emissions than diesel cars”, and especially the Tesla Model 3 “performs particularly poorly” as it emits over 150 grams of CO2 for each kilometer it travels!
Up to 28% more CO2!
According to a study led by Christoph Buchal of the University of Cologne released by the Ifo Institute in Munich, when one takes into account Germany’s current energy mix — where the share of coal and gas still remains considerable — and the amount of energy used for electric car battery production, CO2 emissions by electric cars are higher than comparable diesel powered cars.
Co-authors of the study were energy expert Hans-Dieter Karl and renowned economist Professor Hans-Werner Sinn.
Citing the results of the study, the Stuttgarter Zeitung writes that when the production of the batteries is accounted for, an e-car “burdens the climate 11 – 28% more than a diesel car”.
Dirty e-cars: emit up to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometer!
The study also found that it takes great energy to extract the lithium, cobalt and manganese needed to produce the batteries, a process that entails the emissions of 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2 for one Tesla model 3 battery. The study found that the Tesla electric car in reality emits on average between 156 and 181 grams of CO2 per kilometer, which is “considerably more than a comparable diesel Mercedes.”
The Ifo Institute compared the Mercedes C 220 diesel cars and the new Tesla Model 3 in terms of diesel and electricity consumption and used the German electricity mix from 2018 as the basis for calculation.
The study also criticizes how the EU legislator likes to consider electric cars as being “zero-emission” vehicles, thus giving the impression electric cars do not cause emissions and have little impact on the environment.
Methane powered cars the cleanest
The Ifo Institute researchers found that other technologies, however, offer great potential, for example hydrogen electric cars or combustion engines powered by “green” methane.
According to the study, the methane-powered engine is the cheapest and is almost a-third lower in CO2 emissions than the diesel engine.
According to the calculations of Dr. James Hansen, the radiative influence derived from the increase in CO2 during the last deglaciation was so negligible that it equated to “a third of energy required to power a honey bee in flight” (Ellis and Palmer, 2016).
Between about 22,000 and 17,000 thousand years ago, Earth’s sea levels were about 120 meters lower than they are now because much of the Earth’s seawater was locked up in kilometers-thick continental ice sheets.
Then, about 14,500 years ago, nearly the entire Northern Hemisphere abruptly warmed up by about 4-5°C within a span of about 20-30 years as sea levels rose at rates between 3 and 6 meters per century (Ivanovic et al., 2017). Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures warmed by 3°C in less than 90 years during this time.
The Earth cooled and warmed and cooled and warmed for the next 3,000 years, during which time there was a gradual overall increase in global temperature of about 5-6°C superimposed on the abrupt decadal- and centennial-scale climate undulations.
By 11,700 years ago, when Greenland warmed up by 10°C within about 50 years (Steffensen et al., 2008), the last ice age glacial period ended and the Holocene interglacial warmth we now enjoy officially commenced.
The honey bee-sized magnitude of CO2’s influence during the last deglaciation
There are many adherents to the Shakun et al. (2012)-endorsed position that “increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.”
Not only that, but as Ellis and Palmer (2016) point out, Dr. James Hansen’s calculations of CO2’s radiative influence during the ~5,000 years of the Pleistocene-to-Holocene 5-6°C deglaciation suggest a 0.006 W/m² per decade CO2 forcing during this period, which is “about a third of the energy required to power a honey bee in flight.”
With this vanishingly small forcing magnitude, why is it nonetheless thought that CO2 is a macro-level driver of Earth’s temperatures and a determinant of deglaciation transitions?
NDR north German television recently broadcast a report about the protests against a planned windpark near the German village of Kreien, some 200 km east of Hamburg.
White tail eagles being chased away from nest by loudspeakers in order to clear the way for permitting 14 wind turbines over 200 meters tall in Northern Germany. Image cropped: juvenile white-tailed eagle, Christoph Müller (www.christophmueller.org) –CC BY 4.0
One local resident told NDR television the area is already packed with 178 turbines, and that the plans to build 14 new over 200-meter tall behemoths are no longer welcome. The resident had noticed something very peculiar: a loudspeaker system that had been installed in the area of the planned project (see video, 0:20 mark).
