By Paul Homewood
Interesting comments from Roy Spencer:
.
I have also come to the same conclusion. Hopefully I will have something to post later today.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 10, 2024 at 09:04AM
By P Gosselin on 9. October 2024
North Africa seems to be greening as a result of climate change, which mostly occurs naturally.
Satellite photos and studies have shown that the Sahara desert has been shrinking over the past 40 years, e.g. read here and here.
The latest news is from the southeastern Moroccan desert, which is among the driest around the world, where it is reported to have gotten up to 100 mm of rain within a 24 hour period in September. Hard hit were villages 400 miles from the capital city of Rabat, including Tata, reports Al Jazeera here.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory
Once dry lakes are filling again
“What’s also fascinating is that normally dry lakes in the Sahara are filling due to this event,” said Moshe Armon, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Several of these lakes are visible in the image as dark blue areas, including one in Morocco’s Iriqui National Park (shown in detail within the inset circle).
“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,” added Houssine Youabeb of Morocco’s General Directorate of Meteorology. See more photos here.
“Preliminary satellite analysis shows accumulations of many tens to more than 200 millimeters of rainfall in the areas affected—roughly equivalent to what the region receives in a year. The rainfall accumulation estimates are based on NASA’s IMERG (Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM) data,” NASA reported.
The rains, of course, are welcome, making a harsh region a bit less harsh for those living there. Nothing you’ll hear about in the climate propaganda media.
Hat-tip: Snowfan here.
via Watts Up With That?
October 10, 2024 at 08:07AM
The plan becomes the problem if/when the so-called overshoot never comes back. Advocating the end of fossil fuels as the only hope is futile without a vanishingly unlikely global economic agreement, which would create worse problems than anything the IPCC climate alarm team can conjure up on its models. The authors here insist that ‘Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return’. But climate fantasies are rife.
– – –
Summary: Surpassing 1.5°C of warming can be undone at a later date – using tech, land and resources that don’t exist.
When the Paris agreement on climate change was gavelled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the world that, due to colonisation by today’s wealthy nations, have contributed little to the climate crisis – but stand to suffer its worst ravages, says The Conversation.
The world had finally agreed an upper limit for global warming. And in a move that stunned most experts, it had embraced the stretch target of 1.5°C, the boundary that small island states, acutely threatened by sea-level rise, had tirelessly pushed for years.
Or so, at least, it seemed. For soon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.
Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.
Scientists responsible for modelling the response of Earth’s climate to greenhouse gas emissions – primarily caused by burning fossil fuels – called these “overshoot” scenarios. They became the dominant path along which mitigating climate change was imagined to proceed, almost as soon as talk of temperature limits emerged.
De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.
From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed.
Many impacts of climate change are essentially irreversible. Those that are might take decades to undo, well beyond the relevant horizon for climate politics.
For policy makers of the future, it matters little that temperatures might eventually fall back again; the impacts they will need to plan for are those of the overshoot period itself.
. . .
The findings of this new paper make it perfectly clear: There is no time machine waiting in the wings. Once 1.5°C lies behind us, we must consider that threshold permanently broken.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
October 10, 2024 at 07:41AM
The other day I was reading a book on the mathematics of uncertainty and how understanding it can lead to better predictions, when I quite unexpectedly came across this statement on page 171:
If we let it, Bayes can be a powerful tool for updating our preconceptions in the light of new data. What Bayes doesn’t do for us, however, is suggest how we should pick those prior beliefs in the first place. There will always be some people who hold their convictions with 100 per cent certainty – think of religious fundamentalists, anti-vaxxers or climate-change deniers.
Well, I say I came across it quite unexpectedly, but that is only because I was taken by surprise that it took the author until page 171 to lay into the climate sceptic and vaccine-concerned. Normally, academics who write on matters of uncertainty have rushed to such condemnation long before they have finished their preface. It seems they just can’t help themselves. If they need to illustrate how thinking about uncertainty can go horribly wrong, they invariably pick on the climate change ‘denier’ and the anti-vaxxer. They now go together like fish, chips and holocaust deniers, although on this occasion the author preferred instead to ram his point home by invoking the example of the religious fundamentalist. The choice of comparison matters not, however, as long as the reader understands that some people are just so irrational as to be downright unreachable. As the author puts it in the very next sentence:
What Bayes theorem tells us in these situations is that there is not a single piece of evidence, no matter how strong, that will ever shift these hardliners from their convictions.
Frankly, I don’t know where he got that particular nugget from, but certainly it wasn’t from the Reverend Bayes. There is absolutely nothing in the mathematics of Bayes’ Theory to suggest that there is a limit beyond which the strength of a prior belief can render the holder impervious to new information. That bit of prejudiced thinking comes straight from the author himself and is purely down to his prior beliefs about how climate sceptics and the vaccine-concerned came to hold their particular views. His understanding, for what it is worth, is based, as always, upon the assumption that the science is settled and that there can be no legitimate basis for ever holding out against a scientific consensus. The only possible explanation, in his mind, is that these individuals simply do not believe in updating their beliefs and have no time of day for evidence. How else could they have arrived at a position that is so remote, not only from his own, but from every one of his like-thinking academic chums?
It is obvious that the book’s author certainly knows all about the perils of the transposed conditional, but I would bet my shirt that he doesn’t appreciate that a prime example is the IPCC statement that scientists are 95% certain that over half of the recent warming has been anthropogenic. He seems to have grasped the important difference between aleatory and epistemic uncertainty, but I suspect he knows nothing regarding the extent to which that important distinction is ignored by the majority of climate scientists. He won’t be aware, I’m sure, of the profound flaws within the ONS data that were used by everyone who defends the effectiveness and safety of the Covid-19 vaccines, nor that the Office for Statistics Regulation, no less, has ruled the ONS data unsuitable for such analyses. And though he will have been as aware as anyone of the impact of false positives when testing the asymptomatic, I wonder if he took that into account when he accepted the Government’s claim that there were legions of symptom-free Covid-19 disease-spreaders roaming the streets – the assumption upon which the multi-billion pound Operation Moonshot was premised.
In fact, I just don’t think he has the faintest idea of the extent to which evidence has informed the opinions of those he so confidently dismisses as being the equivalent of religious fundamentalists.
The reality is that there are many amongst those labelled as ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘climate-change deniers’ who are simply trying to abide by the philosophy of the empirical sceptic and, contrary to what the author might think, they have a very healthy regard for evidence. Should the author ever deign to interact with those individuals who he has unjustifiably accused of holding views with 100 per cent certainty, it would be nice to think that he would be prepared to apply Bayes’ Rule and modify his views of them in the light of the evidence thereby revealed. But I suspect that he would prove every bit as intransigent as those he condemns. I expect that there is not a single piece of evidence, no matter how strong, that will ever shift him from his conviction that ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘climate-change deniers’ are just mindless fundamentalists. Despite the fact that he himself offered no evidence to support his proposition that such people are intransigent and evidence-averse, he will continue to presume that he and his enlightened colleagues are alone in understanding the laws of uncertainty and hence able to remain open-minded.
Okay, rant over.
I can now return to reading what had, until page 171, been a reasonably entertaining and informative book. I shall take on board what page 171 has taught me about the author, and like a good Bayesian I will update my prior assumptions. None of this has been enough to put me off finishing the book, but it has only entrenched my firm belief that intelligence and academic status are not sufficient to prevent the individual from hypocritically falling into a silo of thinking, informed more by bigotry than by evidence or logic.
via Climate Scepticism
October 10, 2024 at 07:35AM
