ScienceDaily’s article, “Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming,” promotes a new Geophysical Research Letters paper claiming that global warming has entered “a faster gear” since about 2015. This is false. The authors argue that after statistically removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variability from five global surface temperature datasets, they detect a statistically significant acceleration in warming of about 0.35°C per decade over the past 10 years. But historical temperature data show a much different picture.
There is no convincing evidence that Earth’s warming has suddenly accelerated. Instead, this appears to be an exercise in statistical manipulation built upon climate modeling assumptions, presented as though it were an observational discovery.
And there’s advocacy behind the paper too, as evidenced by this quote from the paper’s co-author, climate science blogger Stefan Rahmstorf:
If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030. How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.
Science and advocacy are not a convincing combination.
The paper does not report the discovery of a new measurement. It takes existing surface temperature records, applies a statistical procedure designed to subtract what the authors consider “noise” from El Niño, volcanic aerosols, and solar variability, and then analyzes the adjusted temperatures for an acceleration signal.
In other words, the claimed acceleration appears only after the authors modify the observations. ScienceDaily presents this as though scientists have discovered a new physical phenomenon. They haven’t. They have created a new statistical product.
While that may be a perfectly legitimate scientific exercise, it should not be confused with or take precedent over direct observational evidence. In addition, to be a fair statistical comparison, they would have had to run the same analysis, “removing noise,” from past historical temperature data.
The paper acknowledges that the apparent acceleration is not statistically significant in the unadjusted data. Only after removing what the authors characterize as natural variability does the acceleration exceed their chosen confidence threshold.
That raises an obvious question: If the temperature acceleration is so obvious, why must it first be extracted mathematically via statistical methods?
Even more revealing is what the authors admit later in the paper. Their adjustment for El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar influences is “empirically based, but approximate and imperfect,” and they acknowledge that the influence of the powerful 2023-2024 El Niño may not have been completely removed. Those are important caveats, and ScienceDaily barely mentions them.
Instead, readers are told that global warming has “shifted into overdrive” and that warming has accelerated with more than 98 percent statistical certainty. That makes for a dramatic headline, but statistical confidence in a chosen analytical method is not the same thing as confirmation that the climate system itself has fundamentally changed.
The paper also leans heavily on climate models. ScienceDaily notes that the observed acceleration is considered “consistent” with current climate models, while the journal paper likewise states that such acceleration is expected under standard global warming scenarios and falls within the range of model predictions.
That should immediately raise skepticism.
Climate models are hypotheses expressed as computer code. They are useful research tools, but they are not measurements. Their value depends on how well they match the real world. Using model expectations to validate statistical adjustments derived from observations risks becoming a circular exercise, i.e. “junk science.” As importantly, models consistently fail, without adjustment, to accurately portray past and present temperatures. If models don’t get past and present temperatures right, consistently overstating measured warming, no one should trust their projections of the future or base predictions upon their outputs.
If the question is whether global warming has accelerated, perhaps the first place to look should be the atmosphere itself. The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) satellite temperature record provides one of the world’s longest continuous measurements of lower-tropospheric temperature using microwave sounding instruments carried aboard satellites. The UAH team has maintained this record since 1979, producing a globally consistent dataset that measures the bulk atmosphere rather than relying on a patchwork of imperfect and biased surface weather stations.
The latest UAH global temperature time series, seen below, tells a very different story from the one presented by ScienceDaily.
The graph accompanying the July 2026 report shows that lower-troposphere temperatures surged during the recent El Niño, peaked in 2024, and have since declined noticeably. The current anomaly remains above the long-term average, but the sharp rise that fueled so many alarming headlines has subsided. The short-term trajectory is downward, not upward.
That does not prove that global warming has ended. Neither does it support headlines claiming that warming has suddenly accelerated into a new phase.
Instead, it illustrates something climate scientists have long recognized: global temperatures fluctuate considerably from year to year because of natural variability, particularly from El Niño and La Niña events. A few unusually warm years following a strong El Niño are not, by themselves, evidence that the long-term warming rate has permanently changed.