Apparently the speaker system had been put in place to scare away white tail eagles that might get the idea to nest atop an adjacent nesting mast just meters away. The mast had been provided earlier for the purpose of providing a nesting place for the endangered bird species. White tail eagles nesting there would mean a sure stop of the project, and shooing them away would ensure the go-ahead for the wind project.
The sound of barking hounds
Eagles entering the area and looking to establish a nest there would be scared away by the sound of barking dogs blaring from the speaker (2:40). The result: keeping the nest empty and thus a free path for the construction of the wind park by wind project company UKA Nord.
Residents in the area have reacted angrily at the prospect of yet even more giant wind turbines getting erected in their area, and especially at the tactics used by UKA Nord to ward off potential nesting birds.
One local mayor described the loudspeaker measure as “unbelievable”.
Climate protection before habitat protection?
When asked to comment by NDR, windpark builder UKA Nord replied by text message claiming that the nesting mast was not “to protect birds” but instead was “a pure measure to prevent the expansion of wind energy, which is necessary for climate protection.”
Moreover, the written UKA Nord statement appealed to the local policymakers “to live up to their responsibility for transition to green energies and climate protection and strive for a constructive cooperation.”
At the 3:30 mark of the report, citizens are shown banding together to organize a citizen’s group against the project. So far they have seen some success. The UKA Nord has since turned off the speaker system and it’s been decided to dismantle it. Yet, plans for the construction of the park still have not been halted.
According to German online business daily Handelsblatt here, German electricity are set to get significantly more expensive in 2019 due to the power grid becoming 8 percent more expensive to use. This will make already painfully high electricity prices even more excruciating.
The Handelsblatt cites calculations by German think tank “Agora Energiewende”, which reports that revenues for the network operators total 24 billion euros this year.
According to Agora, “Costs previously referred to as grid costs are expected to rise by a total of six to eight percent.” For household customers the grid already amounted to 7.17 cents per kilowatt hour in 2018, which compared to 6.79 cents per kilowatt hour levied for the renewable energy feed in tariffs. This year it was 6.41 cents.
According to the Handelsblatt, “The EEG levy and grid fees thus add up to amounts of over 50 billion euros” annually. The rising grid fees are due to “massive investment in grid expansion to integrate renewable energies into the grid”. And because Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies) still finds itself in the early stages, the costs are projected to keep rising.
In Germany, electricity prices of around 30 cents per kilowatt hour for private consumers are among the most expensive worldwide, and are in fact “the highest in Europe” Handelsblatt reports.
What is especially warped about Germany’s electricity market is that one kilowatt-hour of electricity “is available in wholesale for less than five cents”, reports the Handelsblatt. This shows how grotesquely distorted the price structure has become since renewable energies have been mandated and nuclear power plants taken offline. .
The high end-user prices have become a huge burden on private individuals and energy intensive companies alike. German think tank Agora is demanding reforms and more transparency in the country’s murky electricity pricing structure.
A potential wind turbine installation on the island of Crete may be poised to drive an endangered raptor population to extinction.
Recent studies have found the favored “renewable” energies – wind and solar – are not effective, even counteractive, when it comes to reducing emissions from fossil fuels.
Solar PV installation, for example, results in a net loss of energy, meaning that the net effect of solar energy use is ultimately more dependence on fossil fuels.
Due especially to its intermittent energy generation, the installation of wind turbines also necessitates eventual growth in fossil fuel energies to back them up (due especially to the frequent occasions when the wind is not blowing).
Roughly 25% of North American bats are now classified at risk for extinction (Hammerson et al, 2017) in large part due to the explosion of wind turbines across the landscape.
If the expansion of wind turbines continues at its current pace, the hoary bat population is projected to be reduced by 90% (Frick et al., 2017) within the next 50 years.
In a new paper (Xirouchakis et al., 2019), scientists detail the austere short-term mortality risks wind turbines pose upon an endangered griffon vulture on the island of Crete.
Considering the unreliability and counteractive effectiveness of wind turbine use in mitigating fossil fuel dependency, one needs to ask why we are willing to risk the extirpation of rare raptor species for the purpose of expanding “renewable” energies that increasingly seem to do more harm than good.
