Day: 24 June 2020

A strong and shallow earthquake registered by the USGS as M5.8 hit central California at 17:40 UTC on June 24, 2020. The agency is reporting a depth of 4.7 km (2.9 miles). 12 aftershocks were reported over the next 47 minutes, with the strongest one M4.5.

The epicenter was located 9.5 km (5.9 miles) WSW of Keeler (population 66), 17 km (10.5 miles) SSE of Lone Pine (population 2 035), and 96 km (59.5 miles) NNW of Ridgecrest (population 28 940), California.

There are about 54 000 people living within 100 km (62 miles).

2 000 people are estimated to have felt strong shaking.

Image credit: Google, TW/SAM

Image credit: Google, TW/SAM

The USGS issued a green alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. There is a low likelihood of casualties and damage.

Overall, the population in this region resides in structures that are resistant to earthquake shaking, though vulnerable structures exist. The predominant vulnerable building types are unreinforced brick masonry and reinforced masonry construction.

Recent earthquakes in this area have caused secondary hazards such as landslides and liquefaction that might have contributed to losses.

Estimated population exposure to earthquake shaking

Selected cities exposed

Regional seismicity

Featured image credit: Google, TW/SAM

Strong and shallow M5.8 earthquake hits Owens Lake, California — The Watchers » Latest articles

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Nowadays as soon as there’s any hint of some heat in the forecast, the European press immediately jump to holler a “record hot” summer is in the pipeline. Brace yourselves! A total miss For example, just last week The Weather Channel Germany warned of 40°C temperatures for Germany, probably after some model results sniffed out […]

The Weather Channel’s Bogus Forecast Of 40°C Heat…Also “Record Hot Summer” Forecast Looking Fake — Iowa Climate Science Education

Nowadays as soon as there’s any hint of some heat in the forecast, the European press immediately jump to holler a “record hot” summer is in the pipeline. Brace yourselves!

A total miss

For example, just last week The Weather Channel Germany warned of 40°C temperatures for Germany, probably after some model results sniffed out the possibility of very hot weather 7-10 days out – and likely based on model inputs that everyone knew were going to change, anyway. Certainly they had to know that.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1273184820877766657&lang=de&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.com%2Fread%2Fblogs%2F121663784%2Fposts%2F73622&theme=light&widgetsVersion=0b113ea%3A1592946486158&width=550px

But today the temptation to put out spectacular headlines, even when based on very little, is greater than it’s ever been.

“Tropical nights, extreme heat over the day,” The Weather Channel Deutschland blared a week ago, even though most models showed nothing of the sort. And now that the extreme heat is supposed to have arrived, here’s today’s forecast for Hanover for the next 10 days:

Image: Kachelmannwetter

30°C, not 40°C

Surprise! Not a single model even shows Hanover exceeding 30°C this week, when the 40°C heat wave was supposed to have “rolled in”. But last week’s forecast got some headlines, and that’s all that matters in these times of rampant fake news.

Forecast of record summer looks to fail big as well

As far as forecasts of another record summer this year for Europe go, that too appears to be a complete washout. Yesterday Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann tweeted the ECMWF 45-day forecast for Europe (until the start of August):https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1275322429003440130&lang=de&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.com%2Fread%2Fblogs%2F121663784%2Fposts%2F73622&theme=light&widgetsVersion=0b113ea%3A1592946486158&width=550px

Though there’s heat up in northern Europe currently, the ECMWF shows a cooling-off by day 10, and a coming 45-day summer period that’s just run-of-the-mill. So, the headline-seeking forecasts of a “another record hot summer” heard earlier in the media are turning out to be BOGUS.

No hot summer (for Austria)

Also Austrian weather site wetter.at here reports: “Certainly not a hot summer this year” and “A lot of rain is still to be expected”.

Wetter.at adds: “According to the experts of the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), this mix of sun and rain should continue throughout the summer. In any case, there should not be a hot summer this year.”

“It does not look like it will be a hot summer”, expert Claudia Riedl told the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten. Instead, the meteorologist expects a “normal, typically Austrian summer”.

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June 24, 2020 at 12:23PM

The recent Harvard Howler study claiming to link PM2.5 in outdoor air with increased risk of death from COVID-19 was always obvious junk science. And that reality is now underscored by this new study showing an inverse relationship between smoking and death from COVID-19.

