Party Over for Alarmists as Sea Temperatures Plunge Around the World
Surface ocean temperatures are plunging rapidly around the world with scientists reported to be puzzled at the speed of the recent decline. Less puzzlement was to be found when the oceans were ‘boiling’ during the last two years. Plebs flying to Benidorm for an annual holiday and causing ‘global heating’ was a favourite explanation, although mainstream media put it in marginally more polite terms.
For almost two years, this boiling ocean trope has been a reliable standby for every alarmist spiv promoting the Net Zero insanity. But expect the scare to be parked for a while along with coral reefs, polar bears and Arctic sea ice. It is a very good bet that nobody in mainstream media is going to report the oceans are cooling at what are remarkably dramatic rates. Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news.
Until recently, the surface sea temperature (SST) graph below showing measurements up the Arctic and down to Antarctica was rarely out of the public prints.
This year the temperature shown by the black line flatlined until April compared with the substantial rise in orange for 2023. It then fell more sharply than last year and is now 0.2°C lower.
In the Atlantic, the turnaround has been even more dramatic. Temperatures have cooled quickly since May and in the central equatorial region are up to 1°C colder than average for this time of year. The American weather service NOAA notes that the high SSTs at the start of the year were the strongest warm event since 1982. The rapid transition from warm to cold SST anomalies (current temperatures compared over a longer past trend) was said to be remarkable. “Never before in the observed record has the eastern equatorial Atlantic swung so quickly from one to another extreme event,” observes NOAA.
It is not unusual for waters in these parts of the Atlantic to cool in the summer months as seasonal southern winds drag surface waters away from the equator and expose deeper colder water. The process is called ‘upwelling’, but this year it coincided with a weakening of the trade winds which should have led to warmer anomalies. “As of now, these atmospheric conditions… are quite perplexing.” NOAA says it will need to dig deeper to reveal the exact causes of this “seemingly unusual event”.
These days we must of course welcome any outbreak of scientific head-scratching in the usually ‘settled’ climate business. Temperatures suddenly go down and scientists are seemingly clueless as to why it happens. Yet temperatures go up and it is all due to global warming and humans must return, instanter, to a pre-industrial societal and economic hellhole. In fact, scientists have little idea how a great deal of weather suddenly changes and how the sea and atmosphere warms and cools. Over 100 super-computer models are simply not up to the job of explaining natural variation in a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere. The fact that some scientists are perplexed when temperatures go down, but full of fear-mongering explanations when they go up, says it all.
It is not only in the Atlantic that surface temperatures are plunging. In the Pacific, a strong El Niño natural variation that warms the ocean and affects weather across the planet has dissipated. The higher SST anomalies recorded over the last year have fallen sharply as the latest figures below from NOAA show. The blocks record the anomaly on a rolling three-month basis with the last figure of 0.2°C referring to May, June and July 2024. As the latest figures along with records that go back much further show, recent changes in SSTs due to El Niño are nothing out of the ordinary. It is shameful how the figures have been used incessantly to whip up unnecessary alarm and anxiety around the world. Everyone from UN Secretary General Antonio ‘Global Boiling’ Guterres to GB News climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale should hang their heads in shame.
The recent El Niño was powerful although the natural distortion in the centigrade anomaly record was not as large as those produced by a previous El Niño around 2015-16. Over the last 25 years, all of the global temperature boosts – apart from those retrospectively added by state-funded compilers – have occurred at around the same time as El Niño formations. Strong oscillations have been recorded in 1998, 2016 and 2024. As we have seen, alarmists have taken full advantage of the changes wrought by the latest El Niño effect, particularly the warmer ocean temperatures that have arisen. As with most natural variation, that process is being reversed – what goes up, usually comes down.
According to NOAA, SSTs in three of the four locations around the Pacific used to determine the presence of an El Niño are now below the long term trend. Temperatures have also dropped considerably in many parts of the Pacific down to 300 metres as the graph below for the central and eastern area shows.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for narrative-driven messengers such as the BBC’s Georgina Rannard. Last August she claimed that while scientists have known that the sea surface would continue to warm up because of greenhouse gas emissions, “they are still investigating exactly why temperatures have surged so far above previous years”.
What a difference a few months makes in the climate alarmism business
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‘Climate Change’ is Not Causing Anxiety But The Media Is
Evie Magazine, a conservative-leaning women’s publication, recently posted an article titled “Climate Change Anxiety Is A Cause For The Decline In The Birth Rate,” in which the author claims that human-caused global warming is leading to climate anxiety that misdirects its wrath at larger families
This is mostly false.
