From the NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin

In a recent open letter, researchers warned that a warmer Arctic could lead to cold waves across Northern Europe – due to “complex feedback mechanisms”.

According to Forschung & Wissen here, an international group of renowned scientists recently published an open letter (PDF) stating that the melting of ice in the Arctic could disrupt ocean currents in the Atlantic, and thus have “devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world.”

Source: Open Letter by Climate Scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers

According to their publication in the journal Nature Communications, October 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-53401-3, melting of sea ice during the last interglacial significantly impacted the density and salinity of seawater, and thus led to significant changes in ocean currents and heat distribution in the oceans.

The researchers looked at sediment cores collected in the North Sea and reconstructed surface temperatures and salinity and found that these processes have led to a significant drop in temperature in northern Europe.

According to Mohamed Ezat: “Our discovery that the increased melting of Arctic sea ice in the Earth’s past probably led to significant cooling in northern Europe is alarming.”

He adds:  “The impacts particularly on Nordic Countries would likely be catastrophic, including major cooling in the region while surrounding regions warm.  This would be an enlargement and deepening of the ‘cold blob’ that already has developed over the subpolar Atlantic Ocean and likely lead to unprecedented extreme weather.”

By James R. Riordon – NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Healing continues in the atmosphere over the Antarctic: a hole that opens annually in the ozone layer over Earth’s southern pole was relatively small in 2024 compared to other years. Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project the ozone layer could fully recover by 2066.

During the peak of ozone depletion season from Sept. 7 through Oct. 13, the 2024 area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh smallest since recovery began in 1992, when the Montreal Protocol, a landmark international agreement to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, began to take effect.

At almost 8 million square miles (20 million square kilometers), the monthly average ozone-depleted region in the Antarctic this year was nearly three times the size of the contiguous U.S. The hole reached its greatest one-day extent for the year on Sept. 28 at 8.5 million square miles (22.4 million square kilometers).

The improvement is due to a combination of continuing declines in harmful chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals, along with an unexpected infusion of ozone carried by air currents from north of the Antarctic, scientists said.

The ozone hole over Antarctica averaged nearly 8 million square miles (20 million square kilometers) between Sept. 7 and Oct. 13, 2024, the 20th smallest extent in 45 years.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Kathleen Gaeta

In previous years, NASA and NOAA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time frame dating back to 1979, when scientists began tracking Antarctic ozone levels with satellite data. Using that longer record, this year’s hole ranked 20th smallest in area across the 45 years of observations.

“The 2024 Antarctic hole is smaller than ozone holes seen in the early 2000s,” said Paul Newman, leader of NASA’s ozone research team and chief scientist for Earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The gradual improvement we’ve seen in the past two decades shows that international efforts that curbed ozone-destroying chemicals are working.”

The ozone-rich layer high in the atmosphere acts as a planetary sunscreen that helps shield us from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun. Areas with depleted ozone allow more UV radiation, resulting in increased cases of skin cancer and cataracts. Excessive exposure to UV light can also reduce agricultural yields as well as damage aquatic plants and animals in vital ecosystems.

Scientists were alarmed in the 1970s at the prospect that CFCs could eat away at atmospheric ozone. By the mid-1980s, the ozone layer had been depleted so much that a broad swath of the Antarctic stratosphere was essentially devoid of ozone by early October each year. Sources of damaging CFCs included coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as aerosols in hairspray, antiperspirant, and spray paint. Harmful chemicals were also released in the manufacture of insulating foams and as components of industrial fire suppression systems.

The Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 to phase out CFC-based products and processes. Countries worldwide agreed to replace the chemicals with more environmentally friendly alternatives by 2010. The release of CFC compounds has dramatically decreased following the Montreal Protocol. But CFCs already in the air will take many decades to break down. As existing CFC levels gradually decline, ozone in the upper atmosphere will rebound globally, and ozone holes will shrink.

Ozone 101 is the first in a series of explainer videos outlining the fundamentals of popular Earth science topics. Let’s back up to the basics and understand what caused the Ozone Hole, its effects on the planet, and what scientists predict will happen in future decades.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Kathleen Gaeta

“For 2024, we can see that the ozone hole’s severity is below average compared to other years in the past three decades, but the ozone layer is still far from being fully healed,” said Stephen Montzka, senior scientist of the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.

Researchers rely on a combination of systems to monitor the ozone layer. They include instruments on NASA’s Aura satellite, the NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, jointly operated by NASA and NOAA. 

NOAA scientists also release instrumented weather balloons from the South Pole Baseline Atmospheric Observatory to observe ozone concentrations directly overhead in a measurement called Dobson Units. The 2024 concentration reached its lowest value of 109 Dobson Units on October 5. The lowest value ever recorded over the South Pole was 92 Dobson Units in October 2006.

NASA and NOAA satellite observations of ozone concentrations cover the entire ozone hole, which can produce a slightly smaller value for the lowest Dobson Unit measurement.

“That is well below the 225 Dobson Units that was typical of the ozone cover above the Antarctic in 1979,” said NOAA research chemist Bryan Johnson. “So, there’s still a long way to go before atmospheric ozone is back to the levels before the advent of widespread CFC pollution.”