Ironically, even the paper cited by ScienceDaily acknowledges this uncertainty. The authors explicitly state that they are not identifying the physical cause of the claimed acceleration and concede that whether such rapid warming continues “remains to be seen.”
Those are appropriately cautious scientific statements. ScienceDaily’s headline is not, and that is the broader lesson here.
Science advances through observations that can be independently verified, not through increasingly sophisticated methods of massaging existing datasets until they reveal the desired statistical signal. When a claimed acceleration appears only after extensive adjustments for multiple variables and is then celebrated because it agrees with climate model expectations, skepticism is not only appropriate, but also essential. Also, there is no evidence whatsoever presented in the article that reducing fossil fuel use will change temperature trends in the near or long-term, although statistical filtering and manipulations might project a favorable decline called for by the advocates/researchers if the data is massaged enough.
The climate is changing, as it always has. The question is how fast, why, and with what degree of confidence we can measure those changes. Those questions are answered by observations, not by admittedly imperfect statistical filters designed to tease out an “acceleration” that isn’t obvious by simply looking at the base data.
ScienceDaily’s readers deserved to hear that distinction. Instead, they received another clickbait style headline announcing certainty with possible future consequences where the underlying science remains far more nuanced and proof of danger of exceeding a politically chosen temperature target is non-existent.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
I just don’t get why they do it.
Why? Egotism. No one is ever willing to accept that their entire career was spent in worthless activity and that their actual useful knowledge (and contribution to human society) is zero. They don’t want to accept they advocate for state control of everyone and everything.
All of this means that the sum total of their entire adult life has been garbage. None of them will accept this, because it suggests that they personally never had any reason to exist.
I blame Henny Penny:
“Henny Penny (AKA Chicken Little) is a European folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes that the world is coming to an end. The phrase “The sky is falling!” features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.” …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
I get why they try it!
There is huge personal gain attached to being an alarmist of the Potsdam institute in Germany.
I dont understand how they get away with this, the editor and reviewers must be deaf and blind!
Climate models are… the first resort of the climate crisis scoundrel. We all know their very severe limitations and overt biases, and that what they output is, frankly, far less than credible. Only recently their favourite scenario had to be thrown overboard.
Put data – and common sense – to one side and feel Monbiot’s pain
“Murderous heat, an endangered food supply and no net zero: this is the life the radical right wants you to have”
And to kickstart the hysteria:
Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified
The rest is a diatribe against the editor of the Telegraph – a dubious publication that publishes very pro climate action stuff while simultaneously claiming it’s all over – Frankenfurter.
It’s time we started medicating the climate schizos in our midst, locking them up in rubber wallpapered rooms if necessary. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
They have created a new statistical product.
Similar to the GWP Global Warming Potential numbers.
The data clearly show an acceleration. You just don’t like how the data was used. Denying reality is a bad look
the claimed acceleration appears only after the authors modify the observations
No it’s also there before “modifications” …..
“Yearly average global mean surface temperature from five data sources, in two versions: (top) unadjusted, (bottom) adjusted for El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanism, and solar variation. All are aligned so that the average from 1991 to 2020 equals 0.88°C, to approximate warming since pre-industrial.”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025GL118804
It is invalid to make statements based on the very end of a graph line.
It’s valid is the last point is of accord with the previous, in the case of climate, 30 years.
Agree that just 10 years here is invalid.
one of those numbers is as valid as the next one, short intervals open the door to additional uncertainty when interpreting the result in the real world, for example the ENSO index might be flat in the long run but behave strange in this decade because of the Tongo eruption (which happened after most of this particular publications range)
As I said above ….
“Agree that just 10 years here is invalid”.
To me it seems invalid based on a lacking uncertainty analysis!
What is the full uncertainty attached to this statement for the real world data before the “filtering by certain choices” (the word choice here means that alternatives and attached uncertainty was suppressed)?
Hockey Stick-Man returns…
Where are the error bars?
After removing the spike step change caused by major El Nino events, there is basically NO WARMING AT ALL.
In the spirit of some above posts:
Would you care to give some error bars for the above graph?
I mean we wouldn’t want you to be excluded from that which I am required.
And also what is the original source for that graph?
