Tag Archives: climate scientists

A Note to The Guardian – Opinion Is NOT Science

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A recent article in the newspaper The Guardian reports that some of the ”world’s top climate scientists” believe that disaster is soon to occur due to what they claim will be an additional degree of warming on the planet. This is a false narrative. The earth has experienced similar temperatures in the past without disastrous consequences. In addition, one should note that opinion when it comes to climate science has had a terrible track record.

The opinion piece, titled “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target,” starts off with gloom and doom in the first couple of paragraphs:

Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.

Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts, and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.

First, as Climate Realism has previously discussed, here, for instance, the 1.5°C so-called limit is an arbitrarily made-up threshold. There is no scientific evidence that surpassing the 1.5℃ politically established amount of warming will result in worsening extreme weather events. What’s true of the 1.5℃ threshold is equally true of the 2°C limit, as Roger Pielke Jr., Ph.D. explains in his article, The Two Degree Temperature Target is Arbitrary and Untethered.

In The Guardian article, the opinion of “climate experts” suggests that disasters are afoot, with experts telling the paper that “massive preparations to protect people from the worst of the coming climate disasters were now critical.”

Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said: “I am extremely worried about the costs in human lives.”

“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt, at the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”

What’s ironic, is that both The Guardian and those “climate experts” have missed the fact that in Europe, both the 1.5° and 2°C “limits” have already been surpassed, with no deleterious effects.

Below in Figure 1 is the Berkeley Earth average surface temperature record for Europe since about 1780. Europe is a good location to analyze, because some of the longest continuous temperature records are from Europe. It shows that not just 1.5°C, but 2.0°C of warming has already occurred.

Figure 1. (click to enlarge) Berkeley Earth average European temperature showing a 2.0°C rise since about 1820. Source: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/europe Annotated by Anthony Watts

Claims that reaching such temperatures supposedly driven by increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere are causing or will cause disasters, such as climate tipping points, have been repeatedly debunked at Climate Realism, not a single one of those predictions has come true.

Also, Cotrim da Cunha’s stated worry that warming will result in more humans dying is belied by the fact that research shows that 10 to 17 time more people die of cold than heat, and that as the Earth has warmed the number of people dying from temperature related illnesses has fallen dramatically. 

Given that track record, it hardly seems likely that some additional warming will result in disasters. According to a 2023 study by the University of California Santa Cruz, Earth has experienced higher CO2 levels and warmer temperature in the past, as seen in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2. Temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide over the past 66 million years. Bottom numbers indicate millions of years in the past; right-hand numbers, carbon dioxide in parts per million. Hotter colors indicate distinct periods of higher temperatures; deeper blues, lower ones. The solid zigzagging line charts contemporaneous carbon dioxide levels; shaded area around it reflects uncertainty in the curve. (Adapted from CenCO2PIP, Science 2023)

Earth survived, and history shows that humans are highly adaptable, thus the alarm over missing some arbitrary climate target temperatures we’ve already reached is both unjustified and moot.

What we have here is nothing more than an opinion poll of people whose entire careers are built upon hyping climate catastrophe, whose and reputations will be destroyed if the climate crisis narrative is untrue.

Scientific thinking and practice involves forming testable hypotheses, deciding how to test those hypotheses, doing the tests and analyzing the results to formulate proof and test theory. The claims of climate catastrophes, when they have been tested by experience and time, have proven false. And the future disastrous climate scenarios the experts are forecasting can’t be confirmed outside of the climate models that the self-same experts reference and rely upon to for their opinions. Opinion about science is not science at all but a belief.

This Guardian article is not news, but rather simply gives voice to so-called “experts,” whose past claims about the future are one long train of failed predictions. The Guardian has proven time and again that when it comes to “reporting” on climate change, it and its writers are shameless promoters of the climate crisis narrative which has no basis in evidence or data.

Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

‘Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,’ said astrophysicist Willie Soon.

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response. The Epoch Times has the story.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.

But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.

“But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”

The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.

“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”

In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture.

Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.

“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.

While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”

“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.

Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.

“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data.

“If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”

Homogenization

One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.”

According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.

These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.

For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.

Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.

But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.

“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.

Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.

Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.

One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.

He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.

“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”

This is “very bizarre,” he said.

“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.

These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.

Because NOAA doesn’t maintain historical information on its weather stations, the CERES scientists reached out to European scientists who had been compiling the data for the stations that they oversee.

They found that just 17 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were consistently applied. And less than 20 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were clearly associated with a documented change to the station observations.

“When we looked under the hood, we found that there was a hamster running in a wheel instead of an engine,” Mr. Connolly said. “It seems that with these homogenization programs, it is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.”

A spokesman for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information downplayed the significance, but said the agency was working to address the issues raised in the papers.

“NOAA uses the well-documented Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm every day on GHCNm (monthly)—version 4, and the results of specific adjustments to individual station series can differ from run to run,” the spokesman said, adding that the papers in question didn’t support the view that the concerns about the homogenization of the data made it useless or worse.

“NOAA is addressing the issues raised in both these papers in a future release of the GHCNm temperature dataset and its accompanying documentation.”

Read the full story here.

Climate Scientists More Generally, & Boris Kelly-Gerreyn More Specifically

From Jennifer Marohasy

January 25, 2024 By jennifer

Black is white, hot is cold. That is what we are continually being asked to believe, including by the counsel for Michael Mann in his defamation trial again Mark Steyn.

If you haven’t already started listening along, I suggest you begin with the re-enactments in the daily Ann and Phelim podcasts. I have just finished listening to Day 5, Mann in the Box. And I’m angry.

I am angry that information can be so misrepresented, and I am also angry that for so many years John Abbot and I have not been properly supported in our fight for the parallel data to enable some checking of the last thirty years of thermometer temperature data for Australia.

