By Jo Nova

No wonder climate models can’t predict rainfall

” Until now, isoprene’s ability to form new [cloud seeding] particles has been considered negligible.”

Broad leaf tees emit up to 600 million metric tons of isoprene each year, but no one thought it mattered much. For obvious reasons it is made near the ground, and it’s quite reactive and doesn’t last long. During daylight it’s destroyed within hours. So the experts didn’t think the isoprene could help seed clouds in the upper atmosphere. But there is still quite a lot of isoprene left in a rainforest at night, and tropical storms suck it up “like a vacuum cleaner” and pump it up and spray it out some 8 to 15 kilometers above the trees. Then powerful winds can take these molecules thousands of kilometers away.

When the sun rises, hydroxyl radicals start reacting with the isoprene again, but the reactions are quite different in the cold upper troposphere. And lightning may have left some nitrous oxides floating around too. This combination ends up making a lot of the seed particles that generate clouds in the tropics. It’s almost like the forests want to create more rain…

To put some perspective on this, isoprene is the most abundant non-methane hydrocarbon emitted into the atmosphere.

As Jasper Kirkby at CERN says — this is big:

Isoprene represents a vast source of biogenic particles in both the present-day and pre-industrial atmospheres that is currently missing in atmospheric chemistry and climate models.”

Until now, isoprene’s ability to form new particles has been considered negligible.

But climate models have also been estimating aerosols in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and they didn’t realize trees made so much aerosol than they thought

“This new source of biogenic particles in the upper troposphere may impact estimates of Earth’s climate sensitivity, since it implies that more aerosol particles were produced in the pristine pre-industrial atmosphere than previously thought,” adds Kirkby. “However, until our findings have been evaluated in global climate models, it’s not possible to quantify the effect.”

Another possibility is that if forests of broadleaf trees turn out to be much more useful for producing clouds, presumably that means the last few centuries of deforestation might have reduced cloud cover on Earth, which would have allowed much more sunlight in to heat the planet. If that’s true, it’s just one more climate forcing the modelers didn’t know about. It’s one more thing that warmed the planet which we blamed on carbon dioxide, but were wrong about. And it’s yet another feedback. More CO2 makes more forest grow, which may seed more clouds.

As usual, even though this study shows that climate models are missing yet another major factor, it’s always good news as they say:  “The researchers, therefore, expect that their findings will contribute to improving climate models”. Hardly anyone says “The models were wrong, and the experts had no idea”.

Who hasn’t enjoyed the aromatic scent in the air when walking through the woods on a summer’s day? Partly responsible for this typical smell are terpenes, a group of substances found in tree resins and essential oils. The primary and most abundant molecule is isoprene. Plants worldwide are estimated to release 500 to 600 million tons of isoprene into the surrounding atmosphere each year, accounting for about half the total emissions of gaseous organic compounds from plants.

Thunderstorms act like vacuum cleaners

… tropical thunderstorms … brew over the rainforest at night. They pull the isoprene up like a vacuum cleaner and transport it to an altitude of between 8 and 15 kilometers. As soon as the sun rises, hydroxyl radicals form, which react with the isoprene. But at the extremely low temperatures that prevail at these high altitudes, the rainforest molecules are transformed into compounds different from those near the ground. They bind with nitrogen oxides produced by lightning during the thunderstorm. Many of these molecules can then cluster to form aerosol particles of just a few nanometers. These particles, in turn, grow over time and then serve as condensation nuclei for water vapor—they thus play an important role in cloud formation in the tropics.

People at CERN were involved in testing the reactions at minus 30°C and minus 50°C

“High concentrations of aerosol particles have been observed high over the Amazon rainforest for the past twenty years, but their source has remained a puzzle until now,” says CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby. “Our latest study shows that the source is isoprene emitted by the rainforest and lofted in deep convective clouds to high altitudes, where it is oxidised to form highly condensable vapours.

In addition, the team found that isoprene oxidation products drive rapid growth of particles to sizes at which they can seed clouds and influence the climate – a behaviour that persists in the presence of nitrogen oxides produced by lightning at upper-tropospheric concentrations. After continued growth and descent to lower altitudes, these particles may provide a globally important source for seeding shallow continental and marine clouds, which influence Earth’s radiative balance (the amount of incoming solar radiation compared to outgoing longwave radiation).

This story reminds me of the big paper ten years ago Do forests create the wind that brings the rain?

