Tag Archives: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Licenced to Kill: Wind Industry’s Atlantic Whale Slaughter Gets New Govt. Greenlight

From STOP THESE THINGS

The wind industry’s licence to kill whales and other marine mammals is the perfect example of institutional corruption. As the cetacean carnage continues, one might think that the US government might pause (just for a moment) and consider revoking their ‘take permits’ – rather than simply continuing to green light the wind industry’s wholesale whale slaughter. But, not a bit of it, as Vijay Jayaraj explains in the first piece below.

As we have outlined on numerous occasions, the principal cause of whale (and other marine mammal) deaths is the noise generated during the construction of these things offshore, which is the subject of the second piece by Rob Rand, one of America’s leading acoustic experts.

NOAA Permits Wind Energy Operators to Harass and Kill Whales
California Globe
Vijay Jayaraj
29 April 2024

Wind energy is clean and green. It is the magic switch to turn off global heating. And unicorns are real. You may name your most cherished illusion among those three if you please. But it will not change the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and wind energy companies are complicit in a state-sanctioned, modern-day butchery of marine mammals along the U.S. East Coast.

NOAA-issued permits allow each operator of wind turbines to kill or harass 100s of whales annually, a fact that climate doomsayers and green energy enthusiasts ignore or deny in a manner reminiscent of flat-earthers dismissing photographs of our blue sphere suspended in the void of outer space.

NOAA: From Whale Hero to Whale Villain
On its website, NOAA claims that it works “to protect marine species populations from decline and extinction, conduct research to understand their health and environment, and evaluate and monitor human activities that might affect them to ensure future generations may enjoy them.”

NOAA says that the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires it to protect all whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, and sea lions from “take” by U.S. citizens in the nation’s waters. “Take” is NOAA lingo for harassing, hunting, capturing, killing or attempting to do any of those.

However “exemptions” to this protection are granted to allow lethal and non-lethal interference with cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — by wind energy developers along the Eastern Seaboard.

Known as “Incidental Take/Harassment Authorizations” (IHAs), these exemptions give wind operators latitude within the regulation to kill and harass marine mammals while carrying out sonar surveys for site characterization and other activities related to construction and operations.

The species authorized to be harassed in these IHAs include the endangered North Atlantic right whale, fin whale, sperm whale, sei whale, minke whale, humpback whale, long-finned pilot whale, Atlantic white-sided dolphin, common bottlenose dolphin, short-beaked common dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, Risso’s dolphin, harbor porpoise, harbor seal and gray seal.

For example, Bluepoint Wind, LLC, is allowed to kill or harass 270 whales, including 11 right whales and 149 minke whales between March 2024 and February 2025 in the coastal waters of New York and New Jersey, a region known as the New York Bight. The “harassment” quota includes other marine mammals as well.

Other active IHAs for wind operators include the following: Dominion Energy Virginia, 599 whales in the next five years, including 17 Endangered right whales); Empire Offshore Winds, 509 whales; Ocean Wind, 248 whales; TerraSond, 381 whales; Community Offshore Wind, 7,809 dolphins; Orsted Wind Power North America, 6,000 short-beaked common dolphin. There are many others.

NOAA divides these IHAs into two categories: Level A harassment results has the potential to injure or kill, while harassment at the Level B may cause changes in behavioral patterns. Most of the authorizations listed above are Level B, but many of the companies have been authorized for Level A for various species, including the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Please note that the most common cause of death for whales on the eastern seaboard of the United States is from entanglements or vessel strikes. Level B harassment may indirectly lead to increased whale deaths by forcing them into busy shipping channels.

It is critical to note that the NOAA does not give scientific reasons to prove that Level B harassments are non-lethal or that they would not cause permanent injury.

The bipolar NOAA itself admits that humpback whale deaths along the Atlantic Coast have been unusually high since 2016, with the highest count of 37 in the year 2023 being when IHAs were more common. Similarly, NOAA has documented the unusual mortality rate of the North Atlantic right whales since 2017.

The question is why would NOAA authorize wind companies to harass and kill whales at a time of increasing deaths? And who gives NOAA permission to do so?

NOAA’s treatment of these marine mammals contrasts starkly with its institutional ethos of shielding these gentle ocean giants from peril and even demise. Instead, NOAA has seemingly embraced offshore wind farms with the unwavering resolve of climate alarmists.

Frankly, I’ve grown weary of ceaseless calls for more evidence connecting animal mortality with wind energy activities and, all the while NOAA authorizes more killing.
California Globe

Pile Driving Noise
Technical Report
Rand Acoustics, LLC
28 March 2024

Abstract
This technical report presents the methodology, analysis, and results of an independent investigation of underwater noise levels from wind turbine pile driving operations, conducted southwest of Nantucket on November 2, 2023.

Conclusions
This paper presents the methodology, analysis, and results of an independent investigation of underwater noise levels from pile driving by the crane ship Orion utilized as a pile driving vessel
in the Vineyard Wind BOEM Lease Area OCS‐A 0501 southwest of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. The pile driving operations included double bubble curtains and hydro damper net for noise controls. Nonetheless, the survey results find pile driving impulsive sound levels are similar to seismic airgun arrays and raise concerns about heightened adverse noise impacts on
marine mammals.

