Bats stand in the way of wind turbines
via Ontario Wind Resistancehttp://ontario-wind-resistance.org
The Enterprise Bulletin COLLINGWOOD – Citizen scientists have proven beyond a doubt there is a population of endangered little brown bats in the area where wpd Canada Inc. plans to erect eight 500-foot wind turbines. Evidence from three bat biologists was … Continue reading →
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March 2, 2017 at 10:34PM
White House Considers Breaking Trump’s Promise To Withdraw From The Paris Agreement
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com
“Trump’s advisers have not yet fleshed out a detailed position on whether the U.S. should stay in the Paris agreement,” a source told Politico. The agreement, which was spearheaded by the Obama administration, entered into force November, 2016.
The source said “[s]ome advisers have argued the U.S. should pull out altogether, a process that would take years under the agreement’s rules” while “[o]thers favor staking out a middle ground, perhaps by staying in the agreement and rewriting the emissions reduction targets that Obama set.”
President Barack Obama pledged to cut U.S. emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025, largely through his “Climate Action Plan” — a sweeping regulatory agenda targeting emissions from power plants, appliances, vehicles and energy production.
Not everyone is dismayed at news of dissent within the Trump administration over the Paris agreement.
“President Trump has made clear he want to keep his campaign promises,” Myron Ebell, the director of energy policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who also worked for Trump’s transition team.
“Every administration is going to have these dissenting voices. So far president Trump has been a stand-up guy about keeping his promises,” Ebell told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Trump also promised to roll back Obama’s “Climate Action Plan” and is readying an executive order to rescind major regulations impacting coal mines and coal-fired power plants as soon as next week.
But news reports surrounding the planned order have Paris agreement opponents worried.
Ivanka Trump and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, reportedly intervened to get language critical of Paris stripped from the order.
Kushner and Ivanka “intervened to strike language about the climate deal from an earlier draft of the executive order,” sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Ivanka and her husband “have been considered a moderating influence on the White House’s position on climate change and environmental issues,” WSJ reports.
Trump promised supporters he would withdraw from the Paris agreement.
“We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs,” Trump told energy industry representatives in a May, 2016, campaign speech in North Dakota.
“President Obama entered the United States into the Paris Climate Accords – unilaterally, and without the permission of Congress,” Trump said. “This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America.”
The White House originally planned to include language in Trump’s pending energy executive order designating the Paris agreement a “treaty,” even though it was never ratified by the Senate, according to those familiar with the matter.
Trump did say he’d keep an “open mind” on the Paris agreement in a New York Times interview after winning the election in November and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told lawmakers he supported staying in the Paris agreement during his confirmation hearing.
The executive order is not expected to mention the Paris agreement, despite Trump’s campaign pledge to “cancel” the agreement.
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
March 2, 2017 at 09:46PM
New Paper Indicates More Arctic Sea Ice Now Than For Nearly All Of Last 10,000 Years
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com
By Paul Homewood
Reposted from No Tricks Zone:
The causes that are controlling the decrease in sea ice are still under discussion. In several studies changes in extent, thickness and drift of Arctic sea ice are related to changes in the overall atmospheric circulation patterns as reflected in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO). The NAO and AO are influencing changes of the relative position and strength of the two major surface-current systems of the Arctic Ocean.
The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon, coinciding with major glacier advances on Franz Josef Land, Spitsbergen and Scandinavia. The increase in sea ice may have resulted from the continuing cooling trend due to decreased solar insolation and reduced heat flow from the Pacific.
The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon as PIP25-based sea ice records from the Fram Strait, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea and Chukchi Sea display a generally quite similar evolution, all coinciding with the decrease in solar radiation.
The main factors controlling the millennial variability in sea ice and surface-water productivity are probably changes in surface water and heat flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean as well as the long-term decrease in summer insolation, whereas short-term centennial variability observed in the high-resolution middle Holocene record was possibly triggered by solar forcing.
Read the full report here.
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March 2, 2017 at 09:45PM
Study reveals the atmospheric footprint of global warming hiatus
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They admit the hiatus, or pause, is still a puzzle: ‘processes remain unclear’. What is clear is that the observed temperature trend in the study period is unlike the carbon dioxide trend.
The increasing rate of the global mean surface temperature was reduced from 1998 to 2013, known as the global warming hiatus, or pause.
Researchers have devoted much effort to the understanding of the cause, reports Phys.org. The proposed mechanisms include the internal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, ocean heat uptake and redistribution, and many others.
However, scientists also want to understand the atmospheric footprint of the recent warming hiatus as the dynamical and physical processes remain unclear.
In a recent paper published in Scientific Reports, LIU Bo and ZHOU Tianjun from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have investigated anomalous atmospheric features during the global warming hiatus period from 1998 to 2013. They show evidence that the global mean tropospheric temperature also experienced a hiatus or pause.
To understand the physical processes that dominate the warming hiatus, they decomposed the total temperature trends into components due to processes related to surface albedo, water vapor, cloud, surface turbulent fluxes and atmospheric dynamics.
The results demonstrated that the hiatus of near-surface temperature warming trend is dominated by the decreasing surface latent heat flux compared with the preceding warming period, while the hiatus of upper tropospheric temperature is dominated by the cloud-related processes. Further analysis indicated that atmospheric dynamics are coupled with surface turbulent heat fluxes over lower troposphere and coupled with cloud processes over upper troposphere.
As to why the surface latent heat flux, atmospheric dynamics and cloud-related processes showed such large differences between 1983-1998 and 1998-2013, LIU, first author of the paper, explained, “They are dominated by the Hadley Circulation and Walker Circulation changes associated with the phase transition of Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO).”
According to LIU, the IPO is a robust, recurring pattern of sea surface temperature anomalies at decadal time scale. During a positive phase of IPO, the west Pacific and the mid-latitude North Pacific becomes cooler and the tropical eastern ocean warms, while during a negative phase, the opposite pattern occurs.
The IPO has shifted from the positive phase to negative phase since 1998/1999, and this transition has led to the weakening of both Hadley Circulation and Walker Circulation, which served as a hub linking the three processes mentioned above.
“Though the heat capacity of the atmosphere is nearly negligible compared with the ocean”, said ZHOU, corresponding author of the paper, “understanding the atmospheric footprint is essential to gain a full picture of how internal climate variability such as IPO affects the global climate from the surface to the troposphere. The new findings also provide useful observational metrics for gauging climate model experiments that are designed to understand the mechanism of global warming hiatus.”
Source: Study reveals the atmospheric footprint of global warming hiatus | Phys.org
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March 2, 2017 at 09:24PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 