‘Climate change’ is not producing anxiety so much as false and misleading alarmist media coverage is, and blaming large families for bad weather is equally wrong.
The article begins with writer Carolyn Ferguson claiming that “last year was the hottest year on record for the world,” that the United States is somehow warming faster than the rest of the world, and that “many are feeling the effects of global warming this year.”
This is false.
The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet.
It should be obvious that every place on Earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world.
Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different time frames, using different datasets and methods and whatever time frame is most optimal to show the most warming.
This makes these comparisons worthless.
For the United States, the Climate Reference Network stations record of high-temperature anomalies, e.g., extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high-temperature events since the best records began in 2005. (See figure below)
According to longer-term data, heat waves in the U.S. today areless frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s, as seen below:
Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.
Even looking at proxy data globally, which gives an idea of ancient temperatures, does not indicate we are in a period that can be described as ‘the hottest on record’.
Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1,000 to 2,500 years ago, respectively.
Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
The majority of the ‘abnormal’ warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but were simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September.
A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe.
This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.
This is not to say an average warming has not occurred over the past hundred-plus years, but it is not unprecedented nor is it alarming.
The Evie post proceeds to claim that aggression rises amid higher temperatures, writing “one of the most often overlooked corollaries is a rise in communal anger and aggression.”
The “heat makes people crazy” idea has been floated several times over the years, but even the article the Evie post links to admits that it’s likely heat is not the main factor in most of the studies that found aggression.
The social sciences and psychology experiments are riddled with uncontrollable variables.
Without attempting to conduct any studies, the plain fact that places like Florida and Mexico, the Bahamas, and other hot tropical locales are popular relaxation destinations seems to throw cold water on the hypothesis.
Why would anyone go someplace that makes them angrier or more aggressive for a vacation?
Discomfort can be aggravating, certainly, but it’s not just higher temperatures alone. Ferguson then gets to the claim that mental health professionals are “seeing more patients come in with symptoms of climate change anxiety, which is supposedly the root of many activists’ anger when it comes to large families.”
Climate Realism has written extensively about how misleading the ‘climate anxiety’ diagnosis is here, here, and here, for example, often shifting the blame from the true culprits.
Something like “climate anxiety” does exist – but it is a media-driven phenomenon because of the constant drumbeat of impending doom, not from any actual lived experience of warming.
Constant media coverage telling people that we are hurtling towards “global boiling,” that every weather extreme is because of you and your neighbor’s use of gasoline, including from typically conservative publications like Evie Magazine, is what’s causing anxiety in people.
While Evie is right that climate activists should not turn their ire on big, traditional families, they are wrong that climate anxiety is a legitimate phenomenon.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-change-is-not-causing-anxiety-but-the-media-is/
****************************************************Kamala campaign flip-flops on EV mandates
A campaign official for Kamala Harris said Tuesday that it is a “lie” that the vice president Kamala Harris supports implementing an electric vehicle mandate, even though she cosponsored legislation doing exactly that in 2019.
Harris’s director of rapid response, Ammar Moussa, wrote in a campaign email ahead of Trump running mate J.D. Vance’s remarks on the economy in Michigan that the Ohio senator would “undoubtedly lie, gaslight, and try to run away from the truth.” One such lie, he cautioned, is that “Vice President Harris wants to force every American to own an electric vehicle.”
“Vice President Harris does not support an electric vehicle mandate,” Moussa claimed, before citing several news stories that argued the Biden administration only incentivized, rather than mandated, electric vehicle production by car manufacturers. The administration spent billions to build just a handful of electric vehicle chargers and introduced tax credits for electric vehicle purchases. In addition, however, the Biden administration pushed through a new tailpipe emissions rule through the Environmental Protection Agency that would force car manufacturers to significantly scale back production of gas-powered cars. “The regulation would essentially require automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids by gradually tightening limits on tailpipe pollution,” the New York Times reported in March.
Even more damningly, Harris also supported an electric vehicle mandate when she serves as the junior senator from California. In April 2019, months after announcing her bid to become the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, Harris cosponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019. The bill, which was introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Mike Levin, presented “bold plan for transitioning the United States to 100% zero-emission vehicles.”
The original version of the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019 would require 50 percent of new passenger vehicle sales to be automobiles that use zero emissions — electric or hydrogen-powered cars and trucks. The bill would require all new car sales be zero emission vehicles by 2040, according to text of the bill and a press release from Senator Merkley’s office.
The legislation gave authority to the EPA administrator to issue an “injunction on the manufacture of any passenger vehicles other than zero-emission vehicles by a vehicle manufacturer” by 2040.
