2022, Seventh Warmest Year: Warming Slows Down

Guest Post by Javier Vinós

For those that prefer it, Chris Frey has translated this post into German here.

No minimally informed person denies that climate changes. The climate has always changed. Since 1860 the predominant climate change has been warming, which is fortunate because if we had a winter like those of 1800-1850, we would be in for a shock. No one has been able to prove that global warming is primarily a consequence of our emissions. It is reasonable to assume that increased CO2 has contributed to warming since the mid-20th century when our CO2 emissions increased significantly, but no one knows how much they have contributed, no matter how much the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insists that “humans are the dominant cause of observed global warming over recent decades.” (IPCC AR6, page 515).

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Energy Use 2020 to 2021

By Andy May

We now have another year of energy consumption data, what does it tell us? The graph from ourworldindata.org is shown below:

Energy use is going up. Are we transitioning to renewables? Do renewables matter? See the change from 2020 to 2021 below:

Total global energy use increased 8,650 TeraWatt-hours in 2021 and 83% of the increase was supplied by fossil fuels! Only 14% of the increase was supplied by renewables, with an additional 3% by nuclear.

But, what about total energy consumed in 2021? It was 176,431 TeraWatt-hours, 77% fossil fuels and 13% renewable, excluding nuclear. Sounds impressive until you realize that 83% of the added energy consumption in 2021 was supplied by fossil fuels, which means renewables are losing ground and fossil fuels are gaining. Sorry environmentalists, your goal is moving away from you.

Clintel’s intervention in the Friends of the Earth – Shell Lawsuit

By Andy May

Friends of the Earth (Netherlands) sued Royal Dutch Shell, using The Netherlands law that allows non-governmental organizations to sue over environmental or social issues that affect all citizens. They won a judgement that ordered Shell to reduce its emissions in 2030 by 45% compared to 2019. The reduction includes the emissions by Shell’s customers around the world, including you and me.

Shell has appealed the verdict, which is now before the Hague Court of Appeals. Clintel has intervened (in Dutch here) as a third party in the case to make the case that the court did not consider evidence that climate change is not a danger to Dutch citizens. The court ruled that Shell’s emissions threaten to cause “dangerous climate change,” a phrase and concept that even the IPCC does not use.

Shell did not contest this phrase, a phrase that is not supported by observational evidence. The only evidence is from unvalidated climate models that clearly do not match observations to date.

Since this case affects Shell’s customers and suppliers worldwide, Clintel is asking people from around the world to sign a petition asking the court to consider the scientific evidence that Shell’s global emissions are not dangerous. Shell, and other companies are often terrified of adverse publicity if they challenge the popular, politically correct, and erroneous view that anthropogenic climate change is dangerous. This is despite evidence that it is not. Until Shell and other companies “grow a pair,” it is up to us to fight this nonsense.

Please sign their petition here, and if possible, donate to help them pay their legal costs.

Willie Soon speaks at the University of Chicago

By Andy May

Dr. Willie Soon gave a great presentation at the Federalist Society Chapter at the University of Chicago Law School on November 18, 2022. The title of his talk is:

“The Corruption of Environmental Rulemakings at the US EPA: Climate Change, Mercury Emissions, and Air Quality”

Willie Soon, 2022

Dr. Soon’s slide deck is excellent reading and he has kindly sent it to me, you can download it here. If you prefer to watch his presentation, you can do so on YouTube here. Soon’s presentation starts about 22:46 minutes into the video.

Soon’s key points:

  • Given the daily, seasonal, and annual range of temperatures around the Earth, the warming of the past 125 years is trivial.
  • Except for ENSO variations, the global average surface temperature has hardly changed in over 20 years.
  • Willie humorously dismantles the article on him in Wikipedia and Gavin Schmidt’s criticisms, these slides are worth the download!
  • Willie plugs the article he wrote with 23 co-authors entitled: “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere Temperature trends? An ongoing debate.” Seriously, this is probably the best climate change article written in the last thirty years in my humble opinion, I refer to it all the time. The bibliography alone is worth it. If you never read another climate article in your life, you should read this one. Download it here.
  • He destroys the Mercury pollution nonsense that is permeating the media. Possible spoiler, don’t drink Coca Cola!
  • Is it air pollution or weather?