  1. Peak levels measured up to 180 dB re 1uPa at 1.06 km. The calculated source level SL,pk is 241 dB with noise reduction mitigations employed. Despite double bubble curtains and hydrodamper, pile driving peak levels are comparable to seismic airgun arrays. Propagation loss was 20.1log(r), consistent with spherical spreading.
  2. NMFS relies on the RMS sound level for setting protective radii around impulsive pile driving. There are several different RMS computation methods. RMS was analyzed by applying two methods per Madsen 2005, with a 200ms window consistent with the limits of the mammalian hearing window, and a 90pct window using the 5- to 95-percent effective signal duration. The 90-percent RMS consistently underestimated by 2 to 6 dB the 200ms RMS for mammalian hearing response recommended in Madsen 2005. This disparity is consistent with the observations in Madsen 2005 and of the waveforms acquired in this survey that show lengthening with distance, increased numbers of reflections and pre-peak impulse arrivals of impulse energy through the sediment. It is concluded that at distances of 1 to 8 kilometers in waters of these depths the 90-percent RMS currently used by NMFS should not be considered a conservative metric for establishing protective radii for mammalian hearing and behavioral response.
  3. The calculated sound exposure level weighted for LF Cetacean species is 198.8 dB re 1 μPa2 s. Pile driving sound exposures of 13 minutes at 500 meters, 45 minutes at 1000 meters, or 2 hours at 1800 meters, yields a cSEL exceeding the PTS threshold (onset of permanent hearing loss). A sound exposure of 2 minutes at 1200 meters, 5 minutes at 2200 meters, and 10 minutes at 3200 meters yields a cSEL exceeding the TTS threshold (temporary threshold shift, hearing impaired). It appears PTS exposure is possible for Cetaceans at significant distances.
  4. The calculated sound exposure level weighted for PW Phocid species (seals) is 178.3 dB re 1 μPa2 s. Pile driving sound exposures of 1-3/4 hours at 100 meters yields a cSEL exceeding the Level A PTS threshold (onset of permanent hearing loss). A pile driving sound exposure of 40 minutes at 500 meters, or 2 hours at 1 kilometer, yields a cSEL exceeding the TTS threshold (temporary threshold shift, hearing impaired).
  5. Propagation loss for Weighted SEL measured 16.5log(r) and 15.5log(r) for LF and PW weightings respectively. These propagation loss constants are consistent with practical spreading. Regulators assuming spherical spreading would underestimate sound exposure levels and resulting impacts including Level B and possibly Level A Harassment. Technical Report: Pile Driving Noise Survey, November 2, 2023
  6. Level A Harassment appears feasible depending on time periods occupied at various distances to the pile driving. Further assessment using unweighted SELs (from cautions in Southall 2019) finds much larger setbacks are needed. It is unclear that the mitigation methods set in place are adequate to protect the NARW and other ESA-listed mammals and marine species.
  7. The distance to the unweighted 160 dB,rms isopleth distance for Level B Harassment is 3355 meters, using the RMS,200ms time weighting for mammalian hearing (Madsen 2005). Whereas the IHA Authorization listed a distance of 2739 meters with 12 dB reduction.
  8. The IHA Application and Authorization omit noise impact assessment for exposure at each step between SPLs of 120-140, 140-160, and 160-180 dB listed in the BOEM Offshore Wind Energy Project Biological Assessment Method 2 (Wood 2012). Whereas weighted (LF) RMS
    sound levels compared to the BOEM step table show ninety percent of mysticetes responding (avoidance response) within 1 kilometer, and fifty percent respomding out to 14.5 km.
  9. The IHA Application and Authorization did not evaluate continuous vessel propulsion, DP thruster or combined noise levels by vessel operations in the lease area. The IHA documents including the Authorization treat the Orion and support vessels as silent. Ambient sound levels without pile driving were dominated by Orion and support vessel propulsion and thruster noise including cavitation, despite double bubble curtains surrounding the Orion. Orion and support vessel sound levels with pile driving off measured 127 dB RMS re 1uPa at 0.57 NM (1.06 km) and 123 dB RMS at 3.17 NM (5.87 km) from the Orion.
  10. NMFS appears to have abandoned evaluation of its Level B behavioral harassment threshold at 120 dB,rms which leaves insufficient protections in place for marine species behavioral harassment. To meet the NMFS 120 dB,rms behavioral harassment threshold for the operation’s continuous noise only, the distance required is estimated at over 6 km.
  11. The data acquired during the survey and subsequent review of project and regulator documents raise concerns of sufficient NOAA review methods and mitigation distances to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW) and other marine species from behavioral harassment and hearing loss impacts from pile driving.
randacoustics_piledrivingnoisesurveyHerunterladen

Hurricane Season Begins: Bigger and Badder? – The Climate Realism Show #112

Hurricane Season 2024 officially kicks off Saturday, June 1 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts a more-active-than-normal season in the Atlantic. The agency is “85% certain” that we’ll have 17-25 named storms, 8-13 hurricanes, and 4-7 major hurricanes this year.

Episode #112 of The Climate Realism Show will feature two of America’s best hurricane experts — meteorologists Joe Bastardi and Stanley Goldenberg — to talk about these predictions, and what it will mean for the East and Gulf coasts of the United States.