Harris supported an even more aggressive version of the legislation that would ban non-zero-emission vehicles by 2035, according to an archived page of her 2020 campaign website obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Harris’s campaign has also claimed that she no longer supports a fracking ban and other key policies of her 2020 Democratic primary campaign. Harris herself has not walked back any of these positions or explained why and how she changed her mind so radically in just one election cycle.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/kamala-campaign-flip-flops-on-ev-mandates/
******************************************************Pulling the Plug: State Regulations Force Bankruptcy of California Solar Company
On the one hand, the state of California has decided that it shall become an all-electric, all-renewable power state by, well, for practical purposes, next Thursday.
On the other hand, the state gives utilities a massive break on how much they pay home solar generators for their excess power, leading to the just announced bankruptcy of California-based solar system installer SunPower.
Welcome to schizophrenic Sacramento.
Monday, former industry leader SunPower filed Chapter 11 and said its remaining assets will be purchased by Complete Solaria for $45 million. Complete will also take over an undisclosed amount of SunPower liabilities as part of the deal.
"For nearly 40 years, SunPower has made solar energy more accessible to Americans, driven by our mission to change the way our world is powered,” said Tom Werner, Executive Chairman at SunPower. "In light of the challenges SunPower has faced, the proposed transaction offers a significant opportunity for key parts of our business to continue our legacy under new ownership. We are working to secure long-term solutions for the remaining areas of our business, while maintaining our focus on supporting our valued employees, customers, dealers, builders, and partners."
The failure of SunPower, say industry experts, is directly related to the changes made by the California Public Utilities Commission in December, 2022. Those changes involved, in part, cutting the rate new home solar system owners would be paid for their excess power by 75%, completely eliminating the financial incentive to install new systems (much of the industry’s appeal was the ability to say that household solar would eventually pay for itself.)
That is no longer the case.
Bernadette Del Chiaro, Executive Director of the California Solar & Storage Association, acknowledged that heightened competition and internal SunPower issues played a role in the bankruptcy but that it was California’s regulatory environment that was the main cause for the company’s demise.
The CPUC has “policies that disproportionately favor monopoly utilities like PG&E at the expense of solar businesses, consumers and the environment,” Del Chiaro said.
“SunPower is the largest solar company to fall in the past year, but it is far from the only casualty. Dozens of companies have gone bankrupt or left California since the start of the “net billing tariff” in April 2023,” Del Chiaro said. “In total, 17,000 jobs have been lost, sales are down 60%, and 81% of California solar companies remain concerned about their ability to stay in business.”
The reduction in the reimbursement was made, in theory, to maintain grid reliability as homes with solar, the utilities claim, do not pay their fair share to cover the “fixed costs” of operating the statewide grid.
“All this (was) in the name of a utility lie about a so-called ‘solar cost-shift’ which scapegoats California families and businesses who embrace energy independence and clean energy,” Del Chiaro said. “The truth is, PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric allow their spending to get out of control, ballooning their profits, and driving up electric rates.”
The utilities’ argument was similar to “why give electric cars a tax break when the use the roads as much as regular cars and don’t pay fuel taxes?”
But there is a difference – a big difference: cars do not generate power for the utility to then use and sell – solar systems do.
What the decision was actually like, though, is the incident in late 2022 which involved the state announcing its mandate that every new car sold in the state must be electric by 2025 and then – literally a few days later – asked electric car owners to not charge them because the power grid was too strained.
The millions of rooftop solar systems (including larger systems on commercial buildings and such) in the state provide about 10% of the total electricity used in California.
Considering the various electric/renewable energy mandates the state has imposed, the buckling of SunPower and the wobbliness of the entire industry could make reaching those already absurd goals impossible.
It took ten years to install the first million, five years to install the second million, and now installations are at a ten-year low,” Del Chiaro said.
It should be noted that the execrable Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) – even more so than the other utilities – has a direct pipeline into Sacramento regulators – some even used to work for the company – and politicians – it doles out millions, including money directly to people like First Partner Jennifer Seibel Newsom for her “films.”
PG&E (remember - the company pleaded guilty to actually killing people) to purposefully kick an evil but sadly not dead horse, has been expertly manipulating the levers of power in the capitol for more than a century (too bad they are better at that than manipulating actual power). And they - short of the Second Coming or the actual revolution – are primed to continue to do so for the next 100 years.
“Yes - A convicted felon dictates energy policy for California,” acidly noted Del Chiaro.
So, Go Electric! says the state…just don’t cost the utilities any money or any Sacramento leverage.
We’ll see how that works out.
https://thomas699.substack.com/p/pulling-the-plug
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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