Smoking is a very intense exposure to PM2.5. In breathing an hour of average US air, you will shallowly inhale less than 9 micrograms of PM2.5. Compare that with smoking a single cigarette during which you will deeply inhale anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 micrograms of PM2.5.

The Harvard Howler claimed that every extra 1 microgram of PM2.5 inhaled per hour increased the risk of COVID-19 death by 15%.

But this new study from University of Washington and Stanford University researchers reports an inverse relationship between smoking and death from COVID-19 — i.e., countries with higher rates of smoking had lower rates of death from COVID-19.

If the Harvard Howler claim were true, that relationship would be just the opposite.

The new study is here (Web | PDF).

Although the new study has yet to be peer-reviewed, it is not the first study to report this inverse association.

The new study doesn’t show that smoking is protective against COVID-19, but it does show that PM2.5 doesn’t worsen COVID-19.

The Harvard Howler is just fraudulent trash.

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June 24, 2020 at 12:06PM

Previous posts addressed the claim that fossil fuels are driving global warming. This post updates that analysis with the latest (2019) numbers from BP Statistics and compares World Fossil Fuel Consumption (WFFC) with three estimates of Global Mean Temperature (GMT). More on both these variables below.

WFFC

2017 statistics are now available from BP for international consumption of Primary Energy sources. 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy. 

The reporting categories are:
Oil
Natural Gas
Coal
Nuclear
Hydro
Renewables (other than hydro)

Note:  British Petroleum (BP) for the first time uses Exajoules to replace MToe (Million Tonnes of oil equivalents.) It is logical to use an energy metric which is independent of the fuel source. OTOH renewable advocates have no doubt pressured BP to stop using oil as the baseline since their dream is a world without fossil fuel energy.

From BP conversion table 1 exajoule (EJ) = 1 quintillion joules (1 x 10^18). Oil products vary from 41.6 to 49.4 tonnes per gigajoule (10^9 joules).  Comparing this annual report with previous years shows that global Primary Energy (PE) in MToe is roughly 24 times the same amount in Exajoules.  The conversion at the macro level varies from year to year depending on the fuel mix. The graphs below use the new metric.

This analysis combines the first three, Oil, Gas, and Coal for total fossil fuel consumption world wide. The chart below shows the patterns for WFFC compared to world consumption of Primary Energy from 1965 through 2019.

To enlarge, open image in new tabl

The graph shows tha tglobal Primary Energy consumption from all sources has grown continuously over 5 decades. Since 1965  oil, gas and coal (FF, sometimes termed “Thermal”) averaged 89% of PE consumed, ranging from 94% in 1965 to 84% in 2019.

Global Mean Temperatures

Everyone acknowledges that GMT is a fiction since temperature is an intrinsic property of objects, and varies dramatically over time and over the surface of the earth. No place on earth determines “average” temperature for the globe. Yet for the purpose of detecting change in temperature, major climate data sets estimate GMT and report anomalies from it.

UAH record consists of satellite era global temperature estimates for the lower troposphere, a layer of air from 0 to 4km above the surface. HadSST estimates sea surface temperatures from oceans covering 71% of the planet. HADCRUT combines HadSST estimates with records from land stations whose elevations range up to 6km above sea level.

Both GISS LOTI (land and ocean) and HADCRUT4 (land and ocean) use 14.0 Celsius as the climate normal, so I will add that number back into the anomalies. This is done not claiming any validity other than to achieve a reasonable measure of magnitude regarding the observed fluctuations.

No doubt global sea surface temperatures are typically higher than 14C, more like 17 or 18C, and of course warmer in the tropics and colder at higher latitudes. Likewise, the lapse rate in the atmosphere means that air temperatures both from satellites and elevated land stations will range colder than 14C. Still, that climate normal is a generally accepted indicator of GMT.

Correlations of GMT and WFFC

The next graph compares WFFC to GMT estimates over the five decades from 1965 to 2019 from HADCRUT4, which includes HadSST3.

Since 1965 the increase in fossil fuel consumption is dramatic and monotonic, steadily increasing by 237% from 146 to 492 exajoules.  Meanwhile the GMT record from Hadcrut shows multiple ups and downs with an accumulated rise of 0.9C over 54 years, 6% of the starting value.

