Trump in his second term has learnt a lot on how to get things done in a hurry. Just read what he has achieved already and then imagine what he will achieve in four years! If he succeeds the USA will power ahead and the Republicans could remain in power for decades.
Trump is unravelling the Climate Blob at full speed « JoNova
via climate science
February 23, 2025 at 01:55AM
SUBSCRIBE to Climate Change Weekly
With history as a guide and two months to prepare for the announcement, there was relatively little wailing and gnashing of teeth when President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (for the second time; the lamentations were much greater in 2017) on his first day back in office. Despite efforts by politicos and influentials within the United States and internationally to encourage Trump to stay in the Paris agreement, the writing was on the wall.
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and the green new deal a scam. Trump’s words might indicate his assessment of the nefarious shenanigans that climate researchers have been caught undertaking over the years and the half-truths and falsehoods those climate researchers have peddled in the effort to gain more funding for themselves and influence political action. Alternatively, Trump’s statements might have been signaling his deft understanding that the Paris agreement took America as a sucker and were an attempt to force the United States and developed nations to deindustrialize while our geopolitical and economic rivals, especially China, India, and Russia, continue developing using fossil fuels. Regardless of his motives, Trump said he’d pull the United States out of the Paris agreement (again!), and he did. I hope it will stick this time.
Trump went even farther, however, signing the Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements EO. This order rescinded America’s support for every climate agreement subsequent to the initial U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty the United States joined through Senate ratification in October 1992. These include, for example, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (1997), the 2001 Adaptation Fund (2001), the 2007 Bali Action Plan, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the 2013 Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (2013), the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (2014), and the 2024 New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance.
Trump explained why the EO was necessary, writing,
In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives. Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.
Even before Trump’s move, the Paris agreement was on the rocks. As I wrote back in 2017, it was doomed to fail, in structure and substance, from the start:
Even if all parties to the agreement met their commitments, by most honest analysts’ reckonings the increase in Earth’s temperature would exceed the 2 degrees Celsius the parties to the agreement argued was necessary to prevent disastrous consequences.
Now, even the United Nations (UN) is ‘fessing up to this fact.
An October 31, 2017 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds even if every country abides by its Paris commitments to cut or cap greenhouse gases between now and 2030, a dubious proposition at best, temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees C by 2100.
To be clear, the 2.0℃ was the absolute maximum, with 1.5℃ being the much-desired cap. Ignoring the fact that the longest, consistently maintained and monitored temperature measuring station suggested we had already exceeded two degrees at the time Paris was signed, certainly 2024 signaled Paris’s failure, with numerous alarmists taking to the mainstream media outlets to proclaim the 1.5 tipping point/threshold had been exceeded every month for more than a year. No disaster has become evident yet, despite all the warnings, but just you wait, say the Paris promoters: if prompt action isn’t taken now, catastrophic climate change really is coming, and they mean it this time.
Alarmists’ prognostications have never been right.
With this in mind, what are we to think about other Paris climate agreement news related to other governments’ climate actions?
The BBC is reporting a number of countries party to the Paris climate agreement are openly discussing not keeping their commitments, without officially withdrawing from the treaty. Argentina, Indonesia (a top ten global CO2 emitter), South Africa (Africa’s largest emitter), and South Korea, among other countries supposedly committed to reining in fossil fuel use and cutting their emissions, are now openly saying they will explore for and exploit their domestic reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil, and going further, they say they hope to import those products from the United States.
At least some of those countries’ leaders are blaming Trump for their “new” stance on fossil fuels.
“If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?” said Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Indonesia’s special envoy for climate change and energy, recently. “Yet we are the ones being told to close our power plants. … So, where is the sense of justice here?”
Djojohadikusumo, and anyone else who blames the United States for backsliding on an agreement they remain a party to, are shedding crocodile tears. Every single country now saying they want more fossil fuels was, in fact, increasing its use of fossil fuels long before Trump was reelected, and well before he pulled the United States out of Paris. In fact, no country that set specific targets for emission reductions in the first Paris commitment period has made significant progress toward meeting its goals. None, nada, zilch.
Further evidence the Paris agreement is dead has been reported by Yahoonews.com. Of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris agreement, only 10 submitted their updated carbon-reduction commitments by the time called for, February 10. That makes 190 scofflaws. Also, even those ten have failed to meet their previous carbon reduction commitments. One wonders why they bothered to set stricter goals when they failed to meet their previous ones and weren’t even going in the right direction.
