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Jul 19, 2023 WEDNESDAY WAKEUP www.climatediscussionnexus.comView newsletter in browser

UPDATED CDN VIDEO In an updated version of our Crystal Ball video “Canada’s 2001 Climate Predictions Revisited”, we say if the Canadian government was this dogmatically wrong about climate change science more than two decades ago, the burden of proof is on it when it says it now has everything figured out and then makes the same kind of daffy predictions based on the same kind of overheated computer models. NEWS ROUNDUP A HOT TIME UNDER THE OLD TOWN To a person with a hammer, everything proverbially looks like a nail. So the New York Times warns us of “underground climate change” which at least is underground but which has nothing to do with climate change despite the name. The ground under Chicago, apparently, is warming because of human activity. No, not the dreaded global warming. The fact that buildings are heated and some of the heat escapes into the ground underneath. The Times of course tries to blame fossil fuels, but only monomania can explain their failure to realize that if cities are local hotspots, it doesn’t prove atmospheric CO2 caused thermometers to read hotter there, but it does prove once again that urban areas are not good places to measure global climate. READ MORE SO ABOUT THOSE FIRES... The alarmists are almost as excited about Canadian wildfires as they were a few years back when the lungs of the world were ablaze. Heatmap Daily emailed us “Smoke Until October” on June 30, unlike Canada itself where the smoke dissipated (and dialed it back to “The East Coast’s Smoke Could Last Until October” in the actual story). The Atlantic asked “How Long Will Canada Burn?” though we are in Canada and had the author asked we could have told her “Canada” is not on fire, just a few bits of our vast forest. As for the subsequent “One thing is certain: More extreme smoke days are coming” we could have told her they promptly ended. But here’s the big question: If “global” warming is causing Canada’s record wildfire season, why (h/t Judith Curry) is the American one “setting up to historically be one of the slowest years on record”? Is America on a different planet? Or at least a different continent? Um no. READ MORE TIDBITS In case you were nostalgic for, say, 8 years to save the planet as announced by then-Prince Charles in, oops, 2009, now-King Charles and the mayor of London launched a “Climate Clock” that will count down the years, days, hours, minutes and yes seconds to 2030 in case your calendar, watch and computer are all broken. (There are 150 of them around the UK in case the problem is widespread.) The idea is that it’s how long we have to limit warming to an arbitrary 1.5°C because if we don’t nothing will happen. Except someone will start another countdown. In the UK it’s cloudy with a chance of controversy, as a chart of temperature there since 1933 (a decade old, but just brought to our attention) shows that it correlates almost exactly with… what’s this?... cloud cover not CO2. Wonder why people aren’t rushing to research this exciting possibility? Oh right. Government funding. (Which also went into changing past temperatures there because they weren’t conforming to the narrative.) For fans of statistical analysis (hey, where’d everybody go?) we want to share with you a website “Spurious correlations“ that shows, for instance, how tightly swimming pool drownings correlate with Nicolas Cage movies, or the divorce rate in Maine with margarine consumption. Not because real correlations don’t matter, but because you have to be careful about assuming that, say, not serving your partner margarine will improve your marriage. Hey, wait a minute. From the complete lack of fun file, by contrast, Statista warns us of “The Hidden Carbon Footprint of the Fashion Industry”. Though to be fair the main complaint is all the people flying around to endless fashion shows, and since most of them are probably trendily alarmist on climate it does hit its target. When we read that “Owning tropical fish ‘as bad for the climate as riding a motorbike’” we have a strong impulse to ride a motorcycle to a pet store and buy a goldfish. Must they spoil everything? If it were gasoline cars there’d be complaints. But while The Atlantic’s “Weekly Planet” concedes that “E-bikes Are Going to Keep Exploding” and that “For the foreseeable future, more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die”, especially in crowded New York City but in many other places as well, the problem will probably get better within about 50 years. And presumably we’re doing it for the children… or would be if they weren’t often the ones performing slave labour in faraway countries to produce these carbon-saving, life-taking vehicles. We have a winner. We quoted real weather forecaster Joe Bastardi on June 19 that it should take about 15 days for media to switch from calling rain relief from drought to blaming flooding on climate especially in the eastern U.S. where he predicted a rainy second half to summer. And on July 12 David Leonhardt of the New York Times’s “The Morning” wrote, particularly of Vermont, that “As climate change has intensified rainstorms, more parts of the U.S. are vulnerable to flooding.” OP ED WATCH THIS TIME WE FIX EARTH FOR REAL If you have a packet of Tums or Rolaids or something and you are at the seashore, it seems you should unwrap the tablets and toss them