If you listen to Day 5, Mann in the Box, you will hear Ann McElinney incredulous that climate scientists could believe tree ring data from 1134 AD, but not 1980 (I might have got those years wrong). Thus, the need to ‘hide the decline’ and for ‘Mike’s trick’, which is swapping to thermometer data from proxy (tree ring) data as convenient, which is routinely done by climate scientists as detailed in the Climategate emails.

As Ann explains, from Michael Mann’s own words, the infamous hockey stick graph that created so much impetus for action on climate change, is reliant on tree ring data that are assumed to be reliable back some centuries but are known to not be reliable since the 1980s – it makes no sense.

Welcome to the world of climate science where hot is cold and black is white. And more specifically to my world where I have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the temperature data for Australia, and much of the rest of the world, is not reliable for at least the last thirty years. I have shown this through my blog series, Hyping Maximum Daily Temperatures (Parts 1- 7).

Specifically, that the switch over to automatic weather stations where temperature is increasingly measured as electrical resistance through platinum resistance probes that are susceptible to electrical interference particularly at airports, and that can be calibrated to measure how ever many degrees warmer (or cooler) that Andrew Johnston, the current head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, might deem appropriate.

I’ve been assured over the last few years, including by Andrew Johnson, that the change from mercury thermometer to platinum resistance probe is not the cause of, nor a contribution to, global warming as reported on the nightly television news. If it was, this would be evident as an increase in the number of hot days and their average temperature – just the same as what we are told has been caused by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

They treat us like mugs (by which I mean idiots or lazy ducks in a park), and for the most part my colleagues behave as such. Thank goodness for Mark Steyn. Finally, someone who calls black for black – except when he is joking.

The most straightforward way to know the effect of the change to temperature probes – and to distinguish this from the potential effects of warming from carbon dioxide – would be to compare the automatic readings from the probes with the manual readings from mercury thermometers at many weather stations over many years.

The bureau has been collecting this data as handwritten recordings on A8 forms. There is no official list but, piecing together information, I am confident that parallel data – measurements from probes versus mercury – exists for 38 weather stations and from many of these there should be more than 20 years of daily data available to enable comparisons. Access to all this information, and its analysis, would enable some assessment of the consequence of the equipment change. The issue is doubly complicated by the bureau using more than one type of probe, changing the type of probe used, and the type of data transmitted electronically – initially averaging values and then changing to the recording of instantaneous values.

It was back in 2015 that I first tried get the parallel data for Wilson’s Promontory Lighthouse. (You can read the letter I first sent to the Bureau by CLICKING HERE, and an overview of the saga by CLICKING HERE.)

Then in December 2017, after John Abbot told me that I had been going about it all wrong, I challenged him to get the data for me. Thus began his attempt to get this data through Freedom of Information (FOI).

After some years, and so much correspondence and denial, rather than hand over the temperature data to John Abbot, we ended up at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) with me as the expert witness and him representing himself. That was in February last year, nearly a year ago. Except that trial never proceeded, for reasons I still don’t understand except that Andrew Johnson does not want Boris Kelly-Gerreryn to have to give evidence under oath, for reasons that I do understand.

So, we were forced back into mediation. I was contacted sometime after this by a lawyer concerned that we were representing ourselves. I encouraged him to put the word out through his network that we should get some help, some assistance preferable from someone who understood how difficult it is to win at the AAT and a lawyer experienced in the same. Then I get a phone call from John Roskam asking about all of this because Stuart Woods had contacted him having seen the note from this lawyer to the network of Australian lawyers who ostensibly concern themselves with issues of public interest. Yes, I confirmed, it would be good to get some legal assistance, and that was the last I heard of it.

John Abbot has though received more correspondence from Boris Kelly-Gerreyn specifically a letter dated December 7, 2023. In this letter, the bureau is back to denying that any of this parallel data exists. Boris Kelly-Gerreyn is the General Manager, Data Program and Chief Data Officer, Bureau of Meteorology.

It is the case that in climate science: black is white, and hot is cold and the Conservative side of politics seems, for the most part, to just go along with all of this. The planet is boiling and all of that, let’s go nuclear, say the sitting ducks. Etcetera. Etcetera.

What is Landification?

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 17 January 2024 

Don’t you love it when new words are introduced into the language?  I do, especially when the inventor of a new word is Google Translate.

This issue is raised by tangentially by Dr. Judith Hubbard  [ @JudithGeology ] in a Xweet (pronounced ‘sweet’?) here:

The word “landification” doesn’t exist in English, but appears on this Google-translated webpage (from Japanese). 

Long-time readers will know how fussy I can be:  I checked to make sure that it was Google Translate that made up the word.  If you are as fussy as I am, compare these two versions:  Google Translate version of the Japanese page with the English version provided by the publisher.  The English page uses the phrase “Land emergence”.  We’ll save this little incident for a future essay on the wide latitude accepted when dealing with the alleged  intellectual value of an AI that hallucinates and ”makes stuff up”.

The topic is brought up by the inestimable Roger Pielke Jr.  who is one of the few climate scientists that straddles the line between the Climate Crisis crowd and the Climate Realist crowd, at least when seen in the public arena.  “Love ‘im or hate ‘im”, he is a very effective communicator with a huge presence and broad influence.  The more often he speaks out, the closer he moves towards the Climate Realism corner—my corner—of the climate debate triangle. 

