Sea Levels have been Rising Slowly and Consistently Since the Little Ice Age

Much ado has been written about the accelerating melting of glaciers and sea ice, and how rising sea levels will submerge coastal cities. A study by the University of York found evidence for a period of enhanced pre-industrial sea-level rise of about 2-3 millimetres per year in three locations — Nova Scotia, Maine and Connecticut, which were largely natural, without any human constructions or man-made factors. In other words, sea levels have been slowly rising at a fairly continuous since the Little Ice Age without human influence.

Just a bit of a side note: The Little Ice Age lasted from 1300-1850. There were two phases of the Little Ice Age, the first beginning around 1290 and continuing until the late 1400s. There was a slightly warmer period in the 1500s, after which the climate deteriorated substantially, with the coldest period between 1645 and 1715. During the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age, average winter temperatures in Europe and North America were as much as 2°C lower than at present. So, warming since 1715.

At issue were studies that suggested rising sea levels were accelerating, implicating human caused climate warming. This was based on evidence collected in the noted northern east coast areas — Nova Scotia, Maine and Connecticut. Previous studies showed that, since the 1950s, rates of sea level rise along the Atlantic coast of North America were faster than the global average, leading to this region coming to be known as a sea level rise “hotspot.”

The new study speculates that observed variations (i.e. observed greater than average change) are consistent with sea‐level “fingerprints” of Arctic ice melt, and that sea‐level fluctuations are related to changes in Arctic land‐ice mass.

Lead author Prof Roland Gehrels, from the University of York’s Department of Environment and Geography, said this earlier rapid episode of sea level rise in the 18th Century (coinciding with the warming post-1715) wasn’t known before. To find out what the warming is doing to sea levels today, the team examined the base level from historical times:

“In the 20th Century, we see rates of up to three or four millimetres per year, faster than in any century in at least the last 3000 years.  In the 18th Century they were slightly slower, but still much quicker than you would expect for the Little Ice Age, partly because the Arctic was relatively warm during the 18th Century. ”

“It was a pre-industrial phenomenon, so there were no anthropogenic forces – or human influences … In the 20th Century they might have played a key role but well before industrialization, those rapid episodes of sea level rise on the north east coast of North America in the 18th Century might have been due to natural causes.”

The only clarification I would add is in the last sentence of the two paragraph quote, where Prof Gehrels says “might have been due to natural causes.” Clearly, the timing of the variations were pre-industrial, and had to have been due to natural causes.

So, yes, the climate is changing. No, the evidence does not support that the change is human-caused.

original sources: American Thinker, International Business Times

Svalbard Norway now has more polar bear habitat than it did two decades ago

Its true. There are only about 30,000 polar bears left. In 1960, there were 10,000.

From the Polar Bear Science blog: Sea ice measurements around Svalbard, Norway at the end of February 2020 is way above average, with more polar bear habitat now than there has been in two decades.

Contrary to suggestions that more Svalbard ice is better for polar bears, there is no evidence that low extent of sea ice habitat in winter or summer over the last two decades harmed polar bear health, reproductive performance, or abundance. In fact, polar bear numbers in 2015 were 42% higher than they were in 2004, and most bears were found to be in excellent condition. Read more here …

Read the climate alarmists chirp in here, including the CBC attempting to discredit the Polar Bear Science blog. Haters gonna hate.

That Deafening Silence

Regardless of one’s view on climate or any other topic, it is worth listening to and discussing different points of view. A point which falls on deaf ears amongst progressives. If you disagree with the narrative they support, then you must be silenced, censored, deplatformed, defunded, yelled at, physically attacked yada yada yada.

Advocates of this censorship, strangely enough, defend it by claiming it is Social Justice. Peter Boghossian sums it up nicely in his piece “The Illiberalism of Social Justice”:

One of the easiest ways to understand how illiberal Social Justice can be is available to anyone who attempts to criticize it. Those who criticize Social Justice are not thanked for helping to improve its tenets. Rather, they’re called bigots, homophobes, Nazis, grifters, misogynists, or, the trump card meant to silence all conversation: racists.

This is where we are at with the climate debate. Man-caused climate change skeptics in academia and research are becoming untouchables. Research funding is unavailable, and it appears that secret blacklists are being kept to make sure they are shut out of academic positions.

