THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President,
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
US Weather Stations:
More than ten years after the successful first effort, Anthony Watts announced another effort to expose the shoddy state of NOAA’s instruments for recording surface temperatures. He is asking volunteers to photograph current stations to “find out what has changed, and how many stations have actually closed, gotten better, or gotten worse.”
David Burton, who was an expert reviewer for Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis of IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021), reports the way the central planners of the IPCC keep the expert reviewers informed. It is an authoritarian system in its fullest.
An author of many books on energy, Vaclav Smil, offers reasons why we cannot rely on the magical (or delusional) thinking that was exhibited at COP-26. Fossil fuels are needed by humanity. Using current technology, wind and solar power cannot replace them.
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Warming the Arctic:
In Part 3 of “The Big 5 Natural Causes of Climate Change: How La Niña Warms the World,” Ecologist Jim Steele builds on Part 1, Varying Atlantic Water Transport. In the earlier presentation Steele establishes that. “Jonathan Kahl’s analysis of Arctic surveys between 1950 and 1990 & published in the pre- eminent journal Nature, found no rise in arctic air temperatures.
But after the 1990 shift of the Arctic Oscillation, which caused sub-freezing winds from Siberia to blow insulating arctic sea ice out of the Arctic, arctic air temperatures suddenly began warming several times faster than the global average temperature.
The loss of insulating sea ice increased the ventilation of stored ocean heat, warming the air but cooling the ocean. That warming offset, and obscured, the 25-year winter cooling trend in both North America and Eurasia, ...
Clearly Arctic warming was due to regional climate dynamics, not global.
From Danish sea ice records and modern satellite photos, we see two distinct periods with very similar reductions in the extent of arctic sea ice. One during the 1930s and one since 2000. Those 2 periods of reduced sea ice are separated by an intervening 30-year period of increasing sea ice, suggesting sea ice is modulated by a natural oscillation.
“The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [AMO] represents a natural cyclical dynamic where the northern Atlantic waters alternate between becoming warmer than the southern Atlantic and then become cooler. “It cycles approximately every 60 years.”
After showing graphs of temperature trends of the AMO between 1880 to 2010, Steele explains: The decades with 0.3 to 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer north Atlantic waters coincide with the decades of reduced Arctic sea ice and rising global temperatures.
The decades between the 1950s to 1990s, when the north Atlantic's temperatures were 0.3 to 0.5 degrees Celsius cooler, Arctic sea ice increased and there was no global warming trend.
Steele goes on to explain that as Arctic sea ice thins, its insolation properties are reduced, and the Arctic ventilates much more heat than radiated by humanity adding CO2. Three-meter-thick ice can ventilate about 5 times more heat than humanity adds, one-meter-thick ice about 15 times more heat.
After explaining that the climate modelers with NASA-GISS ignore the changing AMO, Steele concludes:
“Changes in natural climate dynamics firmly dispute alarmists' claims of a rapidly approaching CO2 driven climate crisis.
“1. Increasing arctic temperatures are chiefly caused by ventilating stored heat that warms the air but cools the ocean.
“2. The lowest solar irradiance in 100 years (sunspot cycle 24) suggests further cooling of the North Atlantic.
“3. Declining solar irradiance suggests a southward migrating ITCZ causing less northward transport of tropical heat.
“4. The coinciding shift of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation further suggests cooler north Atlantic waters entering the Arctic in coming decades, and that would predict that as older Atlantic water circulating in the Arctic for 30 years finally cools, conditions would allow Arctic sea ice to recover.
“5. Finally, because most climate models and leading climate scientists incorrectly attributed rising CO2 to the North Atlantic Oscillation's shift to its positive phase, their alarmist crisis claims should be viewed with a great amount of skepticism.”
In Part 3, Steele explains how the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) affects earth’s temperatures, including the Arctic.
He begins:
“La Niñas promote clear skies over the eastern Pacific increasing solar heating. As a result, the eastern Pacific absorbs over 100 watts per meter squared more solar energy than it releases back to space. A similar but smaller energy imbalance occurs in the eastern Atlantic during Atlantic Niñas
“The blue regions [in a map not shown here] release more energy back to space than their surfaces absorbed. That excess energy was initially absorbed and transported from the tropics.
Climate scientists agree any imbalance between the earth's absorption and release of energy can cause climate change. “However, the question is how much of that imbalance is caused by ocean dynamics vs increasing CO2 concentrations
“In all peer-reviewed research the world's energy budget is measured in terms of watts, the flow energy per second. For example, a burning candle emits 80 watts. But step just one meter away from that candle and you will not feel its heat. So, to express the effects of heat energy, heat is measured in the amount of watts reaching a square meter of surface area, or watts per meter squared.
“On average, the earth's atmosphere and surfaces absorb 240 watts per meter squared of solar energy. “Claims of a climate crisis, are based on the belief that CO2 is causing the earth to retain just one more watt of solar energy than it releases back to space.”
