GWPF Newsletter: Weak Solar Activity And La Nina May Cool Global Temperatures In Months Ahead

Germany To Open Another New Coal Power Plant

In this newsletter:

1) Weak Solar Activity And La Nina May Cool Global Temperatures In Months Ahead
No Tricks Zone, 13 December 2017
 
2) New Paper Questions Paris Agreement’s Dubious Temperature Limits
Global Warming Policy Forum, 14 December 2017

 
3) FOI Emails: Disney Rejected Obama Proposal To Use ‘Frozen’ Characters To Push Climate Agenda
The Hill, 12 December 2017
 
4) Climate Change Activists Used ‘Arbitrary’ Adjustments To Exaggerate Sea Level Rise, Scientists Claim
Daily Mail, 14 December 2017
 
5) Global Agricultural Boom: A Million Thanks To Climate Change
Vijay Jayaraj, The Patriot Post, 12 December 2017
 
6) Germany To Open Another New Coal Power Plant
Reuters, 7 December 2017
 
7) Fracking Protesters ‘Fake Police Injuries For The Tv Cameras’
The Times, 14 December 2017

Full details:

1) Weak Solar Activity And La Nina May Cool Global Temperatures In Months Ahead
No Tricks Zone, 13 December 2017

By Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated and edited by P Gosselin)

In November the sun was unusually quiet with respect to activity. The observed sunspot number (SSN) was merely 5.7, which is only 14% of what is typically normal for month number 108 into the cycle. The current cycle number 24 began in December 2008. The sun was completely spotless 19 of 30 days in November.

At the end of the month some activity appeared, but only at a very low level. The following chart depicts the current cycle’s activity:


Figure 1: The monthly SSN values for the current solar cycle 24 (red) 108 months into the cycle, the curve for the mean of the previous 23 cycles (blue), and the similar solar cycle number 5 (black).

The next chart shows a comparison of all observed solar cycles thus far:


Figure 2: The monthly accumulated anomalies of the cycles up to 108 months into the cycle. Cycle number 24 has taken third place for the most inactive.

The situation thus remains unchanged: such a weak solar cycle has not been witnessed in 200 years. It is anticipated with quite high certainty that also the upcoming solar cycle number 25 will be about as weak, because the sun’s polar fields are about as strong as they were during the minimum between cycle number 23 and cycle number 24.

The very weak solar north pole so far has recovered significantly over the past few months since June. What this means now and for the future can be seen graphically at the chart posted here. You can find the latest information at www.solen.info/solar.

LaNina is here

An update to our last post here is surely of interest. We were sure of a La Nina by the end of December, and in the meantime the Australian Bureau of Meteorology officially announced a La Nina in its most recent bulletin. The current model forecast shows continued falling sea surface temperatures along the equatorial eastern Pacific until about February, 2018:


Figure 3: The model for El Nino/La Nina in the Pacific, Source: NOAA. All forecasts point to a moderately strong La Nina event until spring. A powerful La Nina such as the one observed in 2011/12 is currently not projected by the models (which incidentally did not even forecast a La Nina just a few months ago).

Full post

2) New Paper Questions Paris Agreement’s Dubious Temperature Limits
Global Warming Policy Forum, 14 December 2017

New study puts the 1.5°C and 2.0°C temperature limits of the Paris Agreement into a historical climate context

The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 during the COP21 climate conference stipulates that the increase in the global average temperature is to be kept well below 2°C above “pre-industrial levels” and that efforts are pursued to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above “pre-industrial levels.”

Closer inspection of the treaty text, however, reveals that the term “pre-industrial levels” is nowhere defined in this epochal UN-document, that has meanwhile been ratified by 170 Parties. This is particularly odd because the “pre-industrial” temperatures of the past 10,000 years have varied quite significantly, as meticuloulsy documented by hundreds of paleoclimate studies.

Puzzled by this apparent gap in the Agreement, Fritz Vahrenholt went out and researched the history of the temperature limit definition. The former renewable energy manager and current head of the German Wildlife Foundation was surprised to find that the initial description of this important climate goal dates back to the mid 1970s, proposed by an economist, by the name of William Nordhaus.

Nordhaus’ idea was as simple as effective: He looked at the maximum temperatures recorded during the past several hundred thousand years and warned that this natural range should not be exceeded in the future. Two decades later, in 1995, the German Advisory Council for Global Change further refined this concept, but kept Nordhaus’ original idea of a tolerable ‘temperature window’.

Vahrenholt: “Unfortunately this important palaeoclimatological perspective was lost in subsequent key papers on the subject that paved the way to the Paris Agreement. Reports by the World Bank and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2014 and 2015 narrowed their view to the last 200 years which does not do justice to the enormous natural temperature fluctuations on a multi-millennial perspective.”

In order to better understand the complex pre-industrial temperature history of the past, Vahrenholt teamed up with Sebastian Lüning, a professional resources geologist who in his sparetime works on paleoclimatological studies with the Switzerland-based Institute for Hydrography, Geoecology and Climate Sciences. Lüning researched the literature and integrated the Paris Agreement 2.0°C and 1.5°C temperature limits into the climate development of the past 2000, 10,000 and 120,000 years.