“Rather than assuming that forests grow where the rain falls, it would be more a case of rain falling where forests grow. “

REFERENCE

Curtius, J., Heinritzi, M., Beck, L.J. et al. Isoprene nitrates drive new particle formation in Amazon’s upper troposphere. Nature 636, 124–130 (2024). https://ift.tt/DKS7Iak

Shen, J., Russell, D.M., DeVivo, J. et al. New particle formation from isoprene under upper-tropospheric conditions. Nature 636, 115–123 (2024). https://ift.tt/CWIP2Xs

Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash

In The Temperature’s Rising I re-visited an old topic that the Guardian trots out on a fairly regular basis. I had previously looked at in Losing The Plot. In those two pieces, I was at pains to point out that many more people in every continent and on a global level die from extreme cold than from extreme heat. Thus, for the foreseeable future, global warming – all things being equal – is likely to reduce, rather than increase, the number of deaths resulting from extreme temperatures. The point has to be repeated continually, because the Guardian is constantly seeking new ways to spin that reality so as to convince its readership that global warming is somehow going to cause more fatalities.

A few days ago, it took advantage of another opportunity to repeat that tired old trope. This time they seized on a study that was specific to Mexico to supply a headline aimed at persuading any wavering readers that global warming is going to kill them. This time, however, the story generated a neat twist – if you’re young, then you should be afraid: “Younger people at greater risk of heat-related deaths this century – study – New research estimates a 32% increase in deaths of people under 35 if greenhouse gases not radically cut”. I appreciate that headlines are drafted so as to catch the eye, and that even one running to 29 words and figures will struggle to reflect the nuances of the story, but even by Guardian standards this is pretty desperate stuff. Unless you read on and think about the conclusions of the study in question you might well – if you are aged 34 or under – be left with the completely false impression that even here in the UK people of your age are facing a risk of an early demise increasing by almost one-third unless greenhouse gases are “radically cut”. Needless to say, that isn’t what the study has concluded at all.

The first three paragraphs of the Guardian article continue to suggest that global warming (or climate change, call it what you will) is now going to be particularly cruel by leaving the old people to live longer while targeting its rage on the young instead. The implication, perhaps, is that in addition to all the COP-related claims that “the climate crisis” hits women and the poor in the developing countries the hardest, now it’s ageist too: the young are also in its cross-hairs. Having (for once) acknowledged that old people are more likely to die from cold than from heat, the Guardian moves into scary territory. Forget the old – it’s the young who have to worry:

As the world heats up, it will be younger people that will suffer disproportionately as the mortality burden shifts, with the new study estimating a 32% increase in deaths of people under 35 years old this century from heat if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t radically cut.

Only in the fourth paragraph do we learn that “[t]he study is based on data drawn from deaths in Mexico, a country of extensive mortality records and high “wet bulb” temperatures, which is a measurement that factors in humidity to ascertain the heat stress level upon people.” The article then acknowledges that even in Mexico – “like in most countries” – more people die from cold than from heat, but then suggests that although fewer old people will die due to temperature extremes, the increasing heat will kill more young people.

Where things become interesting is when the Guardian chose to seek a handy quote from Andrew Wilson, a Columbia University researcher who led the study. It appears he did what was desired, because the Guardian tells us that:

This pattern [i.e. temperature-related mortality adversely affecting the young] may well be replicated in other countries such as the US and in Europe, Wilson said, due to fundamental similarities in how different age groups react to temperature.

However, if one looks at the study, it makes no such claim. I have read it in full, and carried out a specific word-search for “Europe” and “United States” in the study, and can find no reference to either, other than a small number of references to the US and the UK that do not seek to make the point made by the Guardian. Indeed, if anything, it suggests the opposite: “Research on the US shows that mortality vulnerability to nonoptimal dry-bulb temperatures has decreased historically.” The nearest it comes to extrapolating its findings beyond the borders of Mexico is here:

Our finding that young people in Mexico are especially vulnerable to heat may have global implications because hotter and lower-income countries—which are expected to be the most adversely affected by climate change—have among the youngest populations in the world currently and over the coming century….The youngest and hottest locations in the world are concentrated in Africa, Central America, the Middle East, and portions of South and Southeast Asia. The bottom panel of fig. S12 situates Mexico in the context of the rest of the world. Mexico is near the middle of the global distribution of countries by share of population under 35, and its extreme wet-bulb temperatures are essentially only surpassed by countries in Asia….

