Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Channel 4 News"
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Channel 4 propaganda. As regards ocean acidification, it is estimated that the ocean’s global mean surface pH may have declined (i.e., become less alkaline and thus more “acidic”) by -0.07 to -0.08 in the last 200 years — from pH8.12 during pre-industrial times to 8.04 to 8.05 today (Wei et al, 2015). N.B. The decline in pH occurred before 1930.
However, and very importantly when you look the data after CO2 emissions began rising precipitously in the 1930s, the oceans have become less “acidic”!!!
By way of comparison, from one season to the next, or over the course of less than 6 months, pH levels naturally change by ±0.15 pH units, or twice the overall rate of the last 200 years. On a per-decade scale, the changes are even more pronounced. Oceanic pH values naturally fluctuate up and down by up to 0.6 U within a span of a decade, with an overall range between 7.66 and 8.40. This is decadal rate of pH change is larger than the overall 200-year span (0.07-0.08) by a factor of 8. Indeed the daily noted maximum pH range of 0.7 (Santos et al. 2011) is far greater than the overall change predicted between now and the end of the century.
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Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no families or genera have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data).
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Channel 4 propaganda. As regards the melting of Arctic Ice, the records nearly always seem to start in 1979. Strange that, considering it was a year of record extent for Arctic Ice. Even so, data from NOAA (2022 Arctic Report Card) show winter (March) ice coverage has hardly changed since '79, and that the summer (September) coverage trend had stopped declining since 2007. In September 2022, sea ice reached a minimum extent of 4.87 million square kilometers in the Arctic. This is higher than the extent in 2007, which means the Arctic summer sea ice trend is zero for the past 16 years. It was almost as high as 1995. Summer 2023 is one of the coldest in several decades in the Arctic, and May 2023 was the coldest on record there. The Greenland surface mass balance (SMB) for the past 11 months is a massive but very normal 450 billion tonnes of ice accumulated. 5 out of the last 7 years have seen huge accumulations above the average (1981-2010). How inconvenient! Didn't someone predict in 2007 Arctic ice free by 2010, or 2015, or 2013, or in 5 years? Or was it in 2008 the Arctic ice sheet would melt away. Also predicted in 2008 North Pole ice free in ... 2008 ... or in 10 years. 2009 prediction: Arctic ice free in 2014. 2012 prediction: snow will be gone by 2020. And 2013 star prediction: Methane catastrophe in 2 years because of ice free Arctic. 2018 prediction: zero chance of permanent ice in Arctic by 2022.
The Arctic Ice is still there, and it's stopped shrinking. There is no climate crisis.
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More Channel 4 propaganda. There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data).
There is no climate crisis.
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Total propaganda. There is no climate emergency. Globally the ACE index (accumulated cyclone energy) 1980-2021 shows no increasing trend. Global Hurricane Landfalls 1970-2021 (updated from Weinkle et al, 2012) shows no trend. Satellite data since 1980 shows a slight downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers with 2021 being a record low year. The IPCC reports in AR6, chapter 11, "The total global frequency of TC [tropical cyclone] formation will decrease or remain unchanged with increasing global warming (medium confidence)." Not that I really care about what the IPCC says. Multidecadal variability in Atlantic hurricaines is most probably related to the AMO (Vecchi et al, 2021). NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. What the data from NOAA SPC shows about tornados: EF1-EF5 (1954-2022) no trend; EF3-EF5 (most destructive) (1954-2022) 50% decline. No EF5s in US since 2013 (a record absence).
The Global Land Precipitation Anomaly from AR5 will disappoint with deviations from the average increasing by 0.2% per decade, but if you look at the actual data, it's just very variable over the decades.
Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017.
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%--from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from (EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels,Belgium. )
Globally 2000-2019 there was a large decrease in cold-related deaths and a moderate increase in heat-related deaths (Zhao, 2021, Lancet). However, coldwaves are over 9 times more likely to kill than heatwaves, so the overall result is very beneficial.
What else? Oh, deserts like the Sahara have shrunk considerably and the Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime (NASA).
The Great Barrier Reef's coral cover has reached the greatest extent ever recorded.
On extinction the rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs.
There is no climate crisis.
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The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
How about some quotes from the UN's IPCC AR6?
"There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions."
"There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions."
"Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms)."
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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More Channel 4 propaganda. The whole of East and West Antarctica is cooling, and has been for 40 years. East Antarctica has cooled by an impressive 0.7°C per decade. Resulting in an overall substantial and statistically significant decline of 2.8°C since 1980. So much for "Global" warming. I am referring to a paper by Zhu et al (2021) that looked at the reanalysed ERA5 satellite dataset. Check out table 4. Furthermore, the Antarctic Peninsula ice has since been shown to be on the increase “The eastern Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet has grown in area over the last 20 years, due to changing wind and sea ice patterns.” (University of Cambridge, May, 2022.)
"Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km² since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade." (Andreasen et al, 2023). It is from a paper entitled "Change in Antarctic Ice Shelf Area from 2009 to 2019". They use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Also, as the mass gain (661Gt) was given, you could calculate the volume of the ice gained using the formula: Volume = Mass ÷ Density (assume Density of glacier ice 0.9167 Gt/km³). This would give you (well not you obviously) an Ice Gain Volume ≈721km³. That's how much extra of the lovely white stuff there is around Antarctica. Imagine standing in the centre of this extra ice. It would stretch beyond the horizon in all directions and would be 45 storeys high.
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Channel 4 propaganda. The whole of East and West Antarctica is cooling, and has been for 40 years. East Antarctica has cooled by an impressive 0.7°C per decade. Resulting in an overall substantial and statistically significant decline of 2.8°C since 1980. So much for "Global" warming. I am referring to a paper by Zhu et al (2021) that looked at the reanalysed ERA5 satellite dataset. Check out table 4. Furthermore, the Antarctic Peninsula ice has since been shown to be on the increase “The eastern Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet has grown in area over the last 20 years, due to changing wind and sea ice patterns.” (University of Cambridge, May, 2022.)
"Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km² since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade." (Andreasen et al, 2023). It is from a paper entitled "Change in Antarctic Ice Shelf Area from 2009 to 2019". They use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Also, as the mass gain (661Gt) was given, you could calculate the volume of the ice gained using the formula: Volume = Mass ÷ Density (assume Density of glacier ice 0.9167 Gt/km³). This would give you (well not you obviously) an Ice Gain Volume ≈721km³. That's how much extra of the lovely white stuff there is around Antarctica. Imagine standing in the centre of this extra ice. It would stretch beyond the horizon in all directions and would be 45 storeys high.
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There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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@hazeljones4275 There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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@bocaj.455 There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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@deebarnard5439 There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed:
Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions),
Aridity,
Avalanche (snow),
Average precipitation,
Average Wind Speed,
Coastal Flood,
Agricultural drought,
Hydrological drought,
Erosion of Coastlines,
Fire Weather (hot and windy),
Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods),
Frost,
Hail,
Heavy Rain,
Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms,
Landslides,
Marine Heatwaves,
Ocean Acidity,
Radiation at the Earth’s Surface,
River/Lake Floods,
Sand and Dust Storms,
Sea Level,
Severe Wind Storms,
Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets,
Tropical Cyclones.
There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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