Even more revealing is what the authors admit later in the paper. Their adjustment for El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar influences is “empirically based, but approximate and imperfect,” and they acknowledge that the influence of the powerful 2023-2024 El Niño may not have been completely removed. Those are important caveats, and ScienceDaily barely mentions them.
2023 is when the effect of Hunga Tunga warming took effect.
You just don’t like how the data was used.
Shouldn’t that be: You just don’t like how the data was abused?
The graph does not show data. It shows averages compared to averages. It does not show reality.
One can eyeball that graph and assume a trend exists, but that can only be done by ignoring the massive variability plotted. In other words, eyeballing a trend in a low resolution graphic is denying reality.
No one is denying the planet is gradually warming. We are still recovering from a Little Ice Age.
And are considered to still be in an interglacial.
No it doesn’t. Removing natural variation results in unnatural variation.
First, removing entirely natural variations is not a scientific endeavor. It is an exercise in data dredging to find something that can show a preconceived conclusion is true.
Second, variation is not noise. Noise is an extraneous signal that is added to the signal. If temperature is the signal that is measured, then noise must also have a noise amplitude that is added to the signal. Calling ENSO noise is unreal, neither CO2 nor humans cause it. It is a natural variation in temperature.
Lastly, this is not time series analysis. The most basic analysis starts with creating a stationary trend, usually by differencing. That gives statistically stable parameters of means and variance. From that, models of various predictor variables are added to achieve the actual trend. A bottoms up if you will. Starting at the top and subtracting unmeasured and uncertain variables is data dredging to find a plausible connection. That isn’t science.
>> Removing natural variation results in unnatural variation.
Very nice one!
And very correct. .they can create any product they like, but when they try to compare it with the real world all these pesky little real world problems can affect this comparison, so their analysis is dishonest!
Jim, differencing is commonly recommended to obtain stationarity in a time-series. Do you have any idea how well that works with a time-series that has auto-correlation, such as temperatures? Is there some way to determine what the differencing step-value has to be to suppress the auto-correlation?
There has been a distinct increase in absorbed solar radiation, (which feeds El Nino events).
Nothing to do with human CO2.
What causes that? Decrease in cloudiness?
Oh dear. It’s not ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ it’s carbon dioxide which is harmless and beneficial
Science Daily was the outlet that reported on “the science of climate deniers” in the past. What did you expect from such a group/editor.
Here is their hit job piece from Sweden.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161004103313.htm?hl=en-US
One of the things I love about the tropospheric anomaly graph is that it invites people who are not alive in the late 70s to believe that things were all hunky-dory. I love pointing out to them that in the late 1970s it was so damn cold. We had multiple crop failures in Florida and California. Thank God it warmed up some because if we would’ve stayed there, life would be a lot more challenging today
SSM59 – – – Tell them this (from Duck Search Assist):
The 1950s heat wave in the eastern United States, particularly in July 1954, was a significant event that lasted for 22 days with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing over 300 deaths and severe impacts on water and power supplies, agriculture, and infrastructure. This heat wave remains one of the most extreme recorded in the region’s history.
My family (in western Pennsylvania) did not have an air conditioner in 1954. We did in 1955.
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030.”
This starts with a bogus 10-year rate, references a bogus 1.5°C limit, mentions a bogus agreement concocted in Paris, and finishes with a bogus 2030 critical date. That’s 4 boguses (b) in 145 characters. May be a record.
b^4 = BS
Keep in mind that several of those bogarts were made by politicians.
Since 2014 there have been 2 major El Nino events.
This is what they are relying on to say temperature is accelerating..
El Nino events are NOT ANTHROPOGENIC or related to CO2 at all.. !!
I’m not sure that I have a good grip on this issue yet. However, I’m having difficulty understanding just why they happen. IF they are driven by smoothly increasing CO2 concentrations, why do El Nino events appear episodic and no one has suggested a way to predict them any better than a volcanic eruption?
Another article by the people inside the moat. Pottsdam folks don’t seem to get out much and really don’t seem to have any real world experience. They might want to actually go talk to some farmers to see how farming really works. You can’t build a model if you don’t understand the actual real science.
“You can’t build a model if you don’t understand the actual real science.”
Oops.