“[T]he environmental impact of commercial wind power production on biodiversity has proved to be substantial [3–7]. Wildlife is affected by wind power production through habitat loss, disturbance and displacement and above all by increased collision risk with wind turbines [8–10]. Bird fatalities due to collision with wind turbines have been the most prominent and frequently identified environmental drawback of wind energy development. Bird casualties from collisions can reach up to 40 deaths per turbine per year [11] with large raptors suffering the greatest toll.”
“We evaluated the consequences of wind farm development on the griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) which was regarded as a suitable model species. Griffons are among the most collision-prone large soaring raptors and perhaps the most frequent victims of turbine blades in the Mediterranean region, i.e. up to 1.88 individuals/ turbine/ year [8]. Furthermore, assuming that the most crucial factor in minimizing the negative impact of wind farms on wildlife should be proper siting, we tried to estimate the potential collision mortality of the species by taking into account the existing and all planned wind energy projects on Crete.”
“Creteholds the last healthy population in the country (ca. 1000 individuals) which constitutes the largest indigenous insular population worldwide.”
“The model predicted that 39% of the griffon colonies which were occupied by more than 15 individuals would account for 62% of the wind farms and vulture interactions and would suffer 65% of the expected mortalities. The overall collision mortality rate was estimated at 0.03 vultures/wind turbine/year producing an annual loss ranging from 3.7% to 11% of the species population. More specifically a total of 990 individuals were estimated to be at threat of striking with turbine blades. The scenario #1 predicted a mean annual mortality of 1.49 ± 1.12 individuals (range = 0.18–4.98) per colony, whereas the overall annual fatality was anticipated at 83.5 griffons.”
Although many meteorologists and climatologists confirm that there is no data suggesting global warming is causing more frequent and intense tornado and hurricane activity, there is a small but influential alarmist group who claim otherwise. And it’s no surprise who the click-baiting media parrot at maximum volume.
Landfalling hurricanes downward trend
At the 5:45 mark, Joe presents a chart depicting the frequency of US landfalling hurricanes since 1900:
Thank you global warming!
As the chart above shows, hurricane frequency has declined while global temperatures have risen over the same period, which leads Joe to comment that we “have been fed a bill of goods by people who use the weather as weapons.”
By “people” here, he means the climate-ambulance chasing media, scientists and public figures who seize upon every weather anomaly and claim it’s a sign of manmade global warming.
Also the former veteran AccuWeather meteorologist points out that the alarmists like to forget that there was a record setting 10-year hiatus for major hurricanes striking the U.S from 2005 to 2015. Here he suggests that the warming of the past 117 years may in fact be contributing to the downward trend.
Tornado activity on the decline
Next at the 10:10 mark of the Saturday Summary, Joe looks at tornado activity. Data here as well show that tornado activity has been declining rather than picking up, which is what the climate alarm-heads like to suggest is the case:
Chart: NOAA
As the NOAA chart clearly shows, tornado activity has fallen over the past 50 years. Here as well Bastardi says we’ve “been sold a bill of goods” concerning claims that climate is making tornadoes worse.
And so far 2019 has seen below average tornado activity as well:
High profile German meteorologist Donald Bäcker recently told an audience that there remains great uncertainty as to what is really behind climate change. He told the biggest problem the planet faces is waste, particularly plastic in the oceans.
Donald Bäcker regularly gives his weather forecasts on flagship German public television and spoke in an entertaining way before an open-minded and very interested audience in the Ihme Centre in Hanover.
The lecture lasted two hours and the videos posted at Hallolindenlimmer.de show the climate excerpt of it.
Plastic pollution a greater problem
The topic of climate change was emphasized in his lecture under the title: “Is our climate going crazy?” Bäcker rejected climate panic and recommended to the climate striking pupils to go back to school and learn.
His conclusion on the climate debate: “Plastic in the sea is worse”.
On climate he told the audience that it is very difficult to figure out what part man plays and what natural factors play in the complex system of climate. At the 5:30 mark of the 32-minute video excerpt, he told that rolling back CO2 is not going to save us and that the worst problem is plastics and coping with the population growth.
