The New York Times says drought in the Great Plains is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “It’s Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is ‘Thirstier.’ Higher temperatures caused by climate change are driving complex processes that … Continue reading →
via Real Climate Science
June 6, 2025 at 05:55AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
Today’s climate lie comes from Climate Brief:
.
Global yields of wheat are around 10% lower now than they would have been without the influence of climate change, according to a new study.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at data on climate change and growing conditions for wheat and other major crops around the world over the past 50 years.
It comes as heat and drought have this year been putting wheat supplies at risk in key grain-producing regions, including parts of Europe, China and Russia.
The study finds that increasingly hot and dry conditions negatively impacted yields of three of the five key crops examined.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-wheat-yields-would-be-10-higher-without-climate-change/
Perhaps the con merchants who wrote this study might care to explain exactly at what point in the last 65 years this “climate change effect” began to click in. And why the actual trends show no sign of this so-called effect becoming progressively worse – something which the authors say is already happening:
Maybe they might also like to explain how much lower wheat yields might now be without the benefits provided by fossil fuels, including increased mechanisation, transportation and refrigeration.
Carbon Brief attempt to play the climate scare card, saying:
It comes as heat and drought have this year been putting wheat supplies at risk in key grain-producing regions, including parts of Europe, China and Russia
There are always bad harvests somewhere in the world. But according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, global wheat production will be the second highest on record, even better than last year’s near record total:
https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
We must always bear in mind that Carbon Brief receives more than a million pounds in funding a year from the notorious ECF, the organisation set up to channel billions from far-left US foundations to European bodies like Carbon Brief in order to spread climate misinformation.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 6, 2025 at 04:45AM
South Farnborough No 2 51.28439 -0.77839 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 2 Installed 17/12/2021
The history of sites in and around Farnborough Airport dates back to the earliest days of aviation when the first UK heavier than air powered flight took place there in 1908. There have been 4 different identified sites over the intervening years. The meteorological variations between them, the way much of the information has been concealed and the potential manipulation of site choices are the main topics of this review.
Firstly the above site known as South Farnborough no 2 is Met Office assessed as meeting Class 2. The above image indicates the 30 metre radius circled area which should be free from extraneous heat sources and meet ALL the following regulations.
At first glance from the headline image this site may well meet those standards, however, closer examination reveals significant problems – I assess this site as Class 4 at best. Checking out the Ordnance Survey sheet for the area relief (normally unnecessary for an airfield site as they are generally very flat by their nature) indicates some nearby “hache marks” indicative of steep gradient.
A closer look from the current Google Street view image confirmed artificial earth works almost certainly from the early 21st century modifications to the road network in that area, rerouting water courses and sound screening from the airport activities.
The surrounding tree lines alone are likely to compromise the site with both sun shading and wind sheltering. The roadways around are very extensive and (from personal experience) frequently very busy indeed. The wind issue will be further exacerbated by the extensive wire fencing enclosing the area. The earthworks are clearly of significant height – I estimate approximately 4 metres high with an online measuring tool suggesting the gradient starts at 16 metres from the screen. I find it implausible that Met Office assessors can be using the same interpretations of CIMO regulations that make so many rural sites (for example Ipstones Edge) marked down as Class 4 whilst these seriously compromised UHI/Airfield perimeter sites as Class 2.
The obvious question though is, does this really matter? Well, as the Met Office’s own data demonstrates it most certainly makes a very significant difference when put into context of former sites and the immediate average temperature uplift that can be achieved by a relocation. The site history becomes crucial to explain and the comparative data indicates remarkable differences.
In 2012 Tim Channon briefly reviewed NOT this site but the previous South Farnborough site. Tim did not have then benefit of the Met Office assessement back then but certainly knew his stuff and when viewed in hindsight called almost every single one exactly as the Met office went on to in 2014. Here is his opinion on the previous site.
Whatever anyone’s views of aviation sites may be, this South Farnborough location definitely met Class 1 beyond any doubt. This location is listed as running from 1/1/1914 (when the original Airship Balloon site acquired its first “runway”) up to 12/7/2022. {N.B. as will be analysed further in this review this created a readings overlap period of seven months with the No 2 site having opened on 17/12/2021}
However, this Class 1 site was not the original location. All the digitalised archive data (only covering from 1921) shown as “South Farnborough” give the coordinates of the above site. Despite previous sites being known, it is common practise for the Met Office to not openly archive this data as I have frequently noted in these reviews typically as at Marham. Deep in the archive notes is the comment.
