By: Ken Gregory, P.Eng.

 

CliSci # 400                                        2023-12-11

 

Green Hydrogen Needs Vast Subsidies

Steve Goreham wrote this article for Master Resources. World leaders tout “green hydrogen” as an essential fuel in the renewable energy transition. When produced from hydrocarbons, hydrogen costs only about a dollar a kilogram. About 99 percent of the world’s 70 million tons of annual hydrogen production comes from gas, using steam methane reforming, or from coal, using coal gasification. Net zero advocates propose to produce green hydrogen from electrolysis of water, using electricity from wind and solar energy. Industrial electrolyzers use complex cell structures, catalysts, and electrolytes to maximize efficiency. Hydrogen from electrolysis, called green hydrogen, typically costs more than $5 per kilogram, or more than five times the price when produced from natural gas. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act offers an astounding subsidy of $3 to produce a kilogram of green hydrogen, three times the market price. Most hydrogen produced today from gas or coal is used on site to produce ammonia to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. There are no regional markets for hydrogen because hydrogen is very difficult to transport. Hydrogen is very reactive and degrades metal by a process known as hydrogen embrittlement. Embrittlement can cause cracks, leaks, and even explosions in metal pipelines. To convert the world’s steel industry to run on green hydrogen, over 5,000 TWh of electricity would be required which is more than the world’s total output of renewable electricity today.

 

Irrefutable Evidence of Alarmists’ Ocean Acidification Misinformation

Jim Steele explains that the ocean acidification scare is just alarmist’s misinformation. In the ocean CO₂ forms bicarbonate ions [HCO₃] with a negative charge by combining with the OH- ion from the H₂O molecule. The H+ proton can pop off the bicarbonate ion to form a carbonate ion [CO₃] which has two negative changes. The pH scale indicates the H+ concentration. Distilled water has a pH of 7 because the H+ ions are balance by the number of OH- ions. Ocean water at pH 8.1 is 10 times more alkaline (less acidic) than distilled water. Of the three molecules, ocean water contains about 10% carbonate ions, 90% bicarbonate ions and 0.5% CO₂. The bicarbonate ions and carbonate ions are great buffers that can re-join with H+ ions and prevent the water from becoming as acidic as distilled water. Virtually every mollusk shell, have a protective organic covering that prevents any shell dissolution. Likewise living coral polyps protect their reef skeleton. Shells and reefs are made of calcium carbonate. Steele says ”alarmists’ falsely claim acidification will reduce seawater’s carbonate ions, making it more difficult to make calcium carbonate shells or reefs. The truth is:  not a single researcher has detected in any shell or reef making organism an ability to import carbonate ions directly from sea water to make their shells or reefs. They all only import CO₂ and the abundant bicarbonate ions, which they then convert internally to a carbonate ion.” CO₂ which has no charge, freely passes through the corals outer lipid membranes. Once inside, an enzyme converts CO₂ into bicarbonate ions. The ions are trapped inside because charged ions cannot pass freely through membranes. “Calcium and newly converted carbonate ions combine to form the calcium carbonate building blocks for reef skeletons and shells. Thus, any acidification that converts sea water carbonate ions into bicarbonate ions is actually helping reefs and shell-making which only absorb the critical CO₂ and bicarbonate ions.”

 

NETZERO Is Impeding Progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals

Judith Curry wrote that “The world has already shown that it can thrive under a warming rate of 1 °C/century.  To support continued human development and progress in the 21st century, there is widespread international agreement on the UNSDG Sustainable Development Goals.”  The ranked goals related to climate and energy from most important are; 1) no poverty, 2) no hunger, 3) affordable and clean energy, 4) industry, innovation and infrastructure, 5) climate action.

The current focus on climate action is impeding progress on the UN’s more important development goals. A UN report estimates that under current trends, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. World hunger levels have increased. Some 660 million people will remain without electricity and close to 2 billion people will rely of polluting wood and dung for cooking.

Climate policy driven by the perceived urgency of eliminating fossil fuels and without regard to other needs and trade-offs is itself dangerous. There’s no such thing as a low energy, rich country. Economic development and resilience in underdeveloped countries are being slowed down by a growing emphasis on linking international development funds to reducing emissions. Economic development requires the availability of cheap, reliable, and abundant energy. Limiting the development of fossil fuel projects is profoundly hampering development in Africa. The greatest hypocrisy is that some of the largest private European and US firms are developing natural gas in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Senegal to export to Asia and Europe, since it can’t be used in the countries of origin for lack of infrastructure.

 

Michael Mann’s Other Nature Trick

Stephen McIntyre wrote recently about new information concerning the famous hockey stick graph produced by Michael Mann using tree ring data published in the paper MBH1998. McIntyre reported on work by Hampus Soderqvist who discovered an important but previously unknown Mike’s Nature Trick: Mann’s list of proxies was partly incorrect. Mann’s list included four tree ring series that were not actually used, while it omitted four tree ring series that were used. The calculations were done over several time steps and used a mathematical technique called principal component analysis (PCA) which assigned weighting factors to the individual tree ring series. Mann withheld the important verification r2 statistic. By withholding the results of the individual steps, Mann made it impossible for anyone to carry out routine statistical tests on his famous reconstruction. McIntyre and several other people tried for years to replicate the hockey stick result with only limited success. However, by reverse engineering of the actual content of each network, Soderqvist was able to calculate each step of the reconstruction – exactly matching each subset in the spliced reconstruction. Thus, after almost 25 years, the results of the individual MBH98 steps are finally available.

Mann wrote articles attacking a submission by Stephen McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick to the journal Geophysical Research Letters.  Mann was seeking to block its publication which criticized Mann’s work by showing that the PCA math was faulty. McIntyre wrote “Soderqvist’s work shows that some of Mann’s most vehement claims were untrue, but, oddly, untrue in a way that was arguably unhelpful to the argument that he was trying to make. It’s quite weird. Although Mann claimed statistical ‘skill’ for each of the eleven steps, he did not archive results of the 11 individual step reconstructions. In 2003, we sought these results, ultimately filing a formal complaint with Nature. But, to its continuing discredit, Nature supported Mann’s withholding of these results.  Despite multiple investigations and litigations, Mann has managed to withhold these results for over 25 years.”

 

Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity

The Levelized Costs of Electricity (LCOE) metric has been criticized for ignoring the effects of intermittency and non-dispatchability. This article introduces the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE), a novel cost evaluation metric that compares the costs of serving the entire market using just one source plus storage. The author wrote “Economically, the fact that intermittent generation has no obligation to meet the demand can be seen as a hidden subsidy.” The storage is assumed to be industrial-scale batteries. In Germany, the wind & solar mix is 13 times more expensive than natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) generation, while in Texas, it is 6 times more expensive. Including storage costs, the LFSCOE for solar in Germany is 43 times more than the LCOE.

 

COP28 Will Ignore Net-zero's Atrocious Waste of Money

Bjorn Lomborg predicts that the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates (Nov 30 – Dec 12) will almost certainly be another failure. Despite 27 previous conferences with bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased. Underpinning the climate summit farce is one big lie repeated over and over: that green energy is on the precipice of replacing fossil fuels in every aspect of our lives. Any transition away from fossil fuels is occurring only with enormous taxpayer-funded subsidies. Over the past 15 years, alternative energy stocks have plummeted in value. The costs of climate change are vastly exaggerated by the media while costs of climate policy are bizarrely ignored. Economist William Nordhaus says that early cuts in fossil fuel emissions are cheap but ambitious carbon dioxide reductions have phenomenally high cost and low additional benefits. A new economic study shows that net-zero policies by 2050 will cost between $10 and $45 trillion per year, equivalent to 4 – 18% of global GDP. The study assumes the IPCC estimated climate sensitivity is correct and the benefit of net zero is 1.4 % of global GDP while the cost is 9% of global GDP.  On the contrary, I believe the 100 year warming by CO₂ is about half of the IPCC estimate and the benefits of warming and CO₂ fertilization are significantly larger than the harmful effects of warming. Lomborg says “Clearly, this is an atrocious use of money.”

 

2023 Hurricane Season: Only 1 Landfalling US Hurricane

The hurricane season is over and it is bad news for climate alarmists.  John Robson wrote “In the upside-down world of climate science, where every bad thing is caused by climate change and there is a voracious need for weather disasters to prove just how bad things are getting, nothing cheers up the activists like a large catastrophic hurricane or two.” Roger Pielke Jr. has updated his graphs of continental landfalling U.S. hurricanes, from 1990 to 2023. There was only one landfalling U.S. hurricane this year, Hurricane Idalia in Florida, despite forecasts of many more. The best fit linear trend is sloping down at -0.22 hurricanes per century. The graph of only major hurricanes of category 3 or higher is also sloping down, but by an insignificant amount (-0.01/century). Robson sarcastically says “Spare a thought for the poor alarmists whose hopes were dashed once again.” Peilke Jr. notes that 8 of the 11 forecasts that there would be more hurricanes than the historic average. Almost all the hurricane models have a built-in bias toward the future being stormier than the past.

 

CliSci # 399                                        2023-11-26

 

New Modeling Gives Lower Predictions on Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt

The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest block of ice on Earth, containing over 30 million cubic kilometers of water. Australian scientists decided to build an accurate model for how the Antarctic ice sheet responds to climate change by studying sea levels during the Mid-pliocene warm period era of 3 million years ago. That period is considered the best equivalent to conditions expected this coming century in terms of CO₂ levels and temperature. The scientists looked at the geological record of Australia to find sea-level markers that indicate the past shoreline levels. Using new technology, they made estimates of the whole continent's vertical movements. Correcting the relative sea level changes by the vertical land movements yields an improved estimate of the absolute sea level rise. Previous estimates had sea level during the Mid-Pliocene somewhere between six and 60 meters above current sea level in Australia. Now, it can be more accurately pinned at 16 m (range 10.4 to 21.5 m), with the Antarctic ice sheet likely contributing 9.8 m (range 4.1 to 15.4 m) in height.

Previous estimate of the Antarctic contribution to sea level rise from 2010 to 2100 were between 20 and 53 cm. But by getting a better idea of sea levels during the Mid-Pliocene era, the new study reduces this estimate to between 5 and 9 cm under the RCP8.5 emissions scenario. Estimates of greater than 20 cm sea level rise from Antarctica by 2100 are very improbable. The RCP8.5 emissions scenario is also highly improbable, so the 7 ± 2 cm estimate of sea level rise from Antarctica by 2100 is also very likely too high.

 

California’s Electric Truck Mandate: 19 States Sue

Steve Goreham, a speaker at our 2017 annual climate event, wrote that 19 U.S. states and several trucking companies are suing California over its zero emissions electric truck mandate that would greatly increase trucking costs and put many trucking companies out of business. The new regulation requires that truck operators buy only zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) trucks as early as January 2024. The law suit argues that the regulation is unconstitutional and highlights the negative consequences of forced electrification of the heavy truck fleet. Congress preempted states from adopting emissions standards for motor vehicles in 1967, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted a waiver to allow California to establish emission standards for heavy trucks. Goreham wrote “Diesel trucks can travel about 1,200 miles after filling the tank in 15 minutes. The range of electric trucks is about 150-330 miles, and recharging may take hours, even on a high-speed charger. Electric truck cabs cost two-to-three times as much as diesel cabs, an incremental cost of as much as $300,000 per truck. Electric cabs also weigh about 10,000 pounds more than comparable diesel versions, reducing net freight carried by as much as 20 percent. … China emits more greenhouse gases in a day than California trucks emit in a year.”

 

Can Metal Mining Match the Planned Electric Vehicle Transition?

The government of Canada has policies to have 35% of all new medium and heavy vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, rising to 100% by 2040. The US aims to have 50% of all new passenger and light trucks to be electric or electric hybrid vehicles by 2030. This would require a massive and rapid expansion of mining and refining of metal and rare earth elements critical to battery-electric vehicles. This article by Kenneth Green says that International Energy Agency (EIA) suggests the world will need 388 new mines to provide the materials for the electric vehicle transition. Canada and the US currently have 340 metal mines operating. However, new mining and refining facilities are plagued by regulatory barriers and risk. The production timeline from application to production for nickel mines are 13 to 18 years according to the IEA.

 

Offshore Wind Drives Up Global CO₂ Emissions

A new study by CFACT finds the adding offshore wind power to an energy grid will likely increase global CO₂ emissions. The wind farms are also environmentally destructive.  The local CO₂ emission reductions by displacing fossil fuel generated electricity is partially offset by backup gas-fired power emissions required when the wind isn’t blowing to maintain a stable electrical grid. The supply chain emissions from constructing offshore wind facilities to replace existing generation facilities will be very large. This includes emissions related to mining and processing metals and minerals, constructing the turbines and substations, transportation and decommissioning. The article says “Thus, the net result of combining small local CO₂ reductions with large increases in emissions via the supply chain is not a reduction in global atmospheric CO₂, but an overall increase of atmospheric CO₂. In short, the ‘emission reduction’ justification touted by proponents of building offshore wind facilities is simplistic and false.”

 

Polar Bear Sea Ice Habitat Update

There has been abundant polar bear sea ice habitat this fall across the Arctic so far, with only Hudson Bay sea ice formation a bit behind schedule according to this article by Dr. Susan Crockford. Sea ice is forming at least as fast this year as it has for the last two years, and faster than 2019 and 2020. However, Churchill has not seen the anticipated spike in problem bear reports as predicted by some polar bear specialists. They expect more problem bears when they spend more than four months ashore in the summer and fall. Crockford wrote “This year most bears came ashore by 17 June when the ice broke up, so by 15 November the bears had been onshore for 152 days or about five months.” The temperature high/low on Monday November 27 is forecast to be -22 °C/-25 °C. Freeze-up dates in 2017, 2018, and 2019 were about the same as the average in the 1980s or 16 November. There has been no trend in freeze-up dates 1991 to 2020.

 

Impact of the Hunga Tonga Volcanic Eruption

A new paper states “The  explosive  eruption  of  the  Hunga  Tonga- Hunga  Ha’apai  (HTHH)  volcano  on  15  January  2022  injected  more  water  vapor  into  the  stratosphere  and  to  higher  altitudes  than ever observed in the satellite era.” Some material reached over 56 km high into the lower mesosphere. The eruption increased the water vapour in the stratosphere by about 10%. The largest increase of water vapour was at about 26 km altitude. The authors examined the evolution of the stratosphere’s chemical composition. The water vapor distribution was 78% in the southern hemisphere and 22% in the northern hemisphere. The eruption caused widespread ozone (O₃) reductions in SH mid-latitudes and O₃ increases in the tropics, with peak anomalies at 15° latitude. Because  HTHH  was  an  undersea  eruption,  a  large amount of seawater and associated chemical compounds such as sea  salt  may  have  also  been  injected  into  the  atmosphere. The water vapour mass from HTHH was 145 megatonne (Mt) in February, decreasing to 135 Mt in December 2022. Water vapor levels in the stratosphere will likely continue to be elevated due to the HTHH eruption for several years given the  lack  of  an  efficient  sink  of  water  vapor  in  the  stratosphere.

 

North Atlantic's Marine Productivity has been Stable

A new study of ice cores suggested the marine productivity in the North Atlantic had been stable over the industrial era, contradicting a prominent 2019 study that suggested the marine productivity had declined by 10%. Marine phytoplankton are primary producers in ocean ecosystems and emit dimethyl sulfide (DMS) into the atmosphere. DMS is oxidized to methanesulfonic acid (MSA). Ice core records of MSA are used to investigate past DMS emissions but rely on the implicit assumption that the relative yield of oxidation products from DMS remains constant. The team's analysis of an ice core going back 800 years shows that a more complex atmospheric process may explain the recent trends. The new study goes further back than the previous study by measuring several sulfur-containing molecules in an ice core from central Greenland with layers spanning the years 1200 to 2006. The authors show that human-generated pollutants changed the atmosphere's chemistry. This, in turn, altered the fate of the gases emitted by phytoplankton. The authors found that sulfate derived from phytoplankton increased during the industrial era. When that balance is included in the calculations, the phytoplankton populations seem fairly stable since the mid-1800s. 

 

CliSci # 398                                        2023-11-11

 

Presentation Videos of our 20^th Annual Climate Event Now Posted

Videos of our two speakers, Dr. Ian Clark and Robert Lyman, recorded at our 20^th annual climate event “Break Free from Climate Tyranny: Evidence over Ideology” along with the presentation slides are now posted on our event page. The page is found on the Friends of Science website by selecting on the top menu; Library >> Past Events >> Friends of Science Twentieth Annual Event, With Dr. Ian Clark and Robert Lyman. We want to thank all of you for being our supporting members and for making it possible for us to put on our 20th Annual Friends of Science Society Climate Science Event on Oct. 17, 2023.  Watch this series of short, conversational interviews with our speakers!

Dr. Ian Clark

Robert Lyman

 

New Book: ”Solving the Climate Puzzle. The Sun's Surprising Role”

Javier Vinós announced the publication of his important new book on climate change. Aimed at a wide audience, the book shows a large body of evidence supporting that changes in the poleward transport of heat are one of the main ways in which the planet's climate changes naturally. It also shows that changes in solar activity affect this transport, restoring the Sun as a major cause of global warming. A 50-page excerpt from the book is available here.