Tune for our live-stream of the show at 1 p.m. ET (noon CT) to listen to these experts, and leave your own questions for them in the chat. The Climate Realism Show Host Anthony Watts and regular panelists H. Sterling Burnett and Linnea Lueken will also cover, as usual, the Crazy Climate News of the week.

No, Ohio Capital Journal, Climate Change is Not Causing ‘Weird, Violent Weather’

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

An article in the Ohio Capital Journal claims that it’s time to link violent weather to climate change for the state. This is false. There is no real-world evidence showing climate change is weirding the weather in Ohio or anywhere else. Even the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not link changes in severe weather to climate change, or more particularly changes in tornado patterns which the story focuses upon.

The article, written by Marty Schladen is titled, Analysis: Ohio has had weird, violent weather. Is it time to link it to climate change? It begins with these two paragraphs:

For two years running, Ohio has seen what used to be rare February tornadoes, followed by a deadly outbreak just last week. But news coverage of the twisters almost completely omitted any mention of climate change.

With climate scientists overwhelmingly agreeing that human-caused warming is happening and last year having the hottest average global temperature on record, is it time to start linking that to the weird weather we’ve been seeing?

Had Schladen bothered to look at data and the climate science literature, he would have discovered that they show no link between climate change and shifts in the timing or frequency of extreme weather.

First, Schladen errs in believing that two consecutive years of what he considers to be abnormal weather in February is significant. This is not a long enough trend to be considered climate change. It is well established by the World Meteorological Organization that climate change is measured over thirty years not two.

He compounds that error by using one year of warmer than normal temperatures (2023) as the basis for the claim that warmer weather is driving more tornadoes in February. However, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC) indicates that since 1998, there has been a zero trend in Ohio tornadoes for February:

Figure 1: Average number of February tornadoes per state, 1998-2022. Source: NOAA Storm Prediction Center https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/permonth_by_state/

If, in fact, gradually warming temperatures in Ohio due to climate change were driving more tornadoes you would see it in the trend data, but no trend is evident. The February 2023 and 2024 tornadoes in Ohio were rare, but not unique historically. In fact, 17 tornadoes have been recorded in February in Ohio between 1950 and 2016, including some occurring during the period when the Earth was cooling on average from the 1950s through the 1970s. Nor are tornadoes in Ohio becoming stronger. The last F5 tornado recorded in Ohio was in 1985, nearly 40 years of modest warming ago. Data do not support claims that climate change is causing a long-term trend of earlier tornadoes or more extreme tornadoes in Ohio, or anywhere else.

Climate change does not affect individual states like Ohio, it is a much broader phenomenon. Looking at the entire United States over the past 50 years, which has seen a gradual warming, there is also no upward trend for violent tornadoes as seen in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2. This figure shows the frequency of strong to violent tornadoes (tornadoes registering EF3 or stronger) has been declining since the early 1970s. Sources: Graph by Anthony Watts and David Burton using official NOAA/Storm Prediction Center data.

Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes reports that the United States has been experiencing a record low number of violent tornadoes in the past decade:

The number of tornadoes in the United States, as well as in other countries, has been slowly declining for the past 45 years. At the same time, the number of strong to violent tornadoes, EF3 or higher, has been dramatically declining for the past 45 years. (See Figure 1.) In fact, the United States set a record in 2017–18 for the longest period in recorded history without a tornado death, and it set a record for the longest period in history (306 days) without an EF3 or stronger tornado.3,4 The two record-low years for tornado strikes in the United States both occurred this past decade, in 2014 and 2018.5

Further, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged, “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.”

Not only that, a recent peer-reviewed paper, Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States, published in Science Direct in September 2023, shows that U.S. tornado damage & strong tornado incidence are both sharply down. If warming by climate change was driving more tornadoes you would see it in the tornado damage record, but it’s not there.

There is simply no evidence in the data or in climate research supporting the claims made by Schladen. However, if you read the entire piece by Schladen, it becomes obvious that he strays from analysis into opinion, especially when he starts blaming other journalists for not doing their homework, saying:

For journalists covering weather events, it’s easier not to wade into the subject of Earth’s changing atmosphere and whether that has anything to do with the tornado or flood or hurricane or wildfire that they’re trying to cover. In fact, NPR reported in November, weather experts in the Midwest said that talking publicly about global warming brought them threats.

Not mentioning climate in such coverage is also easy to rationalize. No one weather event can be definitely attributed to global warming, many climate scientists have long said.

If Schladen had simply stuck with the last sentence in that excerpt he would have been on target. Instead he lambasts other journalists for being cautious in linking instances of extreme weather events to climate change. They are avoiding, to Schaleden’s displeasure, the error he commits.

The Ohio Capital Journal story is just another instance of sloppy, irresponsible journalism by a reporter promoting his preconceived views on climate change, and the climate catastrophe narrative, over data and facts which don’t fit the narrative.

Punching Back at Counterpunch’s False Climate Claims

By Anthony Watts

A website called Counterpunch.com ran a story on January 31st saying that we must solve climate change or disaster will befall us. The story is titled, “Solving Climate Change…or Else!” by Stan Cox. As we’ve written time and again on Climate Realism, these sorts of claims about worsening disasters are easily proven false simply by looking at historical data. The story cites other sources such as the New York Times but has no new information itself.

