Hottest day “in human history” was cooler than most of the holocene

By Jo Nova

The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant

So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?

Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?

Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]

Only 6,000 years ago the world was warmer and the Sahara was lush green and wet

Image by Hoeneisen from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?

Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:

New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’

During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world […]

40 years of expert failure: New NOAA STAR satellite temperatures only show half the warming that climate models do

By Jo Nova h/t Cohenite

New NOAA STAR Satellite system gets a major correction and suddenly agrees with UAH satellites, not RSS

An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.

The warming trend in the troposphere was only half of what the expert models predicted. From the paper:

Santer et al. (2021) reported that the multi-model averages for the TTT trends from CMIP5 and CMIP6 were 0.28–0.29 K/decade during 1979–2019. The total TTT trend found in this study was only one-half of the climate model simulations during the same period.

The authors admit that this has strong implications for the models, and supports a paper by skeptics Ross McKitrick and John Christy: Ross McKitrick replied in the Financial Post:

An important new study on climate change came out recently…

Zou’s team notes that their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other […]

Desertification cancelled: Climate Change won’t make the deserts grow

After a thousand headlines told us Climate Change would make deserts grow, a new study suggests it won’t. It’s a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there’s the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.

Looks a bit different?

The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that’s the old predictions which are based only on “atmospheric data” like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.

Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.

Deserts were expanding until experts got a better model.

 

The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.

The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many […]

Massive Fires: far worse 4,000 years ago in Northern Australia

Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.

Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.

Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.

Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”

Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]

A history of droughts and flooding rains from 1782 – 1865 in Australia

Here’s one for all the history-deniers from 1885

Mr N Bartley understood Australias climate 134 years ago better than some climate scientists appear to now.

After the fire came the floods, Feb 2020.

Even then Australia already had a century-long rolling cycle of floods, fires and droughts. One natural disaster after another back when CO2 levels were perfect.

These go back to the earliest dates of European settlement. Wherever Captain Flinders landed in 1782 — 1792 he found “found traces of drought and bush fires invariably”. In 1839, the drought was so bad that fish “putrefied” in the big Murrumbidgee River even though there was not one coal fired power plant on Earth.

The author laments that the droughts “become forgotten in the flood intervals.”

In the modern Wifi era humans can forget even faster.

Below is my summary list of the events described in the story.

Below that, the full letter. From The Queenslander, Sept 19th, 1885.

*Since Captain Flinders was born in 1774 I assume those dates were wrong and he wasn’t commanding a ship when he was 8 years old. Any other suggestions welcome.(thanks Gee Aye, SteveD, James West and Peter Fitzroy)

(1795 onwards?)* […]

Climate change and bushfires — More rain, the same droughts, no trend, no science

Here’s the anti-witchdoctor kit for bushfires and “climate change”

Hi to all the new readers. Keep these graphs handy…

To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark. Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire. Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.

The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought. A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it. Simple yes? El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.

So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what […]

This is the “old normal” — these fires are mid to late season fires for NSW

Fires in Spring? It’s normal for fires to peak in Spring in NSW

Greg Mullins is a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner and a councillor on the Climate Council, he implies in the Sydney Morning Herald that this is abnormal and that fires are starting earlier:

If anyone tells you, “This is part of a normal cycle” or “We’ve had fires like this before”, smile politely and walk away, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

In NSW, our worst fire years were almost always during an El Nino event, and major property losses generally occurred from late November to February. Based on more than a century of weather observations our official fire danger season is legislated from October 1 to March 31. During the 2000s though, major fires have regularly started in August and September, and sometimes go through to April.

This year, by the beginning of November, we had already lost about as many homes as during the disastrous 2001-2002 bushfire season. We’ve now eclipsed 1994 fire losses.