These are the tactics of fascists. I find it strange that there appear to be so many people sympathetic to such actions. What has happened over the last couple of generations? People need safe spaces to protect them from speech and ideas they don’t like? College campuses seem to be the worst places to get a balanced view of contentious issues. Fair enough to lock yourself in your echo chamber, but it is dangerous to society to actively enforce right-think. Truly dystopian. But, this seems to be where we are headed. Very sad.

Greenland’s Ice Sheets Gain Massively

Early in January, I wrote about the extreme cold temperatures being recorded in Greenland. Now this. Despite decades of doom-and-gloom prophecies, Greenland’s Ice Sheet is currently GAINING monster amounts of “mass”— 7 gigatons yesterday alone (Feb. 06, 2020) .

Crucial to the survival of a glacier is its Surface Mass Balance (SMB)–the difference between accumulation and ablation (sublimation and melting). Changes in mass balance control a glacier’s long-term behavior, and are its most sensitive climate indicators. Since September, 2019 –the official start of the season– SMB spikes above the 2/2.5 gigaton daily average have been a regular occurrence. In mid-Nov, the sheet gained 10 Gt in a single day. And during just the first two days of December, a 14Gt gain was registered.

This suggests there is climate change going on. But not the warming the climate alarmists crow on about. In addition to the glacier forming activity occurring in Greenland, The total snow mass for the northern hemisphere continues to track well-above average.

If you have been paying attention, solar activity, far and away the greatest influencer of climate on earth, has been on the wane. Sunspot activity, which is currently ebbing, tracks closely to climate on earth. NASA has recently revealed the upcoming solar cycle will be “the weakest of the past 200 years,” and they’ve correlated previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling.

Sunspots have long been used as a predictor of climate on earth. That activity rises and falls in 11-year cycles. The next one begins this year, and the current forecast calls for the weakest solar activity in the last 200 years. Somewhat counter-intuitively, fewer sunspots means less radiation towards earth and lower temperatures. From the mid-1600s to the early 1700s, the sun experienced a period of low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum. It corresponded to a time on Earth known as the “Little Ice Age.” i.e. icy cold temperatures across much of Europe and North America.

In all likelihood, earth has already entered into a prolonged period of cooling. So, don’t toss those mukluks just yet. You may need them for a few more decades.

And yet another climate science study scandal exposed: Ocean acidification does not impair the behavior of coral reef fish

Eight academic/scientific studies over the last few years concluded that acidification of the oceans, via absorbing excess CO2 in the atmosphere, was addling reef fishes brains and senses such that they were unable to hunt and hide, and were dieing as a result. Specifically, the studies found that high CO2 concentrations cause small reef fish to:

  • lose their ability to smell predators, and can even become attracted towards the scent of predators
  • become hyperactive
  • loose their tendency to automatically swim either left or right
  • have impaired vision

7 scientists repeated experiments documented in eight previous studies on the effect of climate change on coral reef fish to see if they were correct. They found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.

Now, researchers of the original eight studies, all done at James Cook University’s Coral Reef Centre, are being investigated for fraud and misconduct. Why does climate science fraud always go in one direction?

The Face Behind the Mask: 4chan users exploited a Facebook bug that allows users to see who runs Greta Thunberg account

Spoiler alert: its not Greta. Not a surprise that Greta is a public face and little more. Now we know for certain.

As you can see from this Twitter thread, Greta’s Facebook account is administered by a guy named Adarsh Prathap. According to his Twitter profile, Adarsh is, predictably, a “climate crisis activist.”

Here is the 4chan thread that exposes the fraud.

The Facebook bug allows you to see which profile edits (i.e. who owns the page) Facebook posts in a Facebook page. The only condition is you need to find a post which was edited. Since 4Chan outed Greta and the bug, Facebook has closed it.

update Jan 12: The plot thickened quickly. Turns out Greta’s dad, Svante Thunberg, is also editing Greta’s Facebook page. This is so funny. Turns out, surprise surprise, that the Thunbergs are just a bunch of grifters that have figured out how to cash in on the gullibility of climate alarmists. The only one that doesn’t seem to be editing it is Greta. What a laugh. What a fraud.

update Jan 18: The Swedish public has voted that climate change spending has been the biggest waste of taxpayer money in 2019, according to a poll by the Swedish Taxpayers’ Association. I guess they haven’t been reading Greta’s dad’s Fakebook ramblings.

