Is the sun responsible for El Nino?

The authors below find a correlation with solar activity  but have no firm explanation for it

Modulations of solar activity on El Niño Modoki and possible mechanisms

Abstract

This paper uses the sunspot number (SSN) index and the El Niño modoki index (EMI) to examine the possible modulation of El Niño Modoki events by variations in solar activity. A significant positive correlation was found between SSN and EMI with a lag of two years, and both SSN and EMI have an obvious period of about 11–12 years. The evolution of El Niño Modoki events was investigated using composite analysis.

There was a clear evolution of El Niño Modoki events in the three years after the solar peak year. An ocean mixed layer heat budget diagnostic method is used to investigate the contributor to the anomalous patterns in the three years after the solar peak. The atmosphere radiation fluxes are confirmed as the major contributor to the warming response in the central tropical Pacific.

Two possible mechanisms are proposed, one is the direct mechanism that the solar radiation warms up the tropical pacific with a geographical difference, due to the cloud distribution. The warming response in the central Pacific is amplified by the coupled positive feedback between the ocean and atmosphere with 1–2 years lag.

Another possible way can be described as follows: the solar heating effect propagating from the upper atmosphere modulates the strength and variation of atmospheric anomaly at high and mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere winter, which results in an anomalous subtropical cyclone over the northeastern Pacific in the winter seasons following the solar peak years. The anomalous cyclone reduces the cloud cover over the northeastern Pacific and enhances the local input of solar radiation.

As a result, a positive sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly occurs over the northeastern Pacific and extends towards the central tropical Pacific along the path of anomalous southwesterly winds, which may trigger an El Niño Modoki event in the following years.

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics
Volume 160, July 2017, Pages 34-47





The New Coal – Burning wood pellets creates more global warming pollution than coal, not less

British government idiocy at work: converting a big coal-fired generator to run on wood

The new coal. More CO2 than coal. Yet biomass is called green by the AGW cult and the EU and the other cult leaders .

“A controversy with reverberations across the Atlantic Ocean is brewing in Hamlet, North Carolina – a literal hamlet 120 miles northwest of Wilmington – where a new wood-pellet facility is already in the initial stages of construction.

The mill would become the fourth in North Carolina and the seventh in the Southeast built and operated by Maryland-based Enviva, the largest producer of wood pellets in the world.

The dried and compressed bits of wood produced at the plant would be shipped from Wilmington to a power company in the United Kingdom, who plans to burn them instead of coal as part of the country’s effort to slash greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by the end of the decade.

The problem, according to many energy analysts, is that burning pellets creates more global warming pollution than coal, not less. One prominent research ecologist even calls wood biomass “the new coal.”

At the same time, environmental advocates say the new mill will further the destruction of deciduous forests in the Southeast – especially in wetlands – and disproportionately harm public health in Dobbins Heights, an overwhelmingly African-American town two miles northeast of the facility.”

“A 2015 analysis for the Southern Environmental Law Center examining the loss of forests found that Enviva wood pellets supplied to Drax would create two and a half times more greenhouse gas emissions than coal over 40 years.

A 2014 study by the U.K.’s environmental agency also factored in drying and transportation costs; it found climate pollution from southeastern U.S. wood pellets to be three times that of coal.”

SOURCE




UN Admits It Can’t Link Global Warming To The Spike In World Hunger, Then Does It Anyway

A United Nations report admits it’s “impossible” to link man-made global warming to a jump in world hunger statistics, but then goes ahead and does make that link anyway.

The new U.N. report estimated global warming helped increase the number of people around the world suffering from chronic hunger and undernourishment, which was mainly driven by violent conflicts in poor countries.

The U.N.’s mainline findings claim global warming compounded foot shortages and famine driven by economic slowdowns and violent conflict, while an accompanying Q&A document makes another stunning admission about global warming.

