YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE TO CLIMATE CHANGE WEEKLY.
IN THIS ISSUE:
- No, Melting Greenland Ice Is Not About to Swamp Coastal Areas
- Podcast of the Week: Some States Fight Crazy Energy Policies, Others Embrace Them (Guest: Tim Benson)
- Arctic Glacier Extent Greater Now Than In The Past
- Texas Fights Woke Investing
- Video of the Week: Insane Cost of Replacing an Electric Vehicle Battery Exposed
- BONUS Video of the Week: Why a Dud Hurricane Season … So Far?
- Climate Comedy
- Recommended Sites
No, Melting Greenland Ice Is Not About to Swamp Coastal Areas
A study published in Nature Climate Change in late August claimed anthropogenic climate change has already committed approximately 3.3 percent of the Greenland ice sheet to melting—approximately 110 trillion tons of ice. By itself, that would cause nearly a foot of global sea-level rise, the article stated. Even worse, the researchers estimate if the high-period ice loss experienced across 2011 through 2012 were to resume and continue throughout the end of the century, the ice melt could be 185 percent greater, with a correspondingly bigger sea level rise.
Corporate media outlets were quick to hype the extreme outlier projections of this single study. CBS News, CNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, to name just a few, gave the report prominent, alarmingly headlined coverage.
As with so many frightening climate claims, in the words of Carl Sagan (which were a restatement of Pierre-Simon Laplace), “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
The study and the news stories hyping it definitely lack extraordinary evidence. Hard data backing up the claim of alarming amounts of Greenland ice melt driving increasing rates of sea level rise is absent, probably because such data does not exist.
As my colleague meteorologist Anthony Watts pointed out in a Climate Realism article addressing The Washington Post’s story about the Nature Climate Change study, all the scenarios in the report were based on computer model projections, and such projections have been consistently wrong in the past. This is not surprising: the models themselves have fatal flaws that make their projections untrustworthy:
One of the favorite scare stories that has continued to circulate about effects of climate change is the never-ending alarm over future sea level rise. Back in 1989, when today’s catch-all phrase of “climate change” was known as “global warming,” there was this prediction from the United Nations (UN) covered in an Associated Press story[:]
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
That claim voiced by the UN official was based on computer models projecting future sea levels. Obviously, the models were wrong, because [what was described in] that claim never happened. Today, 22 years past the due date, not one country, not even a city, has been “wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels.”
The projections were wrong then, and the data indicates they are almost certainly wrong now. As Watts points out, although 110 trillion tons of ice loss sounds enormous, it is a minuscule portion of the total amount of ice in Greenland’s ice sheets. In addition, weather patterns, not climate change, dominate Greenland’s ice volume and its variations over time.
As Watts notes, in a July 2021 Guardian story the paper asserted “Greenland: Enough Ice Melted on Single Day to Cover Florida in Two Inches of Water.” That amount of melting would have amounted to more glacial melting in Greenland in a single day than NASA measured in the previous three decades, which indicates the Guardian’s claim was probably grossly false. Even if true, the Guardian failed to report on the next day’s weather in Greenland, during which all that melted water refroze when the clouds returned. The water never made it to the ocean, and thus it had no effect on sea levels.
The new study cited by The Washington Post and other corporate media climate alarm flacks failed to include the influence of weather patterns, assuming instead a simple linear causation from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warming the planet to Greenland glacial melting. There is no such direct causal connection.
The same week as the model-driven study was published, data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and Denmark’s Polar Portal undermined the claims of accelerating ice loss and provided factual support for Watts’ analysis.
On August 29, Greenland posted a gain of seven billion tons of ice. This represented the largest single-day ice gain the DMI has recorded since it began keeping consistent records in 1981, more than 40 years ago. This gain was remarkable not only for the amount of ice but because it came in the waning days of the Arctic summer, when ice is usually still melting. Other data from the DMI throws further shade on Nature Climate Change for publishing the ill-considered (and as it turns out, ill-timed) study, and the media outlets that publicized the report as terrifying breaking news. It turns out, according to the DMI, Greenland’s surface ice mass balance for the 2021-2022 ice year, even before fall and winter 2022 arrive, is well above the mean average for 1981 through 2010, the 30 year period DMI uses for comparison. And that was before Greenland gained an additional seven billion tons of ice on August 29.