Too many people living in naturally hazardous areas
Concerning natural disasters hitting populated areas, he tells the audience that it’s not climate change causing the tragedies, but rather people living in hazardous areas.
“Dangerous” to declare climate science settled
He also criticizes the climate discussion and calls the claims that the discussion is over and that CO2 is the main driver today “dangerous”. Bäcker points out that predictions made by climate scientists in 2000 that Germany would dry out have turned out to be wrong.
At the 14-minute mark he warns that the climate model predictions are lacking in quality and that climate scientists know their predictions will be forgotten 30 to 40 years down the road. He reminds the audience how scientists warned in the 1970s of a coming ice age, which today we know never showed up.
At the 16-minute mark, Bäcker reminds the audience that renewable energies like solar are not what they are cracked up to be, saying that the production of solar modules “is very energy intensive” and more damaging to the environment than we are led to believe.
Today’s climate not unusual
When questioned about the “dramatic” situation in the Arctic, Bäcker remined that this is not an unusual situation in that people once settled in Greenland 1000 years ago and how the climate back then was warmer than it is today.
No consensus
At the 18:00 mark he sharply criticizes the notion that the science is settled and finds it disturbing that people who present alternative explanations get dismissed and labelled as nuts, and shut out by the press. He adds that there is in reality no consensus and there are scientists out there who don’t agree.
German climate skepticism may have awakened, and ironically it may in large part be an unintended consequence of the “Greta demonstrations”. Germans may be finally getting fed up with the hysteria that has emptied out schools and turned into an ambush on their industrial jobs.
German geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning, who together with Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt runs German climate skeptic site Die kalte Sonne, was recently interviewed by the conservative Junge Freiheit TV in Berlin (In German).
While the mainstream media focus almost exclusively on the ultra-alarmist climate scenarios, Lüning takes a far more moderate, non-alarmist view of climate and man’s impact on it.
In Lüning’s view, natural factors play an as big, or even bigger. role on climate than humans do.
Recent warming “not unusual”
In the interview, Lüning explains how the assumptions made by the CO2 alarmists fall apart when tested against the observations of the past. The experienced German geologist explains why the modern 20th century warming is nothing unusual and that the same has already occurred numerous times over the past 10,000 years.
Start of industrialization coincided with end of Little Ice Age
One problem, Lüning says, is that scientists like to begin their temperature charts right before industrialization began in earnest, which happens to coincide near the temperature low point of the Holocene. He says that the term “pre-industrial” has been the source of “lots of confusion”.
Medieval and Roman times were warmer. Image: Die kalte Sonne
Natural factors at work
Lüning reminds listeners that the question concerning how much of the recent warming can be attributed to man is still being hotly debated, and that we know that natural factors have always been in the driver’s seat in the past. Personally Lüning believes that the real figure is closer to 50-50, with a likelihood that natural factors are a bit more than half.
He thinks the CO2-based climate models so far have been unable to explain the climate variability of the past, but that those based on natural factors and the past changes are far better.
97% consensus claim very misleading
On the claims that there is a 97% consensus among climate scientists that man is now driving the climate, the geologist – who is also co-author of the book: The Neglected Sun – says that claim is totally misleading:
The study is often cited, but unfortunately misunderstood. If you look closely at the study, then you quickly see that it has to do with a completely different question. That Co2 drives warming, most people – even the large majority skeptics – concede CO2 warms, but it gets down to the question of how much. […] All those who think it’s just a little bit get also lumped into the 97%. I’m in the 97%. Donald Trump is a part of the 97%, as he recently said that it is possible that CO2 warms.”
Preindustrial global temperature much worse
Next Junge Freiheit (JF TV) asks if a one-degree temperature rise would be so bad. “Is today’s temperature worse than the level of 1850?”
Lüning replies, reminding us that 1850 was the Little Ice Age and how it was “really a difficult time”. Lüning added:
We had crop failures. We had cold. We had disease. We really should appreciate that we no longer live in the Little Ice Age because that one degree of warming was urgently needed. No one would want to go back to this cold period.”
Concerning another 1°C of warming ahead, he says that it would not be only bad news. “There would be winners and there would be losers.” He points out that especially Canada and Siberia would profit.