As the Yahoo story reports,
Under the climate accord, each country is supposed to provide a steeper headline figure for cutting heat-trapping emissions by 2035, and a detailed blueprint for how to achieve this.
Global emissions have been rising but need to almost halve by the end of the decade to limit global warming to safer levels agreed under the Paris deal.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell has called this latest round of national pledges “the most important policy documents of this century”.
Yet just a handful of major polluters handed in upgraded targets on time, with China, India, and the European Union the biggest names on a lengthy absentee list.
The Paris climate treaty has no enforceable penalties. It was a paper tiger from the start.
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in a wonderful turn of a phrase centuries ago, aptly described in foresight the result of each and every climate agreement to date, writing in Leviathan: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” That describes each and every climate agreement developed thus far, in a nutshell.
Sources: Yahoo.com; BBC; Climate Change Weekly
Under the Paris climate treaty, Mexico made relatively modest CO2 commitments. Mexico’s leaders pledged only to reduce emissions by 22 percent compared to a self-developed business-as-usual scenario. Under that plan, Mexico’s emissions in 2030 would still be higher than they were in 2015, when Paris was signed, but they would be lower than they would supposedly have been otherwise. Guess what? Mexico’s emissions have increased since 2015.
Under the 2022 commitment period, Mexico said it would now reduce emissions 35 percent below business as usual. However, as Climate Action Tracker points out,
Mexico’s climate policies continue to go backwards, as fossil fuel use is prioritized and climate-related policies and institutions dismantled. Mexico’s updated 2030 target (NDC), submitted in November 2022 results in higher emission levels than the targets from 2016, breaching both agreements under the Paris Agreement and Mexican Law—where governments committed to improve their targets over time. . . . With this update, the CAT’s rating of Mexico’s climate targets and action worsens from “Highly insufficient” to “Critically insufficient”.
While the new target includes a larger percentage reduction it still leads to higher emissions. The NDC update increases the percentage reduction of the unconditional target from 22% to 35% (30% with own resources and an additional 5% from agreed international support) by 2030 and from 36% to 40% conditional on additional international support. But the business-as-usual (BAU) baseline, against which the targets are defined, has been revised upwards. In addition, Mexico expects a higher contribution of emissions sinks in forests to achieving the target. Together this means that the new target can be met even if emissions excluding those of forestry are higher than what they could have been under the old target. …
Mexico pursues a “gross-net” approach, meaning it counts only emissions sources in its BAU, ignoring sinks from land use and forestry. However, the NDC does intend to use these sinks to achieve the target. …
Mexico’s 2022 NDC update removes the target to peak emissions in 2026 and does not mention any net zero nor other long-term targets.
Any way it’s calculated, Mexico’s CO2 emissions are growing and will continue increasing for the foreseeable future. How many other countries are pursuing similarly phony “emission reduction” plans? Surely Mexico is not the only country that’s proven sly enough to game the system.
Sources: Watts Up With That; Climate Tracker
Research recently published in Nature Communications confirms what The Heartland Institute has reported for years: if recent wildfire trends are historically unusual, it is not for being too large or frequent but because they are much lower than occurred historically.
A team of 19 researchers from universities and research institutes in the United States, Canada, and Switzerland examined tree-ring fire scars “on individual living or dead trees, stumps, or logs … derived from multiple trees from plots … [to] incorporate the longest and most complete census of fire dates obtainable from the available material.”
Their analysis found,
Wildland fire was common and widespread across many forests and woodlands in North America prior to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In subsequent decades, fire exclusion—the practice of preventing and suppressing nearly all wildland fires—occurred as the result of the disruption of traditional burning, livestock grazing, and active suppression of human- and lightning-ignited fires. As a consequence, average annual area burned since the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries is generally less than that experienced under historical fire regimes across many North American forests, resulting in a widespread 20th century ‘fire deficit’ relative to earlier time periods.
The North American tree-ring fire scar network breaks down the continent into 10 forest/fire regions. Of those regions, only “the Taiga & Hudson Plain, in Northern Canada, had had more fires in the 1984-2022 study interval than would be predicted based on the burn scar data prior to 1880.” In fact, only three regions, including the Taiga & Hudson Plain area, experienced even 50 percent of the historical norms of fires. Forty percent of the regions experienced less than 20 percent of the historical amount of fire.
The main takeaway of the study is this:
Overall, contemporary fires (1984-2022) burned NAFSN [North American tree-ring fire scar network] sites less frequently than fires during the historical reference period (pre-1880), indicating that a substantial fire deficit persists and is still accumulating across many forests and woodlands across the United States and Canada. … Based on the historical fire-scar record, NAFSN sites collectively would be expected to have burned 4346 times from 1984-2022, yet they burned 989 times, or only 23% of what would be expected under the historical fire regime.