“Although it is impossible to establish a causal relation, the impact of climate change-related phenomena (such as the higher frequency of extreme events, be them floods or drought) cannot be ruled out as one of the causes for the reduced per capita availability of food in several countries,” the U.N. admitted.

Even so, the U.N. warned droughts and floods, “linked in part to El Niño phenomenon and climate-related shocks,” hurt food production, they can’t say for sure this is behind the increase in global hunger. The U.N. even admits global food production was high enough to feed everyone on the planet, despite weather shocks.

The U.N. still claimed global warming was a compounding factor behind the spike in hunger statistics.

“Conflict, especially when compounded by climate change, is therefore a key factor explaining the apparent reversal in the long-term declining trend in global hunger, thereby posing a major challenge to ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030,” the U.N. reported.

Many in the media pointed fingers at global warming.

The New York Times editorial board highlighted the study’s grim findings, reporting hunger was on the rise “because of scourges like global warming and civil conflicts that show little sign of abating.”

The newspaper claimed “rising civil strife and climate disruption in explaining the sudden downturn” in success for fighting global hunger. Undernourishment increased from 777 million to 815 million people from 2015 to 2016, the U.N. estimated.

“Compounding these problems globally are the disruptions of climate change — droughts and floods, as well as political crises and severe economic drops in nations reliant on commodity exports, the study found,” wrote The New York Time’s editorial board.

However, most malnourished people “live in countries affected by conflict,” the U.N. said.

“Over the past ten years, the number of violent conflicts around the world has increased significantly, in particular in countries already facing food insecurity, hitting rural communities the hardest and having a negative impact on food production and availability,” the U.N. notes.

SOURCE






Rex Murphy: All global warming predictions are infallible... until they're not

There is a disturbance in the troposphere, much perturbation. The little Gore molecules that do so much to keep everybody in the climate change industry in a sweat are slacking off. The results are—let me coin a word—undeniable. The world’s leading climate entrepreneur’s new PowerPoint agitprop, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, hasn’t stirred the waters or warmed the air.

Take note of that bathetic subtitle, Truth to Power. With just about every government and sub-sovereign government in the world on side, every progressive university in full harmony, every pseudo-science radio and TV program treating global warming with the reverence only found these days among Scientologists and faith healing sorcerers, and every celebrity that owns a yacht and a private jet willing to swear, “It’s real and it’s happening,” which side do you think has the “Power?”

Not to mention the annual mass march of the penguins—sorry, my mistake—the annual trek (by jet) of the hordes of NGOs, Greenpeace camp followers, Green parties, and bureaucrats to Rio or Paris or Beijing or Marrakesh to piously intone The End is Near under the illustrious banner of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Conference of the Parties. All, of course, are lathered and lubricated by billions and billions of dollars in the fight against global warming, a.k.a., climate change, a.k.a. (for a little while there) global weirding. I think it’s fair to say the power and the publicity and the loot are squarely with the doomsayers of Camp Gore.

However, no Academy trinket, no Nobel olive leaf for the boring update—I don’t think it even made a showing at the Toronto International Film Festival (which is an omission worth noting when you consider that TIFF, the emporium of films fashionable, was willing to highlight the dreadful mother!, one of the bleakest flops of our time).

None of this, however, has cooled the troposphere as has the real news from an infinitely more prestigious source. From a number of venues normally in robotic lockstep with the great consensus of settled science, the London Times, the Washington Post, and even the maniacally warmist The Independent, a story emerges that the famous models of the global warming industry may have overstated the degree of global warming in the past two decades.

They do not say this on their own, mind you. That would localize the heresy, and no organ of respectable journalistic opinion is willing to go full apostate on the creed of the Ecopocalypse without external backup.

Instead, they issue the findings of the prestigious scientific oracle, Nature Geoscience, and the published work of two acknowledged experts in the field, Messers Myles Allen, professor of geo-system science at the University of Oxford, and Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London.

