The ‘evil twin of global warming’ is melting starfish and other sea creatures, scientists discover

The usual rubbish.  Warming would cause the oceans to OUTGAS CO2, thus making the seas LESS acidic. Below is just an experiment which does not duplicate natural conditions.  It must have been unpleasant for the sea creatures to have acid poured on them.  Are Greenies allowed to do that?  They pretend to be zealous about looking after nature

Sea creatures are literally being eaten away and ‘dissolved’ by pollution, scientists have discovered.

It’s feared that high levels of carbon dioxide in the water could cause irreparable damage to marine ecosystems after tests found acute levels of the gas cause starfish to dissolve.

A team of marine scientists conducted a four-day experiment at Loch Sween on Scotland’s west coast to measure the response to short-term carbon dioxide exposure.

Previously, tests had focused on the effect high levels of the gas had on individual plants or animals, leaving a gap in knowledge about how whole marine ecosystems respond to sudden influxes of carbon dioxide.

When high levels of carbon dioxide enters the oceans it causes them to become more acidic due to a process that’s been described as ‘global warming’s evil twin’.

Researchers from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and Glasgow University pumped water enriched with carbon dioxide into chambers placed over the coralline algal ecosystem and monitored the community’s response before, during and after exposure.

The experiment revealed acute exposure led to net dissolution, meaning calcified organisms such as the coralline algae and starfish were dissolving.

Heidi Burdett, Heriot-Watt University research fellow, said: ‘We found that there was a rapid, community-level shift to net dissolution, meaning that within that community, the skeletons of calcifying organisms like starfish and coralline algae were dissolving.

‘If you think of pulses of carbon dioxide being carried on the tide to a particular site, it’s like a flash flood of carbon dioxide.

‘Our continued monitoring of the site directly after the carbon dioxide exposure found recovery was comparably slow, which raises concern about the ability of these systems to ‘bounce back’ after repeated acute carbon dioxide events.’

SOURCE





King Penguins' habitat threatened by global warming: study

This is just a modelling exercise with no new deata

Failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions to address climate change, by the end of the century, could see 70 per cent of king penguins needing to either find a new home or die, according to new research.

King penguins inhabit islands scattered throughout the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica.

The birds depend on lanternfish, squids, and krill in the waters circling the continent. They can swim 310 kilometres into the waters for their food.

However, according to projections of climate models this food belt will move closer and closer to the South Pole, forcing the penguins to swim farther to catch their meals and by 2100, the penguins are expected to migrate to other islands or as many as 70 per cent of them could disappear, according to a study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change.

''Wow,'' says Michelle LaRue, a research ecologist at the University of Minnesota, who was not part of the study. ''That's not something I would have expected,'' The Verge reported.

Unlike their closest relatives, the emperor penguin, king penguins do not live on sea ice, rather they only live on ice-free islands. In a warming world, therefore, one would expect penguins that do not need ice to breed to fare just fine, LaRue told The Verge.

"The species may disappear," study co-author Celine Le Bohec, a scientist at the University of Strasbourg, told Agence France Presse.

The king penguin is among several threatened species of penguins in Antarctica. Earlier studies had revealed that other species, such as the emperor, Adelie and chinstrap are also in danger of extinction or severe population loss due to climate change.

What is also a greater problem is that the penguins cannot move with the fish. "The main issue is that there are only a handful of islands in the Southern Ocean and not all of them are suitable to sustain large breeding colonies," said study co-author Robin Cristofari, also of the University of Strasbourg.

SOURCE




A Teetering Consensus: 97 New Papers Amassed In 2018 Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

In just the first 8 weeks of 2018,  97 scientific papers have been published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob…or that otherwise serve to question the efficacy of climate models or the related “consensus” positions commonly endorsed by policymakers and mainstream media sources.

These 97 new papers affirm the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes, emphasizing that climate science is not settled.

More specifically, the papers in this compilation support these four main skeptical positions — categorized here as N(1) – N(4) — which question climate alarm.

N(1) Natural mechanisms play well more than a negligible role (as claimed by the IPCC) in the net changes in the climate system, which includes temperature variations, precipitation patterns, weather events, etc., and the influence of increased CO2 concentrations on climatic changes are less pronounced than currently imagined.

