Week in review – science edition

via Climate Etc.
https://judithcurry.com

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye this past week.

Sun’s impact on climate quantified for the first time [link]

North Pacific 20th century decadal-scale variability is unique for the past 342 years [link]

A reconstructed South Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation time series since 1870 [link]

A robust empirical seasonal prediction of winter NAO and surface climate [link]

An interannual link between Arctic sea-ice cover and the North Atlantic Oscillation [link]

Cosmic Rays Increase Cloud Cover, Earth’s Surface Cools [link]

“New Studies Confirm Solar Activity Plays Important Role On Driving Climate” [link]  …

Removing #mountains from #EarthSystem models affects #ElNino amplitude, frequency & regularity.  [link] 

Melting sea ice may lead to more life in the sea [link]

Lovejoy: How accurately do we know the temperature of the surface of the earth? [link]

Russia identifies 200 lakes “bubbling like jacuzzis” with methane [link]

Deep-water masses in the Subpolar North Atlantic, where do they occur & what are the physics? [link]

New paper: “eastern Medit. experienced wetter-than-present summer conditions during the early–late Holocene.” [link] …

“Influences of temperature &precipitation on historical &future snowpack variability over N Hemisphere in…Model” [link]…

“The relationship between wintertime extreme temperature events & large-scale atmospheric circulations” [link]

“Higher Southern Oscillation Index &Pacific Decadal Oscillation trigger increase in frequency of heavy precipitation

Greenland’s Coastal Ice Passed a Climate Tipping Point 20 Years Ago [link]

Climate seesaw at the end of last glacial phase” finds “regional warming in Europe caused COOLING &snow in E Asia [link]

Sensitivity of attribution of anthropogenic near-surface warming to observational uncertainty [link]

Paper finds glaciers have been melting at the same rate since 1850  [link]

Prediction of #AtmosphericRivers may help #avalanche risk forecasts, especially near coasts.  [link] 

Theory: oceanic feedback across Indian Ocean in 70 days triggers new MJO convection. [link]  

The main outcomes of the Fourth International Workshop on the Advances in the Use of Historical Marine Climate Data. [link]

The many flavors of #ElNino are traced by model test to coupling w/Pacific westerly wind bursts. [link]

Paper on East Asia summer monsoon  finds extreme rainfall more intense due to climate change [link]…

Amplification of AMO by AGW [link]

“Severe testing of climate change hypotheses”, Joel K. Katzav, [link]

Weather/land model of 2012 US #drought shows locally 2-3 deg. cooler air near #irrigation. [link] 

NH midlats haven’t been warming as fast recently due in part to decadal trends in strat polar vortex. [link]

Molecular liquid storage of solar energy [link]

New mesoscale convective prediction study shows #moisture errors matter a lot: [link] 

How Will Earth Respond to Plans for Carbon Dioxide Removal? First Workshop of CDR Model Intercomparison Project [link]

Regional Greenland accumulation variability from Operation IceBridge airborne accumulation radar [link]

Decision making under uncertainty

Turning uncertainty into useful information for conservation decisions [link]

Robust decision making in data scarce contexts: addressing data and model limitations for infrastructure planning [link]

Consensus? No, Good Decisions Require “Respectful Disagreement” [link]

Why most reasoning for policy interventions is (possibly) wrong [link]

About science

Comment: Research needs more competence, less ‘excellence’ : Nature  [link]

On being female in science [link]

The suicide of expertise [link]

This is as good an article as you’re going to read on science and innovation policy. [link]

“Expert reviewers spend a lot of time allocating grant money… But the truth is that they’re not very good at it” [link]

The Problem Is Epistemology, Not Statistics: Replace Significance Tests by Confidence Intervals [link]

via Climate Etc. https://judithcurry.com

April 2, 2017 at 03:19AM

Climate Undamaged

via Science Matters
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The fake news outrage over POTUS Executive Order this week obscured that fact that the wrecking ball is applied to a wall of regulations, not the climate or the planet, which are doing just fine, thank you very much.

Overlooked entirely is the fact that all government actions enacted or under consideration are projected to have a negligible effect on the climate.  For example, some excerpts from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

The oddest criticism of Donald Trump’s climate action this week was the claim, mentioned almost triumphantly by every news source, that it would save few coal jobs. The economic and technological forces, especially the flood of low-carbon natural gas from fracking, are just too powerful.

Of course the news reports are right: “The regulatory changes are entirely outweighed by these technological changes, not to mention the price of natural gas or renewables,” Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution was quoted telling the New York Times .

So potent and large are these global forces that repealing the Obama rules, costly as they are, not only won’t affect coal jobs, it won’t affect climate.

Gina McCarthy, Mr. Obama’s EPA administrator, admitted as much when confronted, during a 2015 House hearing, with the fact that, by the agency’s own climate models, the effect would be only 1/100th of a degree Celsius. Instead, she said success should be measured in terms of “positioning the U.S. for leadership in an international discussion.”

Pile up all the government policies enacted or seriously on the table, and their net effect is zilch. A new McKinsey study, that would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad, points out that Germany’s switch to renewables has been a success by almost every metric except CO 2 output—which is up instead of down.

Rising energy prices to support this energy transition have had one measurable effect—more than 330,000 German households have had their electricity shut off in the past year from nonpayment of bills almost three times as high as those paid by U.S. households.

Germany, needless to add, is many greens’ idea of a country “positioned for leadership in international discussions.”