The story leads with this claim:

In December, the New York Times reported that “Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000.” (Though it’s not the Times’s style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist, “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.”

Then after establishing what they believed to be a record warm year, they immediately go towards trying to link catastrophes to the warmth in 2023 without any real evidence to support it.

And you don’t have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating.  Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms.

First, the landslides claim. Landslides aren’t a direct result of climate change, but rather are a symptom of weather events, such as excess rainfall saturating the ground and weakening it. Put simply, weather events are not climate. The following table is from Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Page 90 of Chapter 12 Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment.  It essentially charts the UN IPCC’s assessment of the odds that each type of extreme weather is due to climate change.

Second, the increased wildfires and storms claim made by counterpunch.com are also addressed by the IPCC in the table below.

Table 1 from Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, for the present-day, 2050, and 2100. The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal.

As can be seen from the table, there is no evidence of any increase or decrease, globally or by region, in the frequency, severity or extent of frost, mean precipitation, river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial floods, landslides, aridity, hydrological drought, agricultural or ecological drought, fire weather or wildfires, mean wind speed, severe wind storms or tornados, tropical cyclones or hurricanes, sand and dust storms, snow glacial or ice sheets, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, relative sea levels, coastal floods, coastal erosion, marine heatwaves, ocean acidity, or air pollution weather.

In addition to no increase in landslides or wildfires, the IPCC states there’s no increase in storms overall.

So, the “increasing disasters” claim made by counterpunch.com is completely nullified because there’s no evidence to support it whatsoever.

As for the claims of the hottest year ever in 2023 going back 125,000 years, that too is false. A study in 2013 by Marcott, et al. reconstructed temperatures from the present back to 11,300 years ago. Figure 2 shows clearly that temperatures about 9500 years ago known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum were warmer than present-day.

Figure 1: Temperature and carbon dioxide change during the Holocene. Black curve, global temperature reconstruction by Marcott et al., 2013. Red curve, CO2 levels as measured reported in Monnin et al., 2004. Importantly, Carbon Dioxide (CO2), in the red line, began increasing 8200 years ago even as temperatures, the black line, went down.

Clearly the author Stan Cox has no significant comprehension of climate data and climate history but prefers to simply regurgitate claims made in other publications as if they were fact. This lack of attention to detail and facts might explain why even after being online since 1993, counterpunch.com remains virtually unknown.

The post Punching Back at Counterpunch’s False Climate Claims appeared first on ClimateRealism.

False, Washington Post, Low Great Lakes Ice Levels Are Not Proof of Climate Change

By H. Sterling Burnett

The Washington Post published a story claiming the current low levels of ice coverage across the U.S. Great Lakes are a result of climate change. This is false. Data show that Great Lakes ice levels vary widely from year to year, and although this year’s current levels are low, that can change quickly, with the annual peak ice coverage not until March.

In the Washington Post story, “Great Lakes start 2024 with smallest amount of ice in at least 50 years,” reporter Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff writes:

The Great Lakes had the smallest amount of ice cover this New Year’s Day in at least the past 50 years and are on track to see less than the seasonal average this winter, according to government data. The decline comes during a five-decade drop in ice cover that experts say is due in part to human-caused climate change.

Rosenzweig-Ziff misses the ironic fact that the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age. Warnings of the pending ice age were common in headlines at the time among mainstream media outlets.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory reveal that Great Lakes ice extent levels vary widely from year to year, forming and dissipating at different times throughout the years. (see the figure, below)

The same data also show that the Great Lakes exceeded 90 percent ice coverage five years between 2003 and 2023, during a period which mainstream media has claimed are the hottest decades on records. By comparison, from 1973 to 1993, when global average temperatures were cooler, the Great Lakes only exceeded 90 percent coverage in four years. (See the figure, below)

In short, Rosenzweig-Ziff and the Washington Post are playing chicken little to hype the “human climate change causes everything bad” narrative that they’ve been pushing for more than a decade; trying to link a single year’s slow start to ice coverage extent on the Great Lakes to climate change.

What the data show, however, is that there is no clear, sustained trend in declining ice coverage extent, which might be an indication of climate change. Instead, this year’s slow start to the Great Lakes ice season is an anomaly, not a unique event, experienced previously 50 years ago, despite the fact that temperatures then were modestly cooler on average than they are now.

The post False, Washington Post, Low Great Lakes Ice Levels Are Not Proof of Climate Change appeared first on ClimateRealism.

Climate Fact Check: October 2023 Edition

Sure 2023 has been an unusual year so far. But the key question remains: Has 2023 weather been
driven or caused by emissions? A reasonably correct answer comes, surprisingly enough, from NASA’s
chief climate alarmist, Gavin Schmidt who told the Washington Post: “It is indeed hard to give a good
and informed answer to why this is happening.”

From The JunkScience.com

By Steve Milloy

10 bogus climate claims from October 2023 debunked here.

Climate-Fact-Check_October-2023-Edition_v2Herunterladen

Climate’s ‘Catch-22’: Cutting air pollution heats up the planet

Doomsters need your fears to produce a apocalyptic climate future. Let the climate boogey man walk around. Wag the dog.