Emotionalized – kids should return to school, learn fundamentals
Lüning is also critical of the “Greta demonstrations” which he says “have moved the discussion from a factual one to one that is emotional”. He adds: “It’s good that the youth are getting involved, but they should return to school and learn physics, chemistry and geography and all the fundamentals of climate science.”
Strongly filtered press
Lüning also sharply criticizes the press, saying the issue has been “strongly filtered”:
Everything that is negative gets sold as headlines. And things like it’s been cooling for the last 3 years naturally get no headlines. What gets reported is very selective.”
Lüning calls the media “filtering” a fundamental problem that should not be happening in the 21st century.
Published literature far more balanced than media
When asked if the the published science is as imbalanced as the media, Lüning responds: “Not at all.” He says a new (non-alarming study) comes out almost daily, but the media refuse to report on it and instead they “prefer to report on alarmist ones, particularly from an institute located close to Berlin.”
Catastrophe very unlikely
Finally, when asked if we need to worry about the planet going under, as many projections range from manageable to catastrophic conditions ahead:
I see very many indications showing that it’s going be at the lower end of the range, towards manageable. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to do anything. But we don’t need to be preparing for the worst case scenario.”
In Lüning’s view, the path is very long and it should be taken one step at a time. He also tells JF-TV that climate science is still poorly understood and that more research needs to be done. He sees no need to hysterically put the entire economic system in question.
Viral: Nearing 50,000 views in just 2 days
On a positive note, since the JF-TV interview was released on Youtube just 2 days ago, it has been viewed already almost 50,000 times. For a German climate skeptic video, this is nothing short of phenomenal!
Perhaps in Germany it’s one thing to protest climate change, but maybe people are now getting fed up with kids not going to school and instead irrationally turning the discussion into a hysteria.
I asked Dr. Lüning what he thought about the video getting so many views. His reply by email:
People want to see a more balanced climate discussion, involving all views, not just the most extreme alarm scenarios.”
Germans are also starting to get fed up with the onslaught on their industry and jobs.
In most scientific fields, hypotheses that fail to be verified by real-world observations 85% to 100% of the time are rejected immediately.
In Consensus Climate Science, when 126 of 126, 111 of 114, 42 of 49… modeled projections are wrong, or when the opposite sign of the modeled trend is observed, the climate models are still regarded as mechanistically correct, especially with regard to the CO2 climate influence.
“Observed changes in Northern Hemisphere snow cover from satellite records were compared to those predicted by all available Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (“CMIP5”) climate models over the duration of the satellite’s records, i.e., 1967–2018. A total of 196 climate model runs were analyzed (taken from 24 climate models). Separate analyses were conducted for the annual averages and for each of the seasons (winter, spring, summer, and autumn/fall). A longer record (1922–2018) for the spring season which combines ground-based measurements with satellite measurements was also compared to the model outputs. The climate models were found to poorly explain the observed trends. While the models suggest snow cover should have steadily decreased for all four seasons, only spring and summer exhibited a long-term decrease, and the pattern of the observed decreases for these seasons was quite different from the modelled predictions. Moreover, the observed trends for autumn and winter suggest a long-term increase, although these trends were not statistically significant.”
“However, three combined gridded observational datasets, four reanalysis datasets, and most of the CMIP5 models cannot capture extreme precipitation exceeding 150 mm day−1, and all underestimate extreme precipitation frequency. The observed spatial distribution of extreme precipitation exhibits two maximum centers, located over the lower-middle reach of Yangtze River basin and the deep South China region, respectively. Combined gridded observations and JRA-55 capture these two centers, but ERA-Interim, MERRA, and CFSR and almost all CMIP5 models fail to capture them. The percentage of extreme rainfall in the total rainfall amount is generally underestimated by 25%–75% in all CMIP5 models.”
“Atmospheric models forced by observed SSTs and fully coupled models forced by historical anthropogenic forcing do not robustly simulate twentieth-century fall wetting in the SE-Gulf. SST-forced atmospheric models do simulate an intensified anticyclonic low-level circulation around the NASH, but the modeled intensification occurred farther west than observed. CMIP5 analyses suggest an increased likelihood of positive SE-Gulf fall precipitation trends given historical and future GHG forcing. Nevertheless, individual model simulations (both SST forced and fully coupled) only very rarely produce the observed magnitude of the SE-Gulf fall precipitation trend.”