Finally, President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about “public policy [becoming] the captive of a scientific-technological elite” was correct:

“It is time to face a hard truth: the seventy-year experiment to federalize the sciences has been a failure. The task now is to prevent the Big Science cartel from further dehumanizing society and delegitimizing science. There is a second hard truth: the necessary reforms will not come from within. Rather, it will be the people and their representatives that will have to impose them. To restore science to its rightful and valuable place, break up the Big Science cartel.”

(J. Scott Turner, Professor of Biology (emeritus), SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, December 10, 2021)

I wish I had said that.

Three Climate Debates, Three Wins

Steve Koonin participated in three recent debates of the resolution:

“Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Koonin went three for three! They were all Oxford style debates with the audience polled before and after, and in every debate, the agrees went down and the disagrees went up.

This was part of the Steamboat Institute Campus Liberty Tour and the debates were at the University of Maryland, the University of Dallas, and Oklahoma State University.

Read more about his debates here. The truth always comes out (paraphrasing Lancelot in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) and common sense often does prevail. I find it comforting that in these debates the skeptics nearly always win.

Greenpeace Crimes and Lies, Updated

By Andy May

This is the transcript of my interview with Hügo Krüger. If you prefer you can view and listen to the podcast here.

These two books, Patrick Moore’s Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, my book, Politics and Climate Change: A History, and the Heartland Report on the Greenpeace business model by Michael, Ronan, and Imelda Connolly, Willie Soon, and Patrick Moore are the main sources for this talk.

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Meridional Transport, the most fundamental climate variable

By Andy May

“The atmospheric heat transport on Earth from the Equator to the poles is largely carried out by the mid-latitude storms. However, there is no satisfactory theory to describe this fundamental feature of the Earth’s climate.”

(Barry, Craig, & Thuburn, 2002)

This is the transcript of the talk I gave in Tom Nelson’s podcast interview here.

After Leon Barry and his colleagues write the above statement in their Nature article, they write that the middle latitudes are a zone of strong temperature gradients and these gradients generate storms that can be severe. Their paper proposes that the severity of the storms is proportional to the temperature gradient, such that the smaller the temperature gradient from the tropics to the poles, the fewer severe storms are needed to accomplish the task of transferring excess tropical energy (or heat) to the poles. Keep this concept in mind as I describe meridional (north-south) energy transport.

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Greenland Mass Balance

By Andy May

The following is from Cap Allon’s excellent post here. We are all used to the mainstream media distorting climate science data and analysis, but he has uncovered a case that is beyond the pale.

Read on in Cap Allon’s words:

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Talk on Climate Shifts for the Creative Society

By Andy May

The Creative Society ask to interview me on the 20th century climate shifts that Dr. Javier Vinós and I discussed in Part IV of our series of posts on Javier’s Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis. I don’t agree with a lot of the Creative Society ideas, but we do agree that open discussion on the future of mankind is important. I was pleased that an organization that has such a different outlook on civilization would want to interview me, a proponent of small and local government. More discussion and debate between differing worldviews is needed today. The interview was October 10th, but it has not been posted or published yet.

Most of this talk is based on Chapter 11 of Javier Vinós’ new book: Climate of the Past, Present, and Future: A Scientific Debate. This is a graduate school level review of natural climate change processes, an often-ignored area in modern discussions of climate science. The book comprehensively introduces Javier’s new Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis of natural climate change.

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New research supports the Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis

Guest Post By Javier Vinós

1. Introduction

The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis, proposed by this author in his book “Climate of the Past, Present and Future” (Vinós 2022), is based on evidence that climate change is primarily the result of changes in poleward energy transport, and that solar variability is an important modulator of this transport. If correct, the hypothesis will provide a new answer to two important questions: How climate changes naturally on the multi-decadal to the millennial time scale, even in the absence of changes in the greenhouse effect, and how changes in solar activity can profoundly affect climate despite their small energy changes. One conclusion of the hypothesis is that the Modern Solar Maximum of 1935-2005 contributed to 20th-century global warming, implying a significant reduction in climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

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