View the latest status of the ozone layer over the Antarctic with NASA’s ozone watch.

From the “But the science was settled!” department.

You may remember just four days ago, WUWT ran this story: Oops, Science Was “Settled”—Until It Wasn’t: Plants Absorb 31% More CO₂ Than We Thought

Now, hot on the heels of that one, another underestimated CO₂ absorption has been found: New Study Reveals Oceans Absorb More CO2 Than Previously Thought. The article states:

New research confirms that the cooler temperature of the ocean surface layer enhances CO₂ absorption, with the Atlantic absorbing 7% more CO₂ annually than previously estimated.

…

Scientists studied the “ocean skin” – a sliver less than 2 mm deep at the ocean surface that is fractionally cooler than the rest.

Theoretical and lab work have suggested this temperature difference should increase the amount of CO₂ absorbed by the ocean – but this had never been successfully observed at sea before.

The new study – led by researchers from the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall – used precision measurements to confirm that the temperature of the ocean skin does indeed aid carbon absorption.

Carried out in the Atlantic, the findings suggest this ocean absorbs about 7% more CO₂ each year than previously thought. It might sound small, but when applied across all oceans this additional carbon absorption is equivalent to one and half times the carbon captured by annual forest growth in the Amazon rainforest.

Now, cumulatively, within a week, we now have a 38% difference in CO₂ absorption not previously known to climate science. That’s big.

The two recent studies on oceanic and terrestrial CO₂ absorption reveal significant, previously underestimated roles of natural carbon sinks, which have strong implications for climate models and predictions. Here’s an quick analysis of these findings and their combined impact on climate sensitivity and modeling.

1. Increased CO₂ Absorption by Oceans: The study led by the University of Exeter shows that the oceans absorb 7% more CO₂ annually than previously estimated. This is due to the “ocean skin” – a cooler, thin layer on the ocean’s surface that enhances carbon uptake. These findings suggest that the global ocean absorbs an amount of CO₂ equivalent to 1.5 times the carbon captured by Amazon forest growth, highlighting oceans’ role in moderating atmospheric CO₂ levels​.
2. Higher CO₂ Absorption by Terrestrial Plants: In parallel, research by Oak Ridge National Laboratory finds that plants absorb 31% more CO₂ than prior models indicated. By tracking carbonyl sulfide, scientists achieved a more accurate estimate of global photosynthesis, especially in tropical rainforests, which emerged as vital carbon sinks. The revised figure raises the annual global Gross Primary Production (GPP) from 120 to 157 petagrams of carbon, further underscoring the importance of natural carbon dioxide sequestration for climate balance​.

Cumulative Impact on Climate Models and Climate Sensitivity

The combined effect of these findings suggests that current climate models might be underestimating the natural carbon cycle’s role in moderating atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. With both oceans and land absorbing more CO₂ than previously thought, climate models need to incorporate these increased absorption rates to predict temperature and atmospheric CO₂ levels more accurately.

1. Climate Sensitivity Adjustments: The increased CO₂ absorption could reduce climate sensitivity estimates in the short term, as more CO₂ is removed from the atmosphere than expected.
2. Long-term Climate Projections: Enhanced natural absorption may temporarily ease the pace of CO₂ buildup, but as oceans approach saturation and deforestation pressures mount on terrestrial carbon sinks, this buffering effect may diminish over time. Including these findings could lead to more refined, temporally dynamic climate models that adjust carbon dioxide sink efficiency based on environmental changes.
3. Policy and Mitigation: Acknowledging the ocean and terrestrial ecosystems as increased carbon dioxide sinks emphasizes the importance of reevaluating climate science used to drive policy.

We’ve known for some time that climate models have been running “hot” due to some of the emission scenarios like RCP 8.5 being unrealistic in CO₂ growth rates in the future. See: New Confirmation that Climate Models Overstate Atmospheric Warming. Perhaps these new findings will cool some of those models (assuming climate science has any integrity left) and we’ll hear less about a projected climate doomsday being just around the corner.

By Jo Nova

We need to understand the Machine

The way Mike Benz explains the world, crazy things suddenly make sense, but it is at its core, a dark and deep corruption that for most us, has been operating for our whole lives. It is, though, depressingly easy to believe that people with virtually unaccountable power, even those who start with good intentions, end up at the gates of hell, discussing “heart attack guns”.

For the deep state, the dark art of influencing elections started on foreign governments, but once the CIA and State Department had honed the skills they needed, and broken every rule, what would stop them doing the same thing on domestic politics “to save democracy”? In a sense, it is as if a World War II no-holds-barred mentality has lived on to this day. It’s easy to believe this shapes the Uniparty

If what Mike Benz says is correct, we should be under no illusions that even a “landslide” polling advantage will guarantee anything. There is no way that those who apparently influence elections all over the world will give up that power easily.

Presented Hillsdale College, transcribed at RealClearPolitics

Something has gone very wrong — that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it.