“Here, by conducting a comprehensive analysis based on multiple independent observational records, including satellite observations along with a large ensemble of model simulations, we objectively determine the relative contributions of internal variability and anthropogenic warming to the emergence of long-term PWC [Pacific Walker Circulation] trends. Our analysis shows that the satellite-observed changes differ considerably from the model ensemble-mean changes, but they also indicate substantially weaker strengthening than implied by the reanalyses. Furthermore, some ensemble members are found to reproduce the observed changes in the tropical Pacific. These findings clearly reveal a dominant role of internal variability on the recent strengthening of the PWC [Pacific Walker Circulation].”
“Observed Southern Ocean surface cooling and sea-ice expansion over the past several decades are inconsistent with many historical simulations from climate models. Here we show that natural multidecadal variability involving Southern Ocean convection may have contributed strongly to the observed temperature and sea-ice trends.”
In these times of Fridays for Future led by Greta Thunberg, all experts and self-proclaimed experts are talking about how badly the earth is doing and warning that planet earth is about to collapse unless action is taken immediately. It’s claimed that all experts agree on their vision of the future! Droughts, floods, crop failures and famines threaten – and millions of climate refugees will make their way from south to north.
These are the visions of the “climate impact researchers”. But is that really the case? The opposite is the reality.
Let us first take a look at the grain yield of the most important cereals grown in the world.
Miracle upon miracle. The grain yields per hectare of corn, rice, wheat and barley have increased strongly over the last 25 years and have not decreased at all, despite all the climate horror claims.
In the case of maize, the yields per hectare have almost doubled. Maize yields have increased by around 80%, rice by around 65%, wheat by around 70% and barley by around 65%.
And this in times when droughts and torrential rains are supposedly reducing the harvest yields?
Global production of maize, rice and wheat. Source: FAOSTAT
If you look at the world harvests of the most important grains, they have also risen sharply over the last 25 years. The amount of maize harvested has roughly doubled, i.e. increased by 100%, the amount of rice harvested by about 75% and the amount of wheat harvested by about 80%.
If we look at global grain production and grain production in selected tropical countries, this has increased sharply since 1960. On average, production has quadrupled!
Exponential growth since 2000! Source: Worldwatch Institute
And when we look at the world grain production as a whole (wheat, rice and coarse grains), production has quadrupled since 1961!
This means that four times as much grain is harvested in the world as 60 years ago. The world population has only grown from 3 billion to over 7 billion in the same period. So it has only more than doubled a little bit
Maize and wheat yields for Germany and USA. Source: Felde 2009 as to FAOSTAT
The above figure shows how in Germany and the USA yields per hectare of cultivated land have risen sharply since 1960. Maize in Germany by approx. 130% and for wheat in Germany by approx. 120%. This is more than doubling. Maize in the USA has jumped by approx. 110%, for wheat in the USA approx. 75%. So almost doubling.
Grain production in tonnes and yield per hectare. Source: German Federal Office of Statistics
If we look at the development of grain production in Germany since 1950, we can see a significant increase both in the total harvest quantity and in the yields per hectare. The total grain production has increased by about 450%, the grain yield by about 350%.
Wheat yield (top), maize yield Germany (bottom). Source: Prof. F. Isermeyer, FAL Braunschweig
By international standards, wheat yields per hectare of cultivated land have risen worldwide. Germany, in particular, is distinguished in wheat cultivation by high yields per hectare and a strong increase in yields per hectare. The yield per hectare of wheat has more than doubled since 1970 and is four times higher than in other countries.
And maize acreage and maize yields have also grown strongly in Germany. In the last 30 years, the yields per hectare of maize have almost doubled and the area under maize has increased by about 75%.
Good news censored
The question is: Why don’t you hear about it in the media and news? As a rule, there are only reports of failed harvests and famines, but no new record harvests. Perhaps simply because this does not fit into the picture of a climate catastrophe?
Now imagine that the Arctic and Siberia would also become fertile arable land as a result of global warming and that crop yields increased even further as a result. Would that be bad or good?