Triangle?  Yes, the Climate Debate TriangleTM  — the Climate Crisis crowd in one corner, the Climate Skeptics in another, and the Climate Realists in the third.   I prefer the triangle view to the two-pole view and think it reflects the ongoing differences of opinion and viewpoint far better.  However, you may prefer to see it as a square, if you want to include (who knows why…) the Climate Crazies (these are the “edgers”, those way out on the edges of their respective viewpoints, such as “We are all doomed, five years left, the Earth is on fire, give up and die!” sliding down to “The whole thing is an utter hoax, there has been no warming and never will be!”.   The total range of opinions is galactic in scale.

So, Landification?  “the emergence of new land area.”

In the Climate Crisis world, only land-loss is considered.  Land which is being eroded away by the ongoing dynamics between the waters and the dry land at the edges of the seas, rivers and lakes.  Of course, this includes dry land that is being covered by water as the surface levels of various bodies of water – seas, oceans – rise.  We are all familiar with the usual suspects:  Low Lying Islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans or the disappearing deltas of great rivers that have been channelized.  Even lesser erosion losses have been blamed on climate change, such as that of villages built on river bends in Alaska.

The other side of the coin is “land emergence”  — or the gaining of dry land.  How does this happen?  Ask a geologist.  Continental masses rise up, coral islands and reefs accrete (gain) sand and expand their shores, oceanic volcanoes grow and poke their heads above the waters and river deltas build up through deposition sediment washed down by the water.

Pielke Jr. dives into the question based on the paper noted in Dr. Hubbard’s xweet:  “Coastline change caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake detected by ALOS-2 SAR satellite image (Jan. 4, 2024)” [ original Japanese version here ].  Asking: “What are long-term trends in global landification?

In the process, Pielke Jr. exposed a bit of pure-evil NASA propaganda aimed at the youngest of our children, the subject of my  OpEd  the other day.

But what is this whole thing about Land Emergence?  Is it real?  Is there more land today than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago?  Really?  We know sea levels have risen anywhere between 8 and 12 inches over the last century.  That must have reduced the amount of dry land.  Yes?  No?

The  research question of the Japanese-led study was coastline change caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake.  The earthquake happened on New Year’s Day 2024, and the paper was published before 12 January 2024.   Marvelous rapid research starting with posing an important question through collecting relevant information, collating and writing up that information in a scientifically useful way followed by bi-lingual publication – all in less than two weeks — under the auspices of the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan.   The paper is almost entirely comprised of before and after satellite photos of the shorelines affected. 

It concludes “The shoreline shifted seaward approximately 200 m at most.”   That’s a lot of new land. 

Is this the only study about land emergence?   No. 

Yongjing . Mao et al (2021) explored the use of Google Earth to determine changes in land area at high tide on coasts, helping to eliminate the confusion that can be caused by large-area tidal flats. 

Nienhuis et al. (2020) — “Global-scale human impact on delta morphology has led to net land area gain” —  studied river deltas and found  “Here we show how the morphology of about 11,000 coastal deltas worldwide, ranging from small bayhead deltas to mega-deltas, has been affected by river damming and deforestation. We introduce a model that shows that present-day delta morphology varies across a continuum between wave (about 80 per cent), tide (around 10 per cent) and river (about 10 per cent) dominance, but that most large deltas are tide- and river-dominated. Over the past 30 years, despite sea-level rise, deltas globally have experienced a net land gain of 54 ± 12 square kilometres per year (2 standard deviations), with the largest 1 per cent of deltas being responsible for 30 per cent of all net land area gains.”   And that’s another additional 1620 km2 of land surface.

In Southeast Asia, Anthony et al. (2015) found evidence that various human activities have adversely affected land area of the Mekong Delta through “(1) a reported significant decrease in coastal surface suspended sediment from the Mekong that may be linked to dam retention of its sediment, (2) large-scale commercial sand mining in the river and delta channels and (3) subsidence due to groundwater extraction”  resulting a loss of land area.

You may recall studies finding similar results about the U.S.’s Mississippi Delta covered in posts here at WUWT.

Holdaway et al. (2021) — “Global-scale changes in the area of atoll islands during the 21st century“ — found “As a result, the global response of atoll islands coincident with sea level rise remains uncertain. Using rich collections of Landsat imagery, this study analyses changes in land area on 221 atolls in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Results show that, between 2000 and 2017, the total land area on these atolls has increased by 61.74 km2 (6.1 %) from 1007.60 km2 to 1069.35 km2. Most of the change in land area resulted from island building within the Maldives and on atolls in the South China Sea. Since 2000, the Maldives have added 37.50 km2 of land area, while 16.57 km2 of new islands have appeared within the South China Seas Spratly and Paracel chains.”

Webin Shen et al. (2015) — “Evidences of the expanding Earth from space-geodetic data over solid land and sea level rise in recent two decades” —  claims to have found that the Earth itself is expanding at a combined (land and ocean) rate of “0.35 ± 0.47 mm/a in recent two decades.”  [Note:  I have very little faith in the results of this particular study, as it was performed in an openly stated attempt to justify satellite calculated SLR of 3.4 mm/yr when in-situ physically-measured SLR is approximately 2 mm/yr — kh]   They may be right in their finding that the Earth is expanding ever so slightly, which would result in more land area.

Donchyts et al. (2016) — “Earth’s surface water change over the past 30 years“ — came to the conclusion that “Earth’s surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas.”

I have studied and written a great deal about sea levels, their rise and fall, and the impacts these might have in general and on specific locations.   On the whole, I agree with Pielke Jr. on this:

“Sea level rise is important to coastal management. Of this, there is no doubt — it will continue, regardless of what changes are made to energy policies.  Sea level rise will cause impacts around the world and require adaptation regardless what is done on global energy policies.  ….  At the same time, the consequences of sea level rise for coasts around the world is not as simple as rising seas inexorably encroaching upon static land. Human influences such as sedimentation and reclamation make a big difference on outcomes. So too do natural processes of erosion and deposition.”