The CO2 Greenhouse Warming Effect is an Assumption that Lacks Empirical Verification

Well, this is not a surprise. Turns out there is no empirical evidence that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere causes radiant warming. A critical assumption of IPCC consensus on CO2 concentrations is that it causes radiant heat to be retained in the upper atmosphere. This conjecture “lacks empirical confirmation.” Experiments continue to fail to show that CO2 is a factor in warming the atmosphere.

It turns out that any heat effect is due to the different density in gases. One experiment used pure (1,000,000 ppm) CO2 in one container and air (N2, O2) in another to demonstrate the CO2 container warms more than the air container. It ended up illustrating that CO2 molecules are heavier than nitrogen and oxygen molecules. Heavier CO2 molecules “reduce heat transfer by suppressing convective mixing with the ambient air.” In other words, the CO2 molecules aren’t warming the container via their radiative properties, but due to the density differential for CO2 relative to N2 and O2.

Another experiment, again using pure CO2 in a container, compared the radiative absorption properties of CO2 to that of argon, helium, and air (nitrogen and oxygen). The capacity to absorb radiation (sunlight) was found to be quite similar for CO2 and for argon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The latter 3 are non-greenhouse gases. Nitrogen and oxygen together constitute 99% of the atmosphere. Argon’s atmospheric representation is 0.93% (9,300 ppm) and CO2 is 0.041% (410 ppm).

In the experiment, the limiting absorption temperature for pure CO2 molecules wasn’t significantly different than the far more atmospherically abundant non-radiative gases. Dr Allmedinger summarizes, this means that “a significant effect of carbon-dioxide on the direct sunlight absorption can already be excluded.”

update 110320: Here is a useful primer on CO2, temperature, climate, solar activity, global greening etc. We have Nothing to Fear from CO2, by Donn Dears

update 110320: And here is a study published in Jan 2020 that concludes agricultural productivity is increasing as the CO2 level rises. So, far from CO2 is a boogie monster that will destroy the earth and humanity, it is actually hugely beneficial. How did we get here? Well, read my post below on carbon credits. Always follow the money.

update 160320: There are now more than 115 scientific studies published that conclude CO2 has little or no effect on the climate.

The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed

Looks like 2020 is turning out to be a banner year for moving climate alarmist goalposts. This is getting too easy.

Per CNN tweet: The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed. They were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, a park spokeswoman says. And in a bit of face-saving, new signs will say: “When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.”

In response, Tony Heller tweeted: Experts said Glacier National Park would be ice-free by 1948, and 1961 and 2002 and 2020 and 2044. The climate alarmist clown show never ends. https://realclimatescience.com/2018/10/ice-free-glacier-national-park-update/ …

I suspect there will be more of this. Twenty years ago, 2020 was a nice round number to hang a prediction on. Now that the future has arrived, turns out the climate apocalypse has been delayed. Yawn.

Australia Bushfires: Green Tape Prevents Volunteer Rural Firefighters from Reducing Bushfire Risk. Oh, and Australia has a Firebug Problem

The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW, refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales.

The VFFA is angered by comments from the green lobby groups that tackling climate change was more important than prescribed burning of forest fuels to reduce bushfire risk. The real blame rests with the greens and their ideology as they continue to oppose and undermine efforts to conduct hazard reduction in the cooler months and to prevent private landowners from clearing their lands to reduce bushfire risk.

The bushfires in Australia are hardly unprecedented. There have been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia, including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, according to Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA.

Read the VFFA press release here.

Listen to scientist David Packham explain that the wildfires have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with fuel-loads.

Read about Australia’s firebug problem.

… “A 2015 satellite analysis of 113,000 fires from 1997-2009 confirmed what we had known for some time – 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit, another 47 per cent accidental. This generally matches previous data published a decade earlier that about half of all fires were suspected or deliberate arson, and 37 per cent accidental. Combined, they reach the same conclusion: 87 per cent are man-made… ” — The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 19, 2019

There are, on average, 62,000 fires in Australia every year. Populated areas and satellite studies tell us that lightning is responsible for only 13 per cent. The rest, 54,000 are man-made. I wonder what is the CO2 load from those man-made fires. Climate alarmists should be all over that! “How dare you!”