You can. You can build a model about anything you want.
The question is how well the model matches reality.
After all, a model is merely an imperfect, symbolic representation of reality or some portion thereof.
OK, so you can’t build a USEFUL model if you don’t understand the actual real science.
The “climate models” are all examples of the prinicple of “GIGO” because they all assume “climate driving power” of a gas that demonstrably couldn’t prevent the opposite of the effect they presuppose at a level 10 times as high as now.
From the above article’s first paragraph:
I nearly stopped reading the article right then and there.
Some “authors” (certainly not qualified to be real scientists) want to argue that a mere ten years of data is sufficient to establish “statistically significant acceleration in warming”???
Lets see, in just the last million years of Earth’s paleoclimatology history there have been about 10 or so glacial/interglacial cycles, each averaging about 100,000 years in duration. In addition, the Earth exited (i.e., warmed up from) the last glacial episode only some 12,000 or so years ago.
It is widely known among climate scientists that even during interglacial periods there are “temporary” excursions up and down in the general trending of atmospheric temperature, such as have occurred in the current Holocene with the Roman and Medieval warm periods, with spans of 600-750 years and 300-400 years, respectively, and the Little Ice Age with a span of about 550 years.
Sure, let’s compare 10 years of recent data against historical time span transients of hundreds and even thousands of years of duration as a means of “establishing” a significant trend . . . right, got it!
Despite these known facts, the editors at Geophysical Research Letters, aided by the “news” organization ScienceDaily, see fit to publish such non-science as is summarized in the above article. So sad.
Anthony treats both organizations far too kindly by referring to this “news” as just “clickbait”.
“Some “authors” (certainly not qualified to be real scientists) want to argue that a mere ten years of data is sufficient to establish “statistically significant acceleration in warming”???”
As opposed to all the monthly articles about 6 year pauses?
I agree you shouldn’t read too much into a 10 year period, but that doesn’t mean a 20 year period cannot be statistically significant. The length of time is only one factor in determining significance.
But significance only tells you it’s unlikely the observed change was due to chance, it does not tell you what caused the change or if it’s a long term change or just a blip.
In other words, it tells you nothing of significance.
Anomaly is another of those words hijacked, repurposed with a social/common language context derived definition.
Where once it was an rare, out of family, unusual measurement, or outlier, it is now the delta between a short term average (temperatures cannot be averaged, (tmax + tmin)/2 is not average, it is midpoint) and a long term trend in those averages.
Statistics do not lie, but people do use statistics to lie. Most people understand anomaly to be something abnormal.
In statistics, an anomaly (aka outlier) is at or beyond the 3rd sigma. In other words a datum in 0.27% of the data compared to 99.73% of the data falling within the +/-3 sigma demarcations.
“An anomaly is something that is different, abnormal, or does not fit a normal pattern or rule. It is an unexpected result, oddity, or irregularity that stands out because it goes against what you expect to see.”
Given the magnitudes of those deltas compared to the average, none can be claimed to be rare or unusual.
Others, no doubt, will disagree, but to me, use of “anomalies” in that kind of data presentation is deliberately trying to evoke a fear response with an alternate possibility of deliberate deception.
What would be more informative to me would be the daily or monthly highs and lows and medians with the highs, lows, and medians used plotted as graphical trend lines. The median in statistics is the value that splits the data into 50% above and 50% below.
The other point, of course, is there is no way to average the micro climate of the Sahara with the micro climate of Antarctica. The insistence on a global average temperature or a global mean surface temperature is misleading at best and likely intended to deceive.
Sorry, but we have to face reality: global warming has risen sharply in recent years.
But the reason for this acceleration must be understood.
So, why? What correlates best with the dramatic warming we have observed over the last 15 years?
We are experiencing what looks increasingly like a nearly endless El Niño.
What is El Niño?
In the tropical Pacific, there is a huge reservoir of warm water concentrated around the Equator.
This warm water stores an enormous amount of heat.
Under normal conditions, strong trade winds help keep this warm water concentrated in the western tropical Pacific and maintain the characteristic circulation of the tropical Pacific.
Every few years, these trade winds weaken. The warm water then moves and spreads eastward, releasing a large amount of stored heat into the atmosphere.