Bottom Lines:

1.  The consensus view, regardless of the contention regarding the rate of rise, that rising sea levels will simply continue to submerge land under the sea and cause land loss through eroding land edges is not factual and is not supported by physical evidence. 

2.  The Earth is gaining land area despite rising sea levels.

3.  Yet again, the physical evidence is counter-intuitive [contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation (but often nevertheless true)] and once more runs contrary to the general worldview presented by the IPCC and its acolytes.

4.  The points above do not obviate the fact that many low-lying cities have been built in harm’s way, built on ephemeral sand bars,  in danger of massive destruction by hurricane winds and storm surge, and others are in danger of simple being flooded even by the slow gradual rising sea levels of the last century.  These areas, with Miami, Florida as a good example, need to begin adaptation and mitigation efforts yesterday (actually, they should have begun decades ago).

# # # # #

Author’s Note:

Seeing every issue as black-or-white is a very serious cognitive error.  Almost nothing, even some moral issues, are almost never so clear cut.

The seas are rising.  The non-linear dynamical interactions of the atmosphere-ocean coupled system means that there will be storms – some of them unimaginably powerful.  This is unavoidable – Lorentz demonstrated this in the 1960s.  We do our societies harm if we ignore this.

But, the fact of rising seas does not mean “millions are going to eventually drown”.   That is a bizarre-world pronouncement of the Climate Crazies, like those who show maps of the calculated sea levels “if all the ice in Greenland were to melt”.

I wrote a chapter on sea level rise for the  CLINTEL publication: The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC.  (also here)  Chapter 5:  Accelerated Sea Level Rise: Not So Fast.  In it, I show that the IPCC-consensus view is not supported by physical measurements of the actual levels of the sea surface where it hits the land.  Sea levels are rising, but they are not accelerating, not rising faster or slower.

And, the Earth is gaining land area, not losing it.

Thanks for reading.

“Many Will Die”: Climate Scientists Respond to COP28 Fiasco

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

The usual wailing and wild statements we’ve come to expect in the wake of the annual COP failure.

‘Weak tea’: Climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer

Washington (AFP) – A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism. 

Issued on: 14/12/2023 – 02:41

…

Michael Mann … “The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP. “It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from donuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes. The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating.”

Mann called for a substantial reform of the COP rules, for example permitting super-majorities to approve decisions over the objections of holdout petro states like Saudi Arabia, and barring oil executives such as COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber from presiding over future summits.

…

‘Death knell for 1.5C’

“No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care,” said Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.

…

‘Many will die’

Friederike Otto, a climatologist and leader in the field of assessing the role of climate change on specific extreme weather events, was equally damning.  … “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.” 

…Read more: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231214-weak-tea-climate-scientists-push-back-against-cop28-cheer

Mann’s demand for a transition to a supermajority rather than unanimous vote is intriguing. I mean, how does Mann plan to enforce agreements if he has his supermajority, but one or two key players like India or China say no? Send in the US army?

These climate scientists just aren’t living in the real world.

Of course as COP28 demonstrated, you can just wait until the most intransigent delegates are out of the room before calling a vote.

Correct, WBUR, Many Climate Scientists Don’t Tell the Truth

From Watts Up With That?

An October 3, 2023 opinion piece by Barbara Moran at the WBUR (Boston) website has the headline “Many scientists don’t want to tell the truth about climate change. Here’s why.” Since human-caused climate change has become a topic of debate, climate scientists have routinely misstated facts and suppressed the truth.

The WBUR article centers, in particular, around the purported 1.5°C “warming limit” climate alarmists within the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in the mainstream media and climate activist community have claimed since 2010 posed an amount of warming that would bring catastrophic, irreversible consequences. The first U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change document to mention a limit to global warming of 1.5°C was the Cancun Agreement, adopted at the sixteenth COP (COP16) in 2010.

Now, in 2023, there’s a new worry. According to the WBUR article, “[i]n March, the United Nations released a massive climate change report. The biggest takeaway: Global warming will soon pass the oft-mentioned target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

Previously the big worry was that at 1.5 degrees, “tipping points” in the climate will occur. As Climate at a Glance: Tipping Points, shows there is no evidence that any such tipping points exist. Now the worry is that scientists might publicly admit the 1.5 degree Celsius rise is locked in, resulting people to giving up hope and ceasing to fight for scientists’ favored restrictions on fossil fuels.

The article says:

After this report came out, something weird happened. Unlike the blunt Dr. Thorne, most climate scientists (and journalists) didn’t change how they publicly spoke about 1.5 C. Admitting defeat could risk “demotivation” said Pascal Lamy, the commissioner of the Climate Overshoot Commission. Scientists kept saying things like: “We need to act now to stay below 1.5” or “it’s getting harder, but still technically possible.”

Climate scientists, in an effort to stave off despair, aren’t telling the truth about our warming planet. In reality, we’re incredibly close to the point of no return: when rising seas drown island nations and almost all coral reefs die. I’m here to tell climate scientists — and my fellow climate journalists — to knock it off.

Climate scientists lying about 1.5°C so we won’t lose hope? It seems that way. Yet there is no evidence thus far that passing 1.5°C means disaster. We’ve previously taken this topic to task on Climate Realism, here and here, and demonstrated, as seen in Figure 1. below, that in Europe, home of the longest surface temperature record, warming has already met and exceeded 1.5°C. In fact, a 2.0°C rise has been recorded.

Figure 1. Berkeley Earth average European temperature since 1750. Source: https://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/europe

Despite a 2.0°C rise in temperature, Europe is still there. No disaster has occurred. No “tipping points” have happened. Yet climate scientists seem totally unaware of this fact, or simply choose to ignore it and not report it. Also, as showed repeatedly on Climate Realism, there is no evidence climate change is causing an increase in the negative impacts on coral reefs or small island nations that Moran is nattering on about.