 

New Urban Heat Island Effect Dataset

Roy Spencer and John Christy submitted a paper for publication that quantifies the urban heat island effect (UHIE) in the U.S. summer near-surface temperature data since 1880.  The analysis uses correlations between temperature differences between close station pairs and their population densities. The authors found that the homogenized (adjusted) temperature data shows higher UHIE on temperature trends than the raw temperature data. They found that 22% of the U.S. warming trend of the homogenized GHCN dataset from 1895 to 2023 is due to the UHIE. Where population densities are greater than 100 persons per sq. km, the UHIE is shown to be 57% of the reported homogenized GHCN temperature trend. That warming trend shouldn’t be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

The UHIE study was extended to the global land area in all seasons to create a global gridded dataset from 1800 to 2023. The analysis uses 13 million station-pair temperature differences. The UHIE was computed as a function of population density in seven latitude bands for four seasons. This effect was applied to each month at each grid location. The average UHIE of the 100 locations with the most UHIE averaged over 0.5 degree latitude and longitude areas in July is 0.15 °C in 1800, increasing to 0.8 °C in 2023. The UHIE increases rapidly with population at very low population densities, then much more slowly in urban conditions. This high resolution map shows the UHIE for April 2023. It shows that the eastern U.S., most of Europe and Asia have high UHIE, especially in northern India and eastern China. Large orange and red areas of the map have UHIE between 0.4 °C and 1.2 °C.

 

Witch Hunts and Climate

The CO₂Coalition published this article about witch hunts and climate. Here are some excerpts; European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age. A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the “consensus” opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences?

The first extensive European witch hunts coincided with plunging temperatures as the continent transitioned away from the beneficial warmth of the Medieval Warm Period. Increasing cold that began in the 13th century ushered in nearly five centuries of advancing mountain glaciers and prolonged periods of rainy or cool weather. This time of naturally-driven climate change was accompanied by crop failure, hunger, rising prices, epidemics and mass depopulation.

Of course, the people’s misfortunes were attributed to weather-changing witches who had triggered the death-dealing weather, most often in the form of cold, rain, frost and devastating hailstorms. Across the continent of Europe, from the 15th to the 17th centuries there were likely many tens of thousands of supposed witches burnt at the stake, many of these old women living without husbands on the margins of society.

 

Significant West Antarctic Cooling in the Past Two Decades

A new paper explains that the reversal of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) temperature trend from warming from the 1950s to 1990s to cooling since 1995 was caused by the negative phase of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation. The pattern of sea surface temperature (SST) in the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed, with negative SST anomalies in the equatorial eastern tropical Pacific since the end of the twentieth century, as shown by the negative phase of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO). West Antarctica’s mean annual surface temperatures cooled by more than -1.8 °C (-0.93 °C per decade) from 1999-2018. In spring, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) cooling rate reached -1.84 °C per decade. The cyclonic conditions in the Amundsen Sea from a low pressure system and anticyclone in the Drake Passage and in the northern Antarctic Peninsula from a high pressure system promote the prevalence of cold and dry southwesterly wind over the continental WAIS, causing the temperature decreasing trend. In summer, the positive sea ice concentration trend for the 1999–2018 period over the Weddell Sea amplifies the effects of the cyclonic conditions on the cooling on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Of 28 CMIP6 models, none captured a cooling trend – especially of this amplitude – for this region. This modeling failure “implies substantial uncertainties in future temperature projections of CMIP6 models on the WAIS.”

 

The Cost of Net Zero and the Energy Transition in Australia

ARC Research published a study of the cost of Australia to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. The author wrote “It is imperative for decision-makers and the public to understand all relevant costs before committing to net zero by 2050, so that they can pursue well-informed, thoughtful policies that endeavour to steward the environment while also providing access to affordable energy.”  The summary says that Australia will need to spend A$9 trillion over the next 40 years to decarbonize all sectors through mass electrification. Australia would need 500 gigawatt hours of battery storage. Natural gas would still be needed as backup when there is a lack of wind and solar power. Australia exports approximately three times the amount of energy that it consumes. Replacing this energy with net zero energy would cost about A$7 trillion, giving a total cost of A$16 trillion (C$14 trillion). The costs assume a seven-hour storage capacity for batteries and a 15-hour storage capacity for pumped hydro. Pumped hydro would provide only approximately 10% of the required power capacity for short-term storage. The amount of natural gas needed for firming (backing up wind and solar) exceeds the current capacity. The natural gas generating station may sit idle 95% of the time but the full capital costs must be paid by the customers. It is assumed that carbon capture and storage would increase from 1.6 Mt/yr to 150 Mt/yr. The current CO₂ emissions are 391 Mt/yr. Australia’s GDP in 2022 was A$2.70 trillion, so the transition would represent 5.9 times its annual GDP.

 

Hansen’s Latest Overheated Global Warming Claims

James Hansen’s latest paper titled “Global warming in the pipeline” has received heavy criticism by Michael Mann, Willis Eschenbach and Nic Lewis. Michael Mann says that when net CO₂ emission reach near zero, global warming stops, contradicting Hansen’s notions that there are decades of committed surface warming after emissions reach zero.  Hansen warns us of a “predicted post-2010 accelerated warming rate”. Eschenbach calculated the acceleration over that last 50 years and the 50-year trailing acceleration from two surface datasets back to 1900. There has been both acceleration and deceleration in the rate of temperature change over the last 170 years. Since about 1990 the 50-year trailing acceleration has been decreasing and the record shows about zero acceleration over the last 50 years.

Nic Lewis criticizes Hansen’s high new estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of 4.8 °C.  This is way above his previous estimate of 3.0 °C, which is also the IPCC’s best estimate. Hansen’s ECS estimate is based on the transition from the last glacial maximum (LGM) some 20,000 years ago to the preindustrial Holocene. Hansen assumes a 7.0 °C rise in global mean surface temperature (GMST) between the LGM and preindustrial Holocene that comes from the Osman et al 2021. Lewis had previously published an article that was heavily critical of that study. It used only sea surface temperature (SST) proxies and is based on a single climate model that simulates an unusually cold LGM state. Lewis says that the SST proxies implied a LGM to preindustrial GMST change of about 4.5 °C which is much lower than the 7.0 °C assumed by Hansen. Hansen also referenced a study by Seltzer et al 2021 that estimated a 5.8 °C warming, but that was limited to land 45°S–35°N, so does not represent GMST transition change. Lewis says that recent Annan et al 2022 study produces a much more reliable estimate of the GMST of 4.5 °C. Hansen also used too low estimate of the total Holocene to LGM forcing difference which was only 64% of best estimate adopted in Lewis 2023. Hansen seems to be cherry picking as he does not even mention any of several studies that give much lower transition warming than his chosen value.

 

CliSci # 397                                        2023-10-24

 

Whydrogen? Expanded Use for Hydrogen Are Narrower Than Advertised

Michael Cembalset of J.P. Morgan wrote an article that is critical of the enthusiasm for expanding the use of green hydrogen. He wrote “while there might be opportunities to replace some existing “brown/grey” hydrogen with “green” hydrogen, the amounts are likely to be small given the energy intensity of electrolysis; and the new use cases will evolve very slowly, if at all.”  Brown hydrogen is made using coal and gray hydrogen is made using natural gas, both without capturing the greenhouse gases. Green hydrogen is made by electricity from renewable sources. Many hydrogen projects have been cancelled as the costs and efficiencies became clearer. About 2% of global primary energy is now converted into hydrogen. Essentially all hydrogen is now created from fossil fuels without carbon capture. It is used mostly to produce ammonia for fertilizer, to reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuel and to produce methanol. Cembalset says that replacing U.S. brown or grey hydrogen with green electolyzed hydrogen would take all current U.S. wind and solar generation. Only 0.04% of manufactured hydrogen is made using electricity. Blending green hydrogen in existing natural gas pipelines results in very limited CO₂ reductions at a very high cost of $500/ton of CO₂. Hydrogen in the gas pipeline system would cause embrittlement which degrades the pipelines, values and compressors. If green hydrogen is used to replace brown hydrogen in oil refining, it would offset just 2% of global emissions. Hydrogen powered shipping and aviation is unlikely due to the low energy density. An airplane could hold 5.6 times more jet fuel than pressurized hydrogen at 700 bars of pressure (10,150 psi). The size of hydrogen gas storage tanks on ships might need to be very large. Green ammonia produced from green hydrogen is a possible solution as it can be liquefied at -33 °C (rather than -253 °C for liquid hydrogen).  Unfortunately, the overall efficiency of the energy conversions is around half of that for internal combustion engines. The overall efficiency of hydrogen in road vehicles is about 23%.

 

Polar Bear Researchers Hiding Significant Increase in Southern Hudson Bay Numbers

Susan Crockford wrote on her blog “Last December, researchers vigorously promoted a possible 27% decline in Western Hudson Bay (WH) polar bear abundance but kept hidden the fact that adjacent Southern Hudson Bay (SH) numbers increased by 30% over the same period.” The news media was told of the WH population decline by press release based on a survey that wasn’t made public. This science by press release is rightfully considered unethical. Crockford recently received both the WH and the SH from the Nunavut government which were published at almost the same time. The WH survey report shows a decline from 842 (range 562-1121) in 2016 to 618 (range 385-852) in 2021. However, the decline was not statistically significant. The media reported the decline as “polar bears vanishing”, “polar bears…in sharp decline,” and “polar bears disappearing fast.” The abundance of adult male bears remained unchanged but abundance of adult female and subadult bears declined.

Crockford wrote “Notably, between 2016 and 2021, the estimated abundance of SH increased by 223 bears while that of WH decreased by 224. Changes in both subpopulations, at least between 2016 and 2021, could therefore be accounted for by movement of WH bears into SH.” A biopsy study found 22% of bears formerly sampled in WH were found in SH in 2021, but these were predominantly adult male bears. A large movement of WH females and subadults into SH in20212 cannot explain the decline in WH and increase in SH bear numbers. Crockford wrote “However, observations by others (including the authors of the SH report) indicate the decline couldn’t have been caused by poor sea ice conditions over the last five years because WH ice from 2017-2020 was better than it had been for decades.

 

Mummified Penguins from 5,000 Years Ago Found in Antarctica

Scientists recently found on the shores of Antarctica the ancient preserved remains of penguins that have remained remarkably fresh thanks to the chilly conditions. Several ancient penguin boneyards were discovered along the Ross Sea in eastern Antarctica. Along with the bones researchers found several carcasses poking out of the melting snow that “appeared to be fresh”. Radiocarbon dating revealed that they were extremely old, ranging from 5,000 to 800 years ago. “The bodies had effectively been turned into natural mummies thanks to the sub-zero temperatures that stopped microorganisms from decomposing the bodies … The last time the site was occupied by penguins neatly ties into the period between the Medieval Warm Period (800–1300 CE) and the onset of the Little Ice Age (1300 CE) when average summer surface temperatures were around –2°C colder than today in the Ross Sea.”  The study shows that the Antarctic coastal region was warmer in the past when CO₂ level were much lower than now.

 

A Climate Conversation

The film, "A Climate Conversation", takes an even-handed and scientific approach to the question of man-made climate change and its perceived significance for life on Earth. The film can be viewed on the film’s website or directly on YouTube. A Climate Conversation rejects the climate of extremism in favor of a constructive debate on climate change. Devised and produced by geophysicist Walter Johnson and filmmaker Colton Moyer, “A Climate Conversation” offers viewers a welcome opportunity to reach a consensus based on shared values of environmentalism and humanitarian compassion. The film features scientists and economists with deep expertise in the subject of climate change. In addition to Johnson, the film features Ken Gregory, director of the Friends of Science, Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO₂ Coalition and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC, and Ronald Stein, Founder of PTS Advance and author of four books on the economics of clean energy. Radio host Kim Monson of The Kim Monson Show moderates the film. In plain English, Kim asks the most elemental questions at the core of the climate debate. The film was funded by Walter Johnson.  The film was screened at Lakewood, near Denver, Colorado on September 28. A panel conversation featuring all the subject matter experts who appeared in the film followed the screening. “A Climate Conversation” made its debut on Newsmax on October 15^th, 2023.

 

IPCC's Large Error; Identifying RCP8.5 as a Baseline Scenario

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the importance of the large error the IPCC made in AR5 of identifying the RCP8.5 as the baseline greenhouse gas emissions scenario. In order to project the future we need some sense of where we are headed if we don’t change course. These are called baseline, reference and business as usual scenarios. Alternative futures are projected with various policy interventions.  The difference between the two would show the consequences of the policy interventions. Pielke wrote “At the time the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were published, they included three scenarios that could represent emission developments in the absence of climate policy: RCP4.5, RCP6 and RCP8.5, described as, respectively, low, medium and high end scenarios in the absence of strong climate policy. However — and here is where a major and consequential blunder was made by the IPCC — the IPCC AR5 in 2013 identified only RCP8.5 as a baseline scenario.” Of course, researchers in the broader climate community who subsequently used scenarios in their research identified RCP8.5 as the baseline or business as usual scenario because the IPCC said so!

However, the IPCC said in AR6 “High-end scenarios (like RCP8.5) can be very useful to explore high-end risks of climate change but are not typical ‘business-as-usual’ projections and should therefore not be presented as such.” Peilke lists 10 example from the IPCC AR6 report where RCP8.5 was identified explicitly as a business as usual scenario. “In the real world, there is today a broad consensus that a ‘current policies’ emissions trajectory is tracking below RCP4.5 [graph], meaning the RCP4.5 is likely no longer an appropriate baseline. Rather little-used scenarios such as SSP2-3.4 might offer a more appropriate baseline in 2023.

 

Arctic Sea Ice: the Canary in the Coal Mine

Greg Goodman says “With over a decade and a half since the IPCC AR4, it is instructive to see how the ‘run away melting’ of Arctic sea ice is progressing.” Inspired by the release of IPCC’s AR4 in 2007, the media told us that Arctic sea ice was “the canary in the coal mine”, the harbinger of the catastrophic human-caused climate change.  “In 2007 Al Gore was famously saying (unnamed) scientists had told him there may be no more Arctic ice at all in summer by as early as 2013.” Late summer Artic sea ice extent declined to a record low minimum in 2012 leading to claims it was “worse than we thought”. It is well known that melting sea ice causes a positive albedo feedback as less ice allows more solar energy entering the sea. However, less ice also results in more conductive heat loss since ice is a good insulating barrier, more evaporative heat loss due to more open water exposed to strong winds, and more radiative heat loss due to water’s high emissivity. This graph shows that up to 2012, the sea ice extent was indeed reducing significantly and at an accelerating rate. However, the record since 2012 shows a very different outcome. The 2023 sea ice minimum on 18/19 September was indistinguishable from that of 2007 when the hysteria began. The linear trend since 2007 is indistinguishable from zero (-0.17% per year). Goodman concludes “More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.”

 

Can We Trust projections of AMOC Weakening based on Climate Models that Cannot Reproduce the Past?

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a crucial element of the Earth's climate system, is projected to weaken over the course of the 21^th century. The latest IPCC report puts the likelihood of such a weakening as ‘very likely’.  The paper published by The Royal Society looks at the difference in the 20^th century evolution of the AMOC based on observational data and model data from climate model ensembles.  The abstract says “We show that both the magnitude of the trend in the AMOC over different time periods and often even the sign of the trend differs between observations and climate model ensemble mean, with the magnitude of the trend difference becoming even greater when looking at the CMIP6 ensemble compared to CMIP5. We discuss possible reasons for this observation-model discrepancy and question what it means to have higher confidence in future projections than historical reproductions.”

Our confidence in future climate projections of climate models depends largely on their ability to model the past climate. The challenge facing the AMOC community is either to reconcile the differences between climate models and observations or to better understand the reasons for deviation. Only with improved agreement and convergence will future IPCC reports be able to move from assessments of low confidence in this crucial climate variable. Low confidence in the past should mean lower confidence for the future!

 

CliSci # 396                                        2023-10-07

 

Break Free from Climate Tyranny: Evidence over Ideology

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How Trees Promote Cloud Formation

Researchers have identified so-called sesquiterpenes—gaseous hydrocarbons that are released by plants—as being a major factor in cloud formation.  In controlled laboratory experiments performed with the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) chamber at CERN, the researchers found that sesquiterpenes react very quickly with ozone and form new particles that grow into condensation nuclei. A Phys.com news article says “To form the droplets that make up clouds, water vapor needs condensation nuclei, solid or liquid particles on which to condense. These are provided by a wide variety of aerosols, tiny solid or liquid particles between 0.1 and 10 micrometers in diameter, which are produced and released into the air both by nature and by human activity. … about half the condensation nuclei are actually formed in the air when different gaseous molecules combine and turn into solids, a phenomenon that experts call ‘nucleation’ or ‘new particle formation’. To begin with, such particles are tiny, barely larger than a few nanometers, but over time they can grow through the condensation of gaseous molecules and then serve as condensation nuclei.”

The researchers discovered the enormous effect of sesquiterpenes when they added it to the chamber with a suspension of only isoprenes and monoterpenes, which are two other gases emitted by plants. “Adding just two percent doubled the rate of new particle formation.” Sesquiterpenes form ten times more particles than other organic substances at equivalent concentrations. The scientists suggest that sesquiterpenes along with isoprenes and monoterpenes should be included in future climate models to make their predictions of clouds more accurate. As the air continues to get fewer aerosols from human-caused pollutants, these natural emissions will become more important for cloud formation. Increasing CO₂ concentrations are increasing the trees’ emission of these gases via CO₂ fertilization which have the effect of increasing cloud cover. This is a negative feedback that offsets the small CO₂ warming effect.

 

New Climate Model Shows Low Climate Sensitivity to CO₂

Researcher Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer have published a new paper that describes a new 1-D time-dependent climate model driven by observations, rather than theory, that gives a best estimate of the climate sensitivity to CO2 far lower than most 3-D Earth system climate models.  A news article about the paper says “Spencer and Christy's climate model, based upon objective measured data, found carbon dioxide does not have as big of an effect of warming of the atmosphere when compared with other climate models.” The model uses variety of observational datasets of warming between 1970 and 2021 of the deep ocean and land. The model accounts for heat storage in deeper layers of land, which other climate models ignore. A critical advantage of the 1D model is that it conserves energy. The 3-D models used by the IPCC do not conserve energy so they are not useful for making forecasts of climate change. The paper says “In response to two different radiative forcing scenarios, a full range of three model free parameters are evaluated to produce fits to a range of observed surface temperature trends.” The biggest uncertainty in the scenarios is the aerosol forcing. The emissions scenarios used are the new SSP2-4.5 and the older RCP6.

