Climate change: Oceans 'soaking up more heat than estimated'

What happened to the "consensus?".  This study says that the consensus was 60% wrong.  If so, why not 100% wrong?  How can we be sure?  Many skeptics do say that it is 100% wrong.  Interesting that although their figures change radically, their scary conclusion remains the same.  That's strange science


The world has seriously underestimated the amount of heat soaked up by our oceans over the past 25 years, researchers say.

Their study suggests that the seas have absorbed 60% more than previously thought.

They say it means the Earth is more sensitive to fossil fuel emissions than estimated.

This could make it much more difficult to keep global warming within safe levels this century.

What have the researchers found? According to the last major assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's oceans have taken up over 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases.

But this new study says that every year, for the past 25 years, we have put about 150 times the amount of energy used to generate electricity globally into the seas - 60% more than previous estimates.

That's a big problem.

Scientists base their predictions about how much the Earth is warming by adding up all the excess heat that is produced by the known amount of greenhouse gases that have been emitted by human activities.

This new calculation shows that far more heat than we thought has been going into oceans. But it also means that far more heat than we thought has been generated by the warming gases we have emitted.

Therefore more heat from the same amount of gas means the Earth is more sensitive to CO2.

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A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades

Virginie K. E. Duvall

Abstract

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.

Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories' vulnerability to climate change.

Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns.

Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations.

Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers ........

Conclusion

This review first confirms that over the past decades to century, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization by sea-level rise. The global sample considered in this paper, which includes 30 atolls and 709 islands, reveals that atolls did not lose land area, and that 73.1% of islands were stable in land area, including most settled islands, while 15.5% of islands increased and 11.4% decreased in size. Atoll and island areal stability can therefore be considered as a global trend.

Importantly, islands located in ocean regions affected by rapid sea-level rise showed neither contraction nor marked shoreline retreat, which indicates that they may not be affected yet by the presumably negative, that is, erosive, impact of sea-level rise. Second, this review reaffirms that atoll island areal change was mainly influenced by island size. While the smallest islands (less thgan 5 ha, 52.90% of islands) exhibited contrasting areal changes (i.e., stability, increase, or decrease in size) and highly variable values of areal change (from −22.7 to +125.5%), the islands larger than 5 ha (47.10% of islands) generally experienced areal and positional stability.

It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size, making this value a relevant threshold to define atoll island areal stability. We therefore propose to use this threshold, first, to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy or exploitation, and second, to assess atoll and atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Using this threshold for future island development (e.g., resort island) would considerably limit the risk for new developments to be negatively affected by island areal and positional instability, on condition of also avoiding any human intervention that may alter island sediment budget (e.g., sediment extraction) and natural dynamics (e.g., obstruction of sediment transport and deposition by constructions). In addition, the physical instability of small islands (less than 10 ha) suggests that atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to sea-level rise is inversely proportional to the size of the islands composing them. This for example means that the Republic of Maldives (mainly composed of small islands) is, from a geomorphic perspective, more vulnerable to climate change than the French Tuamotu Archipelago (made up of larger islands).

Assessing atolls’ and atoll countries’ vulnerability to climate change using this threshold would offer a first comprehensive overview of atoll status and of atoll countries’ needs in terms of adaptation to climate change. Because they are the most vulnerable, atolls (at the national scale) and atoll countries (at the global scale) having small islands should be the focus of monitoring and assessment activities, and of adaptation efforts.

Third, this paper confirms the highly dynamic nature of some specific atoll island features, such as sand and gravel spits, island extremities, beaches, hoa shores, and ancient hoa areas, which exhibited marked areal and positional changes over the past decades. These changes occurred over short (i.e., several years) to multidecadal timescales, depending on the climate drivers involved (e.g., short term ENSO-influenced beach changes vs. multidecadal shoreline smoothing and spit extension).