German political analysis and commentary site Freie Welt here has an article on how millions of Germans are increasingly unable to afford electric power.
Germany’s Energiewende ‘ risks shorting out as millions struggle to pay their electricity bills. Image cropped here.
While a number of commodities such as electronics, electrical goods and computing power across the country – and the globe – have gotten much cheaper over the years due to development, the price of electricity in Germany has “more than doubled since 2000”.
5 million struggling to pay for their power
Almost all of this is due to the Germany’s ‘Energiewende’: the transition to renewable energies and away from nuclear power and fossil fuels like coal.
According to the Freie Welt: “Last year, almost five million people in Germany had problems paying their electricity bills” as some 4.8 million defaulting customers “were threatened” by power companies.
“As a consequence of unpaid bills, almost 344,000 households were temporarily cut off electricity during the same period. This marks new records,” the Freie Welt reports.
“Next increases already in the pipeline”
The situation for Germans will likely get a lot worse before it gets better. Less than a third of the country’s power is supplied by wind and sun, and as that share rises – as is planned – the costs will only continue to climb and make the hardship for the poor even worse.
“Three quarters of the energy suppliers had raised their prices at the beginning of this year again on the average by five per cent,” Writes Freie Welt. “The next increases are already in the pipeline.”
At 29.42 cents a kilowatt-hour, Germans pay among the highest prices in the world.
Further price increases in the medium to long term
According to Valerian Vogel of the utility Verifox: “In view of the major challenges facing the German electricity system, consumers must prepare themselves for further increases in electricity prices in the medium to long term”.
In Germany, the high prices are mostly made up of taxes, levies, grid fees and green energy feed-in tariffs.
In its report, Freie Welt cites figures from the Federal Network Agency, which says wholesales price for electricity are mostly to blame for the excruciatingly painful prices levels. According to the Federal Network Agency, “Last year was around 30 percent higher than the average price for 2017.”
Fridays for Future (unintended) Revolution
Ironically, the Fridays for Future (skip school) movement yesterday issued a call in Berlin for an even more rapid completion of the coal and fossil fuel power phaseout. They demanded that this phaseout be completed by 2030 rather than 2038. The movement, backed by activist scientists, is in fact calling for a revolution.
And a revolution they will get, but very likely not the kind they are bargaining for.
An empirical analysis using 2005-2015 data from 15 EU countries indicates that as more renewable energies (i.e., solar PV) are deployed, energy costs increase, household poverty risks rise, and incomes decline.
In contrast to the negative consequences of switching from fossil fuels to renewables, Dr. Tadesse Weldu Teklu affirms “CO2 emission (energy consumption) is directly correlated to economic prosperity and industrialization.”
Therefore, least developed countries (LDCs) such as Ethiopia should “increase her CO2 emission per capita as much as possible” to escape from the renewables-centered “poverty trap” foisted upon them by “Earth-friendly” wealthy countries.
Besides, fossil fuel consumption will inevitably continue to grow and maintain a similar share to today’s (~80%) by 2040 despite symbolic “destined to fail” Paris agreement gestures.
We often hear how the climate is changing everywhere, like in California.
Listening to the media we get the impression that the Golden State is drying out and risks burning up, before heavy rains hit. Others claim the state is facing “weather whiplash” because climate change will make the weather more extreme and volatile.
Today we take a look at the precipitation data of 7 stations spread across the state to see what changes have been happening. Used here are the data from the Japan Meteorology Agency (JMA) that cover the last 33 years.
As we can see, there has been no trend over the past 30 years. Variability also appears unchanged. California has always been a state characterized by alternating periods of drought and rainfall influenced by oceanic cycles like ENSO. The data show everything is within the normal range.
The real trend is the massive increase in media climate ambulance chasing where every anomaly gets hyped into something much more than it really is.
One of the fathers of the German environmental movement, Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, comments on models, Friday school strikes and the environmental destruction by green energies.
===============================
Ladies and Gentlemen,
New climate model is useless
Over 80(!) authors, led by Jean Christophe Golaz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have recently developed a new climate model (produced for the upcoming IPCC 6th Assessment Report). While so far the models have been parameterized on the basis of a period of pronounced warming (mostly between 1976 and 2005), the current work of Golaz et al (2019) takes a different approach: the pre-industrial conditions around 1850 were taken as the starting point.