The remains of this site can be seen on Google Earth Pro historic images as below from 1995.
This previous location clearly was a very poor one for climate reporting purposes but it seems it was only relocated due to further development around it. Going even further back in time the period prior to digital archives from 1914 to 1921 was yet another different location again a substantial distance away though I am not able to pinpoint exactly from the relatively imprecise coordinates given.
Summarising all this site history and marking the known sites with distances on a map.
Importantly archived digital data does not openly indicate any moves and suggests a continuous record from one location. Whether the above points are relevant or not depends on how the data is presented. Below is the Location Specific Long Term climate averages for South Farnborough giving 30 year rolling averages from 1961 through to 2020.
This presentation does not indicate any moves and incorrectly implies a continuous single record. Adding more context, in reviewing Braemar no 2 , I demonstrated how the Met office had also seamlessly bonded data from two climatologically different sites into one “Historic Record” named from the newer (and warmer recording) “No 2” site. So does this have any relevance to the new South Farnborough No 2 only recently instlalled? Remember that overlap period for 7 months when both the old and new sites were simultaneously recording – how did the readings compare?
I set about finding out – just the first pass of the earliest 14 days overlap period from 18/12/2021 revealed some alarming discrepancies. Both sites record twice daily at 09:00 and 21:00 for both maxima and minima so 28 readings for each for the period.
In terms of minima, of these 28 options , the new SF2 site recorded warmer than its older neighbour on 16 occasions, with 12 being the same and NONE recording colder. Ignoring the reification of averages, the hard number differences ranged as follows. 6 @ +0.1°C, 2 @ +0.3, 1 @ +0.4, 1 @ +0.5, 2 @ +0.6, 1 @ +0.9, 1 @ +1.1, 1 @ 1.2 and astonishingly 1 @ 1.7.
In terms of maxima of the 28 options, SF2 recorded colder by just 0.2°C on 3 occasions, the same reading on 6 occasions and again warmer on the majority at 19 times. The warmer maxima were much less ranging between 0.1 to 0.3°C. Notably, on every single day the average temperature was warmer at the new South Farnborough No 2 over the older (Class 1) South Farnborough site 630 metres away. This warranted a much longer period investigation (particularly of that major night time discrepancy) I set about doing this manually, gave up and contacted an expert – Dave Woolcock.
“Hi Ray
see attached – your suspicions appear to be pretty well founded.
tMax is very slightly down BUT with some wacky outliers
tMin is WAY increased
seal wadding indeed.”
Dave examined every individual reading for the overlap period and then compiled a histogram showing the range of differences spread over a total of 4.3 °C. Are there any meteorologists who seriously believe the weather could consistently be so different , over such a short distance and at the same elevation for wholly natural reasons?
The screen capture extract below demonstrates Dave’s diligence in examining every single entry – no fudges, estimates nor adjustments required – just hard numbers.
A close up of the graph demonstrates the consistency of the difference. This reminded me of Dr Eric Huxter’s wry comment in his guest post on PRTs regarding the readings from Heathrow
“It is interesting that one of the CIMO 3 stations is Heathrow, whose 1.48°C/hour change would place it as an extreme CIMO 5 station. Who knew?”
The data evidenced from comparing South Farnborough No 2 with its Class 1 near neighbour and predecessor of a 4.3°C range indicates this new site is more likely ” 2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C) Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.” Furthermore the marked major uplift in minima supports the issue recently highlighted by Anthony Watts
To greater clarity to Dave’s graphics:
In 5 years time the Met Office will publish their 30 year rolling climate averages for the period 2000 to 2030 – the first full climate averaging period of the 21st century – and will no doubt by then have updated their list of “Historic Stations”. In exactly the same way as they did not openly disclose the 1994 site relocation, and in the same way that Braemar No 2 (and others) “absorbed” data from an earlier different site, I anticipate the new station’s warmer data will bond onto the older ones. The rolling period will have almost 9 full years of warmer readings feeding through to “prove” the required agenda which will continue to worsen as the older stations cooler readings progressively “dilute” 2. If that may seem a cynical view, at least it is one that is now on record for future reference. Anthropogenic warming but nothing concerned with Carbon Dioxide.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
June 6, 2025 at 04:13AM
By Kennedy Maize — June 5, 2025
“… model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate…. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development … Or not….” – Gavin Schmidt, Real Science, May 31, 2025.