Mosomoso: The fire season in NSW is spring — this is not early, this is “late season”

For those […]

Settled! Global Warming and the pause, caused by changes in cloud cover, not CO2

That’s it: It was 4% cloudier in 1985, then roughly the same after 2000 — that’s the Pause and the Cause

A new paper in Russian, by OM Pokrovsky, shows that global cloud cover decreased markedly from 1986 to 2000. This is a very large decline in terms of the planetary atmosphere. Pokrovsky uses ISCCP satellite data (the “International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project” — a US program). It’s the best cloud data there is. The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”. [IPCC, 2007]

Clouds cover two-thirds of the Earths surface, reflecting around 30% of the total energy from the Sun back to space. A small change in cloud cover can easily warm or cool the planet, like a giant pop-up shade-sail.

This, on its own, explains all the warming that occurred from 1986 – 2000. It explains the pause. We don’t know why clouds decreased, but we know it wasn’t due to CO2, which kept rising relentlessly year after year, and even faster after the turn of the century.

Something else is driving cloud formation, or […]

California: maybe prescribed burns once every 500 years are not enough?

 

California’s devastating Kincaid Fire located in Sonoma County has grown to over 66,000 acres and NASA’s Terra satellite captured this dramatic image of the smoke plume cascading down the coast. OCt 27, 2019. | NASA image.

In Western Australia (WA) we have incendiary gum trees, regular droughts, and humidity so low that sometimes the clothes dry in the washing machine. Far be it for me to tell Californians how to manage their forests, but thought it worth a mention that Western Australian State govt do managed burns on 8% of the forest each year, and our top experts say it should be twice as much.

Compare that to California, where the rate of prescribed burning is now around 0.2% of the forest or so. Not the same type of fire-loving trees, but still the flammable kind…

BushfireFront: WA burns about 8% annually

A regime of green burning also produces a healthier and more vigorous forest and is better for biodiversity. This approach was applied rigorously in WA forests for nearly 30 years, with tremendous success. Unfortunately since about the 1980s green burning has been under constant attack from environmentalists and academics. As a result, in […]

EPA Part 2: How many degrees Celsius of warming will these new WA Guidelines abate?

Time for the cost-benefit question. In a sane world, the business case for carbon mitigation is like a naked singularity. No matter how many times the question is asked, no numerical answer ever emerges.

Yet whole economies are circling around this very question. — Jo

—————————————————————————-

Question 2: How many degrees Celsius of warming will these new requirements abate, and how will this outcome be measured?

What are the benefits to the Western Australian environment from the EPA recommendations, especially given that almost no nation is trying to reduce emissions and installing as much renewable energy as rapidly as Australia already is.[1]

The WA population is 2.6 million or about 0.03% of the total population of Earth. Given that the largest economies in the world, such as China, India, Brazil, Japan and Indonesia are not going to achieve significant emissions reductions, the imposition on the people of WA poses a large burden on the industry and economy of the state which may be entirely pointless. Only 16 countries are even aiming to meet their Paris targets.[2] One of those 16 is Indonesia, but only five months ago Indonesia threatened to withdraw from Paris Agreement.[3] The United States of America […]

EPA Part 1: Has the EPA done due diligence on the IPCC Climate Report? (Has anyone?)

The WA Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) wants every new project to aim for carbon neutrality, costing billions, almost certainly increasing pollution overseas, but hoping to lower temperatures over WA by 2100 AD.

The EPA is a scientific advisory body — the government doesn’t have to follow their advice — but if it does, and the advice was wrong — who is responsible for loss and damages which are foreseeable? The IPCC favoured models do not include solar magnetic, spectral or particle-flow parameters, and repeatedly fail. They are unaudited, unvalidated, and unaccountable. If the sun controls the climate these models will not show that. If the EPA is not doing due diligence on reports of a foreign committee, which person representing Western Australians is?

— Jo

 

Submission for the EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions Assessment Guidance – Consultation

Joanne Nova, Sept 2, 2019: Submission ID: ANON-1TDB-D593-G.

___________________________

Question 1: Has the EPA done due diligence on the IPCC Climate Report?