The next graph compares to GMT estimates from UAH6, and HadSST3 for the satellite era from 1979 to 2019, a period of 40 years.

In the satellite era WFFC has increased at a compounded rate of nearly 2% per year, for a total increase of 87% since 1979. At the same time, SST warming amounted to 0.52C, or 3.7% of the starting value.  UAH warming was 0.58C, or 4.7% up from 1979.  The temperature compounded rate of change is 0.1% per year, an order of magnitude less than WFFC.  Even more obvious is the 1998 El Nino peak and flat GMT since.

Summary

The climate alarmist/activist claim is straight forward: Burning fossil fuels makes measured temperatures warmer. The Paris Accord further asserts that by reducing human use of fossil fuels, further warming can be prevented.  Those claims do not bear up under scrutiny.

It is enough for simple minds to see that two time series are both rising and to think that one must be causing the other. But both scientific and legal methods assert causation only when the two variables are both strongly and consistently aligned. The above shows a weak and inconsistent linkage between WFFC and GMT.

Going further back in history shows even weaker correlation between fossil fuels consumption and global temperature estimates:

Figure 5.1. Comparative dynamics of the World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (ΔT), 1861-2000. The thin dashed line represents annual ΔT, the bold line—its 13-year smoothing, and the line constructed from rectangles—WFC (in millions of tons of nominal fuel) (Klyashtorin and Lyubushin, 2003). Source: Frolov et al. 2009

In legal terms, as long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for the set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. The more likely explanation is that global temperatures vary due to oceanic and solar cycles. The proof is clearly and thoroughly set forward in the post Quantifying Natural Climate Change.

Background context for today’s post is at Claim: Fossil Fuels Cause Global Warming.

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June 24, 2020 at 10:55AM

Chilling words from snarky teen activist turned climate change icon Greta Thunberg.

The Black Lives Matter protests and success of the ‘corona crisis’ lockdown across the world provide a blueprint for the climate change fight, Greta believes. They show the ‘necessary force’ people need to use when fighting global warming,

Admitting that a “green recovery plan” from the government is not enough to solve the problem — Thunberg now says climate change should be treated with the same weight as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It shows that in a crisis, you act, and you act with necessary force,” she said of the current events. “Suddenly people in power are saying they will do whatever it takes since you cannot put a price on human life.”

https://www.rt.com/news/492475-greta-thunberg-black-lives-matter

Thanks to Jimmy Walter and many others for this link

The post ‘Act with necessary force,’ says Greta appeared first on Ice Age Now.

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June 24, 2020 at 11:23AM

Posted on June 20, 2020

by Gerald Browning

Climate model sensitivity to CO2 is heavily dependent on artificial parameterizations (e.g. clouds, convection) that are implemented in global climate models that utilize  the wrong atmospheric dynamical system and excessive dissipation.

The peer reviewed manuscript entitled “The Unique, Well Posed Reduced System for Atmospheric Flows: Robustness In The Presence Of Small Scale Surface Irregularities” is in press at the journal Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans (DAO) [link]  and the submitted version of the manuscript is available on this site, with some slight differences from the final published version.  Link to paper is here: Manuscript

Abstract:  It is well known that the primitive equations (the atmospheric equations of motion under the additional assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium for large-scale motions) are ill posed when used in a limited area on the globe. Yet the equations of motions for large-scale atmospheric motions are essentially a hyperbolic system, that with appropriate boundary conditions, should lead to a well-posed system in a limited area. This apparent paradox was resolved by Kreiss through the introduction of the mathematical Bounded Derivative Theory (BDT) for any symmetric hyperbolic system with multiple time scales (as is the case for the atmospheric equations of motion). The BDT uses norm estimation techniques from the mathematical theory of symmetric hyperbolic systems to prove that if the norms of the spatial and temporal derivatives of the ensuing solution are independent of the fast time scales (thus the concept of bounded derivatives), then the subsequent solution will only evolve on the advective space and time scales (slowly evolving in time in BDT parlance) for a period of time. The requirement that the norm of the time derivatives of the ensuing solution be independent of the fast time scales leads to a number of elliptic equations that must be satisfied by the initial conditions and ensuing solution. In the atmospheric case this results in a 2D elliptic equation for the pressure and a 3D equation for the vertical component of the velocity. 