Although the article didn’t consider this possibility, perhaps, the new worry is that when 1.5 degrees is surpassed and catastrophe does not occur, people will have even less faith in scientists’ alarming climate claims than polls show they already do.

If they lie about this 1.5°C limit being breached, what else are they hiding or lying about? If history is any indication, it seems almost everything.

As far back as 1989, climate scientists were already acknowledging they might have to suppress the truth and exaggerate the dangers of climate change to push climate action. In October 1989, the late Stephen Scheider, Ph.D., admitted to Discover Magazine:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To avert the risk [of potentially disastrous climate change] t we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

And then there is the infamous “hockey stick graph” by Dr. Michael Mann, which has been shown to be nothing more than an artifact of splicing two dissimilar datasets together to hide the decline in tree-ring derived temperatures, aka “Mikes Nature Trick.”

During the ClimateGate scandal Dr Phil Jones wrote an email to Mann, which said:

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Of course, James Hansen, Ph.D., former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, predicted New York City’s  West Side Highway would be underwater in 20 years from sea-level rise, and then when it didn’t come true claimed he really said 40 years.

Or, how about the claims of an ice-free Arctic due to climate change. Several claims were made by climate scientists, but none have come true.

In fact, there is an entire set of claims and predictions about climate from climate scientists that have never come true. As proof of this one can view a searchable plethora Failed Climate Predictions, here.

More recently climate scientist Patrick T. Brown, admitted to not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the causes of catastrophic wildfires in California. Brown reported in an article he wrote for the Free Press that a scientific paper he was the lead author of left out non-climate related factors which were significant factors driving the rapid growth in California wildfires in recent years. Brown wrote:

I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change.

With these sorts of scientific shenanigans going on, lies of omission, and not owning up to failed predictions, is it any wonder that most citizens put climate change worry dead last on the list of concerns?

Science is supposed to be about finding and publishing the truth. Instead, it seems that climate science publishes what it believes is good for the so-called “sake of the planet” rather than scientific truth. For science to be useful, it must be held to a standard of truth, otherwise it becomes unbelievable and undermines the expansion of knowledge and progress. We all deserve better.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.

He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.

He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Climate scientists admit they have a 90% chance of being wrong about Arctic sea ice

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Javier Vinós

Arctic sea ice is lowest during the month of September, and its average extent during this month is a useful metric for measuring Arctic sea ice decline during the current period of global warming. During the 1980s and 1990s, September Arctic sea-ice extent (SIE) showed a moderate decline (Figure 1). After the 1997 climate shift, which involved a rather abrupt global atmospheric reorganization, the Arctic entered a period of rapid change that I call the Arctic Shift.[1] During this period, Arctic SIE declined more rapidly. Scientists noticed this change in trend about a decade later and became increasingly concerned about the prospect of an ice-free Arctic.[2]

Figure 1. September Arctic sea-ice extent since 1979. The blue area indicates the period of rapid change named the Arctic Shift.

The concern about the rapid decline of Arctic SIE in the early years of this century was due to the possibility of a runaway ice-albedo feedback. Loss of sea ice would reduce albedo, and additional solar energy would cause further sea ice loss. Models that reproduced the rapid loss predicted a tipping point that would lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2040, sparking public fears.[3] However, recent work suggests that up to 60% of the decline in September SIE since 1979 may be due to changes in atmospheric circulation.[4] In addition, the persistence of Arctic summer cloud cover significantly reduces the ice-albedo feedback.[5] The realization that internal variability is a more important factor than expected explains why the rate of decline of Arctic summer SIE has slowed so much since 2007, contrary to all expectations.

The Arctic Shift, a period of adjustment of Arctic climate variables to the new atmospheric regime induced by the 1997 climate shift, ended for Arctic SIE in 2007. Since then, the September Arctic SIE shows no significant trend. However, climate researchers are still unaware of the effects of climate shifts and regimes on climate change, and they were surprised by the recovery of sea ice in 2013 when it became clear that there had been no net loss since 2007. Using models, they calculated a 34% chance of a 7-year pause (Figure 2).[6]

However, the hiatus has now extended to 17 years and the probability has dropped to 10%. In other words, there is a 90% chance that climate scientists’ predictions about Arctic sea ice were wrong. If the hiatus continues until 2027, it will become statistically significant (p<0.05, or less than 5%) and no longer explainable by chance. For an explanation of the observed Arctic changes, see chapters 34 and 42 of my forthcoming book “Solving the Climate Puzzle. The Sun’s Surprising Role”.

Figure 2. Probability of a pause in September Arctic sea-ice extent as a function of pause length in the Historical-RCP4.5 experiment. It corresponds to the black curve in Figure 3c of Swart et al. 2015.

The current state of affairs has led society to be alarmed by model predictions that have been proven wrong by the time they are published, but this often goes unnoticed. A recent example of this phenomenon is shown in Figure 3. In June 2023, news headlines around the world highlighted a scientific study that warned of the possibility of ice-free summers in the Arctic by the 2030s, regardless of our efforts to reduce emissions.

Figure 3. Arctic sea ice projections and their implications. a) Results of a modeling study. The black line before 2020 is the observed change in September sea ice area, and after 2020 is the sea ice area projected in the study under the SSP2-4.5 scenario. They correspond to the orange curves in Figure 4b of Kim et al. 2023. The dashed red line is the mean Arctic sea ice area from the 6th Coupled-Model Intercomparison Project. The dotted blue line is the September sea ice extent (SIE), a related measure of sea ice, and the horizontal blue line shows the lack of trend over the past 16 years. b) Examples of media headlines following the June 6, 2023 press release.