The 1-D model was run thousands of times with different combinations of climate sensitivity and two heat transfer coefficients to match with observations (1970 to 2021). The model gives frequency distribution of effective climate sensitivity (EffCS) for land and oceans separately, which are then combined to give a global average. Assuming that all of the observed warming was due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols, the best estimate global EffCS is 1.86 °C for SSP2-4.5 and 2.49 °C for the RCP6 scenario. The new SSP2-45 scenario gives the better EffCS estimate as it has updated aerosol forcings.

The period 1970 to 2021 was also affected by the urban heat island effect (UHIE) on land, the millennium scale warming from the Little Ice Age and the AMO cycle. The global surface temperature trend over the period was 0.183 °C/decade, or 0.93 °C. I estimate that the global UHIE from 1980 to 2021 was 0.168 °C and the millennium cycle contributed was 0.043 °C from their trends given here.  Subtracting these two warming sources from the surface temperature trend gives a net human caused warming of 0.72 °C. This reduces the EffCS from 1.86 °C to 1.44 °C. If the positive phase of the AMO contributed to the warming, this would further reduce the EffCS.

 

Improved Air Quality Has Accelerated Global Warming

An international research team used satellite data to show that concentrations of pollutant particles have decrease significantly since the year 2000. The aerosols of pollutant particles reflect sunlight, create more clouds by forming condensation nuclei and increase the reflectivity of clouds. The IPCC estimates that the presence of aerosols caused the climate to be 0.5 °C cooler in 2019 than without them.  The reduction of aerosols began in the 1970s and has contributed to significant warming since then.

 

Warming 1895-2023 in U.S. Cities Exaggerated by 100%

Dr. Roy Spencer continues to work on a paper about the urban heat island effect (UHIE). He used many thousands of closely-spaced station pairs from NOAA’s GHCN monthly dataset to compute how temperatures between stations change with population density. Spencer wrote “It is interesting that the spatial (inter-station temperature difference) UHI effect is always stronger in the homogenized GHCN data than in the raw version of those data in Fig. 1. The very fact that there is a strong urban warming signal in the homogenized data necessitates that there must be a UHI impact on trends in those data. This is because the urban stations have grown substantially in the last 130 years.”  Spencer calculated a UHIE-corrected estimate of temperature changes by subtracting the UHIE from the area-average yearly summertime temperature anomalies. The result: “The UHI influence averaged across all stations is modest: 24% of the trend, 1895-2023.” The modest UHIE is because the U.S. network is dominated by rural stations. Spencer wrote “But for the average “suburban” (100-1,000 persons per sq. km) station, UHI is 52% of the calculated temperature trend, and 67% of the urban station trend (>1,000 persons per sq. km). This means the warming has been exaggerated in U.S. cities by at least a factor of 2 (100%).”

 

Update on Offshore Wind Projects off the U.S. East Coast

The Biden Administration ‘net zero’ plans include the construction of 30 gigawatts (GW) of new offshore wind capacity by 2030. Francis Menton provided an update of the planned wind projects. There are now only seven wind turbines operating off the U.S. east coast. Since wind power is intermittent, the 30 GW of planned wind farms would produce the equivalent of 9 to 12 GW of electrical generation. New York State plans to issue permits for 9 GW of wind capacity of which 4.5 GW is under active development. The projects were approved with offtake price agreements ranging from $108 to $118/MWh.  The developers of four offshore wind farms in New York are seeking average price rises of almost 50% on their offtake agreements. They want $140 to $190/MWh. These costs exclude power backup and energy storage costs. Natural Gas plants typically sell electricity at $50/MWh. Menton says let’s hope that none of these wildly uneconomic offshore wind projects ever get built.

 

Snowy Pumped Storage Burgeoning Costs

The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in the Kosciuszko national park in Australia was originally touted by the Turnbull government in 2017 as costing A$2 billion. Snowy Hydro’s two main energy projects, an underground pumped-hydro power station and a pipeline, have had their completion costs increase to almost A$13 billion as delays, technical difficulties and rising costs for equipment and staff take their toll. The current estimate is more than six times the initial estimate, and more overruns are likely. The project is designed to operate for up to 175 hours of temporary supply. That cost excludes the $5 billion HumeLink project that will connect it to the wider grid. The project is more than twice as large as any other pumped hydro venture in the world. The project will generate up to 2 gigawatts of power when flowing water downhill through 27 km of tunnels between two existing dams. It is expected to provide 350 gigawatt hours of energy storage. Including the HumeLing project, it will provide storage at a capital cost of A$51/kWh (C$45/kWh) of electricity storage.  This huge cost doesn’t even include the cost of the two dams and reservoirs that were previously built. 

 

CliSci # 395                                        2023-09-15

 

Break Free from Climate Tyranny: Evidence over Ideology

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Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850-2018)

The Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) research group published a paper described in their blog post that shows current estimates of global warming are contaminated by urban warming biases. The study also suggests that the solar activity estimates considered in the most recent reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming since the 19th century. The blog post states “In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850.  The authors compared an estimate of solar activity often used by the scientific community to the rural temperature data and they found that most of the warming and cooling trends can be explained by changing solar activity. Willie Soon and his 36 colleagues found that when using only rural data, the temperature changes shows a more cyclical behavior and less overall warming than datasets that included urban data. The abstract says “The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century.”

 

Do CMIP5 Models Skillfully Match Actual Warming?

A comparison of the global mean surface temperatures (GMST) from 1970 to 2020 to the climate models from the fifth Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP5) historical and projection shows good agreement. At first look, this appears to contradict the statement “The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC“ in CLINTEL’s ‘World Climate Declaration’.  Nic Lewis published an article with the subtitle “Why matching of CMIP5 model-simulated to observed warming does not indicate model skill”. Lewis wrote that the good agreement “is perhaps unsurprising given that modelers knew when developing and tuning their models what the observed warming had been over most of this period.”  Climate models on average have higher climate sensitivity than indicated by empirical observations, even when assuming that none of the observed warming was caused by the urban heat island effect or natural climate change. The set of CMIP6 climate models used for the 2021 IPCC working group 1 report are even more sensitive to increasing greenhouse gases than the CMIP5 models.  The match of GMST to the climate model average would indicate model skill only if changes in the climate forcings of greenhouse gases and aerosols match the actual changes in those climate forcings. The climate forcings changes are the effect on global radiative flux at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere that causes a temperature change.

Lewis compares the effective radiative forcing (ERF) given in Annex III of the IPCC AR6 report to that used in the climate models over 1970-2020. From 1970 to 1988 the models’ ERF was too high, and after 2007 it was too low. The linear trend change of the actual ERF over the period was 2.66 W/m² while that of the climate models was 1.92 W/m². That is, the models used only 72% of the actual climate forcing to fudge the surface temperatures to roughly match the observed warming. Based on the first and last decade, the ratio of actual to model forcing is 1.46.  The discrepancy is largely due to the models’ incorrect aerosol forcing both before 1988 and after 2007. The models’ over-sensitivity was canceled out by increasing the ERF much less than the IPCC estimated ERF increase.  

 

Electric Vehicles Exposed to Saltwater Can Burst Into Flames

Fire authorities are warming owners of electric vehicles that if their electric vehicle comes into contact with saltwater it can trigger combustion in the lithium-ion battery. Recent flooding caused by hurricane Idalia has created an electric vehicle fire risk in Florida according to this article. “The issue with saltwater is that even if the water dries off, the residue can remain, potentially triggering electrical connections within the EV battery, which eventually sparks into a fire.” Two Tesla EVs in Dunedin, Florida caught fire due to the flooding. This wasn’t an unforeseen occurrence. The article explains “When water enters an EV battery, a short circuit can get triggered, causing the cell to discharge energy and heat. This can result in a “thermal runaway,” which refers to a situation in which the heat spreads from one cell to another—leading to an outburst.”

 

The Australian National Grid Manager Admits Blackouts Are Coming

Joanne Nova wrote an article explaining and critiquing a new report published by Australia’s national grid manager (AEMO) about the 10-year reliability outlook of the nation’s electricity market.  Nova wrote “They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.” The lead graph (figure 1) of the report titled “Expected unserved energy” shows unserved energy percentages going off scale for the provinces New South Wales and Victoria by 2027. Off scale is twice the amount of blackout that could be considered acceptable by the reliability standard. AEMO is now calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” which includes offers of industries to shut down when electrical power is lacking and asking for “small onsite generators”. Queensland and South Australia blackouts goes off the chart in 2030 and this is only the “central scenario”. AEMO is forecasting contributions from “consumer energy resources” which means consumers provide electricity to the grid from their home batteries and electric vehicles. The forecast relies on Demand Side Participation (DSP) which means customers who are paid to not use electricity. Perhaps they go on vacation to another country. An increase of DSP is driven by the increasing cost of electricity. Nova wrote “Only the wealthy will have the convenience of electricity whenever they want it. The underclass will be cooking on barbeques, and getting up earlier each day to program the washing machine and set up the timers for the scooters.”

 

Solar Activity: Cycle 25 Surpasses Cycle 24

Javier Vinós wrote an article that provides an update of the progress of solar cycle 25 and explains a compelling theory of how changes in solar activity affect climate. Solar cycle 25 is less than four years into cycle but has already surpassed the highest monthly sunspot number of solar cycle 24. The relationship between solar activity and climate is complex. Vinós wrote “A recent hypothesis is that the solar signal modulates heat and moisture transport to the Arctic, which explains its relatively small effect during a single solar cycle. However, when an anomaly in solar activity persists over several cycles, as it did during the 70-year modern solar maximum, its effect accumulates and has a large impact on the planet’s energy budget.” Changes in the total solar irradiance are not large enough to account for global mean temperature changes over either the 11-year solar cycle or long-term cycles. Temperature changes over the increasing activity portion of solar cycles reveals that some regions experience warming while other show cooling and that pattern is like the warming observed between 1976 and 2000. Increased solar activity leads to increased ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. This leads to a more stable polar vortex which causes a positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation in the winter and a more circular jet stream. This traps cold Arctic air in the Arctic region leading to warmer winters in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes and less heat is transported to the Arctic that otherwise would be radiated to space. This process has the effect of amplifying the warming effect of changes of solar irradiance. Vinós wrote “Remarkably, the climate patterns observed over the past 2000 years are consistent with a millennial cycle of solar activity … Paleoclimatic evidence strongly suggests that this mechanism serves as the primary driver of climate change on centennial to millennial time scales.”

 

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

Climate scientist Patrick Brown wrote “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I know the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”  CliSci # 394 showed that the global annual wildfire burned area has declined from 3% to 2.2% from the early 2000s to 2022. Climate change doesn’t contribute to global burned area but it might contribute to wildfires in some regions during some periods. Brown says “while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus. So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it. … I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and reviewers of the journals I was targeting.”

 

CliSci # 394                                        2023-08-30

 

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Climate Models Don’t Conserve Mass or Energy

Dr. Roy Spencer discusses a paper which describes significant problems in climate models regarding the conservation of mass and energy. The paper’s abstract says “Model drift tends to be much larger in time-integrated ocean heat and freshwater flux, net top-of-the-atmosphere radiation (netTOA) and moisture flux into the atmosphere (evaporation minus precipitation), indicating a substantial leakage of mass and energy in the simulated climate system.” Spencer wrote “These represent potentially serious problems when it comes to our reliance on climate models to guide energy policy. It boggles my mind that conservation of mass and energy were not requirements of all models before their results were released decades ago.” These errors arise from the mathematical formulas used to compute changes in all quantities between gridcells in the horizontal and vertical as well as from one time step to the next. “Miniscule errors in these calculations can accumulate over time, especially if physically impossible negative mass values are set to zero, causing ‘leakage’ of mass.” The models are run for hundreds of year while the errors accumulate over time. The paper says that the drift in moisture flux into the atmosphere (i.e., evaporation minus precipitation) is “large, approaching/exceeding the magnitude of current trends for many models.”

 

Oceans Retain Methane: Very Little Danger of Methane Reaching Surface

Pierre Gosselin wrote on his blog “A Nature study finds there’s very little risk that global warming would lead to more methane escaping from the oceans into the atmosphere. Global warming alarmists have often used the scenario of increased methane in the atmosphere accelerating warming and climatic change. But a recent study appearing in Nature, ‘Negligible atmospheric release of methane from decomposing hydrates in mid-latitude oceans’, dumps a lot cold water on this scenario.” There are large deposits of naturally occurring methane hydrate within marine sediments. Methane hydrate deposits are believed to be a larger hydrocarbon resource than all of the world's oil, natural gas and coal resources combined. Gosselin says “There’s a fear that these ice-like deposits could melt and be released into the atmosphere if the oceans warmed. The researchers looked at the concentration and natural radiocarbon content of methane dissolved in the water column from the seafloor to the sea surface at seep fields along the US Atlantic and Pacific margins.” The paper’s abstract states “For shallower water columns, where the seafloor is not within the hydrate stability zone, we do document seep CH4 in some surface-water samples. However, measurements in deeper water columns along the US Atlantic margin reveal no evidence of seep CH4 reaching surface waters when the water-column depth is greater than 430 ± 90 m.  Gas hydrates exist only at water depths greater than ~550 m in this region, suggesting that the source of methane escaping to the atmosphere is not from hydrate decomposition.”

 

21st Century Global Disasters

Roger Pielke Jr. wrote on his blog “A new peer-reviewed paper out this week by Alimonti and Mariani asks whether global disasters have increased. Their answer is that they have not.” The authors analyze trends of natural disasters reported since 1900 in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).  As reported elsewhere, they conclude that an upward trend through the 20^th century is “largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events, with the EM-DAT dataset now regarded as relatively complete since ∼2000.” Pielke presents a graph showing global weather and climate disasters from 2000 to 2022. The best fit trend line indicates a declining trend of disasters. Pielke wrote “The 2022 count will be just about the average of the past decade and about 10% less than annual disaster counts of the first decade of this century.” The paper’s abstract says “The above result sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO and UNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.” The UN is spreading false information. Pielke asks “When are journalists going to start reporting the facts about disasters and call out misinformation?”

 

Climate Modelling in Australia

This blog article by Rick Willoughby examines how well the Australian climate model produced by the CSIRO organization simulates the important El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), or more specifically, the sea surface temperature (SST) in the central Pacific identified as the Nino 3.4 region.  ENSO has a dramatic effect on the Australian climate. The actual measured SST of the Nino 3.4 region has a downward trend of 0.63 °C/century from 1982 to 2022 and an average temperature of 27 °C. The CSIRO model runs using the very high emissions scenario RCP8.5 used for the 5^th assessment report (AR5) give SST as shown in Chart 3. “Chart 3 has hindcasting back to 1980 where the average is 3 °C below the measured average at that time but ends up averaging 29 °C by 2100 to give a linear upward trend of 4.48 °C/century.  The model produces a warming trend from 1980 to 2023 of 1.85 °C/century compared with measured cooling trend of 0.63 °C/century.”

The most recent computer model runs used for the AR6 using the very high emissions scenario SSP5-8.5 give SST as shown in Chart 4. Willoughby wrote “The overlap with measured data has a warming trend of 1.72 °C/century, which is in the opposite direction to the cooling trend of 0.63 °C/century with measured data.  The starting temperature of 26 °C is now closer to the measured average of 27 °C while the temperature averages 31°C by 2100.” The model predicts sustained temperatures about 30 °C which is physically impossible. This maximum temperature limit is well known and is stated in the scientific literature dating to the 1970s. Higher temperatures cause a great increase in evaporation and an increase in clouds which prevents further temperature increases. The CSIRO modelling team is “deeply embedded in the corruption of science evident in climate models they claim are useful but are clearly not.” 

 

Flood Volumes Decline with Global Warming

This paper published in Advances in Water Resources reports that in most of the world, flood volume declines as temperatures rise. This result contrasts with the usual media narrative that global warming will result in more severe flooding.  The researchers used global flow data from non-urban catchments to investigate the sensitivity of flood volumes to changes in surface air temperatures. The paper’s abstract says “Our results indicate that most of the world shows decreases in flood volume with rising temperature for frequent events (50th percentile in this study) and a lesser decrease for rarer events.” Large catchment in the tropics greater than 1000 km² in area are most sensitive to temperature changes, where flood volumes decrease by 5% to 10% for each °C of temperature rise for frequent flood events. Smaller catchment of less than 1000 km² generally show less than 5% decrease in flood volumes per °C temperature rise. Only in very rare, severe foods (only 0.01% of floods) in small catchment locations are likely to be exposed to more severe flooding. The paper is pay-walled, but a portion of it is here from a blog post by Kenneth Richards.

 

Offshore Wind Farms are Altering Marine Ecosystems

A research paper and press release report that wind farms have a significant effect on airflows and sea currents. Pierre Gosselin wrote “Wind turbines are causing climate change. It’s ironic: Man is changing the environment and climate in order to prevent change.” The researchers performed a computer simulation of the effects of wind farms on ocean currents and winds in the North Sea. Wind turbines represent obstacles for water and air. The effects are of great importance with regard to the planning of future offshore wind farms. As the wind turbines extract energy from the wind they cause wake vortices, reduced wind speeds and increased air turbulence. Under stable atmospheric conditions, the wind speed deficits spread up to 70 km behind the wind farms. This also influences the horizontal currents and the stratification of the water. The effects of the wake turbulence are strong enough to divert the existing currents. This results in a shift in the mean temperature and salinity distribution in the wind farm areas. The lead author said “The changes in flow and mixing are expected to affect plankton production and food web structure, and may affect the functioning of protected areas.”