To be fair, one day’s ice gain or loss (take note, Guardian!) doesn’t mean Greenland won’t suffer a net loss of ice over the next century. It may, or it may not. What it does show is that there is no direct connection between human greenhouse gas emissions and Greenland’s ice mass. Also, if Greenland is losing ice on net and contributing to accelerating sea level rise, something must be offsetting it: neither tide gauge records (see also Hedke) nor satellite data indicate the rate of sea level rise over the past 200 years has been accelerating consistently around the globe.
There are plenty of problems to solve and things to worry about in the world today without adding phantom fears of rising seas swamping the coasts because of ice loss in Greenland, based on flawed computer model projections.
SOURCE: Polar Portal; Newsbusters; Electroverse; Danish Meteorological Institute; Climate Realism
Podcast of the Week
California is leading the charge on misguided energy policies that are both ineffective at protecting the environment and markedly anti-consumer. Other states such as Florida and Texas are doing the opposite, fighting back against energy policies and corporate efforts, such as ESG programs, that hurt residents. Floridians and Texans will benefit while California’s residents watch their energy and transportation systems become less secure. People’s lives are being put at risk.
Both corporations and the government must not be allowed to force investment decisions on people. Blocking these anti-consumer efforts will expand freedom and economic well-being. Mandating only wind and solar removes individual choice and endangers lives.
Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
Get your Copy at Amazon TODAY!
Arctic Glacier Extent Greater Now Than In The Past
A recent study published in the journal Climate of the Past shows there are more Arctic glaciers and ice caps at present, and they extend farther and are thicker, than at several times since the end of the last ice age, contrary to what is commonly claimed.
The research indicates the Arctic was warmer than at present between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, with 80 percent to 100 percent of glaciers and ice caps (GICs) being smaller than today or absent entirely. If the research is correct, the Arctic’s modern ice extent is among the largest of the last 10,000 years, higher than even during the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods.
As No Tricks Zone reports, the paper from Laura J. Larocca and Yarrow Axford, scientists with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern University, indicates “any recession of GICs in the last few centuries is but a partial return to a former period of much greater warmth.”
The scientists’ conclusions are based on a comprehensive survey they conducted of the Arctic glaciers and ice caps near lakes and coasts in Alaska, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Svalbard, and the Russian Arctic. Larocca and Axford write,
For each region and for the full Arctic, we summarize evidence for when GICs were smaller than today or absent altogether, indicating warmer-than-present summers, and evidence for when GICs regrew in lake catchments, indicating summer cooling. … [T]he full Arctic compilation suggests that the majority (50 % or more) of studied GICs were smaller than present or absent by ∼10 ka. We find the highest percentage (>90 %) of Arctic GICs smaller than present or absent in the middle Holocene at ∼ 7–6 ka, probably reflecting more spatially ubiquitous and consistent summer warmth during this period than in the early Holocene. … Our review finds that in the first half of the Holocene, most of the Arctic’s small GICs became significantly reduced or melted away completely in response to summer temperatures that, on average, were only moderately warmer than today.
SOURCE: No Tricks Zone; Climate of the Past
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Texas Fights Woke Investing
In late August, the Texas Comptroller released a list of financial institutions in which state agencies are prohibited from investing, under a state law barring Texas government entities from stock fund management by, bank account holdings in, or brokering of bond sales with firms that boycott or call for divesting from companies involved in the oil and gas industry.
The Chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas supported the move, warning, “If you boycott Texas oil and gas, we boycott you,” according to OilPrice.
A Texas law passed in 2021 prohibiting any state agency or political subdivision of the state, such as counties and municipalities, from entering into “a qualifying contract with a value of $100,000 or more for goods and services unless the contract contains a written verification from the contracted company that it does not and will not during the contract term boycott energy companies.”