The article presents projections based on observations of an ice-free Arctic even under a low emissions scenario.[7] However, it should be noted that the data in the article only cover observations through 2019, although data for 2020-22 were available at the time of publication. In addition, the model projections in the study begin in 2021. Figure 3 shows the results of the study under an intermediate emissions scenario similar to the current situation. However, a significant problem arises when considering the acceptance and publication of the paper, as the model projections for 2021 and 2022 differ greatly from the observed data, with a staggering difference of 1.3 million km2 (0.5 million square miles) or 33% lower. This obvious problem, which undermines the entire study, raises questions about how the paper was accepted for publication.

How could such a blatantly flawed, and provably incorrect, article successfully pass the peer-review process? Moreover, who determines its suitability for widespread dissemination in a global media landscape that seems incapable of questioning or scrutinizing these predictions? The data refuting the article are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection and can easily be located with a simple search engine query. The current method of communicating predictions from highly uncertain climate models to the public is undeniably inadequate, and it is truly surprising that no authoritative scientific voice has addressed this issue and voiced disapproval.

Note: Part of the text and some of the figures in this article are taken from several chapters of my forthcoming book, “Solving the Climate Puzzle. The Sun’s Surprising Role,” to be published in November 2023.

  1. Vinós, J., 2022. Climate of the Past, Present and Future: A scientific debate. 2nd ed. Critical Science Press. ↑
  2. Stroeve, J.C., et al., 2005. Geophys. Res. Lett. 32 (4). doi.org/10.1029/2004GL021810 ↑
  3. Holland, M.M., et al., 2006. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33 (23). doi.org/10.1029/2006GL028024 ↑
  4. Ding, Q., et al., 2017. Nat. Clim. Chang. 7 (4), pp.289–295. doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3241 ↑
  5. Sledd, A. & L’Ecuyer, T.S., 2021. Front. Earth Sci. p.1067. doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.769844 ↑
  6. Swart, N.C., et al., 2015. Nat. Clim. Change, 5 (2), pp.86–89. doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2483 ↑
  7. Kim, Y.H., et al., 2023. Nat. Commun. 14 (1), p.3139. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38511-8 ↑

Media Chases ‘Climate Enhanced’ Heat Waves, Misses Data Showing They are Less Frequent

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A number of media outlets are claiming that U.S. heatwaves are getting worse this week due to climate change. This is false. Actual data from temperature measurements show that heatwaves in the U.S. are on the decline even as climate change has occurred over the last 75 years.

It is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and unsurprisingly to those that pay attention to data, it is hot in many places in the U.S. – in other words, business as usual for summer. But, the media sees climate change in every heatwave event, and seeks to exploit a connection, even though one doesn’t exist. For example, last week it was declared that the world had seen its hottest day ever on July 4, with some outlets claiming the “hottest in 100,000 years.” That of course, was proven laughably false here at Climate Realism on both counts.

This week, the media was at it again. The Washington Post, in an article titled, “Relentless heat wave reaching maximum strength: Weather updates,” says this:

“What is a heat dome? Understand the science and how drought and climate change make them worse.”

Axios, in the article “What this summer’s weather reveals about climate change” written by the ever-excitable Andrew Freedman, opines,

Monitoring the planet’s climate this summer can give one the impression that the climate system — which includes the oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets and more — has gone off the rails.

Climate studies have warned about an uptick in simultaneous heat waves occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Then there is the “World Socialist Web Site”, with the headline: “Record-breaking US heat wave demonstrates the growing dangers of climate change.”

None of the news outlets running heat wave stories this week examined or cites historical data on heat waves, preferring instead to push scary numbers in the form of heat indexes that combine temperature and humidity, reprint the opinion of “climate scientists,” and reference computer models that suggest climate change is making heat waves worse.

Yet, data exists, for any reporter with a modicum of journalistic curiosity to find. The problem is that the data doesn’t look scary.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a web page on heatwaves in the U.S. which contains some very interesting data and maps. Despite the claims of climate change creating worse heatwaves, the data the EPA has compiled going back to 1948 says exactly the opposite.

The data is on display in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: This map shows trends in unusually hot temperatures at individual weather stations that have operated consistently since 1948. In this case, the term “unusually hot” refers to a daily maximum temperature that is hotter than the 95th percentile temperature during the 1948–2020 period. Thus, the maximum temperature on a particular day at a particular station would be considered “unusually hot” if it falls within the warmest 5 percent of measurements at that station during the 1948–2020 period. The map shows changes in the total number of days per year that were hotter than the 95th percentile. Red upward-pointing symbols show where these unusually hot days are becoming more common. Blue downward-pointing symbols show where unusually hot days are becoming less common. Data source: NOAA, 2021, EPA

The EPA writes:

The data come from thousands of weather stations across the United States. National patterns can be determined by dividing the country into a grid and examining the data for one station in each cell of the grid. This method ensures that the results are not biased toward regions that happen to have many stations close together.

[Figure 1] was created by reviewing all daily maximum temperatures from 1948 to 2020 and identifying the 95th percentile temperature (a temperature that one would only expect to exceed in five days out of every 100) at each station. Next, for each year, the total number of days with maximum temperatures higher than the 95th percentile (that is, unusually hot days) was determined. The map shows how the total number of unusually hot days per year at each station has changed over time.

The EPA’s data for 1,066 weather stations across the United States showed a total of 863 stations, or 81 percent, reporting either a decrease or no change in the number of unusually hot days. By comparison, only 19 percent of all weather stations reported an increase in the number of unusually hot days since 1948.