Air pollution, a global scourge that kills millions of people a year, is shielding us from the full force of the sun. Getting rid of it will accelerate climate change tells Euractiv.

That’s the unpalatable conclusion reached by scientists poring over the results of China’s decade-long and highly effective “war on pollution”, according to six leading climate experts.

The drive to banish pollution, caused mainly by sulphur dioxide (SO2) spewed from coal plants, has cut SO2 emissions by close to 90% and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Chinese official data and health studies show.

Yet stripped of its toxic shield, which scatters and reflects solar radiation, China’s average temperatures have gone up by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 2014, triggering fiercer heatwaves, according to a Reuters review of meteorological data and the scientists interviewed.

“It’s this Catch-22,” said Patricia Quinn, an atmospheric chemist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), speaking about cleaning up sulphur pollution globally. “We want to clean up our air for air quality purposes but, by doing that, we’re increasing warming.”

The removal of the air pollution – a term scientists call “unmasking” – may have had a greater effect on temperatures in some industrial Chinese cities over the last decade than the warming from greenhouse gases themselves, the scientists said.

Other highly polluted parts of the world, such as India and the Middle East, would see similar jumps in warming if they follow China’s lead in cleaning the skies of sulphur dioxide and the polluting aerosols it forms, the experts warned.

They said efforts to improve air quality could actually push the world into catastrophic warming scenarios and irreversible impacts.

“Aerosols are masking one-third of the heating of the planet,” said Paulo Artaxo, an environmental physicist and lead author of the chapter on short-lived climate pollutants in the most recent round of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed this year.

“If you implement technologies to reduce air pollution, this will accelerate – very significantly – global warming in the short term.”

The Chinese and Indian environment ministries didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the effects of pollution unmasking.

The link between reducing sulphur dioxide and warming was flagged by the IPCC in a 2021 report which concluded that, without the solar shield of SO2 pollution, the global average temperature would already have risen by 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

That misses the world’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5C, beyond which scientists predict irreversible and catastrophic changes to the climate, according to the IPCC, which pegs the current level at 1.1C.

The Reuters review of the Chinese data provides the most detailed picture yet of how this phenomenon is playing out in the real world, drawing on previously unreported numbers on changes in temperatures and SO2 emissions over the past decade and corroborated by environmental scientists.

Reuters interviewed 12 scientists in total on the phenomenon of unmasking globally, including four who have acted as authors or reviewers of sections on air pollution in IPCC reports.

They said there was no suggestion among climate experts that the world should let-up on fighting air pollution, a clear and present danger that the World Health Organization says causes about 7 million premature deaths a year, mostly in poorer countries.

Instead they stressed the need for more aggressive action to cut emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases, with reducing methane seen as one of the most promising paths to offset pollution unmasking in the short term.

Xi battles ‘airpocalypse’

President Xi Jinping pledged to tackle pollution when he took power in 2012 following decades of coal-burning that had helped turn China into “the factory of the world”. The following year, as record smog in Beijing inspired “Airpocalypse” newspaper headlines, the government unveiled what scientists called China’s version of the US Clean Air Act.

On 5 March 2014, a week after Xi went on a walkabout during another extreme bout of smog in the capital, the government officially declared a war on pollution at the National People’s Congress.

Under the new rules, power plants and steel mills were forced to switch to lower-sulphur coal. Hundreds of inefficient factories were shuttered, and vehicle fuel standards toughened up. While coal continues to be China’s largest power source, smokestack scrubbers now strip out most SO2 emissions.

China’s SO2 emissions had decreased from a 2006 peak of at nearly 26 million metric tons to 20.4 million tons in 2013 thanks to more gradual emissions restrictions. But with the war on pollution, those emissions had plummeted by about 87% to 2.7 million metric tons by 2021.

The drop in pollution was accompanied by a leap in warming – the nine years since 2014 have seen national average annual temperatures in China of 10.34C, up more than 0.7C compared with the 2001-2010 period, according to Reuters calculations based on yearly weather reports published by the China Meteorological Administration.

Scientific estimates vary as to how much of that rise comes from unmasking versus greenhouse gas emissions or natural climate variations like El Nino.

The impacts are more acute at a local level near the pollution source. Almost immediately, China saw big warming jumps from its unmasking of pollution near heavy industrial regions, according to climate scientist Yangyang Xu at Texas A&M University, who models the impact of aerosols on the climate.

Xu told Reuters he estimated that unmasking had caused temperatures near the cities of Chongqing and Wuhan, long known as China’s “furnaces”, to rise by almost 1C since sulphur emissions peaked in the mid-2000s.

During heatwaves, the unmasking effect can be even more pronounced. Laura Wilcox, a climate scientist who studies the effects of aerosols at Britain’s University of Reading, said a computer simulation showed that the rapid decline in SO2 in China could raise temperatures on extreme-heat days by as much as 2C.

“Those are big differences, especially for somewhere like China, where heat is already pretty dangerous,” she said.

Indeed, heatwaves in China have been particularly ferocious this year. A town in the northwestern region of Xinjiang saw temperatures of 52.2C (126F) in July, shattering the national temperature record of 50.3C set in 2015.

Beijing also experienced a record heatwave, with temperatures topping 35C (95F) for more than four weeks.