N(2) The warming/sea levels/glacier and sea ice retreat/hurricane and drought intensities…experienced during the modern era are neither unprecedented or remarkable, nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

N(3) The computer climate models are not reliable or consistently accurate, and projections of future climate states are little more than speculation as the uncertainty and error ranges are enormous in a non-linear climate system.

N(4) Current emissions-mitigation policies, especially related to the advocacy for renewables, are often ineffective and even harmful to the environment, whereas elevated CO2 and a warmer climate provide unheralded benefits to the biosphere (i.e., a greener planet and enhanced crop yields).

In sharp contrast to the above, the corresponding “consensus” positions that these papers do not support are:

A(1) Close to or over 100% (110%) of the warming since 1950 has been caused by increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, leaving natural attribution at something close to 0%.

RealClimate.org: “The best estimate of the warming due to anthropogenic forcings (ANT) is the orange bar (noting the 1𝛔 uncertainties). Reading off the graph, it is 0.7±0.2ºC (5-95%) with the observed warming 0.65±0.06 (5-95%). The attribution then follows as having a mean of ~110%, with a 5-95% range of 80–130%. This easily justifies the IPCC claims of having a mean near 100%, and a very low likelihood of the attribution being less than 50% (p < 0.0001!).”

A(2) Modern warming, glacier and sea ice recession, sea level rise, drought and hurricane intensities…are all occurring at unprecedentedly high and rapid rates, and the effects are globally synchronous (not just regional)…and thus dangerous consequences to the global biosphere and human civilizations loom in the near future as a consequence of anthropogenic influences.

A(3) The climate models are reliable and accurate, and the scientific understanding of the effects of both natural forcing factors (solar activity, clouds, water vapor, etc.) and CO2 concentration changes on climate is “settled enough“, which means that “the time for debate has ended“.

A(4) The proposed solutions to mitigate the dangerous consequences described in N(4) – namely, wind and solar expansion – are safe, effective, and environmentally-friendly.

To reiterate, the 97 papers compiled in 2018 thus far support the N(1)-N(4) positions, and they undermine or at least do not support the “consensus” A(1)-A(4) positions.  The papers do not do more than that.   Expectations that these papers should do more than support skeptical positions and undermine “consensus” positions to “count” are deemed unreasonable in this context.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Maunder Minimum Petri Dish

The global warming pseudo-scientists are desperately trying to keep their funding. Now these con artists are trying to claim that that the oceans’ surface water is cooling and below the water is warming. Those who stop driving to work, opting to walk or ride a bicycle instead, are perhaps speaking at least of what they believe, rather than crying that the planet is warming and we need to hand them billions of dollars to figure out some new technology to reverse the trend.

Meanwhile, real scientists who study the cyclical movement within nature are observing what we have been warning – a coming Ice Age, not global warming. We should see the collapse in temperatures faster than we suspect, for it will mimic a Waterfall Event in our market terminology. This is the true nature of how things simply move. Real scientists are starting to warn that we will see temperatures plummet by 2030. We are entering the Maunder Minimum Petri Dish of Political Change and nobody seems to comprehend the political ramifications ahead.

During my European tour, I packed only summer closes. I had to go buy sweaters for it rarely went over 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15 Celsius). It did not get warm until I arrived in Italy and Spain.

Our model tracks everything including climate for that too is a major influence within the development of the global economy. It just seems that whatever could go wrong is going to go wrong in the coming 26 years from 2007 in many areas, so the other side of 2032.95 is going to be a different world. By the way, global warming peaked in 2007. So for all the supporter of global warming, try doing as you preach. Give up your cars and start walking.

The real problem is not global warming but global cooling. In fact, we are in crash mode. Our model confirms that as we move into the end of this current wave 2032.95, the other side of that appears to be a very serious famine that changes the political landscape as took place in the period known as the Maunder Minimum. This is a serious forecast for during the last such period, the further north you are the higher the probability of starvation. Indeed Prussia lost 40% of its population to famine at that time and Scotland lost about 15%.

Maunder Minimum is also known as the “prolonged sunspot minimum”, which was a period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. Consequently, based upon running the data through our model, it appears that this is crashing faster than any time previously. This would tend to warn that we may exceed the record of deaths of the 16th century and that is not good news. Yet this is just nature’s way of trimming back the population like hitting control-alt-delete in computer terms.