As mentioned above, this study confirms what Climate Realism and Climate at a Glance have long reported: data conclusively proves wildfires are on the decline, both in the United States and globally, contrary to mainstream media lies.
Discussing this study at a recent Watts Up With That post, science journalist Kip Hansen noted several key conclusions one can take away from this new study:
Hansen’s third point suggests a valuable policy option: increased logging in the forests to reduce the overabundance of fuel, including expedited salvage logging of dead, dying, and fallen trees. This action would produce a valuable product, improve forest ecosystem conditions, and set them up for controlled burns to clear brush and forest litter, reducing the severity of future wildfires when they do occur.
Sources: Watts Up With That; Nature
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
via Watts Up With That?
February 23, 2025 at 12:01AM
by Kirby Schlaht
What really does set the global climate state? The Million Year Ice Core Project (MYIC) (Follow on BlueSky), has been underway for several years, preparing to drill the oldest continuous ice core record from Antarctica. The project is a major element in the Australian Antarctic Program, led by the Australian Antarctic Division and other national and international collaborators to answer that very question.
Now, in 2025, the Australian Antarctic Division is leading one of the most ambitious and challenging scientific projects undertaken in Antarctica – the quest to drill an ice core containing over a million years of Earth’s climate and atmospheric history. This continuous climate record will help solve a long-standing mystery about the timing and duration of past “ice ages” detected in marine sediment cores (Fig. 11). These sediment cores with their fossilized foraminifera reveal a proxy temperature record that indicates about one million years ago the cycle of “ice ages” shifted from a regular 41,000 year glacial-interglacial period, to a cycle every 120,000 years.
A prevailing theory is that declining atmospheric CO2 levels were the cause of the longer, colder ice expansions. The new million-year ice core record might provide the essential atmospheric gas record to test this theory.
We can see in the 1998 Vostok ice core data from Antarctica (below) that temperature leads the way with CO2 following by hundreds to thousands of years. At its simplest, this indicates that temperature not CO2 drives the climate change. What then drives the temperature change? Some might say “it’s too complicated”. I beg to differ.
Antarctic EPICA Dome C ice core temperature proxy data below is shown with Milankovitch orbital cycle forcing. While much correlation is discernable, it makes sense that higher obliquity increases insolation especially to the polar regions driving warmer temperatures and interglacials while lower obliquity provides less insolation, cooler temperatures and glacial expansion. Now, superimpose the 20k-year precession cycle where the effective obliquity angle could be modified by as much as 1 degree and the result is a confluence of high obliquity, high precession, and high eccentricity providing the insolation changes sufficient to break the cold feedback loops (water vapor and ice-albedo) of the previous glacial expansion period. After a 20k year interglacial, high eccentricity, low obliquity and low precession drive temperatures lower where the cold ice-albedo feedback loop takes hold and catches us in its hundred millennia icy grip.
Do the ice cores extracted from Greenland show the same climate variability and timing as Antarctica? The proxy temperature record below shows us the fine detail of a glacial-interglacial period from Greenland. The previous interglacial, the Eemian, around 120 thousand years ago, progressed to the follow-on glacial expanse period. As eccentricity and obliquity just begin to fall, we see temperature “jumps” (D-O events) in closely packed time regions. These hot blips are probably solar activity driven warm-ups. We can see the short duration of the events and a long cold recovery. As we approach the midway point of glacial expanse, we see some gaps where no temperature spikes occur. These correspond to low obliquity periods (there are 3 of these during the ice expanse). The periodic solar cycles that gave us the hot events during high obliquity cannot break through the colder low obliquity feedback wall. When high obliquity returns so do the undampened solar spikes. Continuing on to the confluence of high obliquity, high eccentricity where precession produces a series of significantly hotter northern hemisphere summers when the Earth is near its closest distance to the sun (apogee). This results in breaking the ice-albedo feedback and subsequent deglaciation and a 20k year interglacial period – this is our interglacial called the Holocene. We should not expect the fundamental planetary orbital processes that drive the Ice Age climate oscillation to all of a sudden be rendered ineffectual by a few parts per million of some trace atmospheric gases. To foretell the future of climate change then – in 10k years or so, with eccentricity still high and obliquity going low, precession produces a period where northern hemisphere summers occur near apogee with high eccentricity and low obliquity resulting in those summers getting a little warmer while southern hemisphere summers become significantly colder near perigee resulting in rapid sea ice expansion and the next 100k year glacial expanse period.