 

The World Is burning Ever Less, Fire Is Ever More in the News

By Bjorn Lomborg

 

CliSci # 393                                        2023-08-14

 

Break Free of Climate Tyranny: Evidence over Ideology

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How Low-Sulphur Shipping Rules Are Affecting Global Warming

In 2020, international regulations to reduce air pollution from shipping imposed strict limits on the sulphur content of marine fuels. An article on CarbonBrief by Zeke Hausfather and Piers Forster says “Sulphur particles contained in ships’ exhaust fumes have been counteracting some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. But lowering the sulphur content of marine fuel has weakened the masking effect, effectively giving a boost to warming.” The new rules imposed by the International Maritime Organization lowered the maximum percentage of sulphur from 3.5% to 0.5% for all ships operating worldwide. This caused an abrupt decline in global sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emission of about 10%. There was a strong reduction in ship tracks due to the effects of SO₂ on cloud formation at the same time. Less ship tracks allows more sunlight in to the warm the sea surface. The sea surface temperature averaged over 60°S-60° N during the first week of August 2023 was about 0.3 °C higher than a year ago according to ClimateReanalyser.org. The authors estimate the reduction of SO2 emissions by ships may increase the radiative forcing by 0.079 W/m2 over the Earth, but this is very uncertain. This could cause about 0.05 °C of additional warming in 30 years. Half of that warming would be in the first four years.

Other factors that are likely contributing to the recent increase in sea surface temperatures include a massive eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga in the south Pacific, an unusual absence of Saharan dust and a growing El Niño. See CliSci #392 for a discussion of the Hunga Tonga volcano.

 

The Water Vapour Feedback from Two Reanalysis Datasets

I wrote an article to compare the water vapour feedback as calculated from two reanalysis datasets to the value assessed by the IPCC in its recent climate report. Here is the abstract of the article.

Water vapour is the most important and abundant greenhouse gas. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), water vapour acts as a feedback by increasing its quantity in the atmosphere in response to a warming initiated by an increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases, thereby greatly amplifying the initial warming. Here we use temperature, pressure and relative humidity data of 12 atmospheric layers obtained from two state-of-the-art global reanalysis datasets and results from a line-by-line radiative code to calculate the water vapour feedback. The results suggest that the water vapour feedback is about 66% of the IPCC’s assessed value; 67% using the ERA5 dataset and 65% using the NECP2 dataset. We show that a change of water vapour mass in the 100-150 mbar pressure atmospheric layer causes a change in radiative forcing that is 284 times greater than in the 1000-1013 mbar near-surface layer. We determine the water vapour feedback by summing the contributions of 12 layers. The global surface temperature of the 1980s is 0.66 °C higher in the NECP2 reanalysis than in ERA5. The surface warming trend from 1980 to 2022 from ERA5 is 14.6% higher than from NECP2. The relative humidity values in the Polar Regions are much different between the two datasets. ERA5 gives the relative humidity at the 250 mbar pressure level at the South Pole at 2.5% while NECP2 says it is 64%. At the 400 mbar pressure level, the relative humidity discrepancies between the datasets are 58 percentage points at the South Pole and 47 percentage points at North Pole. Large humidity discrepancies between the datasets and water vapour feedback estimates show that climate science is far from settled and the projections of future warming are exaggerated.

 

Betsy McCaughey: The Zero Carbon Flimflam

Betsy McCaughey, PhD, is an author, columnist, a constitutional scholar, a public policy expert, and a former Lt. Governor of New York State. She wrote this article for the Heartland Institute that begins with “When politicians go green, vowing zero carbon, the public should see red.”  Many politicians are making reckless promises to transition entirely to renewables — wind and solar — within a few years. She says the public will get clobbered with huge electric bills, blackouts, unaffordable car prices and layoffs in many industries. Some 10 million New Yorkers who rely on Con Edison for their electricity were warned last week that their electric bills could double by 2025. Energy expert Daniel Turner said that in New York, wind and solar will fail to produce enough power to meet the public’s needs leading to blackouts. The “net zero” mantra has zero chance of working. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation cautions that fossil fuels are being removed from electric grids too fast to meet electrical needs. The Electric Power Research Institute reports that technology does not yet exist to produce an adequate, dependable supply of electricity without fossil fuels. Extreme fuel mileage standards will force most consumers to buy a very costly electric vehicle or settle for a clunker instead of a new car. China controls 85% of the metals needed to make EV batteries. Industry experts show moving to net zero would cause severe, self-inflicted hardships.

 

The Biggest Environmental Scandal in the World: Right Whale Deaths

“Scientists, journalists, and the wind industry are behind the imminent extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whales. They should be ashamed of themselves.” writes Journalist Michael Shellenberger. There have been at least 60 whale deaths on the USA East Coast since December 1, 2022. “The North Atlantic right whales are headed for extinction. Their population has dropped to 340. There have been 200 humpback strandings and 98 strandings of right whales since 2017.” The non-profit Clean Ocean Action found that the only factor that had recently changed was offshore wind exploitation. Shipping and fishing hadn’t changed. “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has, bizarrely and cruelly, given the wind industry 11 [incidental harassment authorizations] (IHA), including for 169 critically endangered right whales.” These are permits to harass whales. Industrial wind projects “could have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species,” warned a top US government (NOAA) scientist last year. “Additional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species [right whales] that is already experiencing rapid decline (30% in the last 10 years).” Shellenberger wrote “The wind industry spent years bribing the US government, scientific organizations, aquariums, and the news media to lie to the American people. Wind energy companies and their foundations have donated nearly $4.7 million to at least three dozen major environmental organizations.”

 

Wildfires Are Declining as Climate Changes

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a paywalled article by Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D., that explains the number of wildfires and the acreage lost to them has declined dramatically over the past few decades. This is in contrast to the near constant media report and political statement to the contrary. The WSJ article is summarized by H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.  Lomborg wrote “One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward. In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.” The area burned annually of Canada, Australia, and the United States has also declined over the last few decades. No wildfires can honestly be attributed to climate change. Forest management policies, arson and accidents have significantly contributed to recent instances of large wildfires. See Michelle Stirling’s recent video explainer on the tragic Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii wildfire.

 

CliSci # 392                                        2023-07-27

 

Break Free From Climate Tyranny: Evidence over Ideology

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Solar Activity: Cycle 25 Surpasses Cycle 24

Javier Vinós reviews the progress of solar cycle 25 and discusses the significant discrepancy between the solar effects observed in paleoclimate proxy records and modern observations. The monthly sunspot number for June 2023 reached 163.4 which is the highest number seen in over two decades. It is likely that Solar Cycle 25 activity will surpass Solar Cycle 24. Vinós wrote “Both solar cycles 24 and 25 show significantly low activity compared to the average of the last 300 years.” Numerous studies consistently identify a climate influence of approximately 0.1°C attributed to the solar cycle, which is about four times larger than expected from the slight radiative change. An amplifying mechanism is required to account for this discrepancy. The average regional temperature change over solar cycles shows some regions warming more than 1 °C while others show cooling trends. Interestingly, this pattern is like the warming observed between 1976 and 2000. The northern land area warmed more than the southern oceans. This pattern is thought to result from the effects of increased solar activity on increasing ozone levels in the ozone layer, leading to increased atmospheric temperatures. Consequently, these changes affect the speed of zonal (West/East) winds and the stability of the polar vortex. The jet stream is shifted poleward and becomes more circular during periods of high solar activity. Cold Arctic air masses are trapped in the Arctic region, leading to warmer winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Vinós wrote “This analysis shows that a large solar forcing is needed to explain both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. As a result, the IPCC hypothesis of low climate sensitivity to solar activity is shown to be incorrect.

 

Cold Causes 10 Times as Many Deaths as Hot Weather in European Cities

The authors of this study did a comprehensive mortality impact assessment due to heat and cold in European urban areas, considering geographical differences and age-specific risks. They included urban areas across Europe between Jan 1, 2000, and Dec 12, 2019, using the Urban Audit dataset of Eurostat and adults aged 20 years and older living in these areas. Across the 854 urban areas in Europe, they estimated an annual excess of 203,620 deaths attributed to cold and 20,173 attributed to heat. The paper gives the uncertainties. Cold weather causes 10.1 times as many deaths as hot weather. Results differed across Europe and age groups, with the highest effects in eastern European cities for both cold and heat. Global warming is expected to dramatically reduce total temperature-related deaths.

 

Canada is Already Net Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions

A recent paper provided estimates of carbon sinks in North America. The authors used an ensemble of 19 state-of-the-art dynamic global vegetation models to improve carbon land sink estimates and study the drivers of its variability. In Canada, the carbon sink increased from 550 MtCO₂/yr during 2000-2009 to 730 MtCO₂/yr during 2010-2019. During the same periods, Canada’s average annual emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) were 724 MtCO₂eq and 716 MtCO₂eq, respectively. The table below shows the CO₂ and GHG emissions, CO₂ sinks and the net GHG emissions.

Period	CO2 emissions	GHG emissions	CO2 sinks	GHG net emissions
	MtCO2	MtCO2eq	MtCO2	MtCO2eq
2000-2009	571	724	-550	174
2010-2019	571	716	-730	-14

Canada’s emissions have been declining while the absorption of CO₂ into land sinks has increase by 33% between the two decades. During the 2010-2019 decade, Canada’s net GHG net emissions were -14 MtCO₂eq., meaning that emissions were less than that captured by carbon land sinks. Canada has likely already surpassed net zero GHG emissions. See our June newsletter, for more information.

 

The Hunga Tonga Volcanic Eruption Warms the Earth

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) underwater volcano injected 150 megatonnes of water vapour and 0.42 MtSO₂ into the stratosphere on January 15, 2022, to altitudes up to 58 km, increasing its water content. This paper published in April 2023 says “The observations provide evidence for an unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% as compared to climatological levels. As there are no efficient sinks of water vapour in the stratosphere, this perturbation is expected to persist for several years.” The HTHH eruption is “among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era.” This paper published in July 2023 says “The majority of water vapour is confined to the Southern Hemisphere tropics.” The presence of water vapour in the stratosphere is due to the transport through volcanic clouds heating the tropopause. Our analysis shows a decrease in ozone caused by an increase in water vapour.” This paper, also published in July, says “This eruption could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the radiative forcing from the excess stratospheric H₂O.” The authors of this paper claim “that HTHH has a tangible impact of the chance of imminent 1.5 °C exceedance (increasing the chance of at least one of the next 5 years exceeding 1.5 °C by 7%)”.

 

Solar Panels Are Three to Five Times More Carbon-Intensive than IPCC Claims

New research suggests that the carbon intensity of producing solar panels is 3 to 5 times greater than that claimed by the IPCC.  This article says “Ecoinvent, the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables, has no data from China, even though it makes most of the world's solar panels.” The nonprofit Environmental Progress reports a “gaping oversight” in the assessment of solar panel carbon intensity due to the difficulty of collecting accurate information from China, especially for the purification processes used to create silicon wafers. The industry voluntarily submits the data in response to academic surveys. The carbon intensity data is confidential so it is unverifiable. The IPCC claims solar photovoltaic (PV) carbon intensity is 48 gCO₂/kWh. Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO₂/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. The solar panel carbon intensity estimates that governments depend on are based on modeling assumptions that likely have grossly under-estimated solar’s carbon emissions because they cannot get data from Chinese manufacturers. China produces 75% of the global solar PV modules and delivers over 50% of global solar PV projects. China also produces 97% of the solar wafers and 80% of polysilicon, both essential components of solar modules. The market was dominated by Japanese, US and German manufacturers unit the mid-2000s, when China’s global share of PV production surged from 14% in 2006 to 60% by 2013. China used cheap coal-fired energy and large government subsidies to gain a dominant global market share of PV production. The modelers are estimating the carbon emissions of solar production as if the panels are still made mostly in the West. Mariutti published an article “The dirty secret of the solar industry” where he states “scientists were disingenuously using European data to model the carbon intensity of Chinese solar manufacturing.”

 

Climate Alarmist War on Nitrous Oxide Threatens the Global Food Supply

An article published in American Thinker discusses the research by four prominent scientists which shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s war on nitrous oxide (N₂O) to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 threatens to cause a significant collapse in the world’s food supply. “It is not possible to maintain highly productive agriculture without nitrogen fertilizer. It’s a genuinely frightening thought that the neo-Marxists at the heart of today’s climate hysteria have chosen to attack N₂O because millions will die if governments ban nitrogen fertilizers.” N₂O is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ but N₂O is much less plentiful than CO₂ in the atmosphere. For current growth rates, the contribution of N₂O to warming is only about 6% that of all greenhouse gases. The warming rate from N₂O is about 0.064 °C per century. The scientists explain that nitrogen fertilizers are the “single most important” factor that has led to the “huge increases in agricultural productivity since the year 1950 that have eliminated the deadly famines that plagued mankind throughout recorded history.” Eliminating nitrogen fertilizers would force a return to “low output agriculture” that would “not achieve the food supply needed to support 8.5 to 10 billion people.”

CliSci # 391                                        2023-07-09

 

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Solar Radiation, Temperatures and Models

The solar radiation absorbed at the Earth’s surface is the total downward solar shortwave radiation less the reflected shortwave radiation at the surface. Willis Eschenbach produced a graph showing the relationship between the absorbed solar radiation to the global average surface temperatures from the CERES satellite data from March 2000 to February 2022. He wrote “As we’d expect given our daily experience, more sunshine raises the temperature and less sunshine lowers the temperature.” A plot of the global average monthly values indicates that global average temperatures increase by 0.22 °C per W/m² of absorbed radiation. A plot on a grid cell basis shows in the region where the absorbed solar is between 50 and 210 W/m², the trend is 0.21 °C per W/m². In areas where average absorbed solar is above about 210 W/m², increasing the absorbed sunlight doesn’t warm the surface much at all. That is because in those areas, more solar energy is converted mostly to evaporation. Willis then looked at what the models say is happening. As expected the models have done a decent job of emulation the historical temperatures. That is because the models are tuned to match the global average surface temperatures. Willis plotted the historical and projected future CMIP5 multi-model mean absorbed solar radiation. He wrote “YIKES! Temperatures are going up and absorbed sunlight is going down? … Modeled surface absorbed solar is decreasing over the historical period all the way right up to 2012, and then it immediately turns around and starts increasing.” The history ends at 2012 in the CMIP5 model runs.

I decided to check if the Canadian model has a similar behavior. This graph shows the global average Canadian model absorbed solar radiation and surface temperatures, average of 5 computer runs, from 1850 to 2100. The forecast used the RCP4.5 emissions scenario, where CO₂ emissions peak in 2040 then decline by 65% by 2080.  The modeled history shows a dramatic drop in absorbed solar radiation from 1950 to the 1980s, similar to the multi-model mean. The models are using aerosols to depress warming during the historical period to compensate for too high climate sensitivity to CO₂. In the Canadian model, absorbed solar forcing is quite constant from 2012 to 2057 then increases, contributing to the forecast warming.

 

Models or Measures of Climate Change: Why Does It Matter?

Kenneth Green wrote this article for the Fraser Institute that argues climate policy should be based on empirical evidence rather than speculative climate model forecasts. The enactment of climate rules and regulations are coercive tools of governance and they should be based on strong evidence as they force higher energy costs on all consumers.  Green wrote “the almost complete reliance on model outputs is problematic.” Model output is not evidence of anything concrete in the physical world. Green says “And in fact, computer model outputs are often at odds with actual, empirically measured reality.” He discusses climate sensitivity and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4) and AR6 both gave best estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of 3.0 °C but with different uncertainty ranges. ECS is the global average temperature change due to a doubling of CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere after allowing the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium (after ~1000 years). In their 2018 study, Nic Lewis and Judith Curry found a best estimate ECS of 1.5 °C. This divergence between modeled and empirically measured climate sensitivity shows that the climate models are running too hot.

Green says the second most important variable is the estimate of future GHG emissions by humanity. A study Bergess et al 2021 evaluates how key variable in the emissions scenarios compare with real data, including population and economic growth and energy intensity. The article says “The modeled estimates of GHG emissions, and GDP/capita are both well above actual measured data on these trends.” A study Hausefather et at 2019 state “Most of the historical climate model projections overestimated future CO₂ concentrations, some by as much as 40 ppm over current levels, with projected CO₂ concentrations increasing up to twice as fast as actually observed”.

 

Canadian Wildfire and the US Media

The US media continues to report that smoke from Canadian wildfires is darkening the skies in the United States. Most media claim that climate change is partly to blame for the size of Canada’s wildfires this season. However, the evidence shows that wildfires this year are not unusual nor caused by climate change. Long before significant fossil fuel use, smoke from Canadian wildfires created dark day many times in US history. The cause is temporary weather conditions, not climate change. Two air pressure systems combined to cause large-scale southerly air flow to the U.S.  Canada’s National Foresty Database shows declining trends for both the number of fires and area burned over the past 31 years. A study by scientists with the Canadian Forest Service attributes the decline in forest fires in Canada over the past few decades to the combined effect of CO₂ fertilization and modestly rising temperatures, which has resulted in improved soil moisture. Plants lose less water through transpiration under conditions of high CO₂ and higher temperatures, so less moisture is drawn from soil. CO₂ fertilization enhances crop yield and plant growth, but also helps to suppress forest fires!  Here is a graph I made which shows that the soil moisture content of the top 10 cm has increased in Canada by 2.0% since 1985, averaged over the fire season months of May – August. The data is from NASA’s Land Data Assimilation Systems. In the report “Researchers Detect a Global Drop in Fires,” NASA writes, “Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015, according to a new paper published in Science.”

 

How Much Warming Can We Expect in the 21st Century?