We get a global warming event.
El Niño occurs.
So, what has changed over the last 15 years?
One dramatic development is the enormous expansion of renewable energy, particularly wind power.
Global installed wind-power capacity is approaching 1.5 TW in 2026.
More than half of this capacity is located in China.
But there is an important point that is often overlooked:
The electrical power produced by a wind turbine is only a fraction of the kinetic power extracted from the wind.
Even the theoretical maximum conversion efficiency is only about 58–59%. In real wind turbines, the effective conversion is lower.
Therefore, as an order-of-magnitude estimate, 1.5 TW of electrical capacity corresponds to roughly 3 TW of kinetic power being extracted from the atmospheric flow.
This does not mean that 3 TW of energy simply disappears. The extracted kinetic energy is divided between electricity and the disturbed atmospheric flow, including wakes and turbulence, and is ultimately dissipated and redistributed.
But the crucial point is that the atmosphere is being subjected to an enormous, geographically concentrated extraction of kinetic energy.
And where is most of this extraction taking place?
In the Northern Hemisphere.
At predominantly mid-latitudes.
Only a very naive assumption would be that extracting such an enormous amount of kinetic energy from the atmosphere cannot have any effect on atmospheric circulation.
The important question is therefore:
Can the rapidly expanding global wind-energy system alter large-scale atmospheric circulation?
In particular, can it weaken the prevailing wind systems that help maintain the distribution of warm water in the tropical Pacific?
If the trade winds become sufficiently weak, they may no longer be able to maintain the normal distribution of warm equatorial water.
The result could be a persistent El Niño-like state.
The warm water of the tropical Pacific would no longer remain confined to its usual region. Heat would be redistributed more strongly through the atmosphere and oceans, contributing to the exceptional warming observed around the globe.
This could provide a possible explanation for the dramatic warming that has emerged after the so-called “global warming hiatus.”
The sequence is therefore straightforward:
Rapid expansion of wind power → massive extraction of atmospheric kinetic energy → changes in atmospheric circulation → weakened trade winds → persistent El Niño-like conditions → redistribution of tropical Pacific heat → accelerated global warming.
This is a hypothesis.
But it is a hypothesis that can be tested.
The required observations and simulations are available: global wind fields, wind-turbine locations and power production, ocean temperatures, trade-wind strength, Pacific heat content, and long-term climate-model simulations.
The question is not whether we should believe this mechanism. The question is whether we are willing to investigate it seriously.
We should not assume that extracting terawatts of kinetic energy from the atmosphere is climatically irrelevant simply because the energy is being extracted in the name of “renewable” energy.
The atmosphere is a physical system.
It obeys the laws of physics.
And when we introduce a new source of energy extraction on a planetary scale, we should expect the possibility of consequences.
Perhaps the “endless El Niño” is one of them.
Seriously . . . you are worried about approximately 3 TW of kinetic power being extracted from the atmospheric flow on a yearly basis?
How about putting that number into perspective by considering the fact that the Earth absorbs (and roughly radiates away) about 122 petawatts (1.22*10^17 watts) of solar power over the period of one year?
Your 3 terrawatts (3*10^12 watts = 0.003 petawatts) is just 0.0025% of the energy flow passing through the Earth’s yearly thermodynamics . . . truly noise level.
But I wish you good luck in investigating it “seriously”, but not using my tax money to do so.
Excellent point!
The Earth receives actually 150 PW from the Sun.
Now, 93% of that power is radiated or reflected back to the Space according to NASA.
7% or 10 PW goes to “thermics”: this is the power that has to sustain the global circulation of the wind AND the ocean currents.
These 10 PW is the THERMAL power.
It has to be converted into the kinetic wind motion.
The only thermodynamically feasible mechanism to accomplish that is the Carnot cycle.
Our atmosphere is just a thermal machine like a steam engine.
Its THEORETICAL maximum efficiency is (Thot-Tcold)/Thot
Assuming Thot ~ 300K and Tcold~Thot-10 degrees, we get the limiting Efficiency ~0.03
So, just 10PW*0.03=300 TW of kinetic wind energy is sustainable.