Lüning: “Comparing the modern warming to reference levels at the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago does not really make much sense because this period represents one of the coldest times of the past 10,000 years. The choice of a baseline near the lower extreme of a variable parameter is uncommon in science. The temperature level that was reached during the interval 1940-1970 may serve as a better reference level because it appears to roughly correspond to the average pre-industrial temperature of the past two millennia.”

On an even longer time scale, it is found that current temperatures have not yet even exceeded the warmest temperatures of a natural warm phase that globally occurred some 7000 years ago, the so-called ‘Holocene Thermal Maximum’. Global temperatures may have even partly exceeded the 1.5°C limit during this warm phase, when combined land and sea surface temperatures are taken into account. The increase in this natural temperature window and the baseline shift potentially enlarges the headroom for the 1.5°C temperature limit of the Paris Agreement which deserves further study.

Nevertheless, the two researchers caution that the upper ceiling of the 2°C limit is not affected by this, because it is represented by the even warmer climate of the last Interglacial, some 120,000 years ago. The 2°C limit therefore remains valid, especially because sea level was 5-7 m higher than today during this time, which would have serious consequences for modern life if repeated today.

The study that was published on 12 December 2017 in the journal ‘frontiers in Earth Science’ reminds policymakers, scientists and the public that the “pre-industrial” times cited in the Paris Agreement involve a dynamic alternation of warm and cold phases which need to be viewed in context. The Little Ice Age that ended around 1850 AD does not represent a suitable reference level for the 20^th and early 21^st century warming as it fails basic scientific baseline criteria.

Paper:
Lüning, S., F. Vahrenholt (2017): Paleoclimatological context and reference level of the 2°C and 1.5°C Paris Agreement long-term temperature limits. Frontiers in Earth Science, 12 December 2017, doi: 10.3389/feart.2017.00104

Media contact:
Dr. habil. Sebastian Lüning
Institute for Hydrography, Geoecology and Climate Sciences, Ägeri, Switzerland
luening@ifhgk.org
Tel.: 00351-961 470 494

3) FOI Emails: Disney Rejected Obama Proposal To Use ‘Frozen’ Characters To Push Climate Agenda
The Hill, 12 December 2017

Emails unearthed by The Hill show Disney’s leadership was frustrated and annoyed by an Obama administration official’s public statements suggesting it was considering using characters in the popular film “Frozen” to teach children about climate change.



Robert Papp, a State Department official, spoke twice in 2015 about the possibility of Disney agreeing to let the department use Olaf the snowman and other characters from the film as part of an effort to warn about the dangers of global warming.

Disney officials felt they had previously closed the discussion at a meeting in the fall of 2014 with Papp, the State Department’s envoy for the Arctic.

“We felt Admiral Papp misrepresented the informational meeting that was held at Disney in October of last year,” a Disney employee wrote to State, according to documents obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The name of the Disney official writing the email has been redacted, though Paul Baribault, the senior vice president of marketing for Disney, had met with Papp in November 2014. Other emails in the chain obtained by The Hill are signed by a “Paul.”

“It is frustrating to see these types of comments continue,” the Disney employee wrote to Erin Robertson, a State public affairs officer who worked for Papp, in the March 12, 2015, email.

Robertson emailed back to the Disney official that a reporter at a Washington, D.C., event had asked about the issue. Robertson said the question “put the Admiral on the spot” and “it would have been very difficult for him to avoid answering.”

The Disney employee then reiterated the company’s dissatisfaction.

“It’s too bad he felt the need to say that he’s continuing discussions with Disney when that simply hasn’t been the case,” the employee said, adding that what he said “is a mischaracterization of the situation” and “happens to be untrue.”

Full story

4) Climate Change Activists Used ‘Arbitrary’ Adjustments To Exaggerate Sea Level Rise, Scientists Claim
Daily Mail, 14 December 2017

Earlier this year, climate-change activists claimed that there had been a dramatic increase in the sea level in the Indian Ocean. But a new study suggests that this may not be the case, and that the activists’interpretation of data may have been based on ‘arbitrary’ adjustments.

Researchers have now reinterpreted the data, and claim that the Indian Ocean in fact has seen a steady, gentle rise in sea level.

THE STUDY

The Permanent Service of Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) collected raw data from three key sea level recording sites at Aden in Yemen, Karachi in Pakistan, and Mumbai in India.

The PSMSL interpreted this data to suggest that there had been a dramatic increase in sea level in the Indian Ocean.

But the researchers suggest that the PSMSL only uses higher sea level readings from the raw data, and discounts readings that show lower sea levels.

This caused their readings to suggest there had been a dramatic increase instead of a gentle rise in sea level.

The researchers used non-aligned data to reconstruct the most likely pattern of sea levels in the Indian Ocean.

