Month: September 2023

Daily News 19 Sep 2023

The online publication Euronews’ “Green” section posted an article claiming that invasive fire ants are “likely” to spread due to climate change. This claim is a stretch, based on predicted warming from climate models, and makes only brief mention of the fact that Sicily and other parts of Europe are already suitable habitat for invasive fire ants. Not to mention the fact that fire ants currently thrive in North America.

The article, “Invasive fire ants have made it to Europe – and they’re likely to spread as the climate heats up,” is somewhat temperate compared to other fearful predictive posts often covered by Climate Realism, but still reports uncritically on a study that bases most of its warming related claims on climate model projections of future conditions. Euronews claims that the study “warns that, with the help of global warming, the ants could spread across the continent.”

The article goes on to say that the climate in “half of Europe’s urban areas is already suitable for the species,” however this appears to be a mistake, because later it is clarified that half the urban areas sampled are suitable, much of northern and eastern Europe were not included in the study. This is notable because those regions are the most obviously inhospitable to fire ants. The vast majority of the urban areas “currently suitable” are along the Mediterranean coastlines, and all in places where winters are typically mild. Additionally, urban areas tend to be hotter than the surrounding countryside, especially at night and in winter, due to the urban heat island effect.

Fire ants seem well established in Sicily, which was the main focus of the study, as 88 active, well established fire ant nests have been found near busy port cities in the area. Euronews says the ants are most likely from the southern United States, or China or Taiwan, based on genetics. To be clear, just as in the United States, fire ants didn’t migrate to Sicily due to the climate suddenly becoming hospitable to them. Rather the ants were introduced unintentionally as unwelcome passengers via trade from countries they already inhabit.

Euronews does admit that “the ants could establish themselves in 7 per cent of Europe and the Mediterranean under current environmental conditions,” but they go on to assert “projections show that Europe’s environment is likely to become more widely suited for the ants as the climate heats up.”

As admitted, Sicily, along with 7 percent of Europe (according to the study) already has a climate that is suitable for fire ants. Like much of California, Sicily has a Mediterranean climate, specifically according to Köppen climate types, primarily hot-summer Mediterranean climate that is typified by winters that are too mild to kill fire ants off due to the lack of sustained hard freeze periods. While winters in South America, the fire ant’s native habitat, and the southern United States, are more humid, they still lack periods of sustained hard freeze. This gives invasive ants the foothold they need to spread.

The good news is, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a study that attempted to predict the expansion of fire ant colonies; the ants are largely estimated to remain in areas where the frost depth of the soil doesn’t penetrate too far. The same is likely for Europe, if the invasion isn’t squashed in Sicily fast enough.

To say that fire ants are a threat to all or most of Europe due to projected future warming is more speculation than science.

The study itself relies on model projections from WORLDCLIM v2 scenario SSP245, which while not the most extreme of warming projections, does have an embarrassing recent record of greatly overestimating the warming in the U.S. corn belt, as covered by Climate Realism in “PJ Media, Steve Milloy, and Dr. Roy Spencer Show Climate Models Overestimate Corn Belt Warming.” Most egregiously, they include projections from HadGEM3-GC31-LL, which projected about seven times more warming than has been observed.

Climate Realism has covered just how suspect these models are on many occasions, but mainstream media outlets continue uncritically report model predictions despite their poor track records.

While it is certainly a good idea to get ahead of a European fire ant invasion, as I currently write this Climate Realism post with my foot covered in fire ant stings myself, there is no need to fearmonger over climate change, especially with models that run way too hot. Invasive species are a serious problem for human comfort and safety as well as native species’ health. Euronews should be able to report on a worrying invasion of fire ants and perhaps offer some solutions without tying their coverage to climate alarm.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

via Watts Up With That?

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September 19, 2023 at 08:06AM

Daily News 19 Sep 2023

Confirmed: Temperature Drives CO2, not the Reverse

From notrickszone New Study: The Rising-CO2-Causes-Warming Perception Not Supported By Real-World Observation. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

One of the most basic concepts in physics is that causes precede effects and effects follow causes. Determining the directionality sequence is thus essential in any causality analysis.

The assumed CO₂→T causality direction cannot be scientifically supported

The assumption in climate models is that CO₂ causes changes in temperature, or T. More specifically, it is assumed modern global warming has been caused by increases in anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

However, scientists (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2023) have now expanded upon last year’s 2-part study on stochastics-formulated causality published in The Royal Society (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022 (1) and Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022 (2)) where they notably contend:

“Clearly the results […] suggest a (mono-directional) potentially causal system with T as the cause and [CO₂] as the effect. Hence the common perception that increasing [CO₂] causes increased T can be excluded as it violates the necessary condition for this causality direction.”

The analysis is in complete agreement with several posts here, especially:

Temps Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse. 2023 Update

The paper is On Hens, Eggs, Temperatures and CO2: Causal Links in Earth’s Atmosphere by Demetris Koutsoyiannis et al. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

The scientific and wider interest in the relationship between atmospheric temperature (T) and concentration of carbon dioxide ([CO2]) has been enormous. According to the commonly assumed causality link, increased [CO2] causes a rise in T. However, recent developments cast doubts on this assumption by showing that this relationship is of the hen-or-egg type, or even unidirectional but opposite in direction to the commonly assumed one. These developments include an advanced theoretical framework for testing causality based on the stochastic evaluation of a potentially causal link between two processes via the notion of the impulse response function. Using, on the one hand, this framework and further expanding it and, on the other hand, the longest available modern time series of globally averaged T and [CO2], we shed light on the potential causality between these two processes.