This is for the whole planet. Globally.
All the wind farms are located in the northern hemisphere, in the mid-latitudes.
Just ~1/10 of the Sun radiation arrives there.
So, we have 30 TW of “sustainable” wind power here.
We ALREADY eliminate 3 TW of it!
The plans are to increase it to 10 TW electric power (20TW wind) within the next 10 years.
Good luck!
That cannot be correct. If only 93% of the incoming solar power was reflected and radiated “back to space”, that asserted 7% of continuous input excess, year after year, would certainly increase Earth’s temperature to make life unsustainable . . . instead, science finds that Earth’s “energy balance” (actually its power balance) is so nearly balanced during the last 2000 years or so of the current Holocene so as to keep a global average temperature that we currently have at about 15 deg-C.
If you were familiar with thermodynamics you would know that a Carnot cycle is a theoretical ideal that defines the MAXIMUM possible thermodynamic cycle efficiency between a heat source and a heat sink and simply cannot be—and is never realized—in practice.
A steam engine is based on a Rankine thermodynamic cycle, not a Carnot cycle.
ask NASA
https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/basic-page/earths-energy-budget
check the “thermals” arrow at the right
“A steam engine is based on a Rankine thermodynamic cycle, not a Carnot cycle.”
yes, but the Carnot cycle is the limiting thermodynamic model.
Rankine can be close to it, but never better.
A good steam engine reaches Thot=500C leading to limiting of the Rankine cycle efficiency (Thot-Tcold)/Thot ~ 40%.
Uhhhh . . . your calculated limiting efficiency value (using the Carnot equation) of ~40% efficiency is only true if Tcold = 190C, given your asserted Thot = 500C.
Most steam engine’s dump heat to a reservoir (Tcold) of about 25C, representing either ambient air or ambient water cooling. Big difference.
However, it is true that modern large-scale industrial and nuclear steam turbine power plants reach practical peak operational efficiencies in the range of 35% to 45%, because they operate on a Rankine thermal cycle and not a Carnot thermal cycle.
I am not even a scientist, and this is something I have been wondering about. What are the short and long-term consequences of taking wind (kinetic) energy out of the atmosphere? Maybe we are not yet extracting enough of it yet to notice much of a difference. But if the global expansion of wind energy continues with these turbine contraptions, will we see an eventual and meaningful effect on the weather and atmosphere?
The pro-renewables crowd will probably play this down and say it is unimportant, but I am not so sure of that. If wind turbines are to play an important role in replacing fossil fuels, we will have to build and install a lot more of them than we have now. As you ask alex, what will happen as we extract more and more kinetic energy from the atmosphere?
Thanks alex for bringing up this subject. It deserves to be discussed, studied and explored. The wind blows for a reason.
Everything we do has an impact.
Wind plants can impact long-term local atmospheric conditions
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02089-2
If you are still determined to push the anti-fossil fuel and anti-CO2 narratives MUNR, then you need to promote nuclear power and not wind and solar. Nuclear power is many times more energy dense than solar and wind power. SMRs and next generation nuclear are said to be less costly to build than the current generation plants.
From Chat AI:
“A 1‑GW nuclear plant produces about 8,120 GWh/year, while 1‑GW of wind produces ~3,000–3,500 GWh/year, and 1‑GW of solar produces ~1,700–2,000 GWh/year.
That means nuclear generates ~2.5× more than wind and ~4× more than solar per unit of nameplate capacity.
But if you compare spatial energy density (energy per unit land area), nuclear is hundreds to thousands of times more dense than wind or solar.”
Note especially the last sentence in the quote above.
yes. local conditions – easily!
at the TW level also globally
Agreed except for one thing – wind turbines will never “replace fossil fuels.” 😆😅🤣😂
Wind turbines, like most things in modern civilization, are 100% DEPENDENT ON FOSSIL FUELS for their very existence.
Just yesterday I wrote about A. Dessler´s model based “proof” that the tonga eruption did not cause that troposheric warming peak in the last years.