During the last Maunder Minimum in 17th century, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests all across Europe. This was the coldest century in a period of glacial expansion that lasted from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century. The summer of 1641 was the third coldest recorded over the past six centuries in Europe and the winter of 1641–1642 was the coldest ever recorded in Scandinavia.

The Maunder Minimum produced an unusual cold trend that lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s most intensely and included ice on both the Bosporus and the Baltic so thick that people could walk from one side to the other. So much for global warming pundits who are putting out such bogus research it is amazing. This crowd of con artists has created such propaganda that the world population is totally unprepared; by the time they figure out these people are bullshitting everyone for grant money, it will be too late to prepare for the onslaught. We could realistically see famine reach the 33%–50% mortality level after 2032.95.

The Maunder Minimum created such a deep cold in Europe and extreme weather events elsewhere that what unfolds is a series of droughts, floods, and harvest failures. Historically, this leads to massive migrations, wars and revolutions. The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population during the last event and this time we are crashing more rapidly than before. Therefore, we may exceed more than a reduction in population of one-third and reach the levels of the 14th century of 50%, which was also combined with the Black Plague.

What took place during the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Political systems are already in crash mode with BIG BANG. Add to this the crisis we see in weather cycles and the world will be augmented by unpredictable crises involving water, food, energy supply chains, and public health. States will unquestionably collapse as famine could overtake large populations and flood or disease could cross borders and lead to internal instability or international conflict.

There were three primary factors at work globally during the 17th century that combined to produce chaos. There were increases in volcanic eruptions, twice as many El Niño episodes (unusually warm ocean conditions along the tropical west coast of South America), and the virtual disappearance of sunspots, reducing solar output to warm the Earth. These three forces combined are acknowledge by real Earth science.

The 17th century saw a proliferation of wars, civil wars, rebellions, and more cases of state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age. This was the Petri Dish that brewed the revolution against the monarchy that would give birth to the American and French revolutions. In the year 1648, rebellions paralyzed both Russia (the largest state in the world) and France (the most populous state in Europe); civil wars broke out in Ukraine, England, and Scotland, and irate subjects in Istanbul (Europe’s largest city) strangled Sultan Ibrahim.

The Maunder Minimum did not cause all the catastrophes alone during the 17th century, but it most certainly exacerbated many of them. Outbreaks of disease, especially smallpox and plague, erupted as was the case during the previous episode that saw the Black Plague wipeout 50% of the population. Plagues correlate to periods when harvests are poor or have failed. When an uprising by Irish Catholics on October 23, 1641, drove the Protestant minority from their homes, no one had foreseen a severe cold snap with heavy frost and snow in a place that rarely has snow. Thousands of Protestants died of exposure, turning a political protest into a massacre that cried out for vengeance. Oliver Cromwell would later use that episode to justify his brutal campaign to restore Protestant supremacy in Ireland. This was the period of the British Civil War with the Puritans beheading Catholic King Charles I.

The Maunder Minimum did take a more direct toll as weather turned bitterly cold. Western Europe experienced the worst harvest of the century in 1648. Rioting broke out in Sicily, Stockholm, and elsewhere when bread prices spiked. In the Alps, poor growing seasons became the norm in the 1640s, and records document the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced to the farthest extent since the last Ice Age. One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

The Maunder Minimum impacted the entire planet for very few areas of the world survived the 17th century unscathed by extreme weather. Even in China, a combination of droughts and disastrous harvests, coupled with rising tax demands and cutbacks in government programs, unleashed a wave of banditry and chaos; starving Manchu clansmen from the north undertook a brutal conquest that lasted a generation.  In 1644, peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng conquered the Ming capital in Beijing. Rather than serve them, Ming general Wu Sangui made an alliance with the Manchus and opened the Shanhai Pass to the Banner Armies led by Prince Dorgon, who defeated the rebels and seized Beijing. The conquest of China was not complete until 1683 under the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–1722).

North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630. In Japan, a mass rebellion broke out on the island of Kyushu following several poor harvests. Five years later, famine, followed by an unusually severe winter, killed perhaps 500,000 Japanese.