One of the most enduring themes of the popular discussion of a man-made warming globe has been sea level rise as a result of the melting of ice from the planet’s two frigid poles.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” featured images of icebergs calving off the Antarctic continent. He proclaimed that if the world proceeded to warm at its current rate, worldwide sea levels would rise “20 feet.”
On Oct. 16, 2009, then Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later presidential candidate and secretary of state, proclaimed, “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.”
Last year, an Antarctic iceberg named A23a, floating in the southern ocean since 1986, the size of the state of Rhode Island and weighing a trillion tons, threatened to smash into South Georgia Island (site of explorer Ernest Shakleton’s grave) before it harmlessly spun away and melted. Catastrophe avoided.
New Data, Research
Is the apocalyptic scenario an unavoidable future? Two new scientific studies have found that melting ice in Antarctica has reversed and slowed in the Northern Hemisphere’s Arctic. It’s too soon to reach any overarching lessons from this new data, but worthwhile acknowledging that few scientific “facts” are immutable.
At the South Pole, a team of Chinese researchers led by Wei Wang of Tongji University of Shanghai found that ice on the Antarctic ice sheet increased from 2021 to 2023, following 19 years of decrease starting in 2002.
Published March 19 in the peer reviewed Springer Nature journal Science China Earth Sciences, the research team found that Antarctica’s melting glaciers caused the “global mean sea level” (GMSL) to rise by “5.99±0,52 mm ( milllimeteres) by February 2020. Then the ice began accumulating in the followed three years, “ultimately resulting in a total GMSL contribution of 5.10±0.52 mm by the end of 2023.”
Moving to the North Pole, a March 29 analysis by four researchers led by Mark England from the University of Bristol, published in the ESS Open Archive research platform wrote, “Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005. This pause is robust across observational datasets, metrics, and seasons.”
What to make of these surprising findings that contradict the popular notion of the impact of climate change, long promoted by some researchers who appear to have more interest in advancing policy positions than science? Researcher England titles his team’s research paper as “Surprising, but not unexpected, multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.”
The Arctic paper, in typical low-key scientific language, says, “The modelling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades, although possible contributions from changes in the forced response remain uncertain. Overall, this observed pause in Arctic sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long term trend according to the bulk of the climate modelling evidence.”
The Wang Antarctic paper concludes modestly, “Overall, the study presents the mass change characteristics of the [Antarctic Ice Sheet] over the past 22 years, highlights the instability of four important glacier basins in the [East Antarctic Ice Sheet], and provides valuable scientific insights for related polar research.”
Pielke View
U.S. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post, “When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.”
Taken together, says Pielke, “the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.”
Writing in The Honest Broker, Pielke observes that “climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.”
He adds, “Humans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes – driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil – is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.”
Pielke recalls the lament of the late, great climate scientist Steve Schneider (1945-2010) in 2002: “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”
Conclusion
What is supposed to be in the world of unsettled climate science cannot substitute for data. And climate models cannot rescue theory or data. Climate modeling is hope-in-process. Gavin Schmidt states:
models are always wrong, but the degree to which they can be useful needs to be addressed – by variable or by model generation or by model completeness etc…. an accumulation of improvements – in physics, resolution, completeness, forcings – have led to a gradual improvement in skill (not just in the sea ice trends!)…. The history of Arctic sea ice comparisons shows that it might be premature to conclude that any specific discrepancies imply that something is fundamentally wrong, or that climate modeling is in a ‘crisis’ (Shaw and Stevens, 2025), it may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development (and as the observed signals become clearer). Or not ;-).
Only the future will tell…. or not.
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via Watts Up With That?
June 6, 2025 at 04:02AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 