Utilizing those constraints with an equation for the slowly evolving in time vertical component of vorticity leads to a single time scale (reduced) system that accurately describes the slowly evolving in time solution of the atmospheric equations and is automatically well posed for a limited area domain. The 3D elliptic equation for the vertical component of velocity is not sensitive to small scale perturbations at the lower boundary so the equation can be used all of the way to the surface in the reduced system, eliminating the discontinuity between the equations for the boundary layer and troposphere and the problem of unrealistic growth in the horizontal velocity near the surface in the hydrostatic system.

The mathematical arguments are based on the  Bounded Derivative Theory (BDT) for symmetric  hyperbolic systems introduced by Professor Heinz-Otto Kreiss  over four decades ago and on the theory of numerical approximations of partial differential equations.

What is the relevance of this research for climate modeling?  At a minimum, climate modelers must make the following assumptions:

1. The numerical climate model must accurately approximate the correct dynamical system of equations

Currently all global climate (and weather) numerical models are numerically approximating the primitive equations  — the atmospheric equations of motion modified by the hydrostatic  assumption.   However this is not the system of equations that satisfies the mathematical estimates  required by the BDT for the initial data and subsequent solution in order to evolve as the large scale motions in the atmosphere. The correct dynamical system is introduced in the new manuscript that goes into detail as to why the primitive equations are not the correct system.

Because the primitive equations use discontinuous columnar forcing (parameterizations), excessive energy is injected into the smallest scales of the model. This necessitates the use of unrealistically large dissipation to keep the model from blowing up. That means the fluid is behaving more like molasses than air. References are included in the new manuscript that show that this substantially reduces the accuracy of the numerical approximation.

2. The numerical climate model correctly approximates the transfer of energy between scales as in the actual atmosphere.

Because the dissipation in climate models is so large, the parameterizations must be tuned in order to try to artificially replicate the atmospheric spectrum. Mathematical theory based on the turbulence equations has shown that the use of the wrong amount or type of dissipation leads to the wrong solution. In the climate model case, this implies that no conclusions can be drawn about climate sensitivity because the numerical solution is not behaving as the real atmosphere.

3. The forcing (parameterizations) accurately approximate the corresponding processes in the atmosphere and there is no accumulation of error over hundreds of years of simulation.

It is well known that there are serious errors in the parameterizations, especially with respect to clouds and moisture that are crucial to the simulation of the real atmospheres. Pat Frank has addressed the accumulation of error in the climate models. In the new  manuscript, even a small error in the system impacts the accuracy of the solution in a short period of time.

One might ask how can climate models apparently predict the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in the past given these issues. I have posted a simple example on Climate Audit (reproducible on request) that shows that given any time dependent system (even if it is not the correct one for the fluid being studied), if one is allowed to choose the forcing, one can reproduce any solution one wants. This is essentially what the climate modelers have done in order to match the previous climate given the wrong dynamical system and excessive dissipation.

I reference a study on the accuracy of a primitive equation global forecast model by Sylvie Gravel et al.  [link]. She showed that the largest source of error in the initial stages of a forecast are from the excessive growth of the horizontal velocity near the lower boundary. Modelers have added a boundary layer drag/dissipation in an attempt to prevent this from happening. I note in the new manuscript that this problem does not occur with the correct dynamical system and that in fact the correct system is not sensitive to small-scale perturbations at the lower boundary.

Biosketch: I am an independent applied mathematician trained in partial differential equations and numerical analysis concerned about the loss of integrity in science through the abuse of rigorous mathematical theory by numerical modelers. I am not funded by any outside organization.   My previous publications can be found on google scholar by searching for Browning and Kreiss.

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June 24, 2020 at 12:13PM

In the middle of summer!

In the south of Croatia, including in coastal cities, unexpectedly snow fell in the middle of summer.

It is reported by 24sata .

Snowfall swept the Cetina region and spread to the coastal cities of Trogir and Kastela. Snow cover in places reached 10 centimeters.

Local residents did not expect such a sharp change in weather. Many had to push their cars, and some even decided to ski.

http://mignews.com/mobile/article.html?id=210620_134737_02326

Thanks to Alexey Parkhomenko for this link

The post Snow suddenly fell in Croatia – Video appeared first on Ice Age Now.

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June 24, 2020 at 10:47AM