After a lengthy discussion of how El Niños and La Niñas (the ENSO) work and vary with the changing Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Steele brings up that the Indian Ocean is the hottest ocean and:
“Higher sea levels in the western Pacific during La Niñas help push warm pool waters into the Indian Ocean. A portion of those waters are further heated in the Indian Ocean, which then get transported around southern Africa into the Atlantic – a dynamic referred to as the Agulhas leakage.”
[The Agulhas Current is a narrow, swift, and strong current flowing southward along the western edge of the Indian Ocean until it meets the strong eastward current from the Atlantic south of Africa.]
“Recent studies have detailed the pathway of Agulhas Leakage water into the Arctic."
In his discussion of how climate modelers ignore the ENSO, Steele brings up the 2005 paper in AAAS Science by James Hansen et al. on Earth’s Energy Imbalance based on a study of climate on Venus. The co-authors include Gavin Schmidt and other advocates of a false “climate crisis.” Venus is entirely inappropriate for study because it is lifeless and devoid of water.
As Steele states:
“So naturally his analyses and models of climate change are typically focused on greenhouse gases that affected Venus.” Further, as Howard Hayden explains in Basic Climate Physics # 3. The clue to the fundamental physics error in the statement to the right [that “a hotter planet radiates more heat to outer space] is to be found in IPCC’s First Assessment Report (FAR 1990),
which said “Firstly, the mean temperature of the Earth’s surface is already warmer by about 33°C (assuming the same reflectivity of the Earth than it would be if the natural greenhouse gases [GHG] were not present.”
“Translation: Given the assumption that the reflectivity (albedo) of the earth is constant, the hypothetical non-GHG planet absorbs precisely the same amount of heat from the sun as the earth does now and radiates that same amount into space. The surface is 33oC warmer than that hypothetical non-GHG earth, but our hotter planet radiates precisely the same amount of energy to space.
“For a second example, consider Venus. The surface is hot enough to melt lead, but because of its very high albedo of 75%, the planet absorbs 156 W/m2 from the sun and emits 156 W/m2 to space, versus our 239 W/m2. In this case, the hotter planet radiates less energy to space. QED!”
Ancient astronomers considered Venus the brightest star in the sky. It is not that it produces light, but it reflects so much light from the sun!
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IPCC expert reviewer David Burton comments on the IPCC review process.
“Note that, until now, even the Expert Reviewers, themselves, were not permitted to see any of this material. Even while reviewing the SOD (Second Order Draft) we were not permitted to see the authors’ responses to even our own FOD (First Order Draft) comments.
“In the case of our FOD comments, we’ve had to wait nearly three years to see the authors’ responses.
“The IPCC’s “expert review” process, despite the similar name, does not resemble peer review for academic papers. The IPCC treats its own “expert reviewers” like mushrooms. The IPCC’s authors needn’t even take reviewer comments into consideration.
“Imagine an academic journal which ran its peer-review process the way that the IPCC runs their ‘expert review’ process:
1. Reviewers write comments, the authors ignore them or not, as they see fit.
2. Eventually (perhaps years later!) the authors write excuses for ignoring reviewers’ comments, but they don’t even show those responses to the reviewers until after the Report is published.
“That’s how the IPCC’s ‘Expert Review’ process works.
“Imagine an academic journal which conducted its peer review process like that. Would YOU trust such a journal? Would YOU publish in it?
“Of course not. Nobody sensible would.”
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Desertification:
Another UN entity is ignoring massive physical evidence. In “World ‘at a crossroads’ in management of droughts, up 29% in a generation and worsening” the UN Convention to Combat Desertification ignores decades of photographic evidence from the Landsat satellites showing the plant world is flourishing with more carbon dioxide.
Instead, it claims: “a 29 percent rise in the number and duration of droughts since 2000. “In addition, from 1970 to 2019, weather, climate and water hazards accounted for half of world disasters and 45 percent of disaster-related deaths, mostly in developing countries.”
A quick review of an encyclopedia article on famines in the past will reveal that no matter how sad the current droughts are, they are small compared with great famines that gripped Europe, China, India, Mesoamerica, and Africa before modern agriculture using fossil fuels.
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Fact Not Proof:
The Quote of the Week states that physical evidence is needed more than mathematical proofs of existence of a concept. In countering claims that the technology exists to easily go to “net zero,” Richard Fulmer quotes energy scholar Vaclav Smil whose book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going prompted an interview from The New York Times:
“’I used to live in the westernmost part of the evil empire, what’s now the Czech Republic. They forever turned me off any stupid politics because they politicized everything. So, it is now, unfortunately, in the West. Everything’s politics. No, it is not!
You can be on this side or that side, but the real world works on the basis of natural law and thermodynamics and energy conversions, and the fact is if I want to smelt my steel, I need a certain amount of carbon or hydrogen to do it.
The Red Book of Mao or Putin’s speeches or Donald Trump is no help in that. We need less politics to solve our problems. We need to look at the realities of life and to see how we can practically affect them....’”