With this sampling of both polar regions, and the exceptional resolution from Greenland, we see the same basic climate shifts. During the last 800 thousand years or so, a seeming pattern of climate variability of 20k year warm interglacials followed by 100k year cold glacial periods has persisted. During the glacial expanse we see solar activity driven warming peeking through the high obliquity window with low obliquity shading and damping any solar influence. Great! Seems to explain a lot. Seems pretty clear. Milankovitch cycles and cold feedback loops. Does not explain the Great Shift though. Why did the periodicity of the glacial-interglacial cycle change from 41k years to 120k years around a million years ago (Fig. 11)? The 41k year obliquity cycle seems to predominate in the early Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycle – for 2 million years. What changed? Further, what had set the earth’s climate to oscillate in the first place?
The Great Shift
From The Story of Climate Change, I lay out the paradigm shifting ideas we can call the cosmic ray/cloud hypothesis (Svensmark). This cosmic radiation/ionization/cloud formation concept might now be expanded. Accepting the centrality of cosmic ray ionization in cloud modulation, and with observational and mechanistic support, I propose that climate is sensitive to the amount of lower tropospheric ionization caused by high energy Galactic Cosmic Rays (CR). More high energy radiation in the lower atmosphere means more ionization, more aerosols, more and whiter low-level clouds, thus cooler climates. Alternately, less radiation in the lower atmosphere means fewer clouds driving warmer climates. We can call this integrated process the cloud-albedo effect.
The long geologic timescale modulation of Earth’s tropospheric cloud cover and global temperature are driven in a top-down process beginning with high energy galactic radiation variations originating in Earth’s galactic orbit location within the Milky Way spiral structure. This produces low frequency climate responses: 50-million-year Hothouse periods with lower CR flux as we transit an inter-arm space and 100 to 200 million year Icehouse periods with higher CR flux as we cross a Milky Way spiral arm. Our solar system also experiences galactic orbital oscillatory out-of-plane perturbations. The plane polarized galactic cosmic radiation intensity is then further modulated by our in-and-out-of-plane orbital motion. This acts as a secondary driver of higher frequency climate responses: periodic 30-million-year warming-then-cooling-then-warming cycles. This signal is superimposed on the background spiral arm radiation signature.
The galactic radiation intensity sets the baseline temperature from which all other drivers vary. For the last 50 million years of our galactic orbit, we have been transiting the Sagittarius spiral arm. The increasing baseline spiral arm radiation leads us further into the colder chambers of the Icehouse. At the same time, the radiation intensity and temperature have been oscillating up and down in unison with our in-and-out-of-plane motion. We are now fully in-plane with cosmic rays at maximum. This promotes increasing tropospheric cloud-cover which can cool the Earth further. A glacial Ice Age can occur if the spiral arm radiation-driven baseline temperature of the planet falls to a critical minimum upon which our vertical galactic orbital oscillation places us nearly fully in-plane. Now we are vulnerable. Other shorter-term forces such as planetary orbital dynamics, ice-albedo feedback, plate tectonics, volcanism, solar activity, or proximate celestial events could push the Earth into a full-blown glacial Ice Age or “Snowball” scenario.
Here we are, in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Age. So far, over the last 3 million years our climate has oscillated between cold and icy glacial climates and warm interglacial climates. The 41k year glacial-interglacial period driven by planetary obliquity dominated the Pleistocene for two million years. One million years ago the glacial-interglacial period switched to the current 120-thousand-year period. What has changed over the last 3 million years? The answer should be obvious, the temperature has changed. A million years ago the global temperature was colder than before and is ultimately colder today. One million years ago we were approaching the galactic plane and the bottom of this Pleistocene cold climate trough. The closer to the bottom the colder we got. So cold in fact, that high obliquity alone could not break the ice-albedo feedback loop. All three planetary orbital parameters – obliquity, eccentricity, precession – must act together in a 120-thousand-year cycle to melt our icy tomb to finally bask in a high obliquity sun once again – into the next warm interglacial.
Where are we now?
One million years after The Great Switch, here we are now. Our current climate state is warm interglacial. We have passed the interglacial optimum temperature (high obliquity) and are experiencing a continuing cooling as obliquity moves lower toward the next glacial inception point about 10 thousand years from now, where high eccentricity and low obliquity will drive rapid sea ice expansion and the next 100k year glacial period. In a wider view, assuming we are currently at the midpoint of the Pleistocene Ice Age and at the bottom of this current cold climate trough, symmetry suggests that we will experience slowly warming temperatures as we proceed out-of-plane with glacial-interglacial cycles becoming more interglacial dominant until finally dissipating in another 3 million years or so.