WorldEconomy

The famines that hit India wiped out millions, weakening the population and the economy, whereas India had been the financial capital of the world after the Byzantine Empire’s collapse in 1453 to the rise of Islam. Following this devastating Maunder Minimum period of the 1600s, we can see that India fell as the financial capital of the world, handing that crown to China. India was ripe for the picking. In the first half of the 18th century, the British were a trading presence at certain points along the coast of India. From the 1750s, the British began to wage war on land in eastern and southeastern India. To reap the reward of successful warfare, which was the exercise of political power notably over the rich province of Bengal. By the end of the century, British rule consolidated over the first conquests and extended up the Ganges valley to Delhi and over most of the peninsula of southern India. The British then turned to China and eventually established Hong Kong, which was handed back in 1998.

No human intervention can avert the Maunder Minimum or volcanic eruptions, halt an El Niño episode or delay the onset of drought, despite the possibility that each could cause starvation, economic dislocation, and political instability. So sorry, I do not ask for donations to prevent this from unfolding. We do possess both the resources and the technology to prepare for them. It is possible to grow food in your basement without land. Hydroponics may become a very valuable asset.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars, and rebellions, killed millions amounting to about one-third of the population. A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today would kill billions. It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation. Country borders will likely change or vanish altogether. This is part of our forecast on why the USA will break-up after 2032.95.

So while we argue over global warming, we should look at history rather than fake research that attributes everything to the invention of the combustion engine at the start of the 20th century and respect that there just may be long-term cycles at work that can be documented from real data. If history repeats, the global warming crowd will be the first to go since they will be totally unrepentant and unprepared.

SOURCE





Australia and East Timor agree on maritime border, 'pathway' to develop gas field

More natural gas!

East Timor and Australia have reached an agreement for a treaty on their disputed maritime border and on a "pathway" to develop the giant Greater Sunrise offshore gas fields, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague says.

Under the agreement, the share of revenue from the offshore gas field will differ depending on downstream benefits that arise from "different development concepts", the statement released following talks in Kuala Lumpur said.

The agreement would establish a maritime boundary in the Timor Sea for the first time.

Australia had sought a boundary aligned with its continental shelf, but East Timor argued the border should lie half way between it and Australia — placing much of the Greater Sunrise fields under its control.

In 2002 East Timor gained independence and the Timor Sea Treaty was signed, but no permanent maritime border was negotiated.

East Timor has long argued the border should sit halfway between it and Australia, placing most of the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field in their territory.

The long-running dispute had led the owners of Greater Sunrise — Woodside Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and Japan's Osaka Gas — to shelve the project.

The fields are estimated to hold 144 billion cubic metres of gas and 226 million barrels of condensates, which analysts have previously estimated could be worth up to $50 billion.

However, development could be at least a decade away, with Woodside looking at the latter half of the next decade.

Ending years of opposition, Australia agreed in 2017 to accept Dili's formal notice to terminate an agreement to split petroleum revenue equally from Greater Sunrise and set a 50-year timetable for negotiating a permanent sea boundary.

Dili had taken the long-running maritime border dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an intergovernmental organisation based at The Hague, which ordered compulsory arbitration between the two parties.

The court announced last year that the countries had reached an agreement "on the central elements of a maritime boundary delimitation between them in the Timor Sea" — but that details would remain confidential until the deal was finalised.

The two governments will meet in New York at the United Nations headquarters on March 6 to sign the new maritime boundary treaty, the statement said.

East Timor had been pushing for the building of an onshore processing plant to boost its economy rather than a floating plant.

According to media reports, East Timor could receive up to 80 per cent of revenue, but could agree to less if gas is piped to a terminal in the tiny country.

The Sunrise joint venture, led by Woodside, said it was aware the two governments had agreed on a new maritime boundaries treaty.

"We hope that the Commission's conclusions and the signing of the treaty will help to provide the fiscal and regulatory certainty required to develop Greater Sunrise for the benefit of all parties," a Sunrise joint venture spokeswoman said.

Australia's foreign ministry said the countries had "agreed [on] a draft treaty establishing our maritime boundaries and the sharing of revenue from the development of the Greater Sunrise resource".

In the emailed statement, the ministry said the countries would "continue to work towards a decision on the development concept for Greater Sunrise".

East Timor's oil minister, Hernani Filomena Coelho da Silva, said his country's preference was for the gas to come to his country to help development.

SOURCE

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