Hakon Karlsen published a discussion on climate sensitivity and emissions scenarios to make an estimate of expected warming by 2100. A study by Nic Lewis published in September 2022 (Lewis 2022) criticized a study by Sherwood et al 2020 which was very influential in the IPCC’s assessment of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) in the sixth assessment report (AR6). Another recent study, Pielke 2022, compared how well different emission scenarios matched actual emissions from 2005 to 2020 and how they matched the International Energy Agency’s projections until 2050. The study found that RCP3.4 is the most plausible emissions scenario. Not accounting for natural variability, Karlsen estimates that global average temperatures will rise by about 0.8 °C from 2023 to 2100. This estimate relies on the Lewis 2022 and the Pielke 2022 studies.  

Without feedbacks, the ECS of a doubling of CO₂ would in the long run cause about 1.2 °C global temperature rise. Karlsen provides a discussion of the major feedbacks. The cloud feedback has the largest uncertainty. The cloud feedback is the amount of radiation change due to cloud changes in response to a temperature change, which would cause a further temperature change.

The Sherwood 2020 paper used paleo evidence from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 20,000 years ago, and from the mid-Pleocene Warm Period (mPWP), about 2 million years ago. Earth’s temperature was about 6 °C colder than today during the LGM and 2 °C warmer than today during the mPWP. Climate sensitivity estimates for these periods were combined with an estimate based on the sum of individual feedbacks and an estimate based on historical temperature data over the last 150 years. Sherwood 2020 concluded that the median value of effective climate sensitivity (CS) is 3.1 °C. Sherwood estimates the ECS is 6% greater than CS.

Nic Lewis used more recent data and fixed a number of errors in the Sherwood analysis. The largest changes to the historical evidence were that Lewis assigns a high forcing from ozone and black carbon on snow and ice. Lewis estimate of CS from historical data is 2.16 °C, which is less than half the Sherwood estimate of 5.82 °C but more than Lewis 2018 estimate of 1.50 °C. From feedback analysis, Lewis substantially reduced the cloud feedback due to new 2021 study. The feedback analysis from Lewis gives a climate sensitivity of 2.21 °C, which is much less than the 3.08 °C estimated by Sherwood. The Lewis CS estimate for the paleo data based on the average of one cold and two warm periods is 2.10 °C, which is much less than the 2.77 °C estimated by Sherwood. The average of the paleo and feedback analysis is the same as the historical estimate, so Lewis overall best estimate of CS is 2.16 °C with a 5–95% range 1.55–3.2 °C. Lewis wrote in his abstract “values between 1.5 °C and 2 °C are quite plausible.”

 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Carbon Dioxide

Ron Barmby, a member of the CO₂ Coalition, wrote “The numbers since the year 2000 provide convincing evidence that increasing CO₂ has positive impacts and reducing emissions entails dire consequences.”  He says that satellite observation shows a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of this century.“  A recent study “quantified how much of that extra greening resulted in food for human consumption since 2000. “Using satellite imagery of U.S. cropland, they estimated that a 1 ppm increase in CO₂ led to an increase of 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% in yield for corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively. They also extrapolated back to 1940 and suggested that the 500% increased yield of corn and 200% increased yield of soybeans and winter wheat are largely attributable to the 100 ppm increase in CO₂ since then.” He argues that the western nation’s efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions have increased CO₂ emission, wealth and influence of totalitarian Russia and China. Between 2000 and 2020 the G7 nations lost 13.8% of the world share of GDP and China increased its share by 12% while China’s share of global emissions increased from 14% to 31%. Barmby wrote “Allowing more CO₂ emissions is better for ending world hunger, promoting world peace, and protecting global ecosystems.

 

CliSci # 390                                        2023-06-17

 

Reduced Emissions During the Pandemic Led to Increased Warming

The COVID19 lockdowns in South Asia caused a reduction of the concentration of short-lived particles in the air leading to a warmer climate according to a new study.  The researchers found that the concentrations of short-lived particles, such as sulphur and nitrogen oxides, were greatly reduced, while the concentrations of long-lived greenhouse gases remained largely unchanged. These short-lived particles have a cooling effect because they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. Measurements taken over the northern Indian Ocean revealed a 7% increase in solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, thus increasing temperatures. The results show that a complete phasing out of fossil fuel combustion in favor of renewable energy sources with zero emissions could result in warming. The lead author said “During a couple of decades, emission reductions risk leading to net climate warming due to the ‘masking’ effect of air particles, before the temperature reduction from reduced greenhouse gas emissions takes over.”

 

Climate Change Didn’t Cause Canadian Forest Fires

Many media outlets blamed Canada’s wildfire and smoke from them that polluted the air in the northeastern United States last week on climate change without citing any credible evidence. Anthony Watts wrote “Data and history show that wildfires in Canada have not increased number or severity, and that, driven by prevailing winds, smoke from Canada’s annual wildfire season has darkened U.S. skies multiple times in the past.” The New England Historical Society reports smoke from Canadian wildfires created “yellow” or “dark,” days in the eastern United States on many occasions. Data from Canada’s National Forestry Database for both the entire country as well as the province of Quebec, where many of the recent wildfires occurred, show declining trends for both the number of fires and area burned over the past 31 years as shown in Watt’s article.  A study by the Canadian Forest Service attributed the decline in forest fires in Canada over the past few decades to the combined effect of CO₂ fertilization and modestly rising temperatures, which resulted in improved soil moisture conditions. This graph shows that the soil moisture content (60°S to 60°N) trend has increased almost 2% over 34 years. Plants lose less water via the process of transpiration under conditions of high CO₂.  NASA reported “Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015.”

 

A Critical Assessment of Extreme Events in Times of Global Warming

This paper reviews time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable. The authors find that since 1950 there has been a significant increase in heatwave-days while the global heatwave intensity trends are not significant. The paper notes that data quality varies significantly over time and regions. An apparent increase of the frequency of some events is due to better reporting and detection technology. The increase in reported tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic is substantially due to better reporting while a decrease is observed in other regions. There has been no global increase in tropical cyclones.  An increase in weak tornadoes is due to better detection technology, while strong tornadoes (EF3 to EF5 on the Fujita scale) show no increase and probably a decrease over time. The study says “a long list of studies shows little or no evidence of increased flood magnitudes, with some studies finding more evidence of decreases than increases.” There has been no increase in droughts on either a global or a grain-producing region basis. The abstract states “None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”

The increase of atmospheric CO₂ concentration has caused a global greening by enhancing plant growth, leaf-scale photosynthesis and intrinsic water-use efficiency. A previous study showed a 31% increase in gross primary production during the twentieth century. The global average grain yields of corn, rice, soybean and wheat for 1961 – 2019 were positive linear trends of 3.3%, 2.4%, 2.6% and 3.8% per year, respectively. The main divers of the trends are technological progress and CO₂ fertilization. The paper’s conclusions states “Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency.”

 

Reducing Radiation Errors in the ERA5 Reanalysis with Surface Observations

The ERA5 is the 5th version of the atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate covering the period from January 1940 to present produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. ERA5 combines vast amounts of historical observations into global estimates using advanced modelling and data assimilation systems. This new paper evaluated the errors in the ERA5 downward solar radiation at the surface using 25 years of summertime measurements in the southern ocean from two research vessels and at Macquarie island (1100 km SW of New Zealand).  The authors reported large errors with a mean bias of 54 W/m² and a mean absolute error of 82 W/m². That is, the reanalysis overestimates the amount of sunlight entering the southern oceans. Simulating the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface is difficult because it relies on a good understanding of how much clouds absorb and scatter sunlight. The scientists used machine learning–based models, the surface measurement and a small set of meteorological variables from ERA5 to predict the amount of sunlight reaching the southern oceans. By bypassing the ERA5’s internal simulation of the absorption and scattering of sunlight, they drastically reduce biases in the predicted surface shortwave radiation and reduced the mean absolute error by 25%. The machine learning techniques could significantly improve reanalysis products.

The total CO₂ radiative forcing from 1750 due to the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere to 2022 is 2.17 W/m² according to NOAA. Kenneth Richards here points out that the errors in estimating the cloud absorption and scattering effects on solar radiation are far greater than the total CO₂ forcing. Computer climate models and reanalysis models use similar methods to estimate the behavior of clouds. The study implies that errors in cloud forcings overwhelm the CO₂ forcings in climate models. This NASA page says that clouds in the climate models “are only accurate to within about 25-35%. …  a climate model to be useful must be accurate to something like 0.25%. Thus today's models must be improved by about a hundredfold in accuracy, a very challenging task.”

 

Polar Bears Survived 1,600 Years of Ice-free Summers in the Early Holocene

Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (11.3 to 9.7 thousand years ago), making the Arctic virtually ice-free. Dr. Susan Crockford wrote on her blog “As I argue in my new book, this means that polar bears and other Arctic species are capable of surviving extended periods with ice-free summers: otherwise, they would not be alive today.” Crockford quotes a new paper published in March this year, “Here we show marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea-ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean.” The paper shows that reduced sea ice during the early Holocene was widespread, with evidence for seasonal ice in much of the Arctic. The Eemian produced conditions even warmer than during the early Holocene and they lasted longer. During the early portion of the Eemian at least (ca. 130-120 k years ago), summer temperatures were about 5–8 °C warmer than today and the Arctic was virtually ice-free. Crockford says that the Eemian warm summers came only about 10,000 years after the polar bears arose as a unique species. The fact that polar bears survived extended periods of ice-free summers implies that their computer-generated predictions of extinction in a slightly warmer world are groundless.

 

CliSci # 389                                        2023-06-03

 

Clintel – Letter to the Chair of the IPCC Regarding the AR6 Report

The Climate Intelligence Foundation (Clintel) published an open letter to Dr. Hoesun Lee, Chair of the IPCC that shows there are serious errors and biases in the IPCC's sixth assessment report (AR6). Clintel’s report “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC” assessed several claims from AR6 reports.  The letter says that the IPCC has failed to follow the advice of the 2010 InterAcademies Council (IAC) review of IPCC procedures, which was commissioned in the aftermath of disastrous publicity regarding errors in earlier IPCC reports. That advice included “Review editors should also ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in the report and be satisfied that due consideration was given to properly-documented alternative views.” The Clintel letter says “We regrettably conclude that the IPCC has failed to follow this advice and the AR6 exhibits the same flaws as before, namely biased selection of evidence, failure to reflect genuine controversies and failure to give due consideration to properly documented alternative views.” The letter mentions some errors in the IPCC reports and criticized the IPCC for remaining silent while high-ranking UN officials repeatedly misrepresented the findings of the IPCC. See our video featuring Michelle Stirling reading the letter. See this video of Marcel Crok discussing the Clintel report. CliSci # 388 provided a summary of Clintel’s report.

 

Wind Farms Dry Surface Soil

Researchers from Ludong University in China have published a paper that concluded “wind farms significantly reduce soil moisture to different extents according to season and wind direction.” Remote sensing images and field data were used to explore the area and extent of influence of wind farms on grassland soil moisture in China.  The soil moisture was measured before and after the construction of wind farms. “The wind farm reduced the soil moisture most significantly downwind of the wind farm throughout the day, with an average value of up to 2.85%.” Soil moisture changes are important for nutrient and energy cycling in ecosystems and have a direct impact on local wildlife. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute reviewed the paper and adds “Since many of the prime windfarm locations are in agricultural regions, farmers would likely find they need to rely on irrigation even more than they already do for crop production if wind farms are on or near their properties. In addition, if the earlier Harvard research is correct, because of the way the large wind developments mix the atmosphere, by themselves, they could cause a surface warming of 0.24 °C. Warmer temperatures are likely to dry out the soil even more.”

 

Solar Power: a Risky Waste of Time and Money

This article published in the Spectator of Australia discusses the Energy Pay-Back Time (EPBT) for solar farms including battery backup required for continuous electricity. Solar panels alone are not a practical, generating system as nothing is generated through the night and output is greatly reduced during cloudy days. The article says “Clearly, a battery has to be added for continuous supply and the embodied energy from the manufacture of the battery has to be included in the analysis.” The article discusses a new analysis of solar farms in Tanzania which concludes that the EPBT of the solar farms is unsatisfactory. At one site, the EPBT even exceeded the lifespan of the photovoltaic panel, indicating that energy recovery was impossible. With respect to the energy return on investment (EROI), it was evident that the income generated from the investments was insufficient to cover current operational costs, suggesting negative returns on investment.

Solar radiation records of Australia show that May, June and July are months the most likely to risk electricity shortages. The study determined the optimal combination of solar panels and batteries. The EPBT of roof-top solar generation is about 23 years for Melbourne and 14 to 15 years for Perth and 14 years for Alice Springs. The EPBT’s exceed the lifetime of the battery so they must be replaced twice in the 30-year lifetime of the solar panel. Storage of excess summer generation for practical use requires very large batteries, resulting in unfavourable EPBT. The article concludes “solar farms are not a feasible replacement for traditional coal/gas-based electricity generation. The more solar generation we have, the more expensive electricity will become.”

 

California’s Duck Curve Hits Record Lows

This article gives a discussion about California’s net electricity load initiated by Mike Hassaballa, an energy engineer, on the social media platform LinkedIn. He says “The belly of the famous “Duck Curve” that symbolizes the challenges of integrating renewable energy into the grid has reached an all-time low.” The Duck Curve illustrates the daily electricity demand and supply patterns in California. Its distinctive shape resembles a duck with its head and neck representing the daily net load, i.e., the difference between electricity demand and generation. As solar panels proliferate across California, the curve’s belly – symbolizing midday surplus energy – has been steadily growing. This phenomenon poses a challenge as it can result in excess electricity during the day, followed by a rapid ramp-up in demand as the sun sets. Managing this imbalance is crucial for a stable and reliable energy system. A person on linkedin commented “The takeaway is that no new solar projects should be permitted (or are needed) without an equal amount of storage being made available.” Another wrote “No amount of batteries will address this problem at a fiscally sensible level. Pursuing further penetration of solar and wind, along with batteries will push California’s electricity rates ever higher to the point of impoverishing the population and driving any sensible business away.” Robert Bradley Jr. concludes “The forced energy transformation crowd continues to be in denial about how badly the California grid has been compromised by wind and solar, how expensive the battery solution is, and the prospect of Big Brother in the home (setting temperatures and restricting power use at will).”

 

Western Antarctic Glaciers and Ice Sheet During the Holocene

An article by Kenneth Richard describes the history and science of the glaciers and ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica. Climate alarmists claim that the melting of Thwaites Glacier – dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” is caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emission, but a new study shows that the melting is mostly natural, reversible and not unprecedented. The Thwaites and nearby glaciers are all situated on a hotbed of active geothermal heat flux, which has led to anomalously high regional melt rates. The region has a very thin crust of 10 to 18 km compared to the Earth’s average crust thickness of about 40 km. The thickness of the ice sheet at this Amundsen Sea region site averages about 40 m today. The scientists used cosmogenic-nuclide concentrations and bedrock cores to determine the ice sheet is presently around 8 times thicker than it was for most of the last 8,000 years of the Holocene, when the ice thickness ranged between 2 m and 7 m. The paper says the “ice at the core sites was 30 to 35 m thinner than the present for at least 3000 years, and possibly as long as 5000 years during the middle to Late Holocene.”

Another paper provides the first systematic quantitative assessment of how strongly the upstream ice of the Thwaites Glacier is buttressed by Thwaite ice shelf, the floating extension of the glacier, and how its collapse affects future projections. It has been suggested that a disintegration of the ice shelf might lead to greatly enhanced ice flow with sea level rise of up to 3 m. The scientists modeled the stresses acting along the current grounding line and using ice flow models of the Thwaites glacier, they find that the ice shelf does not significantly buttress upstream flow, and removing the ice shelf has little effect on the flow of the glacier. They find that a complete disintegration of the ice shelf will not substantially impact future mass loss.  Removal of the ice shelf changes the contribution of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to sea level rise by 1 to 2 mm over 50 years. Richard wrote “In other words, the notorious “Doomsday” glacier is doomless, with “no discernible effect” associated with future mass losses. One of the more commonly-cited alarmist claims has just been bushwhacked.”

 

CliSci # 388                                        2023-05-17

 

Electricity Prices Are Soaring in Leading Wind-energy States

Steve Goreham explains why electricity costs will rise even more as more wind and solar facilities are built. Steve Goreham was a speaker at Friends of Science annual major event in May 2017 and is the author of several books about climate and energy polices. Goreham wrote “U.S. average electricity prices rose 27% from 2008 to 2022. But in eight of the top 12 wind states, power prices rose between 33 and 73% over the 14-year period. Prices rose in Iowa (36%), Kansas (54%), Illinois (33%), Colorado (37%), California (73%), Minnesota (53%), Nebraska (37%) and Washington (35%).” The European countries with the most wind and solar capacity, experience the highest residential electricity prices. Denmark and Germany have deployed over 1,600 watts per person of wind and solar facilities, the highest density in Europe. Electricity prices for Denmark (0.29 euros per kilowatt-hour) and Germany (0.32 €/kWhr) are the highest in Europe, and two-and-a-half times the prices in the U.S., where renewable penetration remains lower. Wind and solar power increases electricity prices by; 90% of the capacity of traditional generators must remain operational to prevent system blackouts, backup facilities must be run at low utilization rates, and wind (and solar) systems require more and longer transmission power line than traditional power plants. As more wind systems are added to the power grid, residents should prepare for soaring electricity prices.

 

Confirmation of a Major Error in IPCC Report on Hurricanes Intensity

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. reported that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used blatant cherry picking to falsely claim that there has been an increasing trend in normalized USA hurricane damage. The IPCC cited an extreme outlier in the literature to make this claim which is contrary to the overwhelming scientific consensus on this topic. Peilke wrote “Uncited by the IPCC are 8 other papers in the peer-reviewed literature, by about 20 authors using a range of different methods, each concluding that there has been no such “increasing trend” in normalized US hurricane losses.”