India and the Middle East

The effects of sulphur unmasking are most pronounced in developing countries, as the US and most of Europe cleaned up their skies decades ago. While the heat rise from sulphur cleanup is strongest locally, the effects can be felt in far-distant regions. One 2021 study co-authored by Xu found that a decrease in European aerosol emissions since the 1980s may have shifted weather patterns in Northern China.

In India, sulphur pollution is still rising, roughly doubling in the last two decades, according to calculations by NOAA researchers based on figures from the US-funded Community Emissions Data System.

In 2020, when that pollution plummeted due to COVID lockdowns, ground temperatures in India were the eighth warmest on record, 0.29 C higher than the 1981-2010 average, despite the cooling effects of the La Nina climate pattern, according to the India Meteorological Department.

India aims for an air cleanup like China’s, and in 2019 launched its National Clean Air Programme to reduce pollution by 40% in more than 100 cities by 2026.

Once polluted regions in India or the Middle East improve their air quality by abandoning fossil fuels and transitioning to green energy sources, they too will lose their shield of sulphates, scientists said.

“You stop your anthropogenic activities for a brief moment of time and the atmosphere cleans up very, very quickly and the temperatures jump instantaneously,” added Sergey Osipov, a climate modeller at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Offsetting with methane?

As the implications of the pollution unmasking become more apparent, experts are casting around for methods to counter the associated warming.

One proposal called “solar radiation management” envisions deliberately injecting sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere to cool temperatures. But many scientists worry that the approach could unleash unintended consequences.

A more mainstream plan is to curb methane emissions. This is seen as the quickest way to tame global temperatures because the effects of the gas in the atmosphere last only a decade or so, so cutting emissions now would deliver results within a decade. Carbon dioxide, by comparison, persists for centuries.

As of 2019, methane had caused about 0.5C in warming compared with preindustrial levels, according to IPCC figures.

While more than 100 countries have pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade, few have gone further than drawing up “action plans” and “pathways” to cuts. China – the world’s biggest emitter – has yet to publish its plan.

By targeting methane, the world could mitigate the warming effect of the reduction in pollution and potentially avert catastrophic consequences, said Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

“This doesn’t doom us to going above 1.5 degrees Celsius if we clean up the air.”

Researchers argue that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not enough to combat climate change

According to a new paper in Oxford Open Climate Change, the strategies humanity must pursue to reduce climate change will have to include more than reducing greenhouse gases. This comes from an analysis of climate data led by researcher James Hansen. Phys.org has the story.

Scientists have known since the 1800s that infrared-absorbing (greenhouse) gases warm Earth’s surface, and that the abundance of greenhouse gases changes naturally as well as from human actions. Roger Revelle, who was one of the early scientists to study global warming, wrote in 1965 that industrialization meant that human beings were conducting a “vast geophysical experiment” by burning fossil fuels, which adds carbon dioxide (CO2) to the air. CO2 has now reached levels that have not existed for millions of years.

Climate sensitivity

A long-standing issue concerns how much global temperature will rise for a specified CO2 increase. A 1979 study released by the United States National Academy of Sciences concluded that doubling atmospheric CO2 with ice sheets fixed would likely cause global warming between 1.5 and 4.5° Celsius. This was a large range, and there was additional uncertainty about the delay in warming caused by Earth’s massive ocean.

This new paper reevaluates climate sensitivity based on improved paleoclimate data, finding that climate is more sensitive than usually assumed. Their best estimate for doubled CO2 is global warming of 4.8°C, significantly larger than the 3°C best estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Aerosols

The authors also conclude that much of the expected greenhouse gas warming in the past century has been offset by the cooling effect of human-made aerosols—fine airborne particles. Aerosols have declined in amount since 2010 as a result of reduced air pollution in China and global restrictions on aerosol emissions from ships. This aerosol reduction is good for human health, as particulate air pollution kills several million people per year and adversely affects the health of many more people.

However, aerosol reduction is now beginning to unmask greenhouse gas warming that had been hidden by aerosol cooling. The authors have long termed the aerosol cooling a “Faustian bargain” because, as humanity eventually reduces air pollution, payment in the form of increased warming comes due.

This new paper predicts that a post-2010 acceleration of global warming will soon be apparent above the level of natural climate variability. The 1970-2010 global warming rate of 0.18°C per decade is predicted to increase to at least 0.27°C per decade during the few decades after 2010. As a result, the 1.5°C global warming level will be passed this decade and the 2°C level will be passed within the following two decades.

Read the full story here .

Official CFACT statement on Maryland offshore wind

There is a rise on whales death and dead birds. This is not caused by climate change but by offshore wind farms.

From  CFACT.

From Craig Rucker, President
CFACT

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) Executive Summary makes it clear it is intended to be the principal EIS for the Letter of Authorization (LOA) issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). The central purpose of the LOA is to authorize the incidental harassment of marine mammals that will be adversely impacted by project noise.

That there will be such a LOA is certain because US Wind applied for one six months ago. That this application is not mentioned in the DEIS is a major omission. The application proposes the harassment of over 6,000 marine mammals, listed by species. A significant number of these harassments are of endangered species, including the extremely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

This multitude of harassments is arguably the greatest environmental impact that will be manifested by the Maryland Wind project. These harassments should be a central focus of the DEIS, but amazingly, they are never mentioned. In fact, the word “harassment” never even occurs substantively, as it is only found three times in a “definition” section. Thus, there is no assessment of harassment or its impacts — an incredible omission.