Three is some empiric and model evidence that his findings are incomplete and uncertain
https://www.polarresearch.at/the-hunga-tonga-eruption-continues-to-have-an-impact-on-weather-patterns/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL122913
(for starters, one article about tonga affecting the stratosphere and stratosphere/troposphere coupling , one abut clouds affecting el nino.. which is completely missing in Dessler et al. analysis)
But the tenor is clear.. we have several expert groups finding just before the next IPCC report
it´s uhm “a very systematic house of cards”!
Even if wind “power” lacks quite such a dramatic effect, it can certainly have other smaller scale effects. In particular, it wouldn’t surprise me if the propensity of some storm systems to move very slowly and/or “linger” in a certain area, and thereby cause disproportionate amounts of rain to fall in such area, might not be connected to “wind droughts” that occur “downwind” of so-called “wind farms.” But of course the chorus of the idiot voices clamoring about “climate change” will just add such things to the imaginary “effects” of an additional pittance of CO2 to the atmosphere.
But in their zeal to shove these stupid non-solutions to the imaginary “climate crisis” down the collective throats of civilization, not a moment’s thought was given to any such effect, nor to more obvious negative effects like the slaughter of birds, bats and insects, and what ecological harm might follow on THOSE ecological harms.
Hey, why exactly is the “last ten years” so special as regards “significant warming”, stated to be 0.35°C per decade over the last decade?
If I go to the most representative and accurate measurement of global warming over the last 47+ years, the UAH satellite-derived measurements of GLAT (see the most recent update of the graphed and tabulated data at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/04/uah-v6-1-global-temperature-update-for-july-2026-0-48-deg-c/ ), I observe the following various intervals over which Earth has warmed at a rate higher than 0.35°C per decade:
— 1979 to 1988: 0.39°C per decade
— 1989.5 to 1998.5: 0.89°C per decade
— 2008.5 to 2016.5: 0.76°C per decade
— 2014 to 2024: 0.78°C per decade
If the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research authors of the above-referenced article, the editors of the Geophysical Research Letters that published this fluff, and the ScienceDaily editors that chose to promulgate this as “news” can all cherry pick data, why can’t I?
UAH
1979-2026 .16C/decade
It is a valid question if there is a short term deviation from a long term trend.
But of course the comparison must be valid and meaningful, which is not the case here.
Jim Gorman said it best:
>> Removing natural variation results in unnatural variation.
And as long that is all they are doing, it is pretty meaningless, but no objections.
But as soon as they want to take it back to the real world they need to discuss the mathematical consequences of every choice and omission.
IMHO the shorter the interval they pick, the more short-time effects, some we might not even know about, will affect this uhm “analysis”.
I posted that to remind readers that UAH shows that number the same number that CRU showed for all the past warming trends back to 1860.
.16C shows there is nothing unusual going on here
The website loads slowly, Anthony Watts covered this in his post here,
Phil Jones momentous Q&A with BBC reopens the “science is settled” issues
LINK
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Q&A: Professor Phil Jones
LINK
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This warming acceleration is a bunch of hogwash as much longer databased intervals doesn’t support it, it still .16C/decade
Dear Anthony,
thank you fro writing this!
>>> A small critique: please fix the “guest blogger” as author, I was wondering who wrote this the whole time!
While I consider it questionable and particular fruitless to generate a new product from measured temperature data, as soon as they start to compare it to the original (the temperature of this planet) they need to address and include all uncertainties or it becomes a very unscientific and dishonest comparison!
And I disagree, it is NOT
“an exercise in statistical manipulation built upon climate modeling assumptions”,
math does not work this way, they are torturing math and science along the way.
If it were about science or correct math they would need to include the consequence for each choice (a choice means there is a valid alternative and if it affects the result this means additional uncertainty, which needs to be documented).
Prof, S. Rahmstorf has a long checkered past of not only expressing extreme radical alarmist opinions, but also distorting math.
17 years ago Lucia published a blog article showing how Rahmstorf changed the statistical method along a series of studies to favor his wanted results:
https://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/source-of-fishy-odor-confirmed-rahmstorf-did-change-smoothing/
(another big nono in statistical science, try to play coin toss with me when I am allowed to change the rule who is winning as we go along..)