All evidence resulting from the analyses suggests a unidirectional,
potentially causal link with T as the cause and [CO2] as the effect.

That link is not represented in climate models, whose outputs are also examined using the same framework, resulting in a link opposite the one found when the real measurements are used.

Discussion and Further Results

The mainstream assumption of the causality direction [CO2] → T makes a compelling narrative, as everything is blamed on a single cause, the human CO2 emissions. Indeed, this has been the popular narrative for decades. However, popularity does not necessarily mean correctness, and here we have provided strong arguments against this assumption.

Since we have identified atmospheric temperature as the cause and atmospheric CO2 concentration as the effect, one may be tempted to ask the question: What is the cause of the modern increase in temperature? Apparently, this question is much more difficult to reply to, as we can no longer attribute everything to any single agent.

We do not claim to have the answer to this question, whose study is far beyond the article’s scope. Neither do we believe that mainstream climatic theory, which is focused upon human CO2 emissions as the main cause and regards everything else as feedback of the single main cause, can explain what happened on Earth for 4.5 billion years of changing climate.

The examined processes in the Appendices are internal to the climatic system. Other processes affecting T, not examined here, could also be external (e.g., solar and astronomical [43,44] and geological [45,46,47,48,49]). Generally, in complex systems, an identified causal link, even though it gives some explanation of a phenomenon, raises additional questions, e.g., what caused the change in the identified cause, etc. In turn, causal links in complex systems may form endless sequences.

For this reason, it is naïve to expect complete answers to problems related to complex systems or to assume that a complex system is in permanent equilibrium and that an external agent is needed to “kick” it out of the equilibrium and produce change. Yet the investigation of a single causal link between two processes, as is the focus of this paper, provides useful information, with possible significant scientific, technical, practical, epistemological and philosophical implications. These are not covered in this paper.

As already clarified, the scope of our work is not to provide detailed modeling of the processes studied but to check causality conditions. We highlight the fact that the relationship we established explains only about 1/3 of the actual variance of Δln[CO2]. This is not negligible for investigating causality, but also leaves a margin for many other climatic factors to act.

Conclusions

With reference to points 1–7 of the Introduction setting the paper’s scope, the results of our analyses can be summarized as follows.

All evidence resulting from the analyses of the longest available modern time series of atmospheric concentration of [CO2] at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, along with that of globally averaged T, suggests a unidirectional, potentially causal link with T as the cause and [CO2] as the effect. This direction of causality holds for the entire period covered by the observations (more than 60 years).
Seasonality, as reflected in different phases of [CO2] time series at different latitudes, does not play any role in potential causality, as confirmed by replacing the Mauna Loa [CO2] time series with that in South Pole.
The unidirectional 𝑇→ln[CO2] potential causal link applies to all timescales resolved by the available data, from monthly to about two decades.
The proposed methodology is simple, flexible and effective in disambiguating cases where the type of causality, HOE or unidirectional, is not quite clear.
Furthermore, the methodology defines a type of data analysis that, regardless of the detection of causality per se, assesses modeling performance by comparing observational data with model results. In particular, the analysis of climate model outputs reveals a misrepresentation of the causal link by these models, which suggest a causality direction opposite to the one found when the real measurements are used.
Extensions of the scope of the methodology, i.e., from detecting possible causality to building a more detailed model of stochastic type, are possible, as illustrated by a toy model for the T-[CO2] system, with explained variance of [CO2] reaching an impressive 99.9%.
While some of the findings of this study seem counterintuitive or contrary to mainstream opinions, they are logically and computationally supported by arguments and calculations given in the Appendices.

via Science Matters

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September 19, 2023 at 07:33AM

Daily News 19 Sep 2023

EV Sales In Decline To Private Buyers

By Paul Homewood

Detailed data reveals that private motorists have stopped buying

Hopes for the mainstream adoption of electric cars have been punctured by figures revealing a fall of more than 11 per cent in the sale of zero-emission vehicles to private buyers.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has said that motorists are holding back from the switch because of continued uncertainty about whether a government ban on petrol and diesel cars will be enforced, the cost of electric vehicles, the cutting of financial incentives, and fears about the lack of a public recharging network.

Ministers and the industry have previously hailed rising sales of electric cars as a sign that Britain is ready to move from the “early adopter” stage of battery electric vehicle (BEV) ownership to mass market.
However, the number of electric cars bought by private owners has fallen from more than one in three of the BEV market to less than one in four in just a year. Figures for the first half of the year showed a 32 per cent surge in BEV sales to 152,000 cars, accounting for a sixth of all new registrations.

However, detailed data reveals that private motorists have stopped buying.
The vast majority of new BEV registrations this year — more than 75 per cent — were with fleets and business owners, which can take advantage of company car tax breaks, the benefits-in-kind regime and salary-sacrifice schemes that mean running an electric car attracts dramatically less tax.

In the first half of this year, 37,000 new electric cars were registered to private retail-buying motorists, or just 24.2 per cent of all BEVs. That is down from the 41,800 BEVs sold to private motorists in the first half of last year when retail buyers accounted for 36.3 per cent of all electric car sales.

The fall coincides not only with the cost of living crisis but also with the scrapping of the “plug-in car grant”, which at one stage was worth up to £5,000 off a new electric car.
Full story

I have strongly suspected for a long time that most EVs are bought by businesses and fleets, but have never found that data to back it up.

This new study in The Times not only shows that EV sales to private buyers has actually dropped year-on-year. It also indicated that about 8% of private sales are BEV.

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

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September 19, 2023 at 06:34AM