The highly dynamic nature of these features indicates the continuous adjustment of island shores to climatic conditions, which in turn implies that it is imperative to limit as much as possible human interventions that may destabilize the fragile equilibrium of such islands. This once again emphasizes the crucial need for a better consideration of island dynamics in development
projects.

Fourth, this paper shows that over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited highly contrasting behaviors across ocean basins and subregions. No distinct regional (i.e., scale of ocean basins or ocean subregions) or subregional (i.e., scale of atoll groups) profiles emerge from this global review. In some cases, nearby atolls exhibited contrasting behaviors, for example, a majority of expanding vs. a majority of contracting islands, or opposite behaviors of their leeward and/or windward sides.

Likewise, within a given atoll, nearby islands and island shorelines (either ocean-facing, or lagoon-facing) commonly experienced opposite behaviors. The patterns of atoll island planform change are resolutely atoll- and even in some cases island-specific.

This conclusion suggests that the atoll and island “shadow effects” (Andrefouët et al., 2012), which contribute to the contrasting responses of nearby atolls and islands to rather similar climatic conditions, play a major role in explaining the contrasting behaviors of atolls, atoll sides, islands and island shorelines, within a given atoll group.

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The UN’s Terrifying, But Ever-Receding, Human-Caused Climate Catastrophe

By Caleb Rossiter

Just in time for Halloween, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another in a 30-year stream of spooky stories: Global Warming of 1.5 Degree Celsius, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Like its five predecessors, it makes terrifying predictions about human-caused climate catastrophes that are always just about to occur, unless governments reduce the level of the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its current four-hundredths of one percent to the three hundredths it was before industrialization.

Notice that the title chosen by the UN gives the game away. It presents correlation as causation by implying that all the warming since pre-industrial times has been caused by industry. There’s no room here for a natural oscillation back from the well-documented lows of the 1700s, which themselves were rebounds from a higher temperature period in the 1400s.  (See this NOAA chart).

So how will the UN engender so much fear that the public will agree to stop using fossil-fueled electricity to halt “climate change?” After all, the phrase in itself is benign and natural. With enough repetition as images of hurricanes play on the screen, however, climate change has come to be short-hand for fossil-fueled, civilization-threatening storms, droughts, and destruction of coastal cities and islands, a dubious hypothesis on which we are hilariously told “the debate is over.”

For years I assigned statistics students to pick any apocalyptic climate claim in the media and trace it back through the UN reports to its genesis in a scientific study. I knew they would discover that these reports are not scientific documents based on the peer review process, but political documents “approved by governments” and intended to scare the public into supporting constraints on the production and use of energy.

 A powerful publicity machine magnifies the alarm, bombarding citizens with exaggerations and claims of certainty that are proven wrong as you dig down to their underlying scientific studies:

·      Public figures, news editors, and commentators make claims that are more alarmist than what individual IPCC authors say at the release of the report.

·      Individual IPCC authors make claims at the release of the report that are more alarmist than what the official press release says.

·      The official press release makes claims that are more alarmist than what the report’s summary for policy-makers says.

·      The summary for policy-makers makes claims that are more alarmist than the various chapters of the reports.

·      The chapters of the report make claims that are more alarmist than the studies they reference in the footnotes.

The studies referenced in the footnotes are often actually peer-reviewed and generally make cautious claims about a possible trend spotted in one or a small number of locations or in a global computer model.

Both types of studies are more speculative than definitive because, as they always acknowledge in the fine print, they are based on highly-uncertain measurements of highly-complex phenomena with many interacting causes, of which warming gasses generated by human activity are only one, and often a minor component.

For governments to make policy on such a hierarchy of exaggeration brings to mind James Madison’s warning: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”

The serial release of UN reports obscures the fact that the climate catastrophes they predict never occur. As the data contained deep in the bowels of this latest report again acknowledge, Mother Nature is simply not cooperating with the UN There has been no positive trend in hurricanes, floods, and droughts as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.