January 2025 he wrote a blog article at RealClimate about his assumed AMOC slowing
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/01/the-amoc-is-slowing-its-stable-its-slowing-no-yes/
stating
“”Of the 24 CMIP6 models, a full 23 underestimate the sea surface cooling in the ‘cold blob’. And most of the CMIP6 models even show a strengthening of the AMOC in the historic period, which past studies have shown to be linked to strong aerosol forcing in many of these models (e.g. Menary et al. 2020, Robson et al. 2022). The historic Northern Hemisphere temperature evolution in the models with a strong aerosol effect “is not consistent with observations” and they “simulate the wrong sign of subpolar North Atlantic surface salinity trends”, as Robson et al. write. Thus I consider CMIP6 models as less suited to test how well the ‘cold blob’ works as AMOC indicator than the CMIP5 models.””
(there is no justification ever to favor models with lower resolution and flawed physics)
But then he changed his tune 9 months later:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-resolution-fingerprint-images-reveal-a-weakening-atlantic-ocean-circulation-amoc/
All of the sudden CMIP6 models are good enough.
And a discussion of the 23/24 earlier models is missing, he must have forgotten about them..
OR what rather happened is that the new models were tuned to reflect the perceived reality.
This is very common in climate science! Have you ever wondered, why climate models over the years show the same results, no matter if their resolution was lower or significant physics is missing.
Here we have a rare example where some CMIP6 models initially disagreed with Rahmstorf, but that problem was fixed soon enough and without documentation.
One cannot help but observe that the most striking feature all these models share over many decades of massive changes and improvement is the firm believe of the climate alarmists tuning them.
For example the old Exxon models have basically nothing in common with current models in terms of resolution and complexity how many details of our nature is pictured in them – the old models are very incomplete and must have huge uncertainties attached to their findings based on our newer and better knowledge how much lacking they really were – climate scientists like Rahmstorf of course know that, but keep using old results as if they were precise!
For this the same is true as I wrote above “If it were about science or correct math they would need to include the consequence for each choice (a choice means there is a valid alternative and if it affects the result this means additional uncertainty, which needs to be documented).”
I just wanted to document a few known cases of questionable math and statements by one of the studies lead author. Knowing who wrote this might help to evaluate the validity of their findings.
Why should that be the case when there has not been a reported significant acceleration in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration? Perhaps they made a mistake in the ‘corrections?’
A good sanity check for any thesis is to corroborate similar changes in associated or correlated variables. Were are they?
“Why should that be the case when there has not been a reported significant acceleration in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration?”
That’s why people are asking if there has been an acceleration. It was the same a few years back when some scientists were asking why there was an apparent slowdown in warming whilst co2 continued to rise. Personally I’m sceptical about both claims, but it’s still worth asking questions, just in case there’s something unexpected happening.
As to how it’s possible to have accelerated warming without accelerated growth in CO2, a few possibilities spring to mind.
The cause of the acceleration isn’t CO2.Warming up to this point has been surpressed by other factors, such as atmospheric pollution.We are seeing the result of a buildup of energy in the oceans suddenly bring released.We are seeing the result of chaotic climate responding to increased warming in a non-linear way.
Surpressed: Did you mean “suppressed” or “surpassed?”
“We are seeing the result of a buildup of energy in the oceans suddenly bring released.”
How do you propose that oceanic ‘stored energy’ is transferred from the sea surface to the atmosphere when conduction always takes place from warm to cool, let alone “suddenly bring [sic] released? Evaporation can move energy from the mixed layer to the atmosphere, but that would result in more rainfall. Do you have evidence that there is a net increase in rainfall when El Nino events take place?
The cause of the warming, accelerating or not, was never CO2.
Unless you have a ready explanation of the lack of any “climate driving” ability of CO2 when the Earth experienced glaciation with ten times as much as now.
No doubt the popular media will carry this and scare the poorly informed, especially the young people. I presume that is the objective but they do appear despicable .
I love how the hype about the AMOC shutting down because a low pressure cell around Greenland suppressing SST that is gone now, congested social media for months. I do not remember but I am guessing that some people were losing their minds on this day in 2015. Remember what it was like before 80% of the Sulphur was removed from the global shipping fleet…