If the projected harassments are never discussed and weighed, then this DEIS cannot be the EIS for the LOA. If this is to be the LOA EIS, then it will have to be extensively reworked and expanded. This cannot be done until the LOA is issued, at which time the actual authorized harassment numbers will be available for assessment. Even if this is not the LOA EIS, the projected numerous harassments must be analyzed and their impact assessed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Here, several issues arise, which are presented briefly below.

Harassment is itself an adverse impact. This is because harassment can easily lead to far worse impacts, up to and including the death of the animal. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) seems to concur, explaining in the following statement that harassment can cause harm. It refers to “pile driving” in particular, but the argument it contains holds for all harassments.

“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”

Empire Wind DEIS v.1, Page 3.15-14, PDF page 372

We maintain the Maryland Wind DEIS is inadequate and needs to be revised for the following reasons:

1. The Maryland Wind DEIS does not analyze and assess harassment-induced impacts, and this is a major omission.

The DEIS projects there will be a likely increase in boat and ship accident frequency as a consequence of the project, finding it roughly doubles. (See Table 3.6.6-5 and related text.) A similar analysis must be made to assess similar adverse impacts, such as increased ship strikes on whales. Harassing whales into heavy-traffic ship lanes is a likely feature of the Maryland Wind project. And since ship strikes are a major cause of whale mortality and smaller marine mammals, then each of the impacts described in the Empire Wind quote above needs to be carefully assessed, species by species.

2. With pile driving, there is a major omission in the DEIS: alternative energy sources.

The alternative of nuclear power or even floating wind instead of using monopile foundations is not considered. Given that pile driving is projected to be the leading cause of harassment, other forms of energy alternatives might offer better mitigation and should be considered. Moreover, BOEM just let five leases off California specifically for floating wind, demonstrating the technology is feasible. Dominion Energy’s latest Integrated Resource Plan includes adding a number of modular nuclear reactors so that technology is also feasible. The present DEIS only includes a “no action” alternative, so it mistakenly omits other viable alternatives.

3. There is also a major unresolved issue with sonar harassment, the actual noise level.

Recent measurements by the Save Right Whales Coalition (SRWC) discovered that sonar survey sound levels were markedly higher than those being used to estimate harassment numbers. They were so much higher that a revised harassment projection might include five times as many harassments for sonar work. SRWC notified National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Dr. Richard Spinrad of these troublesome findings on September 8, 2023, well before the release of this DEIS. That notification and related materials are at https://saverightwhales.org/. This issue must be resolved for the sonar used at Maryland Wind, so that the correct harassment numbers are used for impact assessment.

4. A huge omission is the lack of assessment of harassment from operational noise.

Neither the NMFS LOA application nor this DEIS addresses this issue. They seem to assume that operational noise is harmless. However, Dr. Bob Stern, the former director of the Office of Environmental Compliance at the U.S. Department of Energy, presented a paper at the 2022 meeting of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium to the effect that large-scale operational noise was likely to create widespread harassment. The scale in question is that planned for Maryland Wind. This operational noise issue needs to be investigated and resolved in a revised DEIS.

5. The major issue of cumulative impact is not addressed.

This project is just one of many presently proposed to be built and operated simultaneously. The cumulative harassment impacts could be very large and must be assessed under NEPA for the Maryland Wind project. NMFS has deemed that harassment authorizations are limited to 30% of the stock population. At present, the simultaneous cumulative harassment requests exceed several hundred percent of the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale population. Such an impact needs to be cut back to 30% or less.

6. Life cycle harassment impact is a major omission.

The LOA is only for five years, while this EIS covers the impacts over the entire project life cycle. Thus, a separate harassment impact estimate, by species, will be needed for that longer period, especially given the harassment potential of operational noise.

Read CFACT’s Maryland Offshore Wind DEIS Comments as a PDF

Maryland-Offshore-Wind-DEIS-Comments-CFACT-1Herunterladen

Author


Craig Rucker

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president.

Widely heralded as a leader in the free market environmental, think tank community in Washington, D.C., Rucker is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, written extensively in numerous publications, and has appeared in such media outlets as Fox News, OANN, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, among many others.

Rucker is also the co-producer of the award-winning film “Climate Hustle,” which was the #1 box-office film in America during its one night showing in 2016, as well as the acclaimed “Climate Hustle 2” staring Hollywood actor Kevin Sorbo released in 2020.

As an accredited observer to the United Nations, Rucker has also led CFACT delegations to some 30 major UN conferences, including those in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Kyoto, Bonn, Marrakesh, Rio de Janeiro, and Warsaw, to name a few.

A new paper shows that U.S. tornado damage & strong tornado incidence are both sharply down

From CLIMATE DEPOT

ROGER PIELKE JR.: A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find: “[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.”


Their analysis confirms our earlier work: “[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.” … 


Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.

By Marc Morano

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/trends-in-us-tornado-damage-and-incidence

By ROGER PIELKE JR.