Many of the stations showing hotter temperatures over the 1948-2020 period were located at airports or otherwise badly sited locations that created heat biases such as reported by the study Climate Realism covered last year, Corrupted Climate Stations: The U.S. Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed. As reported in that study, much of the upward heat bias occurs in the minimum overnight temperature at these weather stations, enabling them to reach higher than expected daytime high temperatures had they not had a “head start” from the warmer than expected overnight low.

In fact, you can see this issue on display using maximum and minimum data for all weather stations in the U.S. Figures 2A and 2B below show maximum and minimum temperatures in the U.S. from 1948, so that it matches the start of EPA data in Figure 1.

Figure 2A maximum temperatures in the U.S. since May 1948 to June 2023, 2B minimum temperatures in the U.S. since May 1948 to June 2023. Source: NOAA National Temperature Index plotter. Note: color of the maximum temperature series in 2A has been changed to red from blue to delineate the two sets of data.

In figure 2A, you can see the maximum temperatures (the sort of temperatures that would occur in a heat wave) have not changed much since 1948. In fact, there are spikes of high temperatures in the U.S. in 1954 and in 1963 that are higher than the present day.

In figure 2B, you can see the minimum temperatures have had a slow and steady rise since 1948, with peaks in the last 20 years (warmer nights) being higher than values in the 1940s and 1950s.

Finally, another graph from the EPA shows that heat waves were actually the worst for the U.S. in the 1930s, well before climate change became a blip on the media radar. See Figure 3.

Figure 3. This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2021. These data cover the contiguous 48 states. An index value of 0.2 (for example) could mean that 20 percent of the country experienced one heat wave, 10 percent of the country experienced two heat waves, or some other combination of frequency and area resulted in this value. Data source: Kunkel, 2022, EPA https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves

The bottom line is this: despite what the media says, real-world data shows heat waves are NOT getting worse in the United States due to climate change. This flies in the face of opinions by climate scientists cited in the mainstream media which seems wedded to the narrative that climate change is causing a crisis, despite data to the contrary.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.

He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.

He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

More RCP 8.5 Fantasy Games:

From Watts Up With That?

Attention Roger Pielke Jr.

New models detail consequences of high emissions for Gulf, Caribbean corals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RICE UNIVERSITY

IMAGE: THE FLOWER GARDEN BANKS NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY ABOUT 100 MILES OFFSHORE FROM TEXAS AND LOUISIANA IS HOME TO SOME OF THE HEALTHIEST CORAL REEFS IN THE UNITED STATES. view more CREDIT: PHOTO BY G.P. SCHMAHL/NOAA

HOUSTON – (Oct. 5, 2022) – Ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea are on pace to surpass critical thresholds for coral health by mid-century, but rapid action to significantly reduce emissions could slow warming, giving corals and coral conservation programs as much as 20 more years to adapt, according to new research.

Climate scientists and marine biologists from Rice University, the University of Colorado Boulder and Louisiana State University used computer models to simulate climate warming from 2015-2100 under both a “business as usual” scenario with very high emissions and a scenario in which emissions were reduced to high levels. Their study and analysis of ocean warming and ocean acidification levels for specific regions in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean under each scenario is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. The researchers found reducing emissions could delay the onset of critically warm ocean temperatures in some areas where reefs are still healthy.

“There are reefs in the Gulf that are really worth saving,” said Rice University marine biologist Adrienne Correa, a co-author of the study. “Some of the healthiest reefs that we still have in the United States are in the areas covered by these projections.”

Live coral cover on reefs has declined worldwide by about 50% since 1950, and few reefs in the Caribbean and Gulf have more than 10% live coral cover. Reefs in Dry Tortugas National Park in western Florida and in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana are notable exceptions with more than 50% live coral cover.

The study found ocean temperatures in the Caribbean and parts of Florida could reach critically warm temperatures as early as 2050, posing a serious risk for coral survival.

“The fact that we’re going to see these changes by 2050 is a strong wake-up call,” said Correa, an assistant professor of biosciences whose lab specializes in studying corals and reef ecosystems. “We get a lot of bad news about reefs, but we can still draw hope and motivation from this. Some of the reefs that are included in this analysis are really special, like the Flower Garden Banks, and reefs off of Cuba and in some other parts of the Caribbean where there’s still really high coral cover. We can help protect and keep the high-coral-cover reefs we have if we take immediate action to shift how much energy we use and where we get our energy.”

Correa co-authored the study with climate scientists Sylvia Dee of Rice, Allison Lawman of CU Boulder and Kristine DeLong of LSU.

“In one case, we have more time to mitigate, and in the other we don’t,” said Dee, a climate modeling expert and assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary science. “People need to be aware this is coming up fast, and the time to explore mitigation techniques is now.”

Corals are symbiotic organisms that live in partnership with photosynthetic algae that help feed their coral hosts. Corals are also builders that draw upon carbonate minerals in seawater to construct their own rocky outer frameworks. Climate warming threatens both coral symbiosis and coral reef-building. For example, heat stress can cause corals to expel their symbiotic algae en masse, a sometimes deadly phenomenon known as bleaching. And oceans become more acidic as they warm, reducing the efficiency of the chemical reactions corals use to build reefs.

Previous studies have shown that heat-related coral bleaching is often triggered by prolonged, abnormally warm ocean temperatures. The critical threshold temperature for bleaching varies between ocean regions and reefs. For example, the threshold temperature for reefs in the Flower Garden Banks is 29.5 degrees Celsius (85.1 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers analyzed regional warming patterns in each scenario to project when specific regions with coral reefs were likely to reach threshold temperatures under each emissions scenario. A similar regional analysis was performed to project the timing of critical thresholds for ocean acidification.

Lawman, the corresponding author of the study and a former postdoctoral scholar in Dee’s lab, said the study showed heat-related stress was the biggest and most immediate climate-related threat to corals under each emissions scenario.