The law also directs the Texas Comptroller to “prepare and maintain, and provide to each state governmental entity, a list of all companies that boycott energy companies.” The government entities are required to warn the companies on the comptroller’s list they are on it and they have 90 days to alter their anti-fossil fuel investment strategies. If a company or fund fails to remove its policies banning investment in companies in the fossil fuel industry, the government entity “shall sell, redeem, divest, or withdraw all publicly traded securities of the company,” the law states.
Since the law has passed, several municipal bond sales initially planned for offering by banks boycotting oil and gas companies were withdrawn and offered by alternative, legally compliant financial institutions.
The firms on Texas’ blacklist of banned companies include a roster of giants in the fields of banking, investment banking, and portfolio management: some ESG funds managed by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, BlackRock (the world’s biggest asset manager), BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse Group, Danske Bank, Jupiter Fund Management, Nordea Bank, Schroders PLC, Svenska Handelsbanken, Swedbank, and UBS Group. The list of banned funds names more than 350 firms.
“My greatest concern is the false narrative that has been created by the environmental crusaders in Washington, D.C., and Wall Street that our economy can completely transition away from fossil fuels, when, in fact, they will be part of our everyday life into the foreseeable future,” Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar said in a statement announcing the list. “A complete divestment of the industry is not only impractical and illogical but runs counter to the economic well-being of Texas and our citizens.”
OilPrice reports,
The oil and gas regulator in the state, the Railroad Commission of Texas, welcomed the Comptroller’s move, [saying in a statement] that “Texas is leading the fight to curb the expansion of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement, a woke investment strategy that places a priority on subjective environmental and social metrics instead of financial metrics that ensure quality returns for investors.”
“Texas is far from the only state dealing with this issue, with the Attorney Generals [AG] of 19 states signing a letter with similar sentiment last year,” OilPrice reports, noting the states’ actions are a growing response to and rejection of the “growing trend of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment which many financial firms have embraced.”
The 19 state AGs sent a letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in early August, saying they were concerned about his publicly stated commitment to reaching net-zero emissions across all his firm’s assets.
“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” the attorney generals stated.
West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore said the Board of Treasury Investments, which manages the state’s roughly $8 billion of operating funds, announced in January 2022 the state would no longer do business with five financial institutions which he determined were working to undermine West Virginia’s economic well-being by pushing ESG and net-zero business investment: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.
“Any company that thinks Communist China is a better investment than West Virginia energy or American capitalism clearly has a bad strategy,” Moore said at the time.
SOURCE: Oil Price
Video of the Week: Insane Cost of Replacing an Electric Vehicle Battery Exposed
People think replacing the battery of an electric vehicle is as simple as a regular car. They’re wrong, but the price even surprised us.
BONUS Video of the Week: Democrats Hand Our Energy Independence to China
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted an active hurricane season earlier this year. Up until now, this hasn’t been the case, but there’s still time for this to change.
Stanley Goldenberg is on NOAA’s team that produces seasonal hurricane outlooks. He joins the program to discuss why this hurricane season was predicted to be active, what we should expect moving forwards, and how these predictions are made.
Tune in EVERY FRIDAY at noon CT for another LIVE episode of Climate Change Roundtable.
Climate Comedy
CERES data shows earth’s energy imbalance is currently quite small, less than 1 W/m2. We had a zero imbalance about 25 years ago, according to CERES, which leaves no excess energy for plants. Does anyone know how much imbalance we need to keep the plants alive? I have read that plants use 1-2% of the sunlight to grow and the earth is about 1/3 covered with plant life. That comes to about 1W/m2 or so. Does anyone have better data?
You are assuming CERES data/product is accurate.
I sourced a CO2 sensor the other day. Resolution of 1ppm. Accuracy +/- 200ppm.
It’s certainly much more accurate than land-based temperature monitoring systems. That being said, I believe the uncertainty for CERES is about +/- 0.4 W/m2.