Excerpts: In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising:

[A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom:

The analysis presented in this paper indicates that normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant one is not). The degree to which this decrease is the result of an actual decrease in the incidence of strong tornadoes is difficult to assess due to inconsistencies in reporting practices over time. However, an examination of trends within sub-periods of the dataset is suggestive that some part of the long-term decrease in losses may have a component related to actual changes in tornado behaviour. Further research is clearly needed to assess this suggestion.

…

A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. (Published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes) They find:

[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.

Their analysis confirms our earlier work:

[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards

…

Compare their results with ours in the figure below, which I have just updated through 2022.

Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1950-2022. Source: Updated from Simmons et al. 2013.

…

In the 11 full years following our analysis, 9 of 11 have seen overall below average tornado incidence in the United States — 2023 will wind up slightly above average. There is simply no evidence to support claims that tornadoes are getting worse or causing more damage. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite and peer-reviewed research is strongly in agreement.

…

#

Whale-Sized Revolt: Fishermen Slam Biden’s Offshore Wind Power Disaster

From STOP THESE THINGS

The wind industry is determined to destroy the marine environment along the Atlantic coast; its fishermen are even more determined to stop them.

As whale carcasses mount up along the coastline, those who depend on the sea for their livelihoods have turned on the offshore wind industry and its government enablers, with a vengeance.

As Josh Christenson reports below, the wind industry and its spin doctors have a whale-sized revolt and their hands, one which won’t be placated with the industry’s usual soft soap, gaslighting approach.

RI fishermen’s board resigns en masse over Biden admin-backed offshore wind farm: ‘Wholesale ocean destruction’
New York Post
Josh Christenson
5 September 2023

A plan backed by the Biden administration to OK a string of wind farms off Rhode Island has prompted every member of a fishing regulatory board in the state to resign.

The entire Rhode Island Fisherman’s Advisory Board quit en masse Friday to protest the 84-turbine Sunrise Wind project after the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council approved the third offshore wind farm in two years off the Ocean State’s waters.

The project falls under President Biden’s executive order authorizing his Interior Department to double US offshore wind capacity by 2030. With the project’s approval, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is on track to finish reviews for 16 wind farms by 2025.

But foes including the fishing board say the Sunrise plan ignores environmental regulations and anglers’ concerns

In a letter addressed to CRMC Executive Director Jeff Willis, the nine-member fishermen’s panel said its regulatory role had been reduced to “political theater,” as the state continues to defer to developers such as the Danish wind giant Orsted.

“We will not allow our names to be connected in any way to Council approvals now amounting to wholesale ocean destruction,” wrote board members Lanny Dellinger, Christopher Brown, Michael Marchetti, Greg Mataronas, Chris Lee, Brian Thibeault, Meghan Lapp, Richard Hittinger and Rick Bellavance.

“Rhode Island is supposed to be the Ocean State, not the Windmill State.”

The board said it was drawing specific attention to the project’s violations of state environmental protection requirements, as well as warnings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about its effects on Atlantic cod.

A letter addressed two days earlier to Willis from another board member, who also chairs the Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers Association, raised concerns about the effects on recreational tuna fishing in the region.

“Our members are shocked at the scale of the current development now occurring on their fishing grounds but are being told that permitting is complete and there is no way for them to have input at this late date,” Hittinger said.

He added that the “one-sided push by developers” ensures that environmental considerations will continue to be ignored, calling the decision, “effectively a rubber stamp of the political desires of Washington, DC,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Post.

CRMC officials responded by saying the board members had “provided valuable information and insight” but that their resignations would not deter the project from meeting its federal mandates under the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972.

“The CRMC remains hopeful that the Rhode Island fishing community will continue to participate in the public process for reviewing offshore wind energy projects, as well as any other projects affecting the fishery resources of the State,” a rep said in a statement.

Rhode Island approved Sunrise Wind just weeks after the Biden administration gave final approval to the 65-turbine Revolution Wind project after a permit from the CRMC. In April, the administration also approved the 12-turbine South Fork Wind project after the CRMC gave a thumbs-up to that project, too.

All three projects are joint enterprises between Orsted, one of the world’s largest offshore wind developer, which is headquartered in Denmark, and the New England utility Eversource.

The approval pace has alarmed fishermen as well as local environmental groups, who say the renewable energy initiatives will eventually build around 1,000 turbines in the waters south of Rhode Island covering roughly 1,400 square miles — larger than the Ocean State itself.

The projects will cause major disruptions to commercial and recreational fishing, says one of those groups, Green Oceans, while pointing to one of the BOEM’s own assessments.

The agency’s draft environmental impact statement for the Revolution Wind project stated that there would be “no measurable influence on climate change” either.

The first offshore wind farms in the US were built off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016 and have also been correlated with a surge in whale deaths.

Through increased boat traffic because of construction, as well as high-decibel sonar mapping, whales are apparently being struck and killed by vessels or else disoriented and driven away from feeding grounds.

Other groups such as the Save Right Whales Coalition have noted donations from Orsted to some state environmental groups and other institutions.

In 2020, Orsted and the Revolution Wind project donated $1,250,000 to the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut to fund pro-offshore wind exhibits, the group noted in a report.

Between Dec. 1, 2022, and Aug. 25, 2023, at least 60 whale species have been found dead on the East Coast.
New York Post