“The difference was whether you crossed the critical thresholds around 2050 versus 20 years later,” said Lawman, a postdoctoral associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder.

The researchers found the key determinant of coral mortality in each scenario was the number of months that corals in the future will be exposed to prolonged temperatures hotter than the hottest average months projected for 2015-2034. The researchers dubbed these “degree heating months.”

“There’s always one month that is the hottest of the year,” Lawman said. “Let’s say it’s August and the average baseline temperature for that month is 29 degrees Celsius in the region we’re studying. A ‘degree heating month’ in that region is any month in the future that has a higher average temperature than 29 degrees Celsius.”

The research showed that under the “business as usual” emissions scenario, “degree heating months” become the norm in the late 2100s, occurring as much as 10 months out of the year in some parts of the Caribbean.

“That’s a huge number of months in which corals could experience thermal stress beyond the usual levels to which they are adapted,” Lawman said.

“These projections are very concerning,” she said. “I think the takeaway message is that the time to act is now.”

DeLong is an associate professor of geography and anthropology at LSU.

The research was funded by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Rice University, the Department of the Interior (G19AC00086) and the National Science Foundation (2102931, 2109622).

-30-

Peer-reviewed paper:

“Rates of future climate change in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea: Implications for coral reef ecosystems ” | Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences | DOI: 10.1029/2022JG006999

A. E. Lawman, S. G. Dee, K. L. DeLong and A. M. S. Correa

https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JG006999

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/10/1004_CORAL-n1192-lg.jpg
CAPTION: The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary about 100 miles offshore from Texas and Louisiana is home to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the United States. (Photo by G.P. Schmahl/NOAA)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/10/1004_CORAL-n1410-lg.jpg
CAPTION: Coral reefs in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico. (Photo courtesy of the National Marine Sanctuaries/NOAA)

Related stories:

Sylvia Dee wins fellowship to launch Gulf of Mexico study – Sept. 28, 2021
https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/sylvia-dee-wins-fellowship-launch-gulf-mexico-study

Houston flooding polluted reefs more than 100 miles offshore – April 6, 2021
https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/houston-flooding-polluted-reefs-more-100-miles-offshore

Gulf Coast corals face catastrophe – Dec. 5, 2019
http://news.rice.edu/2019/12/05/gulf-coast-corals-face-catastrophe/

Rice’s Correa, Hassanzadeh named Gulf Research Program Early-Career Research Fellows – Aug. 29, 2018
https://news.rice.edu/2018/08/29/rices-correa-hassanzadeh-named-gulf-research-program-early-career-research-fellows/

Links:

The Climate and Water Lab (Dee group): sylviadeeclimate.org

The Correa Lab: owlnet.rice.edu/~ac53/index.html

Department of BioSciences: biosciences.rice.edu

Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: earthscience.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: naturalsciences.rice.edu

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

JOURNAL

Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences

DOI

10.1029/2022JG006999 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Rates of future climate change in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea: Implications for coral reef ecosystems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

27-Aug-2022

From EurekAlert!

BBC Blame Bologna Floods On Climate Change

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

The BBC is now even inserting climate propaganda into its weather forecasts:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/av/65640935

It did not take the BBC long to link the tragic Bologna floods this week to climate change. They even included this video at the start of their weather forecast, just in case people missed it.

There are several references to extreme weather, extreme rainfall and extreme drought. The weatherman, Chris Fawkes goes on to say:

“As our planet warms up, climate scientists tell us that extreme weather are likely to become more frequent, and I think that really does fit the bill for Italy for what we’ve seen”

Climate scientists say all sorts of things, much of it lies or baseless. What they say should not though be confused with evidence.

I have seen no official data for the rainfall yet, but 200mm appears credible. Bear in mind though this is over the mountains. Annual rainfall in Bologna is about 1000mm, so clearly the”half annual rainfall” claim is a fabrication.

It is a sad fact that Northern Italy is prone to these sort of disastrous floods. For instance, the 1966 Florence floods killed 101 people, when a third of a year’s average rainfall fell in two days:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/05/the-great-flood-of-florence-50-years-on

Before that there were the River Po floods in 1957:

And in 1994, 77 lost their lives in the Piedmont flood. As in Florence, a third of a year’s rain fell in the space of three days.

Such weather events are due to meteorological conditions, not climate change, as even Chris Fawkes admits when he tells us that the storm was the result of the jet stream being far to the south of its usual position. Something incidentally which is more likely in a colder world. A recent study by Grazzini et al looked into the Piedmont floods, and concluded that it was the result of a meridionally elongated upper–level trough embedded in an incoming Rossby wave packet, just as previous severe floods had been.

But leaving the causes of this flood to one side until all the facts are known, which the BBC should have done, does the historic data for Bologna back up the BBC’s claims about climate change making these things worse?

Let’s start with the KNMI data, which goes up to 2021. (I do, by the way, feel very frustrated at times that it is so difficult to access up to date weather data from official sources, including our wonderful Met Office; if climate change is so critical, surely the least they should do is provide the public with this sort of information).

Bologna has data all the way back to 1813, and the daily rainfall chart below quite clearly indicates that rainfall used to be much more extreme in the past:

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

We get a similar picture from ECA&D, with data up to 2020:

https://www.ecad.eu/indicesextremes/customquerytimeseriesplots.php

Clearly Fawkes’ claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Before we finish, it is worth looking at annual rainfall, bearing in mind Fawkes’ claims of the extreme drought last year. Remembering that the data only runs to 2020, the evidence clearly shows that droughts were much worse prior to 1950. And there have always been large swings in rainfall from year to year, making a nonsense of his claims.