Here is an amusing twitter debate on the Australian bushfires. Hothead alarmists on the thread seem more motivated by opinions without any facts to back it up, just spouting off alarmist dogma. There is quite a bit of good data presented, pretty much debunking climate hysteria relating to the Australian bushfires.

This photo in the thread says a lot. Read the protest placards. Protesters in East Gipps­land in the state of Victoria stopped a hazard-reduction burn that they said was “killing baby birds alive.” “I’m more worried about climate change,” one protesting grandmother told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. As a result, the hazard reduction was reduced to 3 percent of the area planned. Two months later, East Gippsland was burned out. I think this is a pretty good example of irony.

ABC Gippsland which originally ran the story about the protesters, deleted the article from its website after it gained notoriety on social media.

There is now tremendous blow-back in Australia as people begin to fully understand that climate change is not the cause of the bushfires. At least two decades of “green” environmental policy severely cutting backburns designed to remove fuel (i.e. wood and brush) is the true culprit. That and arson.

update 090120: Australian climate scientist Jennifer Marohasy discusses how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has deleted actual recorded temperatures, massaging with fake temperature data, and consistently fudging the data (i.e. “cooled the past”) to validate the global warming narrative. Its ClimateGate all over again (see reference below).

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming … The Legacy of Climategate

I have to admit I haven’t spent enough time fully take in this rather lengthy blog post by Judith Curry — Legacy of Climategate – 10 Years Later. (from November 2019) Mainly because it has A LOT of information about the genesis and history of climate alarmism. I have covered some of this information in my last few blog posts, but Curry’s post peels the whole onion.

Climategate is in reference to the uncovering that climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK had deleted, then fudged climate data and then lied about it, presenting climate papers to the IPCC based on this knowingly falsified data. Once outed, there was sufficient evidence and concern that five inquiries or investigations were conducted by, respectively, The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The Oxburgh panel, the Independent Climate Change Emails Review under Sir Muir Russell, Penn State University and the InterAcademy Council. The first three were established in the UK and focused on scientists at the CRU. The fourth was focused on our friend, Mr Climate Hockey Stick, Michael Mann of Penn State University. The fifth was commissioned by the IPCC itself as a review of its policies and procedures.

Curry references a paper by Ross McKitrick, Professor of Environmental Economics at Guelph University, Understanding the Climategate Inquiries. (The link is to a Word document).

The net finding of these inquiries is that there was a conspiracy and collusion to fraudulently fake and then misrepresent climate data, which coincidentally provided research-based “evidence” of global warming. Fancy that. Didn’t see that coming.

Its mind-boggling how vast this climate hysteria conspiracy is. Its not like what has been going on has been a secret. Rather it is A Big Lie. But progressives in the climate science community, aided and abetted by MSM, have succeeding in shouting down and censoring critics. Ahh, yes, the Cancel Culture, the progressive’s grim reaper, will come for anyone that challenges THE NARRATIVE. The word for that is fascism.

p.s. I did learn something very interesting in this. For his “seminal” hockey stick analysis in the mid-’90s, Michael Mann used an algorithm which mined data for hockey-stick shaped series (i.e. it specifically looked for correlations in the data which formed a hockey stick when graphed). The algorithm was so powerful that it could produce hockey-stick shaped “reconstructions” from auto-correlated red noise (i.e. randomly generated data). Mann failed to disclose the use of the algorithm for his climate work, even into 2004. Small wonder he failed to reveal the algorithm in his defamation suit in British Columbia, which he lost for failure to produce court ordered data and methodology. As a result of the loss in his defamation suit, Mann is a wholly discredited climate charlatan.

update 240120: Speaking of Mann, watch Hide The Decline: A Climategate Backgrounder. Dr. John Robson looks back on the 10th anniversary of the exposure of the scandalous “Climategate” decision to delete awkward data that contradicted the idea that settled science said we face a man-made global warming crisis. IPCC cannot be trusted. It was clearly complicit in developing and promoting Climate Alarmism to suit their agenda, not the science. Conceal data that counter their narrative, slice and dice the data to suit the narrative. Their narrative? Climate is warming and the change is man-made = climate crisis … NOT! Fake data, fraudulent science. Wake up! Video from December 6, 2019