They wrote: ‘Without arbitrary alignment of data, Aden exhibits very stable sea level conditions like those in Mumbai, India and Karachi, Pakistan, without any significant sea level trend.’

Dr Albert Parker and Dr Clifford Ollier, researchers at the University of Western Australia, are questioning measurements made by the Permanent Service of Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).

The PSMSL collected raw data from three key sea level recording sites at Aden in Yemen, Karachi in Pakistan, and Mumbai in India.

The PSMSL interpreted this data to suggest that there had been a dramatic increase in sea level in the Indian Ocean.

But in the new study, the researchers suggest that the PSMSL only uses higher sea level readings from the raw data, and discounts readings that show lower sea levels.

This caused their readings to suggest that there had been a dramatic increase instead of a gentle rise in sea level.

In their study, published in Earth Systems and Environment, the researchers wrote: ‘Properly examined data from tide gauges and other sources such as coastal morphology, stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, archaeological remains, and historical documentation indicate a lack of any alarming sea level rise in recent decades for all the Indian Ocean.’

Full story

5) Global Agricultural Boom: A Million Thanks To Climate Change
Vijay Jayaraj, The Patriot Post, 12 December 2017

Global cereal (grain) production has reached record levels in 2017. Credit for the increase usually goes to agrochemicals and other advanced agricultural technology. However, there are two other key contributors — carbon dioxide and climate change.

World cereal production for 2017 is projected to reach 2,613.3 million tons, 5.8 million tons above 2016’s level and nearly one-fourth higher than 2008’s. Despite population growth, production per capita rose 13 percent over the last decade, from 0.31 to 0.35 tons per person.

Production of all the world’s staple food crops — such as rice, wheat, and other coarse grains like millet — has risen in the past decade.

Comparison with the period before 2008 is even more startling.

The global food production index — an index of crops considered edible and nutritious — has risen steadily in the past six decades. Doubling from 1983 to 2008, it grew more than twice as fast as population and has continued to rise.

Rice production, for example, rose almost 30 percent from 361.33 million tons in 1990 to around 506.5 million in 2017.

Yet climate alarmist scientists, politicians, and mainstream media claim that climate change would hinder global agricultural production.

There are two key reasons their claims are false — exaggeration of climate change and misconceptions regarding the biological impact of carbon dioxide.

The change in global average temperature has in fact been beneficial to life during the past 2,000 years.

Global temperatures during the Roman Warm Period (around 0 A.D.) and the Medieval Warm Period (around 1000 A.D.) greatly aided human life by enhancing crop growth. The Modern Warm Period we are experiencing is in fact very similar to these earlier warm periods.

Global agricultural production suffered only during cold periods, including the Little Ice Age, which ended around the late 18th or early 19th century.

Since the 1800s, the earth has been warming — returning to levels ideal for crop production. It is remarkable that the mainstream media can claim that temperatures are killing crops when they have actually contributed to exponential growth of crop yields.

A second major reason for unprecedented growth in global vegetation, including crop yields, has been the increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere during the past few centuries.

Increasing carbon dioxide has been a major driver of plant growth since the Little Ice Age.

It contributed roughly $3.2 trillion worth of crop yield in 1960–2011 and can be expected to contribute another $9.8 trillion by 2050.

Full post

6) Germany To Open Another New Coal Power Plant
Reuters, 7 December 2017

German utility Uniper will start up its Datteln IV hard-coal fired power station in the fourth quarter of 2018, it said in slides for an analyst and investor call on Thursday, having previously planned to start it in the first half 2018.
 

The Datteln IV coal power plant will start up in 2018

The 1,050 megawatts plant in western Germany has been held up for years by intense legal battles with environmentalists as Germany seeks to move away from coal-fired electricity long-term.

Full post

7) Fracking Protesters ‘Fake Police Injuries For The TV Cameras’
The Times, 14 December 2017
Ben Webster

Ambulance staff have accused anti-fracking protesters of faking injuries and making false allegations of police brutality in publicity stunts aimed at preventing drilling for shale gas.



An activist is carried off by police at the Lancashire fracking site. Ambulance staff said that others were inventing injuries KRISTIAN BUUS/IN PICTURES VIA GETTY IMAGES

North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) was called out ten times in July to attend to protesters outside a site near Blackpool where Cuadrilla intends to carry out hydraulic fracturing of wells.

Graham Curry, the ambulance service’s area manager, said that seven of the protesters refused to go to hospital and were found to have no injuries or illnesses.

In an email seen by The Times he wrote: “I can say that the seven cases who refused seemed to be more for effect and the cameras rather than for any clinical need.”

He added that in another incident, on August 1, a protester claimed that his neck had been broken by the police. When crews arrived he became “very aggressive” towards them, prompting Mr Curry to attend.

“I found the patient was walking around and swearing at my paramedics and me. He refused to go to hospital,” he added in the email, sent to the office of Clive Grunshaw, police and crime commissioner for Lancashire.

He said protests that blocked the main road beside the fracking site had delayed ambulances responding to genuine emergencies in a nearby village on at least two occasions.

Full story

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.