Until around 1955 the model did well with the “tuning” of 1850, even though it did not reflect the warming of around 0.4°C between 1925 and 1945. After that, however, it literally goes out of control. We see a reduction in the temperature level of up to 0.5°C until about 1996, then a warming rate of over 0.5°C/decade. The observations do not show this:
The evolution of global surface temperatures in observations ( blue, green, grey) and in models ( red). Source: Fig. 23 from Golaz et al. (2019).
The paper also explains how this happens: The aerosols (they cool by shading the solar radiation) have far too great an effect in the model and the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases is also clearly too high. Björn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Hamburg (MPI) also addresses the problem that models compensate too high a sensitivity to greenhouse gases by too much (negative) aerosol forcing.
Natural variability not taken into account
It seems to be a fundamental problem of all models that do not sufficiently take natural variability into account and want to explain temperature development solely by anthropogenic influences. In the end, Golaz et al. (2019) comes to the conclusion that both the (negative) aerosol propulsion and climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases (especially CO2) must be reduced in models in order to simulate the recent past from 1960 onwards with the necessary precision.
“Little to do with reality”
For the declared purpose (the development of scenarios up to 2100 – i.e. the next 80 years), even the latest “sophisticated” models turn out to be unsuitable. They predict a catastrophic development because of faulty modeling that has little to do with the reality of the last 50 years.
Greta and the world of models
Greta and her German followers derive their demands for an immediate end to our lifestyle from this very false model world. In fact, climate researchers who are familiar with the unreliability of climate models should steer the children’s crusade to a sensible direction, for example with reference to the contribution by Jochem Marotzke, who recently came to the conclusion in Spiegel that “our remaining CO2 budget for the 1.5 degree target is probably at least twice as large as we thought it would be“.
Yet the very same Marotzke now supports the Fridays for Future demands for a short-term coal phase-out in Germany by 2030, bot in China where the annual CO2 increase is about as high as Germany’s total emissions. And Marotzke is assisted by climate researchers Claussen, Schellnhuber, Rahmstorf, Latif, Mosbrugger, Stocker and Anders Levermann (this is the one who claimed in the scientific committee of the German Bundestag that CO2 is an angled molecule and therefore a greenhouse gas).
He probably missed too many chemistry classes on Friday as well.
New headlines on environmentally friendly alternatives
The number of wind turbines is to be doubled to tripled in the course of the Energiewende [transition to green energies] energy revolution, one wind turbine every 2.7 km. But now there are new warnings about the environmental impact.
According to a DLR model analysis carried out at the end of 2018, flying insects (e.g. the admiral, ladybirds) seek high rapid air currents shortly before laying their eggs in order to be carried by the wind to distant breeding sites. The currents are above 60 -100 m and hit a rotor area of 200 million m². An air throughput of 10 million km³, which is more than ten times the German airspace (up to 200 m height), will be sucked in by the rotors.
1200 tonnes of insects to be destroyed
1200 tons of insects will be destroyed by the rotors, which is 1200 billion insects. One of the authors estimates that this corresponds to the size of the insects destroyed by 40 million cars. Remarkably, the decline of flying insects and the expansion of wind turbines over a total height of 100 m to 200 m coincided 15 years ago. Coincidence? We do not know.
“Shut down wind turbines from April to October”!
The scientists demand a shut down the wind turbines from April to October at temperatures above 10°C. For our parliamentarians in the German Bundestag: The Federal Agency for Nature Conservation has so far rejected an investigation.
Green Energies’ “Silent Spring”
Maybe our striking students should take a look at this topic in class. Because if the fear turns out to be true, it’s not just about flying insects, but also about the whole ecosystem. Silent Spring – without chemicals – simply through the transition to0 green energies without technology assessment. It started with corn crops and biogas and ends with wind turbines. If you are interested, you can download the facts in my lecture to the Hamburger Hafen-Klub at vahrenholt.net/publikationen(p.23-30)
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this. More information at our Data Privacy Policy
Recent Comments