- Not only does the IPCC not want to talk about global greening, their models get the role of plants in the global carbon cycle woefully wrong. A new study which was published in Nature magazine (never a good sign but we’ll tell you about it anyway) looked at the question of how much CO2 plants gobble up very year. The standard estimate of 120 Petagrams annually was put out in the 1980s and everyone stuck with it thereafter, confidently building all the estimates of the global carbon cycle around it and presenting them in IPCC reports, among many other places in which the settled science is handed down to the masses. But then someone had the bright idea of checking the numbers and using new satellite technologies to estimate the amount from scratch. They found plants actually take up about 157 Petagrams of CO2 each year, 31 percent more than expected. Oops. The authors acknowledge that this is going to change estimates of future atmospheric CO2 levels and climate projections too, though they don’t speculate in what way. But we can guess: it’s worse than the settled science had settled on. It always is.
- “Warming at twice the global average” is the go-to phrase for alarmists wanting to scare you into thinking that your country/town/street is in exceptional trouble (see our previous comments here and here etc.) But what does the IPCC say about it? In the process of looking for what they had to say about global greening, or felt they had not to, we found this gem in the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (p. 9): “Since the pre-industrial period, the land surface air temperature has risen nearly twice as much as the global average temperature (high confidence).” Exactly. Comparatively little warming has happened over the oceans, and since the oceans cover 70% of the Earth surface, the land surface has warmed by about twice as much as the combined land+ocean average. Your country is warming twice as fast as the global average not because it’s special but because it’s on land.
- Is warming accelerating? A new study in Nature Communications says no. Which is a bit surprising because there were two strong El Niño events after 2016 and then the Hunga-Tonga volcano erupted pushing lots of water vapour into the atmosphere, but when the statistical savants did their number crunching they found that, yes temperatures went above trend but no, the trend itself did not change.
- Roger Pielke Jr. has published part II of his expose on the “tactical” science behind extreme weather attribution. (We discussed Part I here.) In it he discusses the formation of a new panel of the US National Academy of Sciences tasked with looking into the technical basis of weather attribution. Good news, right? After all, surely this eminent and trustworthy institution can be relied upon to examine the science carefully and the data and offer some sound guidance on this controversial subject. Except that, as Pielke Jr. points out, the committee has accepted cash sponsorship by both the Bezos Earth Fund and a wealthy donor to a climate activist group (yes the NAS accepts sponsorships), a leading figure in the World Weather Attribution advocacy group will sit on the NAS panel, as will a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists “Science Hub for Climate Litigation” action committee, and its first meeting will feature a presentation by a lawyer heavily involved in filing climate liability nuisance suits. Add the National Academy of Sciences to the list of public institutions complaining that the public doesn’t trust it anymore even as they make a bonfire of their reputation.
- Meteorologist Chris Martz has a post on X going over the numbers on Greenland ice loss. In response to a post from someone else howling that the Greenland ice sheet “is losing around 30 MILLION tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis – 20% MORE than what scientists originally thought” (caps in original) so we have to “Stopfossilfuels” pronto (and so much for the settled science), Martz patiently goes through the calculations. He shows that, even though 30 million seems like an enormous number, at that rate it would take 11,035 years for the ice cap to melt, and in the meantime Greenland will contribute about seven-tenths of a mm per year to sea level rise, or 1 foot every 417 years. Not a reason to panic, unless you enjoy panicking.
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Science notes in passing
27 Nov 2024 | Science Notes