The IPCC also falsely reported an increasing proportion of category 3-5 tropical cyclones over the last four decades has been detected and attributed to human-caused climate change, which is contrary to both evidence and the scientific literature.   A high level participant in the IPCC confirmed that the major error on tropical hurricanes was a result of claims being inserted into the IPCC outside its review process. The first draft said “it is not expected that a trend in TC intensity should be detectable over the past 40 years or so”. This was changed in the final published report to “It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3-5 tropical cyclone instances and the frequency of rapid intensification events have increased globally over the past 40 years.” The false claim was apparently never actually subject to peer review at any stage in the process. The accurate and nuanced statement was removed, and in its place a false claim was inserted and expressed with confidence.

 

The Clintel Analysis of the IPCC Report

A group of scientists from the Clintel network has published an extensive analysis of the IPCC AR6 Report titled “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC”. This 180-page report documents many biases and errors in the IPCC AR6 report. Two important conclusions of the Clintel report are;

• The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920.
• The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change.

In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, has a huge bias in favour of ‘bad news’ and against ‘good news’, and keeps the good news out of the Summary for Policy Makers. The errors and biases that Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Council (IAC Review) in 2010. Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform or be dismantled.

The errors are worse in the WG2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) report than in the WG1 (The Physical Science Basis) report. A review article published in 2020 showed that 52 out of 53 peer reviewed papers dealing with “normalised disaster losses” saw no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. The IPCC highlighted the single, flawed paper that claimed an increase in losses. The IPCC has tried to rewrite climate history by erasing the existence of the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (or Holocene Climate Optimum), a warm period between 10,000 and 6000 years ago. It has introduced a new hockey stick graph, which is the result of cherry-picked proxies. And it has ignored temperature reconstructions that show more variability in the past, such as the well-documented Little Ice Age.

Canadian economist Ross McKitrick has pointed out that all global climate models used by the IPCC show too much warming in the troposphere, both globally and in the tropics (where models predict a ‘hotspot’). This indicates some fundamental problems in the way that these models simulate the climate system, probably by overestimating the alleged positive water vapour and cloud feedbacks. The Clintel report suggests that observed warming and other evidence indicates that the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO₂ doubling is likely to be below 2°C; not near 3°C as the IPCC says. The IPCC is ‘addicted’ to its highest emissions scenario, so-called RCP8.5 (or now SSP5-8.5) which is now considered to be highly implausible. The IPCC says the scenario has a ‘low likelihood’ but doesn’t mention this is the summary; instead, it is the scenario most often referred to in the IPCC report.

 

The Wind and Solar Power Myth Exposed: Pointless Waste

The UK’s “The Telegraph” newspaper published an article by Bryan Leyland that show that wind and solar power are completely pointless. It was cross posted by Paul Homewood. Bryan Leyland is a power systems engineer with more than 60 years worldwide experience. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of “The Global Warming Policy Foundation”. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This belief has led many governments to heavily subsidise wind and solar power. Leyland wrote “These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.” The necessary miracle doesn’t exist to make wind and solar power useful.

A wind farm’s output often drops below 10% of its rated capacity for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50% or more during cloudy days. About 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to produce that same amount of energy over time as a 1000 MW conventional power station, however, the conventional power station will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online. Power stations that are used as backup for wind and solar systems have to offset unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. This dramatically increases operating and maintenance costs. Efficient combined-cycle gas turbines are often replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily, but open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much natural gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Leyland exclaims “Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!”  As efficient natural gas plants are shut down, power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.

For every MW of wind or solar power in California, $120 million would need to be spent on battery storage. The battery costs would be 80 times the cost of the wind farm. Leyland goes on to explain that it is not possible to mine enough minerals to build the batteries. Hydro pumped storage can’t provide anywhere near enough storage capacity. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuel stations is “just a case of wishful thinking” due to high costs and the lack of geological storage locations. Emissions-free “green” hydrogen is made from water using huge amounts of electrical energy, 60% of which is lost in the process.

Hydrogen technology has been suggested for energy storage. Hydrogen under pressure is extremely dangerous as it make metal brittle, leaks through almost anything, and may cause devastating explosions. Hydrogen would have to be mostly stored and handled cryogenically due to its low density, creating even more losses and costs. There is next to no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed by 2050 to make wind and solar workable. We might as well just enjoy the huge benefits of CO₂ fertilization and the mild warming!

 

CliSci # 387                                        2023-05-02

 

Scientists Map 19,000 Previously Unknown Undersea Volcanoes

A team of oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other institutions has mapped 19,000 previously unknown undersea volcanoes in the world's oceans using radar satellite data. The satellites cannot actually see the seamounts; instead they measure the altitude of the sea surface, which changes due to changes in gravitational pull related to seafloor topography; an effect known as sea mounding. In their paper the group describes how they used radar satellite data to measure seawater mounding to find and map undersea volcanoes and explains why it is important that it be done. Undersea volcanoes have a very strong impact on deep-sea ocean flow. As currents run into seamounts, they are pushed upward, carrying colder water with them, and mix in unknown ways. Mapping such currents has become more important as the oceans absorb more heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The higher than expected number of undersea volcanoes would cause more vertical mixing of sea water which would allow more heat and CO₂ to be mixed into the deep oceans than currently projected by climate models.

 

Urbanization Effects on Tmax and Tmin

Urban warming is much larger at night than during the day. Roy Spencer has calculated the cumulative urban heat island effect (UHIE) during the months May, June and July of the recorded and adjusted maximum temperatures (Tmax) and minimum temperatures (Tmin). The results show that the UHIE on Tmin of high population density locations (around 10,000 persons per km²)  is 3.5 °C and the UHIE on Tmax is 1.0 °C, both using adjusted GHCN datasets produced by NOAA from land stations from 20°N to 80°N. In other words, the UHIE on Tmin is 3.5 times as large as on Tmax at high population densities. The UHIE on Tmin is 2.8 times as large as on Tmax at medium population densities of about 2000 persons per km². Calgary’s population density is 1,590 persons per km².

 

Great Barrier Reef in Record Coral Cover but 97% of Australians Don’t Know It

Which part of this headline is more important: The fact that the Great Barrier Reef is at a record high coral cover, or that 97% of Australians don’t know that? Joanne Nova wrote “Ten years ago, coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef hit record lows. The news has been full of dire reports of bleaching ever since, but quietly, a phenomenal recovery was blossoming across the full 2,000 kilometer span of the reef.  Last year coral cover hit a record high — better than any year since records began in 1986.” The Australian Environment Foundation surveyed 1,004 Australians to find out whether they had heard the good news. The question asked was “Compared to the last 30 years, what do you think the state of coral coverage on the Great Barrier Reef is today?” Less than 3% of them knew the coral cover was “at a record high”. All up, only 10% of Australians realized that coral cover is even above average, leaving 80% of the country falsely thinking the situation was average or worse, and another ten percent having no idea at all. Australians have been subject to years of misinformation. The poor score reflects badly on the media coverage that reports on every local bleaching event, but rarely on the rapid recovery.

 

Giant Underwater Waves Increases the Ocean's Ability to Store CO₂

A team of researchers quantified the effect of underwater waves and other forms of underwater turbulence in the Atlantic Ocean and found that their importance is not being accurately reflected in the climate models that inform government policy. An author of a paper said "Beneath the surface of the water, there are jets, currents, and waves—in the deep ocean, these waves can be up to 500 meters high, but they break just like a wave on a beach." The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) plays a key role in regulating global heat and the absorption of carbon dioxide (CO₂). The AMOC has a strong pole to pole circulation, moving heat and dissolved CO₂ northward in surface layers to the Arctic where the water sinks and flows in deep layers to the Antarctic region. The water also moves faster at the surface than it does in the deep ocean. Using several data sources the researchers found that heat from the North Atlantic Ocean can reach the Antarctic in several hundred years, which is much faster than previously thought. The researchers found that the movement of heat and CO₂ between layers is facilitated by small-scale turbulence, a phenomenon not fully represented in climate models. The turbulence in the deep oceans allows more CO₂ to be stored in the oceans than is projected in climate models. The research implies that the ability of the oceans to absorb CO₂ will decline much slower than projected by climate models, so the CO₂ remaining in the atmosphere and its induced warming will be much less than the models predict.

 

Irish Climate Science Forum Critique of the IPCC AR6 Report

The Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) published this critique of the IPCC sixth climate assessment report (AR6). The critique says that the synthesis summary and its underlying reports are “seriously flawed in failing to reflect the latest objective climate science and observations.” The IPCC is still “unable to predict future climate with any certainty, while real-world observations point to only a modest further 1ºC warming to 2100.” The ICSF says “Flawed IPCC science has unfortunately led to absurd mitigation-based policymaking that will only damage the economy and do virtually nothing for climate. Well-focused adaptation to the modest warming is the way forward in the coming decades.” The critique states that the climate models significantly exaggerate warming and that the two upper emissions scenarios (SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5) are highly implausible. Humanity has benefitted from warming since 1850. IPCC chooses to ignore evidence of natural climate variability. The AR6 summary cites “extreme weather events” while the WG1 report WG1 Report indicates no evidence of increasing trends in flooding, drought (meteorological or hydrological), wildfires, tropical cyclones, winter storms, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, lightning or extreme winds”. IPCC fails to explain that the slightly increased global CO₂ levels are actually enhancing photosynthesis and global crop yields, in turn helping alleviate continuing under-nourishment in developing regions.

 

No Climate Crisis Found in Greece Rainfall Data

The abstract of a new paper begins with “In the context of implementing the European Flood Directive in Greece, a large set of rainfall data was compiled with the principal aim of constructing rainfall intensity–timescale–return period relationships for the entire country. This set included ground rainfall data as well as non-conventional data from reanalyses and satellites. Given the European declaration of climate emergency, along with the establishment of a ministry of climate crisis in Greece, this dataset was also investigated from a climatic perspective using the longest of the data records to assess whether or not they support the climate crisis doctrine.”  

Only two stations with available data of more than a century in length were found; one in Athens and one in Thessaloniki. The Athens precipitation data shows remarkable climate stability. In the last 30 years, there has been no remarkable climatic event. The largest annual rainfall in Athens’ 161-year history was recorded in hydrological year 1890 (ending September 30) and the smallest was in 1990. The largest annual rainfall in Thessaloniki’s 127-year history was in 1919 and the smallest was in 1985. The linear trends at both cities are 0.00 mm/day/decade. A warming climate is expected to result in greater global precipitation. The two time series of Greece show negligible climate variability. The ERA5 reanalysis data over the territory of Greece from 1950 does not show a linear trend. The most remarkable climatic event identified is the major rainfall deficit around 1990. The management of that drought was quite successful; however, that success may now have been forgotten as there is a tendency to associate everything with anthropogenic climate change.

 

Rapid Ocean Temperature Rise Puzzles Scientists

The daily surface temperature between 60°N and 60°S reached a record high on March 31^st according to the NOAA record. David Whitehouse wrote for Net Zero Watch says “It occurs as we are moving from persistent La Nina into El Nino conditions which could later this year increase global ocean temperatures by more than half a degree Celsius. Many factors have been postulated to be contribution to this temperature spurt. Sunspots are set to reach a high maximum sooner than expected this solar cycle. In 2022 the Tonga submarine volcano eruption added a huge amount of water vapour into the atmosphere. Also in 2022 the International Maritime Organisation issued a ban on pollution from ships reducing their sulphur emissions. This reduced the blanket of reflective aerosol particles reflecting sunlight back into space before it reached the oceans, thereby potentially heating it. The temperature of the North Atlantic has been at a record high for some time surpassing 20°0C at the end of March. This is curious because at this time of the year North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are usually at their annual low. Sea surface temperatures are also high in the Pacific presaging a coming El Nino. Because of its speed scientists are not yet linking this to the steady movements of climate change seen so far in the oceans. It might be natural variability, but whatever its explanation it is not replicated in most climate models.”

 

CliSci # 386                                        2023-04-17

 

A New Tropospheric Temperature Record Show Little Warming

A new paper by a group of scientists at NOAA presents a new satellite-derived temperature record for the global troposphere. About a decade ago the NOAA group produced a data product called STAR (Satellite Applications and Research), but this original version produced more warming than the weather balloon and other satellite records. The scientists have now rebuilt the STAR series based on a new empirical method for removing time-of-day observation drift of the satellites and a more stable method of merging satellite records. Dr. Ross McKitrick published an article in the Financial Post where he wrote “The old STAR series had a mid-troposphere warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade, but it’s now 0.09 degrees per decade, compared to 0.1 in UAH [University of Alabama in Huntsville] and 0.14 [°C/decade] in RSS [Remote Sensor Systems]”. The RSS uses a climate model to adjust for satellite drift, but the method is partly circular reasoning as the trends are used to compare to climate models. The 38 newest models produces too much global warming compared to satellites and weather balloons. “[John] Christy and mathematician Richard McNider have shown that the satellite warming rate implies the climate system can only be half as sensitive to GHGs as the average model used by the IPCC for projecting future warming.” In the lower troposphere, the warming trends from January 1981 to February 2023 of Star and UAH are 0.129 and 0.139 °C/decade, respectively (GRAPH).

 

The Antarctic-driven Abyssal Ocean Overturning Is Not Doomed

The BBC wrote a headline: “Antarctic Ocean currents heading for collapse – report”. The article reports on a recent paper published in Nature titled “Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater”. The Antarctic currents are part of the Meridional Overturning Circulation which is responsible for the vast majority of the northward heat transport on the Earth. A slowdown of the abyssal ocean overturning circulation of just over 40% is projected by 2050. However, this article by Frank Bosse says that the observations from the RAPID-AMOC array across the Atlantic shows “there is much internal variability, with a dip in 2010 and thereafter a slightly recovery.” Bosse is critical of how the authors calculated the ice melting which is a critical input of their model. They used the high emissions scenario SSP8.5 for the future greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 to 2050, which the authors described as ‘business as usual’. But scenario SSP8.5 is an extremely unlikely scenario. Another article in Nature says “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome”. The authors also used the multi-model mean of the CMIP6-models, which even the IPCC and Gavin Schmidt of NASA say have too high climate sensitivities. Most of those models are running much too hot. Using the emissions scenario RCP4.5, Bosse shows the air temperature trends around the western Antarctic are 50% higher using the SSP8.5 scenario than with the more realistic RCP4.5 scenario. Furthermore, the trend slopes of the observation for GISS for the period 1991-2021 are much less than that of the CMIP5 models. The modeled warming is poorly correlated with observed warming in most grid cells. Bosse estimates the additional warming would be only 0.3 °C for 2020 to 2050, which is only 23% of the estimate given in the paper. Bosse concludes “Further failures by Nature’s review and editorial process, combined with uncritical and amplified media promotion, have unnecessarily confused the science and public.”

 

Methane’s Unexpected Cooling Impact Unveiled

New research from the University of California shows that methane creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat caused by methane’s greenhouse warming effect. A summary of the research by SciTechDaily says “Methane’s absorption of shortwave energy [from the Sun] counterintuitively causes a cooling effect and suppresses the increase in precipitation by 60%. This finding emphasizes the need to incorporate all known effects of greenhouse gases into climate models. Heat is created when water vapor condenses into rain or snow. Precipitation acts as a heat source, making sure the atmosphere maintains a balance of energy. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation. Methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. This reduces the amount of water that evaporates which leads to an equal decrease in precipitation. The paper’s abstract say “The methane short-wave-induced cooling is due largely to cloud rapid adjustments, including increased low-level clouds, which enhance the reflection of incoming short-wave radiation, and decreased high-level clouds, which enhance outgoing long-wave radiation.” Both of these effects cause cooling, offsetting part of methane’s warming effect.

 

The West Burns More Fossil Fuels per Capita but Has Healthier Air

An article by Jo Nova says “Tell the world: two weeks ago a new study showed Australians and New Zealanders breathe the cleanest air on Earth. Not far behind them are people in the US, Canada, most of western Europe and Japan.”  A study by IQAir, a company that tracks air quality, found that only six countries met the World Health Organization's air quality guidelines. The study looked at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which has been linked to a number of respiratory illnesses. The study says that the PM2.5 comes from fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires. But modern fossil fuel fired electrical plants have equipment to remove almost all of the PM2.5 pollution. Nova wrote “The best air in the world turns out to be in nations that burn a lot of fossil fuels per person. The most polluted air is in poorer nations, poor sods.” Canadians, Americans and Australians burn more fossil fuels per capita than anywhere yet have the cleanest air. Chad topped the list of countries with the worst air pollution, registering a level of 89.7 μg/m³. The country doesn’t have any coal fired power plants. Thirty-nine of the 50 cities with the worst air pollution were in India, which also ranked as one of the worst countries in overall pollution. Air pollution improved in the United States last year due to a mild wildfire season.

 

Mercury Rises in Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology Probe Row

Jo Nova wrote “Sometime in the mid-1990s the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) replaced many of their glass thermometers with electronic sensors.” Electronic sensors can react to temperature changes much faster than glass thermometers. Both types of thermometers were kept side by side in the same monitoring station and recorded all that data.  The newspaper The Australian reported “The documents, released after a years-long Freedom of Information [FOI] campaign, show temperature measurements taken using updated BOM probes in automatic weather stations at the Brisbane Airport site could be up to 0.7 °C warmer than the temperature taken using a traditional thermometer at the same time at the same site. More than three years after a FOI request for parallel data was lodged by scientist John Abbot, the BOM released three years of data on Easter eve after the matter was taken to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.” The released data is just 3 of the 14.5 years of parallel data held for Brisbane Airport, which is just one of the 38 sites requested under FOI. Over the 3-year period, the electronic probes recorded higher temperatures than the mercury thermometers 41% of the time and lower 26% of the time.