Even the average global temperature (whose rise is supposed to increase disasters) has barely budged, only rising a third of the amount that has been repeatedly been predicted by the IPCC computer models.

Sea levels, which are very difficult to measure due to human use of land and even to the natural rise and fall of land itself, chugs along at the same inch-per-decade that it has for thousands of years – not the terrifying 10 feet in a century warned about in previous reports. The islands and polar ice that we were repeatedly told would be gone by now are still there, and no closer to destruction.

The UN’s response to its failed predictions is simply to move the goal-posts, and make new dire predictions for some future date – in this case 2030.  There is no reason to believe that this speculation will be any more accurate the ones that predicted human-induced climate catastrophes by certain dates, now passed.

But don’t be too frightened: the same governments who authorize the UN reports never take the steps needed to reduce the supposedly horrifying carbon dioxide level. Hidden behind their teeth-chattering fear of fossil fuels is their awareness that oil, gas, and coal have helped bring dramatic improvements in health, welfare, and life expectancy, and that alternative methods of generating power are currently available only at unacceptable economic (and hence political) cost. 

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DELINGPOLE: No, Vegetarianism Won’t Save the World from ‘Climate Change’

Vegetarians and vegans have been getting very uppity of late. One reason for this is that some idiot told them they hold the key to saving the world.

According to the (rampantly vego-loon) Humane Society “your diet could save the planet”.

According to Yvo de Boer, the former head of the UN climate agency, “the best solution would be for us all to become vegetarian.”

And according to George Monbiot in the Guardian: “The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy”.

All this nonsense has gone to the grass-eaters’ nutritionally-challenged heads.  Instead of being a bunch of pale, anaemic, meat-shunning losers who have to keep taking vitamin B12 to stop themselves being blown over every time they go for a walk in their plastic shoes, they have now convinced themselves that they are like Frodo, Neo from the Matrix, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter all rolled into one.

Why do they believe this rubbish?

Because if you only read the left-wing media, as vegans do, all you ever get to see is hysterical drivel like this (from one of the house eco-loons in the Guardian):

Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses.

Even formerly conservative newspapers have fallen for this nonsense. According to columnist Bryony Gordon in the Guardiangraph (formerly the Telegraph), the reason “we” dislike and fear vegans is that we know in our hearts that they are right:

We know that adopting a vegan lifestyle is better not just for our bodies but also for the planet; we are aware that the harvesting of animals for our convenience could one day kill us all.

I’m trying to envisage a scenario in which “the harvesting of animals for our convenience” could ever kill us all. Bacon poisoning? Cows and pigs and chickens accidentally breeding with sharks or polar bears and stalking us like clucking, mooing, oinking velociraptors? I don’t know what Bryony is eating right now but whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t involve enough of the meat we all need to stop us from turning into vegetables.

Basically, Bryony and all the other hacks that have bought into this bollocks are being played. Man-made global warming theory is a busted flush so, in order to keep the scam going, the climate industrial complex has been desperately seeking new ways to bolster its Enron-style business model. One of these is to use veggies and vegans as their useful idiots to keep the climate scare going.

In fact, if we all went veggie or vegan it would make next to no difference to the climate. As Bjorn Lomborg, himself a vegetarian, points out here, the claim is based on cherry-picked data.

Almost all articles on this topic suggest going vegetarian could achieve emission cuts of 50 percent or more. But these figures are never a reduction of total emissions, just those emitted from food. This is an important distinction because four-fifths of emissions are being ignored. The real impact is five times less.

Anyway, a systematic peer review of studies shows vegetarian diets likely reduce an individual’s emissions by the equivalent of 540 kg (1,190 lbs.) of CO2. For the average person in the industrialized world, that’s the equivalent of cutting emissions by just 4.3 percent.

Vegetarian diets are also slightly cheaper, and saved money will be spent on goods and services that emit more CO2. A new Swedish study shows a vegetarian diet is 10 percent cheaper, freeing up about 2 percent of an individual’s budget. The extra money would likely be spent proportionally on existing purchases.