No rational consideration, however, will abate the torrent of priestly imprecations hurled by green activists this week at Mr. Trump. The New York Times insists that Trumpian action “risks the planet”—plainly false since nothing either Mr. Trump or Mr. Obama did will make a difference to the planet.

The article is The Climate Yawns
Donald Trump is no more a planet wrecker than Barack Obama (as measured to the third decimal). By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. At Wall Street Journal.  Full text below.

The oddest criticism of Donald Trump’s climate action this week was the claim, mentioned almost triumphantly by every news source, that it would save few coal jobs. The economic and technological forces, especially the flood of low-carbon natural gas from fracking, are just too powerful.

Then why, if you’re a Democrat, put yourself in that position in the first place to take blame for killing coal jobs? Why enact a costly regulation to do what the market was doing for free? When everybody else wanted to blame the Florida recount for his 2000 defeat, Al Gore was smart enough privately to blame gun control. When you lose your home state as presidential candidate, something is wrong. The same blundering ineptitude explains how the Obama alliance with the greens threw away first Congress and then a presidency.

Of course the news reports are right: “The regulatory changes are entirely outweighed by these technological changes, not to mention the price of natural gas or renewables,” Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution was quoted telling the New York Times .

So potent and large are these global forces that repealing the Obama rules, costly as they are, not only won’t affect coal jobs, it won’t affect climate.

Gina McCarthy, Mr. Obama’s EPA administrator, admitted as much when confronted, during a 2015 House hearing, with the fact that, by the agency’s own climate models, the effect would be only 1/100th of a degree Celsius. Instead, she said success should be measured in terms of “positioning the U.S. for leadership in an international discussion.”

Even so, many climate activists felt the need to walk back Ms. McCarthy’s concession by insisting Obama policies would have a measurable effect—on the amount of CO 2 released. Yes, the relative decrease would be tiny but measurable, though the climate effect would be zip. This is akin to medical researchers claiming a drug a success because it’s detectable in the bloodstream, not because it improves health.

And don’t get us started on the “social cost of carbon,” a mechanism of policy justification created by the Obama EPA to assign a dollar-value benefit to carbon abatement rules that, in total, will produce zero impact on climate.

Pile up all the government policies enacted or seriously on the table, and their net effect is zilch. A new McKinsey study, that would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad, points out that Germany’s switch to renewables has been a success by almost every metric except CO 2 output—which is up instead of down.

Rising energy prices to support this energy transition have had one measurable effect—more than 330,000 German households have had their electricity shut off in the past year from nonpayment of bills almost three times as high as those paid by U.S. households.

Germany, needless to add, is many greens’ idea of a country “positioned for leadership in international discussions.”

No rational consideration, however, will abate the torrent of priestly imprecations hurled by green activists this week at Mr. Trump. The New York Times insists that Trumpian action “risks the planet”—plainly false since nothing either Mr. Trump or Mr. Obama did will make a difference to the planet.

Literally no amount of money dissipated on climate policy is excessive to such people, because their shamanistic status is directly proportional to the social waste they can conjure. In the realm of religion are we called upon to perform symbolic actions whose purpose (and cost) is aimed at testifying to our membership in the elect.

The most poignant question, however, is what happened to Democrats? They were once a party whose members cared whether policy was efficient and produced benefits for the American people.

Democrats deserve a large share of the credit for the rescue of the failing U.S. economy of the 1970s by throwing out a host of perverse regulatory policies, not that they embrace or even acknowledge this legacy today—which is the problem.

Airline deregulation was born in Ted Kennedy’s administrative practice subcommittee. His aide, Stephen Breyer, now a Supreme Court justice, recalled a working-class Boston constituent asking why the senator was focused on airline issues when this voter could never afford to fly. “That is why,” said Kennedy.

The Democratic Party once had a brain where regulation was concerned, understanding that the ultimate purpose was a net public good, not an in-gathering of power to Washington for the benefit of lobbyists and influence peddlers.

It was not yet today’s Democratic Party of Chuck Schumer, who isn’t stupid and yet is associated with no body of policy thought or analysis. If he even has anybody on his staff deputized to think about the results of policy, it probably is the lowliest intern.

A wrecking ball of a president was the Trump electorate’s answer to this problem. It’s hard even now to say they were wrong. If he delivers nothing in the next four years, it is alarming to suspect that this likely would still be a better result than we would have gotten under Hillary Clinton.

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April 2, 2017 at 03:00AM

Exposing Big Green Battery Baloney

via Current News – Principia Scientific International
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Every day some green energy promoter or a battery salesman tells us how green energy with battery backup will supply Australia’s future electricity needs.
A battery stores energy. Energy can be stored using lead-acid, nickel/cadmium, lithium, molten salt, pumped hydro, hydrogen, flywheels, compressed air or some other smart gizmo. But NOT ONE battery produces new energy – they simply store and…

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April 2, 2017 at 01:36AM

Tadpoles learn to see with new eyes transplanted on their tails

via Current News – Principia Scientific International
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Blind tadpoles have learned to see again, using eyes implanted on their tails. With help from a migraine drug, these eyes were able to grow new connections to the tadpole’s nervous system. The same approach may work in humans, allowing the body to integrate bioengineered organs, say the team behind the work.
“If a human had an eye implanted on their back connected to their spinal cord, would the…

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April 2, 2017 at 01:15AM