Europe and the USA, to the best of my knowledge, lack both that age demographic and the wet-bulb temperatures referred to (apart from perhaps in the southern areas of both with regard to the second essential element of the findings). It also finds that heat-related deaths among younger people may well be connected to them being more likely to be carrying out strenuous work, such as in agriculture – a factor that I assume is less likely to apply in wealthier countries such as the USA and in Europe. Presumably that is why the study doesn’t mention them when extrapolating its country-specific findings.

The study is interesting, nevertheless. It does make a point that I would endorse, namely if the balance of mortality in a warming climate shifts away from the elderly towards the young, then that should recalibrate how we look at it, since younger people will lose more years of life than older people:

Thus, the choice of whether to value life years—where premature deaths among younger individuals are considered more costly than premature deaths among old individuals—or to value all premature deaths the same becomes especially important.

The key points, however, are that the study – very fairly and very properly – contains a number of caveats to its findings, such as that its findings could be affected by demographic changes and the impact of adaptation. It also reiterates that even in a relatively warm country such as Mexico, cold kills more people than heat:

Consistent with past literature on temperature-related mortality in Mexico, we find that cold is historically associated with more deaths than heat across the whole population: Cold causes 14 times more deaths than heat…

In conclusion, I am grateful to the Guardian for drawing my attention to a study that I might otherwise have missed. It does raise some interesting points that should, perhaps, give policy-makers food for thought, especially in hot, poor countries with a young age profile where many people are occupied in strenuous outdoor activities. Beyond that, however, my message to the Guardian is to stop scare-mongering, stop pretending that a warming planet will – overall – be more dangerous to health than a non-warming one, and stop pretending that we in the UK are at great risk. In short, just stop it. Instead, return to the standards of the great broadsheet you once were, and cut out the cheap tabloid-style misleading headlines. Nothing, after all, has changed. A warming planet will – for the foreseeable future – have a positive impact on human mortality, rather than a negative one.

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims. The move has not been announced in public, needless to say, since drawing attention to this would open a pandora’s box and run the risk of subjecting all the Met Office temperature claims to wider scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.

Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.

The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.

Again we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth photo below.

As a result, Sanders discovered from a freedom of information request that 103 of the 302 sites marked on the climate averages listing – over a third of the total – no longer existed. Subsequently, Sanders sought further information about the methodology used to supply data for both Folkestone and Dover. In reply, the Met Office said it was unable to supply details of the observing sites requested “as this is not recorded information”. It did however disclose that for non-existent stations “we use regression analysis to create a model of the relationship between each station and others in the network”. This generates an estimate for each month when the station is not operating. Each “estimate” is said to be based on data from six other stations, chosen because they are “well correlated” with the target station.

In the case of Dover, the nearest ‘station’ is seven miles away at non-existent Folkestone followed by Manston which is 15 miles distant. By “well correlated” perhaps the Met Office means they are in the same county of Kent. No matter, computer models are on hand to guide the way.

Ray Sanders had sent details of his findings to the new Labour science minister Peter Kyle MP and the recent Met Office changes may have been promoted by a discreet political push. At the time, Sanders asked: “How would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and was simply ‘made up’ by a Government agency?” He called for an open declaration of likely inaccuracies of existing published data “to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions”.

The Met Office also runs an historical data section where a number of sites with long records of temperature are identified. Lowestoft closed in 2010 and since then the figures have been estimated. The stations at Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg have also closed but are still reporting estimated monthly data. “Why would any scientific organisation feel the need to publish what can only be described as fiction?” asks Sanders.

The original Braemar station in Aberdeenshire has recorded temperature data since Victorian times. Due to its interesting topography surrounded by high mountains, it recorded the U.K.’s coldest temperature of -27.2°C in both 1895 and 1982. In summer, the temperature can soar as the heat stays trapped. A new site, some distance from the original, was set up in 2005 and in common with Met Office procedure was labelled Braemar 2 to reflect both distance and climatological differences. In the historical data section of the Met’s website, Braemar 2 is shown supplying data back to 1959. “For reasons I find difficult to understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a spurious merging of two notably different data sets for an illogically defined period that fails to represent either site,” observes Sanders.

The recent changes made by the Met Office to its climate average pages shows that the state-funded operation is fully aware of the growing interest in its entire temperature recording business. This interest has grown because the Met Office is fully committed to using its data to promote the Net Zero political fantasy. But it is silent on the biggest concern that has been raised of late, namely the promotion of temperatures, accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, obtained from a nationwide network where nearly eight out of 10 stations are so poorly sited they have internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ as high as 5°C.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.