in. At least so “Nature Briefing” tells us, though you may not get much relief when you turn to the story saying “Start-ups are adding antacids to the ocean to slow global warming. Will it work?” (Plot spoiler: No. Of course not. The oceans are huge.) So that’s Plan B, if merely screening out the sun doesn’t cause some apocalyptic disaster or monstrous fizzle in the name of saving the Earth from clods like you and me. READ MORE ALL A-TWITTER The “denier” label now gets applied to anyone who questions not only whether climate change is a thing, but whether it is a crisis, a view that encompasses a large fraction of the world’s scientists and most of its economists. Meanwhile in a lament for bad manners online, a Guardian piece hurls that insult, saying “Climate crisis deniers target scientists for vicious abuse on Musk’s Twitter,” apparently in the belief that Michael Mann is the most mild-mannered, soft-spoken person ever to urge that Donald Trump be put “in prison for life” and also unaware that throwing a slur at people doesn’t put you in a position to complain when they throw it back. Instead, according to Anna Fazackerley, the problem is that Twitter is no longer censoring the wrong kinds of people. READ MORE GO JUMP IN THE LAKE The herd of independent minds seem especially keen to declare Crawford Lake, a small freshwater body near Milton, Ontario, just west of Toronto, the “global ground zero“ for the “Anthropocene”. But while we’re all for local-smalltown-kid-makes-good stories, and Crawford Lake definitely grew up in the boonies, the whole story is rubbish. Including that the hype centres on the “Anthropocene” having started in 1950 whereas the disastrous effects of man-made climate change supposedly already started at about 13 different points, and also loom in 2030. But none of those points was in 1950. READ MORE SAY WHAT? “As climate change continues to warm the planet, there may be yet another consequence heading our way: according to a new study, higher temperatures are associated with a higher likelihood of vision impairment.” – CTV News July 2, 2023 [we resisted the urge to use special large print for this item]. SCIENCE NOTES CLINTEL REPORT: MORE CONFIDENCE WE SHOULD HAVE LESS CONFIDENCE IN MODELS Chapter 8 of the Clintel Report on the IPCC’s AR6 presents a review by Guelph University’s Ross McKitrick of how well computer climate models compare to observations. The evidence that these models predict too much heating in the Earth’s atmosphere is pretty much indisputable (see our video on Trouble in the Tropical Troposphere for a quick overview). Every one of them exhibits too much warming, and the bias shows up even when programmers tweak their creations to try and reproduce the known sea surface warming trend (which the models also overstate). With so much evidence of model bias the IPCC has finally, reluctantly, bumped up their confidence that the models exaggerate warming. But only from low to medium. As McKitrick says “One wonders how much more evidence they need to claim high confidence, since in other areas they jump to that level with much less to go on.” READ MORE EXCESS HEAT KILLED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EUROPEANS THIS CENTURY Aha! shout the alarmists. Gotcha! Told you so! But they should let us finish the headline, because it continues that excess cold killed hundreds of thousands. Oh really? Yes. It’s our summary of a new study in The Lancet (h/t the Global Warming Policy Foundation) which presents a study of 854 urban areas in Europe over the years 2000 to 2019, and finds that after taking into account all the usual risk factors, the role of temperature swings on excess deaths in every age group was important, but by and large excess cold killed ten times more Europeans than excess heat. Of course there’s nothing global warming cannot do, including freeze people to death, so naturally the authors speculate that: “As climate change is expected to increase the burden of hot days and add unprecedented cold and heat events at high risks of causing deaths, these results allow for an accurate representation of the risks caused by changes in temperature.” But setting that verbiage aside, the bottom line is that any plausible amount of warming in the next century will eliminate a lot more deaths related to cold than it adds to those related to heat. READ MORE TEMPERATURE-RELATED MORTALITY RISK IN IRAN From the CO2Science Archive: Writing as background for their study, Sharafkhani et al. (2019) say that “the impact of Diurnal Temperature Range [DTR] on human health is not well understood.” And thus they set out to investigate the effect of DTR [the variation between the high and low air temperature during one day] on mortality in Tabriz, Iran, which is the capital of the East Azerbaijan Province and fifth largest Iranian city with a population of more than 1.6 million persons. READ MORE SUPPORT CDN If you like what you see, please forward this newsletter to friends and colleagues and encourage them to subscribe. Also join us on YouTube and now Rumble as well, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, send your comments and ideas via our blog (comment below individual items please) and to help us keep providing content, become a contributor. You can also now buy CDN merchandise in our online store. NOTEWORTHY LINKS For data on one important climate issue, and which one is obvious from the name, we recommend the Rutgers University Snow Lab.