I know a little about instrumentation. I’m also a ‘doubting Thomas’.
I can only report the accuracy that NASA claims. If you have data that shows it’s incorrect, I would love to see it.
PS: I know a little about instrumentation too.
Not interested in an argument. I’m also not interested in chasing some sort of truth about accuracy and ‘proving’ something. I simply have doubts.
It’s not clear to me what you doubt. Do you believe that NASA is lying about the accuracy of their equipment or that they have not measured it correctly? But back to the point, in a temperature-stable earth, there must be an energy imbalance or the plants die. Is that what you doubt?
CERES is a system of satellites over the years that read different things. The information is collated and algorithmed to give output in a ‘product’. The product has a claimed accuracy of +/- 0.4 W/m2.
Climate science has a habit of averaging measurements and somehow reducing error bars by claiming that a large sample size increases accuracy and decreases the size of error bars. This has been discussed numerous times on this site.
I am not a statistics person, so I don’t get involved in those conversations.
Initially, you mentioned an energy imbalance and that it was zero 25 years ago.
There is never an energy balance. Ocean turnover in various cycles that can take 1000 years, PDO, La Nina, El Nino.
As to your question about plants:
Plants don’t wait to grow because of energy balances.
They are voracious and ‘eat’ what they can get whenever they can.
I don’t know if their growth affects energy balance. They only use a small part of the visible spectrum for photosynthesis.
Nullius in verba, a good way to live in every aspect of your life.
No I will be the first to comment
Well done. You did it.
I think this winter will be the REAL tipping point, for the world to abandon green suicide. The carnage (this winter will cause in Europe without fossil fuels) might make Ukraine look like a picnic.
I figured a typical hurricane in the Gulf would really put the squeeze on energy, but look how that’s turning out. If Europe has a very mild winter after no ‘canes in the Gulf, I’m going to have to start going to church again. Someone must be saving us from our stupidity.
Again! This one never gets old here, does it?
The UN-IPCC was set up the year before 1989. Let’s talk through what the letters of the acronym stand for – again.
UN stands for ‘United Nations’.
IP stands for “Intergovernmental Panel”.
Can anyone guess what the letters “CC” stand for? This is pre-1989, remember.
Here’s a clue: it’s not “Global Warming”.
“Can anyone guess what the letters “CC” stand for?”
Coerced Collectivism?
Prove me wrong.
And of course the IPCC was concerned about “climate change” due to both natural and human causes and already had determined that it was all due to anthropogenic CO2 which was going to cause warming and cooling and droughts and floods and less snow and more snow and more and fewer more and less intense hurricanes and sea level rise and ocean acidification and crop failures due to both droughts and floods and longer growing seasons. In fact “climate change” can mean whatever they want it to mean and it only happens because of the incredible magical power of the carbon dioxide molecule. Since they started in 1989 they’ve had 33 years of research and studies that have proven that all bad weather is due to humans burning coal for electricity and driving around in vehicles powered by petroleum products. The science has been settled annually at COP meeting 26 times. When are people going to wake up and accept that we don’t deserve to occupy this poor beaten up planet?
If you don’t believe the IPCC just read Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich.
Except it said catch-all phrase, which at the time was ‘global warming’ until the earth refused to warm consistently and there were episodes of record-breaking cold. All the carbon dioxide angst is over theoretical global warming being what changes the climate.
UNICEF, originally called the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, is now officially United Nations Children’s Fund.
The emergency is over, so the name was changed and no one talks about it any more. Instead, the UN moves on to a different emergency.
Guess why starving children are no longer an emergency? (hint: modern farming employing the use of fossil fuels and fertilizers)
Don’t forget that extra carbon dioxide has made the plants grow like crazy, and grain yields have gone up tremendously. Cheaper, more plentiful food is good for pretty much everybody. Well, except for politicians and other fear mongers.
TFN, even the “global warming” term was a progression of the numerous globalist scams that Maurice Stong engineered starting in the 1960s.