Finally
I am not sure that a new extensive Antarctic ice core record would change my thinking when it come to the ultimate drivers of global climate but it might be enlightening to visualize The Great Switch climate variability from a southern hemisphere perspective through Oxygen-18 isotope temperature proxies from water ice.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
via Watts Up With That?
February 22, 2025 at 08:06PM
The Trump administration has issued a stop-work order to U.S. government scientists, effectively excising them from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next major report, due in 2029. The decision pulls American expertise and funding from a process that’s long leaned on both to prop up its dire pronouncements. For those who’ve watched the IPCC churn out one overheated forecast after another, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing the climate establishment forced to limp along without its biggest benefactor.
The directive halts federal scientists’ contributions to the IPCC’s seventh assessment report, a multi-volume undertaking that typically mobilizes thousands of researchers across years to paint a picture of imminent catastrophe. NASA’s chief scientist, Kate Calvin, was tapped to co-chair an international meeting in Hangzhou, China, next week, where the report’s scope was to be hammered out. That’s off the table now, and the meeting itself hangs in limbo—organizers must be wondering how to proceed without one of their star players.
“Dr. Calvin will not be traveling to this meeting,” a NASA spokesperson said. NASA denied CNN’s request for an interview with Calvin.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/21/climate/trump-blocks-scientists-ipcc
An unnamed scientist involved in the effort told CNN they’re unsure what this means for the planned work. One imagines the uncertainty stings a bit more when your whole career’s been hitched to the IPCC wagon.
The person involved in the report told CNN they were “not sure what this means for the planned work going forward, or if US scientists will participate in the writing of the IPCC reports.”
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/21/climate/trump-blocks-scientists-ipcc
The U.S. has historically been a pillar of the IPCC’s operations, supplying not just talent but a hefty chunk of the budget needed to keep its machinery humming. These reports—laden with warnings of soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, and “deadly, costly consequences”—have been the bedrock of global climate policy, from the Paris Agreement (promptly abandoned by Trump on day one of his term) to endless rounds of UN summits. The IPCC’s clout depends on its ability to project authority, and American involvement has lent it a sheen of credibility. Without that, the 2029 report risks looking like a thinner, less convincing shadow of its predecessors. Climate advocate Harjeet Singh insists the IPCC remains “unbiased” and “evidence-based,” decrying the loss of U.S. collaboration. Skeptics, meanwhile, might note that an outfit prone to amplifying computer-modeled nightmares over real-world data could use a breather—or at least a reality check.
“The IPCC is the backbone of global climate science, providing the world with unbiased, evidence-based insights needed to confront the climate crisis,” said Harjeet Singh, a climate advocate and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.
“The decision to exclude US scientists significantly undermines this collaborative effort and risks compromising the process at a time when robust climate action is needed more than ever,” he told CNN in a statement.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/21/climate/trump-blocks-scientists-ipcc
This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo with the climate crowd. His exit from the Paris Agreement in 2017 (and again in 2025) set the tone, and this latest move doubles down on that skepticism. The timing adds a layer of irony: just as the IPCC was gearing up for its Hangzhou confab, the administration yanked the plug, leaving Calvin sidelined and the process scrambling. It’s a dry kind of poetic justice for those who’ve long questioned the IPCC’s track record—think hockey-stick graphs that wobble under scrutiny, Himalayan glaciers that refuse to vanish on cue, or tipping points that keep tipping past their deadlines. The group’s not dead, of course; it’ll soldier on with whatever it can muster from Europe, China, and the usual suspects. But without Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval and deep pockets, the final product might carry less sway—and that’s a prospect worth savoring.
For the IPCC, the road ahead just got bumpier. The Hangzhou meeting, if it happens, will lack a key voice, and the years-long grind to 2029 will test how well the organization can function on a leaner diet. Trump’s decision doesn’t dismantle the climate machine outright, but it does strip away some of its horsepower. Those who’ve spent decades poking holes in the IPCC’s narrative can sit back and watch the fallout with a quiet grin. The alarmists will howl about “denial” and “sabotage,” no doubt, but the Oval Office isn’t losing sleep over it. Neither, frankly, are we.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
via Watts Up With That?
February 22, 2025 at 04:04PM
