As a long-time critic of climate alarmism, chemistry graduate Graham Stringer MP is not surprised by the latest cracks appearing in the facade of modern climate science, as the GWPF reports.

Al Gore, the U.S. politician and self-appointed champion of the green cause, famously declared that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change. It was a claim that revealed far more about the intolerance of the environmental movement than the reality of scientific inquiry.

Research should be founded on critical analysis of the evidence, not on wishful thinking or enforcement of a political ideology. Now the hollowness of Gore’s assertion is exposed again by a vital new report that shows how the apocalyptic predictions of the green lobby have been exaggerated.

In a study just published by the respected journal Nature Geoscience, a group of British academics reveals that the immediate threat from global warming is lower than previously thought, because the computer models used by climate change experts are flawed.

According to these models, temperatures across the world should now be at least 1.3 degrees above the mid-19th century average, which is taken as a base level in such calculations. But the British report demonstrates that the rise is only between 0.9 and 1 degree.

That discrepancy is ‘a big deal’, says Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study. He is absolutely right. The importance of this new investigation cannot be downplayed. It shows that so many of the assumptions behind the imposition of the fashionable eco agenda — such as the creation of vast, subsidised wind farms or the levying of green taxes — are wrong.

Yet the environmental warriors show not a shred of embarrassment over these new findings.

Continued here.
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Climate jiggery-pokery by Graham Stringer (2011)

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September 21, 2017 at 05:03AM

A kauri tree preserved in a New Zealand peat swamp for 30,000 years has revealed a new mechanism that may explain how temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere spiked several degrees centigrade in just a few decades during the last global ice age.

Unexpectedly, according to new research led by scientists from Keele University and UNSW Sydney and published today in Nature Communications, it looks like the origin of this warming may lie half-a-world away, in Antarctica.

Rapid warming spikes of this kind during glacial periods, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, are well known to climate researchers. They are linked to a phenomenon known as the ‘bipolar seesaw’, where increasing temperatures in the Arctic happen at the same time as cooling over the Antarctic, and vice versa.

Until now, these divergences in temperature at the opposite ends of the Earth were believed to have been driven by changes in the North Atlantic, causing deep ocean currents, often referred to as the ocean ‘conveyor belt’, to shut down. This led to warming in the Northern Hemisphere and cooling in the south.

But the study, which examines a specific Dansgaard-Oeschger event that occurred around 30,000 years ago, suggests Antarctica plays a role too. Professor Chris Fogwill, Head of the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Keele University and co-author of the study said:

“The study analysed highly-resolved climate archives from ancient trees which have been preserved in marshland, by assessing the records against climate models our study provides fresh insights into the mechanisms of climate change, which are crucial to reduce uncertainty in future climate projections.”

The paper describes how the researchers used a detailed sequence of radiocarbon dates from an ancient New Zealand kauri tree to precisely align ice, marine and sediment records across a period of greatly changing climate.

“Intriguingly, we found that the spike in temperature preserved in the Greenland ice core corresponded with a 400-year-long surface cooling period in the Southern Ocean and a major retreat of Antarctic ice,” said lead author and UNSW scientist Professor Chris Turney.

“As we looked more closely for the cause of this opposite response we found that there were no changes to the global ocean circulation during the Antarctic cooling event that could explain the warming in the North Atlantic. There had to be another cause.”

A clue to what might be going on if the oceans weren’t involved appeared in lake sediments from the Atherton Tableland, Queensland.  The sediments showed a simultaneous collapse of rain-bearing trade winds over tropical northeast Australia.

It was a curious change, so the researchers turned to climate models to see if these climate events might somehow be linked.

They started by modelling the release of large volumes of freshwater into the Southern Ocean, exactly as would happen with rapid ice retreat around the Antarctic. Consistent with the data, they found that there was cooling in the Southern Ocean but no change in the global ocean circulation.

Image: Summary of CSIRO Mk3L ensemble simulations showing the impact of a 338-year duration freshwater flux of 0.54 Sv into the Weddell and Ross Seas.

They also found that the freshwater pulse caused rapid warming in the tropical Pacific. This in turn led to changes to the atmospheric circulation that went on to trigger sharply higher temperatures over the North Atlantic and the collapse of rain-bearing winds over tropical Australia.

Essentially, the model showed the formation of a 20,000 km long ‘atmospheric bridge’ that linked melting ice in Antarctica to rapid atmospheric warming in the North Atlantic.

Full story

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September 21, 2017 at 04:44AM

Two Northern California cities filed separate lawsuits against five major oil companies Wednesday, asking state courts to force the companies to fund infrastructure the cities say is needed because of climate change.

U.S. Supreme Court building

The suits, filed by San Francisco and Oakland in state Superior Court, are among the first in which plaintiffs are seeking to force companies to pay for infrastructure to protect coastal cities from potential damages caused by rising sea levels. The cities are asking for the oil companies to pay for sea walls and other infrastructure projects, the cost of which aren’t yet known, according to the cities, but are expected to be in the billions of dollars, they said.

Scientists have linked rising sea levels to the burning of fossil fuels and warming global temperatures.

The cases open a new front in a yearslong effort by environmental groups, Democratic state attorneys general and municipalities to hold big oil companies accountable for the societal costs of climate change.

Plaintiffs in a number of lawsuits or investigations have argued companies knew or should have known about the potential impacts of burning fossil fuels, but instead made efforts to sow doubt about the science behind global warming.

The companies dispute those allegations.

City attorneys reiterated those complaints Wednesday, with San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera saying large oil companies “copied a page from the Big Tobacco playbook.”

“These fossil fuel companies profited handsomely for decades while knowing they were putting the fate of our cities at risk,” Mr. Herrera said.

Matthew Pawa, an attorney who participated in a 2012 California conference that dealt with the potential for seeking climate change damages from oil companies and compared the effort to tobacco-company litigation, is part of the cities’ legal teams, according to court documents.

The San Francisco and Oakland suits allege the companies are a “public nuisance” and ask courts to force the firms— BP PLC, Chevron Corp. , ConocoPhillips , Exxon MobilCorp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC—to create a fund for each city to pay for infrastructure projects likely to cost billions of dollars.

Full story

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September 21, 2017 at 03:17AM

Admit it, we had you there for a moment. No, our headline is definitely fake news. However, if the wind industry was taken at its word (unlikely) then the subsidies would have ended years ago. The likes of AGL, the Clean Energy Council and a whole band of wind worshipping lunatics have been telling us … Continue reading Wind Industry Demands End to Subsidies: Wind Power Now Cheaper than Coal & Gas-Fired Power

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September 21, 2017 at 02:32AM