 

CliSci # 385                                        2023-03-15

 

Ice Cores Show Even Dormant Volcanoes Leak Abundant Sulfur

New research shows that volcanoes leak a surprisingly high amount of their climate-changing gases in their quiet phases. A Greenland ice core shows that volcanoes quietly release at least three times as much sulfur into the Arctic atmosphere than estimated by current climate models. “We found that on longer timescales the amount of sulfate aerosols released during passive degassing is much higher than during eruptions,” said first author Ursula Jongebloed, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. “Passive degassing releases at least 10 times more sulfur into the atmosphere, on decadal timescales, than eruptions, and it could be as much as 30 times more.”

 

Wildfires: Time to Learn Some Science

Ecologist Jim Steele prepared these remarks as an expert witness for a US senate committee that is considering the climate change effect on wildfires. Steele writes “There is no evidence supporting claims that rising CO₂ and global warming increases the spread or intensity of wildfires. The intensity and spread of the destructive Marshall Fire was governed by the flammability of the grassland and the winter winds.” That fire was started by humans on December 30, 2021 in Boulder County, Colorado. It killed two people and destroyed the most buildings in Colorado’s history. “Human ignitions have expanded fire season into the coldest seasons, making deadly fires less predictable. Natural lightning fires are more predictable in the summer months of the more limited lightning season. … The Marshall Fire went from ignition to an out-of-control state in less than one hour. Strong winds will carry an escaped fire into human habitat with devastating speed. California's Santa Ana & Diablo winds have similarly spread California's worst fires. All these winds peak in winter as cold air flows down the mountains. Any global warming should reduce these winds.”

Increasing CO₂ and CH₄ have added 2.1 W/m² of energy flux, in contrast grassy vegetation requires about 3,400 W/m², so the added greenhouse gases is insignificant. Removing vegetation near homes can reduce wildfire risk. Increasing prescribed burns and forest thinning would reduce wild fire spread. Steele wrote “Fires were far more common in the early 1900s when CO₂ was lower and temperatures were cooler as demonstrated by the Oregon Department of Forestry. Likewise, fires were far more common throughout the American southwest during the Little Ice Age. Fire suppression policies that began 100 years ago were meant to save forests, instead caused forest fuels to accumulate, unintentionally resulting now in more intense and devastating fires.”

 

How Land Use Changes the Climate

Roger Peilke Jr. explains how changes to the land surface can have profound impacts on regional climates, in some cases as large as or larger than the regional effects of increasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Land use change, is the consequence of billions of people transforming the Earth’s surface as we grow food, build cities, flood valleys and just about everything associated with human activity. Changing the land surface can alter albedo (its reflectivity of solar radiation). One study used a climate model to compare southern Florida’s climate with a two land surfaces of 1900 and 1992. The July and August precipitation under 1992 land use was about 12 percent less than it was using Florida’s 1900 landscape. Daytime maximum temperatures also increased in urbanized areas and inland by up to 4 °C. Another modeling study shows that land use change also substantially influences regional climate thousands of kilometers away. The deforestation of tropical regions would enhance summer rainfall in the Arabian Peninsula. This study used forest cover data and leaf area index from 1982 to 2011 in a climate model to simulate their climate effects. Both local and global surface air temperatures show a seasonal contrast in response to the past vegetation expansion over China.

 

Climate Model Ranking Based on Climate Sensitivity for the 21st Century

This paper by Nicola Scafetta ranks 41 climate models by how well they hindcast the global surface warming between 1980 and 2100 using their climate sensitivity (CS) estimates. The best performing models are those with low CS. A global risk estimate is moderate, based on a group of 17 models with low CS, which implies that the negative effects of climate change can be adequately addressed by adaptation. However, the government land temperature datasets are contaminated by the urban heat island effect (UHIE) and local non-climatic biases. The paper shows the divergences between the government land temperature datasets and other temperature data, including satellite data, tree ring width data and rural temperature station data, implying that the real CS is much lower than even that of the group of low CS climate models. This would invalidate all of the climate models. The UAH satellite record implies that the transient climate response (TCR) is likely in the range 0.81-1.22 °C which is well below the IPCC’s likely range of 1.4-2.2 °C. The TCR is the temperature increase due to a gradual increase of CO₂ at the time of a CO₂ doubling.

Scafetta presents evidence from other papers of a large UHIE that remains in the government temperature datasets. Scafetta wrote “However, from about 1970 to 2022, the land area appears to have warmed up too fast and too much relative to the ocean region.” Since 1980, the land warming is 148% of the ocean warming in the satellite record but the land/ocean ratio is 181% in the HadCRUT5 temperature data. This indicates a warm bias in the land record. There is also a decoupling between tree ring width data and land station records since 1970. This is evidence of a considerable warming bias in the land station temperature record. Numerous studies have shown that multidecadal and millennial natural oscillations significantly influence the climate system which isn’t reproduced by climate models. This suggests that the TCR should be reduced by a factor of two.

 

Net Zero Plans Are Dangerous and Unsupported by Science

The CO₂ Coalition published this important paper about net zero plans. The summary says “Net Zero initiatives of governments and private organizations are scientifically invalid and will lead to worldwide impoverishment and starvation if implemented, according to a paper published by the CO₂ Coalition.

The 46-page paper details how the objectives of Net Zero to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases are based on analytical methods that violate fundamental tenets of the scientific method. The paper predicts global starvation if fossil fuels are eliminated. The recent experience in Sri Lanka provides a red alert. The agricultural sector of Sri Lanka collapsed as a result of government restrictions on mineral fertilizer. The paper says that 600 million years of geological evidence shows that CO₂ levels are near a record low and that atmospheric increases of the gas follow warming periods rather than precede them. These data “are good enough to demolish the argument that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations control Earth’s climate and the theory that fossil fuels and CO₂ will cause catastrophic global warming. They will not.”

 

Climate Fact Check

Steve Milloy, publisher of the Junk Science website, wrote “the media was once again in hyper-drive blaming all sorts of things on the ever-dreaded, “climate change,” the naked assumption that human emissions of greenhouse gases are destroying the planet.” He fact checks this list of ten climate news items and shows that each is incorrect.  Some examples are;

• Axios claimed that climate change will increase hurricane damage, but the fact check shows no correlation between emissions and hurricane activity. However, damage increases with economic growth.
• The New York Times blamed climate change for the lack of snowfall this season in New York, but it previously claimed warming causes more blizzards.
• The Washington Post claimed that warming seas are melting the Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier, but the fact check shows Antarctica has been cooling slightly since 1980 and there is no trend in Antarctic sea ice extent.
• Eco-Business claimed as the planet warms, food security is weakening, but United Nations data show production of various staple crops has risen significantly during the recent decades.
• The Washington Post claimed that climate change had reduced the Colorado river flow, but the fact check shows that the inflow to the Colorado has not changed since 1895 and so is not related to warming. The river flow reduction is due to increasing withdraws for irrigation and other water uses.

 

Global Warming: Mostly Human-caused or Mostly Natural?

Dr. Willie Soon gave a presentation at the Heartland 15^th Climate Conference in Florida on February 24th, 2023. The video presentation, titled “Global Warming: Mostly Human-caused or Mostly Natural?” is here and his slide deck is here. Much of Soon’s presentation is about the non-climate biases in the station land temperature records. This includes abrupt “step changes” that have nothing to do with climate change and “trend biases” that slowly become larger over time. Adjustments to the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), called homogenization, have the effects of cooling temperatures before 1970 and warming recent decades. Statistical homogenization uses an algorithm to adjust for abrupt changes in temperature, but the adjustments changed every day and don’t match up with the documented station changes. Soon shows that the algorithm results in urban blending where all homogenized records converge towards the average urbanization.

Soon also explains that different interpretations of satellite-based solar irradiance measurements give very different solar activity histories! The IPCC only uses a result that shows little solar variations. The Sun becomes a major cause of warming when using the ACRIM-based measurements. Using a rural-only temperature time series with the ACRIM solar variability gives a good match up to 1990, implying that much of the current warming is likely natural.

 

Correction to CliSci # 384 of 2023-02-27

Article “Net Zero Policies” incorrectly stated “Going to net zero emission will reduce the global world annual income by at least $42 Trillion by 2021.  It should have been “… by 2100.” It was corrected here.

 

CliSci # 384                                        2023-02-27

 

CO₂ Removal–What’s Worth Doing? A Biophysical Perspective

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has become a focal point for policymakers who are pursuing strategies for climate change mitigation. Two types of CDR methods are proposed and subsidized by many countries; mechanical capture and biological sequestration. This study compares methods on the basis of three criteria: effectiveness at net carbon removal, efficiency at a climate-relevant scale, and beneficial and adverse co-impacts. The study says “Our findings indicate that biological methods have a superior return on resource inputs in comparison to mechanical methods. Biological methods are both more effective and more resource efficient in achieving a climate-relevant scale of CO₂ removal. Additionally, the co-impacts of biological methods are largely positive, while those of mechanical methods are negative. Biological methods are also far less expensive. Despite their disadvantages and a track record of failure to date, mechanical CDR methods continue to receive large subsidies from the US government while biological sequestration methods do not.”

 

Video: Hydrogen Will Not Save Us. Here's Why.

We don’t need to be saved, but Sabine Hossenfelder created this informative video about the recent craze of using hydrogen fuel cells for energy storage. The video’s description is;  “Replacing fossil fuel with hydrogen seems like an ideal solution to make transportation environmentally friendly and to provide a backup for intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. But how environmentally friendly is hydrogen really? And how sustainable is it, given that hydrogen fuel cells rely on supply of rare metals like platinum and iridium? In this video, we have collected all the relevant numbers for you.”  Watch the video.

Hydrogen (H₂) is stored at of 700 time atmospheric pressure and take up twice the volume compared to gasoline for the same energy. H₂ produce by solar power produces as much greenhouse gas emission as H₂ produced from methane due to fluctuations of solar energy that makes production of H₂ inefficient. Using wind power to produce H₂ is even worse. Producing H₂ from wind or solar is the most expensive way to do it. Fuel cells require very rare platinum and iridium which are very expensive. H₂ gets into the tank walls making them brittle.

 

Early Holocene Presence of Norway Spruce on a High Mountain in Sweden

This paper by Leif Kullman reports that early Holocene presence of spruce was found on a mountain high above the modern treeline, indicating much warmer conditions than in recent decades. The paper says “The fact that spruce grew at this and other high and exposed sites, may imply that the high-alpine plant cover during this early warm time was particularly rich and luxuriant. This could be understood in terms of insolation-induced warming, high soil nutrient levels and low impact of competition.”

The paper’s abstract says; “A megafossil wood remnant of Norway spruce was retrieved from a high-elevation nunatak in the southern Swedish Scandes. The site was nearly 600 m higher than the present-day treeline. These circumstances comply with analogous earlier recoveries, indicating presence of spruce at high elevations in the Scandes, several thousands of years prior to inferences made by pollen analysis. Radiocarbon-dating yielded a median age of 9300 [year before the present] cal a BP. This result adds firm detail and adheres to ongoing reappraisal of the structure and biodiversity of the late-glacial and early Holocene mountain landscape, in the light of growing megafossil and molecular genetic evidence.”

 

Global Drought Data Shows No Evidence Linking Drought to Anthropogenic Climate Change

The authors of this new paper studied whether droughts could be linked to human-caused climate change. No evidence was found for any systematic trend in droughts attributable to anthropogenic climate change. The paper says that “natural climatic variability remains the main driver of precipitation deficits” or droughts. A review article says “In fact, the authors found that there was globally more intensive precipitation deficits observed from 1901-1938 when CO₂ levels were lingering in the 300-310 ppm range, than since the late 1970s when CO₂ rose to over 400 ppm.”

 

FoS Video: Reality Check on Canada's Sustainable Jobs Plan

Our Friends of Science Odysee and Youtube channels have 567 videos. From our main website, select Library >> Videos.  I highlight our video titled “Reality Check on Canada's Sustainable Jobs Plan: They are Stealing Your Future”. The federal government issued the Sustainable Jobs Plan on Feb. 23, 2023, an iteration of the proposed "Just Transition."  In the plan, many millions and billions of dollars are proposed for spending on various 'green' and 'sustainable' jobs creation or promotion. This video explainer is a reality check on many of the claims made in the Sustainable Jobs plan, and those made by Clean Energy Canada, or other climate activist groups.  The video shows that to develop EV batteries, critical minerals must be mined, and this requires vast quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal, contrary to the claims of climate activist groups.  Likewise, these mining processes are extremely damaging to the environment, so this is not a clean or sustainable sector - despite the fact that mining is critically important to our modern society.  The upshot is that Alberta (and other oil producing regions of Canada) have a bright future, if the government would 'just get out of the way' with its ever growing collection of onerous legislation on climate. There are no legally binding Paris Agreement commitments.  The alleged climate emergency is based on improper use of an implausible scenario known as RCP 8.5 - therefore, there is no real climate emergency.  Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer shows that climate change will have little impact on our future economy - certainly much less than the billions being spent or committed now! And the PBO shows that Canada's emissions are negligible in the global scheme, therefore our young people are being saddled with deficit spending debt, to finance 'green' dreams that are not sustainable and not realistic.

 

The Heartland Institute's 15th International Conference on Climate Change

The Heatland Institute held its 15th conference on Climate Change in Florida from February 23 to 25. This is the most-important and informative conference on climate science and energy policy in the world. The conference page features many videos of various topics about climate science, and energy and climate policy. This page shows 58 speakers including three Canadians; Dr. Christopher Essex, Dr. Patrick Moore and Dr. Ross McKitrick. Climate science topics includes how net zero is killing whales, extreme weather, corrupted temperature data, the effect of the sun on global temperatures, climate sensitivity and the social cost of CO2, climate uncertainty and risk, and the flaws in climate models.

 

Net Zero Policies

I gave a Powerpoint presentation to the Canadian Society of Engineering Management (CSEM) in Calgary, Alberta on February 15, 2023 titled “Review of Net Zero Policies.”  HERE is a link to my slides in PDF format. Some highlights are;

• Global capital cost of Net Zero is estimated at US$ 275 Trillion, [2.9 X Global world income]
• Going to net zero emission will reduce the global world annual income by at least $42 Trillion by 2100.
• The global near surface air temperature trend from 1970 to 2022 as forecast by the Canadian climate model is 2.9 times the observed trend.
• The global net positive impact of GHG emission without mitigation will be up to 1.5% of annual global world product.
• Climate-related Death Risk declined 99.3% from 1920s to 2020.
• If solar and wind with batteries for energy storage replace fossil fuels, the cost per adult in the USA may be over US$1.1 million.

 

CliSci # 383                                        2023-02-10

 

How Those U.K. Rainfall Projections Turned Out

Paul Homewood compared the U.K.’s Met Office 2009 projection of rainfall over the United Kingdom to the actual measured rainfall. The Met Office projected in 2009 that by 2020s, the average summer precipitation change in SW England were expected to be down by 7% compared to the 1961-1990 baseline. Homewood wrote “It turns out that the clowns could not even get the sign right! Average summer rainfall is actually 10% higher than the 1961-90 baseline, and it is also at a similar level to the mid-20^th C, showing little signs of a long-term decline.”

 

Short-term Coastal Evolution Trend in the Shoreline of Venice

A new paper used remote sensing and machine learning to evaluate the coastal evolution trend in the shoreline of the Venice lagoon in Italy over the period 2015–2019. Advanced image preprocessing was done on satellite images taken within the same tidal range. Machine learning was employed to accurately define the shoreline positions. The study found that along the 83 km of shoreline, only 5% of the coast is eroding, 36% is stable and 52% is accreting (growing). The shore land area is growing probably due to the high presence of coastal protection structures that stabilize the beaches, enhancing the deposition processes.

 

Shoreline Change Assessment in the Meriç Delta

This new study analyzed 46 years between 1975 and 2021 of shoreline changes of the Meriç Delta using Landsat images. Meriç Delta is located between Turkey and Greece and formed by the sediment of the Meriç River flowing into the Aegean Sea. More than 2 billion people live in the 100 km coastal zone, which is three times the average global population density. The statistical result of the study indicates that the maximum shoreline accretion rate is 10.6 m/yr and the maximum shoreline erosion rate is -3.9 m/yr. Accretion means land area is added to the shore. The accretion and erosion patterns have been influenced by various processes such as waves, tides, and sediment rates. The shoreline of the Meriç Delta is more accretive and less erosional during the 46 years and the mouth of the Meriç River is the most accretive zone in the study area. The average net shore accretion rate is 1.5 m/yr. The land in the delta is increasing despite sea level rise.

 

Coupled Stratosphere-Troposphere-Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

A new paper published in Nature evaluates the Northern Hemisphere (NH) multidecadal climate oscillations and shows their importance for near-future climate projection. The paper shows that large parts of the coherent NH-multidecadal changes can be understood within a damped coupled stratosphere/troposphere/ocean-oscillation framework. At mid-latitudes, the troposphere extends from the surface to about 12 km, and the stratosphere extends from there to about 50 km altitude. Stratospheric cooling initiates strengthening of Atlantic overturning circulation. This increases the poleward oceanic heat transport leading to Arctic sea-ice melting, Arctic warming and large-scale Atlantic warming. This initiates wave-induced downward propagating negative Northern Annular Mode (NAM) and stratospheric warming which therefore reverses the oscillation phase. The NAM (which is also called the Arctic Oscillation) refers to the differing atmospheric pressure patterns in middle and high northern latitudes. The negative phase has high Arctic air pressure with a very wavy jet stream. There is modeling and observational evidence that the North Atlantic multidecadal oscillations and the associated meridional overturning circulation response can explain a considerable part of the multidecadal Arctic sea-ice variability. The northern oscillations can propagate throughout the NH by atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections like a “stadium wave”. Computer simulations can partially replicate the stadium wave.  The authors project North Atlantic cooling and a hiatus in wintertime global surface temperatures similar to the 1950s to 1970s.