Be it noted: these two are not “deniers,” that being the vile term that those who champion global warming fling out with reckless ease at those who disagree with them. They deliberately, knowingly, associate their opponents with Holocaust denialism, without so much as an arched eyebrow of rebuke from the censors of political correctness. This stands in contrast to the stern policing from the commentariat when it comes to instances of “sexist” rhetoric. If we’re going to have standards on “correct” rhetoric, let’s have standards for all of it. No deniers, no Barbies.

The Geoscience article has it all. The models were wrong. They “were on the hot side.” They “overstated the impact of emissions.” From The Independent: “Michael Grubb… admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.” As a consequence, the world now has a “larger carbon budget” than previously thought. There is, in other words, more time—the end is not as near as every crusader for the cause has insisted for the last 20 or 30 years.

One global warming scientist made a point everybody should pay attention to:

“Did the IPCC get it wrong? Just let me leave that question hanging for a while… While you ponder that question, it is worth noting that the authors of this paper developed the idea of carbon budgets, are the world leading experts on carbon budgets, and derived the carbon budgets in the IPCC process…”

Can these things be? Could even a smidgen of the skepticism some have been urging, some of the warnings that science and politics are a terrible blend, be justified? If those who design the models find the models have “overstated” matters, that the models “were too hot,” could we not find room to pause awhile before we redesign industrial civilization according to the imperatives of Al “The science is settled” Gore?

It isn’t settled. The science is emergent. The conclusions are at best tentative. I leave you with this consolation: All global warming predictions are infallible, but some global warming predictions are less infallible than others.”

SOURCE




Really dangerous climate change — The next ice age

Prudent Australian farmers take into account past climate events and provide for the risk of potential droughts and floods. No such past climate events have been taken into account with climate models based on theory and assumptions to predict the future. Unfortunately the predictions of  temperature from all the climate models have a record of exceeding the measured temperatures by a large margin for the last twenty years.

Model failures demonstrate the underlying theory and assumptions used are not supported by the results. This conclusion is further supported by evidence that the planet has continued to warm, with interruptions to the trend, independent of CO2 levels since the last Ice Age. For example the planet cooled from 1940 to 1976 while CO2 levels continued to rise. The absence of dangerous global warming is also relevant when past levels of CO2 were at least four times the present level.

The direct effect of higher CO2 levels as shown in the graph illustrates the diminishing global warming impact as CO2 levels increase. Climate models magnify this diminishing effect with a multiplier that results in increasing global warming.


We are at present at the 400 mark

The failure of models to predict future climate however does not support the multiplier assumption.

The dangerous global warming threat from using fossil fuels is therefore not supported either by climate models or evidence from past global climate experience.

As William Kininmonth, former Head of the National Climate Centre of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has observed, regard for earlier climate events is required to understand the future. It is clear from past Ice Ages that the next Ice Age should be the most serious climate event for humanity. During the Ice Age 22,000 years ago there was extensive permanent ice cover up to two kilometers thick. Sea levels fell 126 metres and there was mass extinction of species.

Nor has there been an appreciation that in the past carbon and energy stored in fossil fuels was CO2 and energy from the sun absorbed by various plant forms before conversion into fossil fuels.

There was no dangerous global warming prior to this period.

Accordingly the same CO2 when released from burning fossil fuels cannot be the cause of dangerous global warming as it did not do so in the first place.

Indeed the return of CO2, a plant food, to the atmosphere will benefit the planet with improved plant and forest growth. A benefit which satellites have already detected.

Nevertheless accepting the outcome of failed climate models has brought about policies which have made Australian power unreliable and moved costs from near the lowest to near the highest in the world despite subsidies of more than $3 billion per annum.

Families are struggling to meet their rising electricity bills. Jobs are threatened with industry in difficulty due to the increased cost of electricity.

There is an urgent need to bring power costs down. To do so Australia must follow other countries that are planning and installing 1200 clean high efficiency coal fired plants.

Australian industry will face competition in the domestic and export markets from companies having the significant advantage of low cost and reliable base power from these new plants.

SOURCE

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