The EPA’s core role is to “protect the environment and abate pollution”, Section 15 of the Act (s.15) Therefore, the EPA would be legally obligated to assess the scientific evidence. The question upon which […]

Denying 2000 years of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age on every continent

Here we go again. For five or so years believers didn’t really mention the Medieval Warm Period. Too bruised by the embarrassment of Hockey Stick Zombie failures. But it’s an inconvenient era they have to rub out because none of the expert models can explain what caused it, and it’s hard to panic about same temperatures that Edward the Confessor survived with oxen and carts.

And it’s hard to call the modern warmth “man-made” if nature created something just like it 1,000 years ago.

Climate change: We haven’t experienced anything like this in the past 2,000 years

By Michael Collett, ABC, Environmental Copy and Paste Promoter

Climate scientists writing in the journal Nature have found there is no evidence for “globally coherent warm and cold periods” over the past 2,000 years prior to industrialisation.

That’s significant, because climate change deniers have sometimes pointed to epochs like the so-called “Little Ice Age” or “Medieval Warm Period” to argue that the current global warming is one among multiple similar global climate events.

But what the research actually shows is that other “peak warming and cooling events” over the past two millennia appear to have […]

Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK

Remember when polar amplification was the rage? So much for that theory

Antarctica is twice the size of the US or Australia. Buried 2 km deep under domes of snow, it holds 58 meters of global sea level to ransom. The IPCC have been predicting its demise-by-climate-change for a decade or two.

A new paper looks at 60 sites across Antarctica, considering everything from ice, lake and marine cores to peat and seal skins. They were particularly interested in the Medieval Warm Period, and researched back to 600AD. During medieval times (1000-1200 AD) they estimate Antarctica as a whole was hotter than it is today. Antarctica was even warmer still — during the dark ages circa 700AD.

Credit to the paper authors: Sebastian Lüning, Mariusz Gałka, and Fritz Vahrenholt

Feast your eyes on the decidedly not unprecedented modern tiny spike:

….

The little jaggy down after 2000 AD is real. While there was rapid warming across Antarctica from 1950-2000, in the last twenty years, that warming has stalled. Just another 14 million square kilometers that the models didn’t predict.

We already knew the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon, thanks to hundreds of proxies, and 6,000 boreholes. But […]

Cosmic rays seeded clouds during the last geomagnetic reversal

That’s not in the models

The cosmic ray theory, Henrik Svensmark, (Click to enlarge)

What if our clouds are partly driven by a rain of cosmic radiation from far flung exploding stars… What if the warming on Earth had more to do with magnetic fields than with CO2? h/t GWPF

The Grand Mal test of Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory was 780,000 years ago when the poles on Earth flipped. For 5,000 wild years our magnetic shield was down to about a quarter of its normal strength. That would have allowed more cosmic rays to come streaking through the atmosphere down to the lowest part, crashing into molecules and generally busting things up in the air. Those ionised particles then seed clouds — in theory, which make an umbrella shade for the planet, keeping things cooler, and reflecting all that solar heat back into space. But how do we measure clouds that disappeared three quarters of a million years ago?

A team at Kobe University studied the patterns of monsoons in East Asia during the reversal. They argue that the extra low clouds would cause the winter monsoons to become stronger, so they looked closely at layers of dust […]

Coral reef totally recovers (for 400th time) and researchers surprised

If only coral researchers read skeptic blogs, they’d know that corals have been getting bleached and wrecked by cyclones for millions of years. They have adaptable genes, honed by 500 million years of natural selection, plus epigenetic tricks, and with safe zones to seed recovery. The Great Barrier Reef spans 2,000 kilometers and five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C and we’re still finding reefs we didn’t even know about. The pH swings on a daily basis, and fish do better when it does. One coral has adapted to ocean “acidification” in 6 months. Other fish remarkably adapted from salt to freshwater in just fifty years. As Peter Ridd says: Of all the ecosystems in the world, the reef is one that’s best at adapting to climate change.

So once again, corals have recovered — and yet the “experts” who wear their dogma covered glasses didn’t see it coming.