 

The Rare Metals War

Rare metals are found in minute proportions in more abundant metals, making their extraction and refinement expensive and difficult. China controls most of these resources. Gullanume Pitron’s e-book sounds the alarm on a serious geopolitical problem; the world’s growing reliance on rare metals which are used for communication, electric transportation and energy technologies. Extracting and refining rare metals is highly polluting, and recycling them has proved a disappointment. “Our quest for a more ecological growth model has resulted in intensified mining of the Earth’s crust to extract the core ingredient — rare metals — with an environmental impact that could prove far more severe than that of oil extraction. Changing our energy model already means doubling rare metal production approximately every fifteen years.” From the 1970s, humans began to exploit the exceptional magnetic properties of some of these metals to make super magnets. These metals have become indispensable to new information and communication technologies for their semiconducting properties that regulate the flow of electricity in digital devices. The 10,000 or so mines in China have played a big role in destroying the country’s environment. Toxic waste dumps created by a mining company producing tungsten — a critical metal for wind-turbine blades — had obstructed and polluted many tributaries of the Yangtze River. Refining rare minerals involves crushing rock, and then using a concoction of chemical reagents such as sulphuric and nitric acids. These acids poison workers and leak into drinking water and rivers. The deplorable energy and environmental footprint of extracting and refining rear metals needs to be considered before we deploy green technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. Put simply, clean energy is a dirty affair.

 

Internal Variability Plays a Dominant Role in Global Climate Projections

This study investigates the different sources of uncertainty in the projected frequencies of daily maximum temperature and precipitation extremes. Climate projection uncertainty can be partitioned into model uncertainty, scenario uncertainty and internal variability. The study uses a large number of climate model computer simulations, and there is no assurance that the model’s internal variability matches the real world. The paper reports that internal variability in the models dominates the expression of maximum temperature extremes in the next two decades. For precipitation extremes, internal variability dominates throughout the twenty-first century, except for some tropical regions.

 

Computer Model Validation Based on ECS and TCR Ranking for 21st Century Temperatures

This paper by Nicola Scafetta ranks the newest set of climate model (CMIP6) according to how well they hindcast global warming between 1980 to 2021 using their published equilibrium climate equilibrium (ECE) and transient climate response (TCR) estimates. The TCR estimates is the temperature response due to a doubling of CO₂ when the CO₂ concentrations increase at 1%/year at the time of that doubling. The best 17 models are those with low TCR ranging between 1.2 and 1.8 °C. TCR is much more relevant to climate policy than ECS because it can take millennia for the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium. Scafetta says that the low climate sensitivity “suggests that the predicted risk of climate change will be moderate in the next decades and that adaptation strategies will be sufficient to address any negative effects.” The models show that the lower troposphere (LT) should warm faster than the surface, but the observation show the opposite, which suggests that the surface measurements are contaminated by spurious urban warming at the measurement sites. The UAH LT record better correlates with the radiosonde dataset than other LT records. Considering the UAH LT record, the TCR should be reduced by about one-third to 0.81 – 1.22 °C. Scafetta provided much evidence that the recent land temperature record is too high by comparisons to rural only stations, UAH LT land, tree-ring based temperature and previous temperature records. In addition to model and urban warming biases, Scafetta says “Large climatic natural oscillations for the multidecadal to the millennial scales that are not reproduced by the models would suggest that the ECS of GCMs should be reduced by at least a factor of two”.

 

CliSci # 382                                        2023-01-23

 

The Urbanization Characteristics of the GHCN Temperature Stations

The Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) is a dataset of climate summaries from thousands of weather stations around the world. Using a Landsat satellite based measurement of human “build-up” areas as described in CliSci # 379, Dr. Spencer reviewed the urbanization characteristics of the GHCH version 4 dataset. There are 4,232 GHCN station with 90% coverage, but Africa and South America are poorly represented. Spencer plotted 40 years of the urbanization growth versus the average urbanization percent at each weather station and found that 13.2% of the stations are less than 5% urbanized. Few GHCN station locations are truly rural. Virtually all stations are located where there has been an increase of building density. The greatest urbanization growth has been in areas not completely rural and not already heavily urbanized. Previous studies have shown that the urban heat island “warming is non-linear, with the most rapid warming occurring at the lowest population densities, with an eventual saturation of the warming at high population densities.” No government temperature dataset corrects for the slowly-increasing spurious urbanization warming.

 

Oldest-ever DNA Shows Mastodons Roamed Greenland 2 Million Years Ago

Back in 2006, scientists collected sediment from a deposit of frozen mud and sand from northern Greenland that built up around 2 million years ago. The sediments were periodically tested over the years as technology for sequencing ancient DNA improved. DNA degrades into ever-shorter fragments over time. The scientists sifted through more than 16 billion DNA fragments and matched them to databases of genomes from modern plants and animals which sometimes differ substantially from those of the organisms’ ancient relatives. This article from Nature says, “Greenland was much warmer then, but the researchers did not expect the DNA sequences to reveal forests of poplar, spruce and yew trees such as those now typically found at much lower latitudes, alongside sedges, shrubs and birch-tree species that still grow in Greenland.” More surprising, the sequences indicated many ancient animals including mastodons — extinct relatives of elephants — as well as rodents, geese, rabbits and reindeer. “Reindeers, according to palaeontologists, should not have survived; they shouldn’t even exist at that time,” says Willerslev. Mastodons were thought to have lived in North American forests, and their remains have never been found in Greenland.

 

Seasonal Temperatures in West Antarctica during the Holocene

An international team of scientists have re-analyzed an ice core in West Antarctica to reveal summer and winter temperatures over the last 11,000 years to the beginning of the Holocene epoch. This is the first ice core analysis that shows the seasonal temperature record. Air temperatures were estimated using a continuous record of the water-isotope ratios.  Mulutin Milankovitch showed a century ago that variations of the Earth’s orbit and axis are strong drivers of Earth’s long-term climate. A co-author of the study said “our result confirms a fundamental prediction of the [Milankovitch] theory used to explain Earth's ice-age climate cycles: that the intensity of sunlight controls summertime temperatures in the polar regions, and thus melt of ice, too,"  The water isotopes tend to move around in the ice over centuries which can blur the data. The scientists were able to correct for this diffusion process. The figures in the paper show that summer temperatures in the western Antarctic generally rose through the early and middle Holocene then decreased towards the present, with a total range of around 2 °C. Winter temperatures varied within a range of only about 1 °C and also fluctuated at about 10 to 8 thousand years ago, a variation too rapid to attribute to orbital forcings.

 

Scotland’s “Energy Strategy and Just Transition plan” is a Disaster in the Making.

Richard Lyon has 35 years of international experience in electrical engineering and power systems, petroleum engineering, and energy economics. He wrote about the coming disaster that would be caused by the Scottish Government’s energy plan in response to the climate hysteria. A recent economic analysis of wind generation shows that it is uneconomic and destined for a taxpayer bailout. Wind and solar power produce only 30% of their nameplate capacity. The energy plan will greatly expand these “wind and solar energy scavenging devices”. Hydrogen is a very dangerous energy carrier that “squanders in waste heat” about 50% of the produced energy. Lyon says, “Converting surplus energy to hydrogen for storage and use at grid scale is unprecedented, wasteful, and fraught with risk.” Hydrogen storage sites located next to Scotland’s towns and cities will have the explosive power of millions of tonnes of TNT. Hydrocarbon gas is to be phased out of Scottish homes from 2030. Wind turbines with an economic life of only 11 years will be resupplied from China powered by coal generation plants that are much dirtier than one Scotland recently blew up. If Scotland’s CO₂ emission immediately fell to zero the effect on Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be undetectable according to climate models.

 

Climate Sensitivity from 1970-2021 Warming Estimates

Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer used a simple 1-D climate model to estimate climate sensitivity using all the various surface and sub-surface temperature datasets and their differing estimates of warming over the last 50 years. While they say that some of the warming was caused by urban development and natural warming from the Little Ice Age, they assume for the model that all of the warming was caused by human-caused increased in greenhouse gases. The model is time dependent so the increase in ocean heat content can be examined. The model has three ocean layers and three land layers. Spencer says “even though borehole temperatures suggest warming extending to almost 200 m depth (the cause of which seems to extent back several centuries), modern Earth System Models (ESMs) have embedded land models that extend to only 10 m depth or so.” This suggests a natural source for long-term climate change which the climate models and the IPCC ignore. The analysis gives equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) central estimate of 2.1 °C, assuming no natural or UHI warming. This is far less that the IPCC’s central ECS estimate of 3.0 °C. I roughly estimate that accounting for the natural and UHI warming could reduce the ECS estimate by 0.4 °C to only 1.7 °C.

 

Are Academics Studying the Right Things for the Grid?

Russell Schussler wrote “Influential academics as a body are encouraging an energy transition to renewables, discussing remote hopes and ignoring huge obstacles and greater costs, which will worsen reliability and eventually result in unbearable blackouts.” Before intermittent wind and solar facilities are connected to an electricity grid, detailed studies must be performed to determine what will be needed to make sure the resulting system is robust enough to meet requirements for dependable stable operation. Large rotating electrical generators operate in synchronism with the 60 Hertz alternating current electrical grid. Conventional generators (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro) readily provide voltage control, frequency control and balancing services. Asynchronous generation, sources which don’t spin with the system, such as wind and solar, do not as readily add strength to a system; rather they tend lean on other resources. Wind and solar will add complexity, cost and uncertainty for a long time. The less well these resources perform, the greater the likelihood of service reductions and blackouts. The best we may be able to do at higher penetration levels of asynchronous renewables is maintain frequency in a highly inferior manner with a boatload of reliability problems, with increasing blackouts at untenably high prices.

 

The Hydrocarbon Elephant in the Room

Ronald Stein criticized California Governor Gavin Newsom’s policies of ending oil production. He says the hydrocarbon elephant in the room is that the end of oil would be the end of civilization as the products manufactured from crude oil played a major role in building the world’s prosperity in the past 200 years. The intermittent electricity for wind and solar power can’t manufacture anything. Stein says the anti-oil policy is causing a shortage of fuels for planes and ships and the “products crisis”. After all, 6,000 products in our daily lives are made from oil derivatives that are manufactured out of crude oil. California is the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries. In 2021, California required 150 large oil tankers to import foreign crude oil to meet consumer demand. The oil tankers emitted about double the annual emissions of the entire Californian transportation sector.

 

The Climate Feedback Debate

The IPCC estimates that a doubling of CO₂ concentrations would cause an initial warming at equilibrium of 1.1 °C without feedbacks. The warming would be increased to roughly 3.0 °C by strong net positive feedbacks.  Feedbacks are changes in temperature caused by changes in other components of the climate system such as water vapor, clouds and albedo, which were caused by the initial CO₂ induced warming. Bob Irvine writes “The problem and paradox here is that all the IPCC’s known feedbacks when counted together produce a strong positive temperature reinforcement while real world measurements point to benign or even negative feedback.” An increase of water vapor in the atmosphere causes both a large positive radiative water vapor feedback (WV) and a smaller negative lapse rate feedback (LRF). The combined WV + LRF increased from 0.96 in AR4 of 2007 to 1.30 W/(m²·°C) in AR6 of 2019. The confidence limits of these estimates don’t even overlap. Irvine says that the high WV + LRF is very unlikely given the recent failure of the climate models that produce this high net feedback as they produce too much warming compared to measurements. The modelled signature of this WV + LRF feedback is a distinct warming high above the tropics. This has not occurred as expected and has caused many to doubt the models in this area. The climate models forecast that global relative humidity over the oceans will remain steady or slightly increase as the Earth warms, but this is not happening according to the UK Met Office. Relative humidity has been decreasing according to this chart.

 

CliSci # 381                                        2023-01-05

 

Things Everyone in Reinsurance Should Know

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. wrote “It is renewal season in the catastrophe reinsurance industry, which is seeing demands for pricing increases based on sub-par performance for investors.” Pielke presents a number of charts about insured losses. The first chart shows there is no trend in insured catastrophe losses from 1990 to 2022 as a percentage of global GDP. This implies that the industry does an excellent job of managing its exposure and losses. Insured losses of 9 of the 11 years from 2006 to 2014 were well below the long-term trend. This was largely due to the total lack of U.S. major hurricanes which spanned that period. Hurricane losses experience over the last 6 years is much closer to “normal” than the previous decade. There are models that make probabilistic estimates of hurricane damages but they have very large ranges of uncertainty estimates.

There has been dramatic housing growth in the most hurricane prone regions along the U.S. coastlines. As the population grows the chance increases that a hazard such as a storm surge or a hurricane will impact developed coastal lands.

U.S. insured wildfire losses have increased dramatically since 2016. Wildfire losses have increased due to large buildups of underbrush and denser forests due to previous fire suppression policies and due to urban development within and next to forested lands. Many communities are now surrounded by dense forests.

 

Humans Are NOT Causing a "Sixth Mass Extinction"

Michael Shellenberger wrote  “On CBS ’60 Minutes’ last night [January 1, 2023] scientists claimed that humans are causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’ and that we would need the equivalent of five planet earths for all humans to live at current Western levels.”  Both claims are wrong.  The claim that “five more earths” are needed to sustain humanity comes from Ecological Footprint calculation. These calculations were debunked 10 years ago as published by a group of scientists in the scientific journal PLOS Biology. Five of six measures of the ecological footprint were found to be either in balance or surplus, including food and forestry. Shellengerger says that the issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be solved simply by using sources with lower GHG emissions, namely natural gas and nuclear power.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that ¾ of all species are not threatened, 9% are endangered and 6% are critically endangered. The IUCN estimates that 0.8% of the 112,400 species identified have gone extinct since 1500. The majority of those extinctions occurred before 1900. Conservationists, it turns out, are skilled at maintaining small populations of animals, from yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand to mountain gorillas of central Africa. We are conserving habitat like never before. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected, an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface. There were 15 times more designated protected areas in the world in 2020 than in 1962. Between 1900 and 2010, the intensification of agriculture allowed Spain and France to reforest. The amount of land that humans use for meat production has declined by an area equal to 80 percent the area of Alaska since 2000.

New research has shown that extinctions “require greater loss of habitat than previously thought.” Around the world, the biodiversity of islands has actually doubled on average, thanks to the migration of “invasive species.” The introduction of new plant species has outnumbered plant extinctions one hundredfold. More plant species have come into existence in Europe than have become extinct over the last three centuries.

 

Water Vapor from Tonga's Eruption Could Warm Earth for Years

A study recently published in the journal Science suggests that the January 14, 2022 underwater volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apa (hereafter Tonga) sent 45 million tonnes of water vapour into the atmosphere and may have increased the water vapour content of the stratosphere by five percent.  The paper was described by an article on Live Science. The volcano is 65 km north of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is a Polynesian country and archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean. The initial volcanic plume rose to 58 km into the mesosphere, the greatest height ever reported for a vapor plume. The Tonga eruption also injected large quantities of ash and volcanic gases into the atmosphere. Tonga expelled approximately 440,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), only about 2% of the amount spewed by Mount Pinatubo during the 1991 eruption. The Pinatubo eruption caused significant cooling, about 0.5 °C for over a year, as the SO₂ combines with water to form sulfuric acid aerosols that reflect incoming solar radiation. The researchers say in underwater volcanoes, "submarine eruptions can draw large parts of their explosive energy from the interaction of water and hot magma," which propels huge quantities of water and steam into the eruption column. Water in the plumes was evaluated by radiosondes attached to weather balloon sent into the volcanic plumes. With tens of millions of tons of Tonga's moisture now adrift in the stratosphere,  Earth's surface will be heating up — though it's unclear by how much, according to the study.  But because the vapor is lighter than other volcanic aerosols and is less affected by gravity's pull, it will take longer for this warming effect to dissipate, and surface warming could continue "over the months to come," the scientists said.

 

Astronomical Battery Cost Looms over “Renewables”

David Wojick of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) wrote “The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it. We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years, he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those year’s actual wind and solar production.”  I had discussed my study with Mr. Wojick via Zoom and I appreciate that he wrote this article. Wojick discusses battery costs, while my report looks at total net zero costs including electrification of transportation, heating and cooling and other costs. Some low estimates of battery costs that Wojick presents assume battery costs would decline dramatically in the future. He is correct to be very skeptical of falling battery cost projections as the price of lithium ore used in batteries have increased by a factor of six since mid-2021 as the demand increased. Wojick wrote “More reasonable unit costs quickly get the total into the hundred trillion dollar range or more. Clearly these astronomical cost figures show that battery storage is simply impossible when it comes to making wind and solar reliable at grid scale. This is why the battery systems being built today are as nothing compared to what is actually needed to go with the wind and solar systems they accompany.”

 

Full Year 2022 Satellite Temperatures

Global temperature anomaly dataset of the lower troposphere from the surface up to about 8 km is published by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) using data from microwave sounding units on polar orbiting satellites. The average global 2022 temperature was the seventh warmest of the satellite record of 44 years. The year 2022 was 0.04 °C warmer than 2021, but was 0.22 °C cooler than 2016 which was the warmest year of the satellite record.  Dr. Roy Spencer wrote “The linear warming trend since January, 1979 continues at +0.13 °C/decade (+0.12 °C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 °C/decade over global-averaged land).” As indicated by my graph, which is displayed on the FOSS home page, the linear warming trend 1979 – 2022 of the climate models of the lower troposphere is more than double that of the satellite data. Even the satellite data is affected by the urban heat island effect (UHIE). The lower troposphere trend corrected for the UHIE is only 0.117 °C/decade. The global temperature in December was 0.12 °C cooler than the year average. This graph shows that tropical (20 °N to 20 °S) lower troposphere temperature trend is 0.116 °C/decade without UHIE correction, which is 0.018 °C/decade less than the global temperature trend.

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