This boosts one’s carbon emissions by about 2 percent. So eating carrots instead of steak means you effectively cut your emissions by about 2 percent. This won’t save the planet.

Lomborg’s article triggered two researchers at Cambridge University, who quibbled with his statistics because, obviously, being at joyless, Cromwellian, tofu-munching Cambridge, they didn’t suit their green narrative.

To get an idea of where they are coming from, read — or cringe, rather, at — this paragraph:

However, poorer countries stand to benefit from widescale adoption of a plant-based diet. Mortality linked to strokes, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer could fall by 5m to 6m avoided deaths and trillions of dollars could be saved in healthcare costs and by preventing productivity losses.

Here are two Cambridge PhD students trying to tell us, straightfaced, what they think is best for the poorest, most nutritionally deficient countries in the world, where starvation is a way of life and where meat is almost never an option. More calories, maybe? A bit of animal protein now and again? Nope. What these countries could really benefit from, according to these deluded prigs, is a “plant-based diet.” (Just like they’ve got already whether they like it or not. So that’s handy, isn’t it?)

So in order to reduce global CO2 emissions by an amount so small it’s barely noticeable, a bunch of salad munching eco-fascists want us to abandon the following: t-bone steaks; foie gras; calves liver with onions; hamburgers; bacon, sausage and eggs; Thai green chicken curry; Rogan Josh; roast shoulder of lamb; shepherd’s pie; beef casserole; Wiener schnitzel; fish and chips; kedgeree; pulled pork; I could go on…

I speak with some feeling on this issue because I am myself currently enduring a vegan diet for medical reasons. Do you have any idea how boring a vegan diet is? Very, very, very, very, VERY boring indeed, whatever gleaming-eyed advocates of “plant-based” food may tell you. Food without butter or cheese or meat or eggs in the ingredients isn’t really food at all, I’ve decided.

So when my diet comes to an end, round about Christmas, how do you think I’m going to respond if some cream-faced loon in a chunky knit sweater knocks and my door and says: “Hi I’m George Monbiot and as part of my holy mission to save the planet I’d like to invite you, yes you, to forgo your turkey and sausages and trimmings this yuletide, or EcoKwaanza as I prefer to call it…”

Well, he’s not going to get himself invited in for my homemade sloe gin and mince pies, that’s for sure.

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Hottest start to November in 13 years: Intense heatwave blasts Australia's east coast with temperatures to nudge 40 for the next three days

"Intense heatwave", bollocks!  My well-calibrated thermometer reads 33.5 on the afternon of the 5th (Monday), which is a normal summer afternoon temperature in Brisbane.  And summer onset has long been variable in Brisbane.  You get both hot and cool days rather randomly for the whole November/December period

The east coast of Australia is expected to battle high temperatures and humid conditions for two more days before a cold front moves in.

South-east Queensland is anticipated to feel the brunt of the heat, with temperatures nudging towards 40C on Monday and Tuesday.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the temperature in Ipswich, south-east Queensland, will hit 39C on Monday.

The Bureau also upgraded their heatwave forecast to 'extreme' for south-east Queensland over the next three days.

According to the Courier Mail, south-east Queensland has experienced the hottest start to November since 2005. 

Senior Meteorologist at Weatherzone Jacob Cronje said conditions are expected to be 'uncomfortable' in Queensland in the coming days due to unrelenting humid conditions.

'It looks like for Brisbane itself, the CBD, we are looking at temperatures in the low to mid 30s, each day until Wednesday before cooler weather arrives from the south, that'll also impact New South Wales before that,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Adding to the uncomfortable conditions, Mr Cronje said: 'It is an extended spell of heat and with that, evenings are unlikely to cool below 20C.'

The cool change is anticipated to begin on Tuesday night, as cold weather arrives from the south, hitting New South Wales first and arriving in Queensland on Thursday.

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