‘Teeming with life’: New hope for the Great Barrier Reef as island shows remarkable coral growth

By Melissa Martin and Erin Semmler, ABC

One Tree Island was lashed by Cyclone Hamish in 2009, destroying much of the island’s coral.

In the five years following the […]

Finally “world first” study on nine houses shows wind towers make pulsing noise for 3.5 km

Generic wind turbine near farm. Photo: @gonz_ddl

Finally, a study looks at data on nine houses within ten kilometers of an old (probably small) wind turbine. What’s amazing about this research is not the result but that this study is so tiny, yet it’s still a “world first”.

There are already probably around 400,000 wind turbines installed around the world.* So you might think that there would have been scores of studies involving hundreds of people and followed up for a year or two. They would have looked at the effect of wind turbines upwind, downwind, side wind, in low wind, high wind, and at different times of day. They’d check for altered sleep patterns, lack of deep sleep, REM sleep, cognitive performance, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and school marks. Dream on. It’s like everything with climate change — who needs data?

Renewables are a $300 billion annual global industry. This work was done with a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant. Where is the precautionary principle when we need it?

Can wind turbines disturb sleep? Research finds pulsing audible in homes up to 3.5km away

Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald

[…]

“Surprise” Climate change, 900ppm CO2, acidification is good news for squid

Squid, “surprise” are going to do well with climate change. (If only it was going to happen).

In the new post-CO2 world, corn and soy may become weeds, but squid may take over the oceans:

Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios, according to a new study published this week.

Dr Blake Spady, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU), led the study. He said squid live on the edge of their environmental oxygen limitations due to their energy-taxing swimming technique. They were expected to fare badly with more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the water, which makes it more acidic.

No academic could have guessed that squid would have evolved ways to control their own blood pH:

“Their blood is highly sensitive to changes in acidity, so we expected that future ocean acidification would negatively affect their aerobic performance,” said Dr Spady.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to more than 400 ppm today. Scientists project atmospheric CO2 — and by extension CO2 in […]

In a warming world we may get overun by cheap soy and corn

New research shows that the impending climate disaster puts the world in danger of growing too much corn and soy. People won’t know what starving is!

H/t to CO2Science

Qiao et al discovered that when temperatures are raised by a “catastrophic” 2 degrees C, and CO2 is raised to 700 unthinkable ppm corn (aka maize) increases its yield by a remarkable 25%. When hit by both high temperatures and extra CO2, soy bean yield increased even more — by 31%.

Presumably this means crop prices will fall and corn and soy may take over your garden. (So make sure you put in a solar panel to control those new weeds!)

Rumour that nutrient densities will fall — proved to be false. Increased temperature raised the oil content of both crops. And the combo of warmer weather plus CO2 increased most of the nutrients as well. Both crops had more phosphorus, potassium, iron, and zinc. There was a statistically small decrease in calcium in maize, so small it may not be there. The only mineral that definitely declined was manganese in soybeans, and as far as humans go, there is apparently no one on Earth who has a clinical manganese deficiency […]

Climate disasters are less costly, less deadly, and corporate warnings are just $1T of hot air

Hitting the presses today, the vacuous news that lots of companies picked huge numbers out of the air using broken models to guess hyperbolic climate losses coming in the next five years, counter to all the trends for the last hundred years which show declining losses on a GDP basis. The world got warmer but the disasters got less nasty. Less bushfire, less cyclones, less tornadoes, less death per capita. The trends are all good. The only thing that’s up is the number of panic merchants.

World’s biggest firms foresee $1 trillion climate cost hit

LONDON (Reuters) – More than 200 of the world’s largest listed companies forecast that climate change could cost them a combined total of almost $1 trillion, with much of the pain due in the next five years, according to a report published on Tuesday.

So hundreds of companies have offered the climate world a free hit for PR by making a guess. They fall into two kinds of companies –The badgered and harried and the profiteers. See below for examples. Firstly, here’s the only chart that matters.

Global Weather losses are down:

If CO2 causes climate events we need more of it. The […]