Read up how many “planet saving” fronts this guy engineered.
The UN agencies were putty in his hands.
Of course Al Gore and Klaus Schwab became acolytes of Maurice’s wagon hitched to UN agencies.
The climater is always changing .
If you or any scientist really thinks that man can control the climate you and they have been duped .
It was originally global warming and the scare story was that fossil fuels were going to cook the earth .
I personalty know meteorologists that attended the first two climate conferences and they told me there was no proof that increasing CO2 was ever going to become a problem .
What we have sen in the last 35 years is very slight warming that has happened many times in past history .
They knew that the earth had been warmer than present four times in the last 12,000 years since the last major Ice Age .
There is no crisis except the man made one which is going to effect the Northern Hemisphere this coming winter when many countries will have massive power cuts as they run out of Russian Gas and also their blind idea of not stocking up on coal and refurbishing coal fired power plants
Following that food shortages will soon show up which means escalating prices and hunger in many countries .
After watching the temperatures up north and observing the behavior of the sun in Florida, my personal observation is that the next ice age is under way.
“Come on, man. We’re all going to die.” – J. Biden
”the new study…”
Stop. Just stop. Running a computer model is not a “study”. And the results of a computer run are simply calculations and not “data”.
Stop helping climate modelers ruin the language of science.
OMG but THAT needs to be pounded into the general discussion and consciousness big time.
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
That statement makes no claim that nations would be wiped off the face of the earth by 2000.
The only thing which is associated with 2000 is that the warming trend must be reversed by 2000.
We don’t need to make the same comprehension mistakes that warmistas love to do.
Wow, that makes a great prediction. So if nations get wiped off the face of the Earth in 4933 then this guy is correct?
Actually, the phrasing is ambiguous. “Let’s eat grandma.” “Let’s eat, grandma.” Punctuation matters. Does the statement paraphrase the official’s actual statement, or summarize the gist of a conversation? The year “2000” can be read either way. I can’t make out any clause dependency as the “quote” is presented. It isn’t uncommon for people to misplace the cause and effect.
Is it: “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising seal levels [by the year 2000] if the global warming trend is not reversed [by some unspecified future time].”
Or is it: “A senior U.N. environmental official says that entire nations could be wipe off the face of the earth by rising sea levels [at unspecified future time] if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
Journos being lazy.
I watch the DMI Polar Portal for Greenland Ice Surface Mass balance. I have done for years it’s quite addictive.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, my view is that even in the year of least gain which was 2011-12 there was a gain of about 25Gt. Most years there’s about 400Gt gain.
Now the DMI says:
But in all the years I’ve been looking at this, since before 2010, the loss is predominantly round the coast in the southern half of the island. I see this as a positive,meaning Viking farms will no longer be stuck in permafrost and Greenland’s gardeners will be able to get better results and grow a greater variety of plants. There may even be an opportunity for growing barley and hay, and a bit of self contained animal husbandry as their Viking predecessors did. At the same time as the snow and ice in central Greenland is increasing in depth
And the warming is SO GREAT that the number of farms in Southern Greenland is 37 or 38 depending on the source. Most are sheep farms with one cattle farm and one reindeer farm. 🙂
The area of Greenland is 836,330 sq miles, 80% of which is covered in ice
Sorry that I am a few days behind on this post. Just wanted to mention a small error in the original article, where it says:
‘On August 29, Greenland posted a gain of seven billion tons of ice. This represented the largest single-day ice gain the DMI has recorded since it began keeping consistent records in 1981, more than 40 years ago. ‘
This is not quite correct, needing a further qualifier. DMI has recorded multiple days when the gain was higher than 7billion tons of ice. An example of this was in may 2021, when 12 million were indicated on the graph. This value, the maximum possible on the chart, has appeared in other prior years as well.
The additional qualifier that is needed is to reference Summer.
They are lying to us constantly now. My house was 81 feet above sea level 20 years ago, it is 81 feet above sea level today.