The CIA was formed in 1947 and the first election they rigged was in Italy in 1948. Bizarrely, we know this because the documents from 1948 were declassified nearly 60 years later in 2005, and then studiously ignored. This should have made headlines all over the world…

After World War II the CIA were afraid the communists were going to win in Italy. So they spent the equivalent of $250 million US dollars (adjusted for inflation) to swing things in favor of their preferred candidate. They coopted, used, and exploited churches and charities. They beamed the US messages through Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. They assessed that 60% of the voters would have chosen the communists if the CIA hadn’t intervened.

…they set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.

The Voice of America and Radio free Europe were created specifically to be a tool of the CIA. Like a wartime propaganda unit but working in peacetime. The CIA battle in Italy was fundamentally dishonest.  They weren’t running adverts to persuade the people of Italy that communism was bad, they were using every dirty trick in the book. They even went so far as to enlist the help of the mafia. They may have had noble aims, but they breached of every principle the USA is supposed to stand on. It was called Political Warfare. As Benz describes it:

Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, “Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy.”

The document that details the election interference in 1948 was “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” by George Kennan, which was written only 12 days after the Italian election.

Once the CIA had tasted the fruit of election rigging, and gotten away with it, he claims they realized they needed a team in every country, just in case an inconvenient candidate looked like winning. Thus since World War II the US Empire has grown, not through conquering countries, but through “soft power”. The Italian election success lit a fire — but also crossed a line the US has not crossed since 1789.

We might wonder if Benz is exaggerating and these operatives are just running amok in Venezuela, Bolivia and Russia? Would they really be so bold as to operate in democratic Western Nations, and then we remember they started with Italy and that was 76 years ago.

Today, he says, they use the exact same language and techniques to stop the rise of domestic populism on the Right…

…

The Spy agency became the Lie agency — they are paid to lie to you

Kennan, the creator of the original Political Warfare doctrine helped craft a memo NSC 10/2 that became a Presidential document that said sabotage, demolition, subversion, and propaganda was fine, as long as the government couldn’t be blamed for it. He later called it the greatest mistake he ever made:

You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.

What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community — this burgeoning, newly created CIA — and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I’m going to read it:

“All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.”

This is from 1948:

“All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons.”

So once the CIA was legally permitted to do “illegal” activities overseas, they had to lie about it to the outside world. And thus, as night follows day, then they also had to lie to the American people. After all, they could hardly tell the American people they were rigging elections in Italy without the rest of the world finding out. Thus do small lies beget bigger lies, and pretty soon everyone forgets they’re fighting for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

The people involved knew this breach was a monster, but thought they could contain it with the Smith-Mundt Act:

Wisely the intel agencies were forbidden from using political warfare propaganda at home:

In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, “Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don’t build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth.”

That was until that safeguard was repealed by Barack Obama

Even though the  cheating and lies had been going on since WWII, if you have the feeling the world became extra crazy in the last ten years, perhaps there’s a reason:

Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, “U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans.”

For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. “Mammoth” is not a big enough word.

The American hard power of World War II evolved into American domination by soft power in peacetime:

After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.

So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we’re about to meet.

After Italy, the CIA was legion, all over the world. The scope and size of this operation spread like cancer:

What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.

Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960.

Fifty regime changes by 1960! No wonder Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex.

By the 1960s and 1970s the pushback to this was growing. A populist leftist faction arose to oppose the CIA. Left leaning protestors, naturally, were sympathetic to the socialist and communist countries the CIA was controlling. They saw the pain the intelligence agents were inflicting.

Mike Benz refers to the article Seymour Hersh wrote in 1974 in the New York Times exposing the CIA.

By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people’s movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.

The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.

Just to show how dark and malevolent this force had begun, imagine, a heart-attack gun:

Think of a democratic agency working on ways to assassinate world leaders and make it look like a heart attack. That’s not what all the CIA and FBI shows look like on TV:

[32 minutes]: This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous “heart attack gun,” which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.

On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.

According to Benz, the CIA had worked its way into popular culture, the media, music, even churches:

At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. [Mike Benz lists the CIA’s use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations.]

Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.

Jimmy Carter conducted the Halloween massacre, firing 30% of the CIA

I had no idea Jimmy Carter did something so useful:

Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the “Halloween Massacre,” where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.

After this Halloween massacre, Ronald Reagan reinstated the powers of the CIA, but the agency went underground, so to speak, keeping its visibility low.

Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today’s premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.

Despite all this power, the CIA is not running the world though, apparently the State Department is:

When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.

But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.

To listen to Mike Benz is to wonder if the whole world became a defacto part of The American Empire, sold as peace, truth and freedom, but based on quite a few lies and a fiat currency that is at this moment spiraling into uncontrollable debt. It was an arrangement that benefited many people in the US and abroad, but ultimately was not the American Experiment we hoped it was.

On the plus side, Mike Benz, and so many others still believe in the US Constitution. His sole goal is free speech online.

Mike Benz is Director for the Foundation for Freedom Online. He worked in the cyber section of the State Department under Trump in formulating foreign policy related to IT. He has written some speeches for Donald Trump. His aim is to preserve free speech online.