As world leaders get ready to head to Paris for the latest pact on cutting CO2 emissions, it has emerged that there isn’t as much urgency about the matter as had been thought. A team of top-level atmospheric chemistry boffins from France and Germany say they have identified a new process by which vast amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted into the atmosphere from the sea ‚Äì a process which was unknown until now, meaning that existing climate models do not take account of it. The effect of VOCs in the air is to cool the climate down, and thus climate models used today predict more warming than can actually be expected. Indeed, global temperatures have actually been stable for more than fifteen years, a circumstance which was not predicted by climate models and which climate science is still struggling to assimilate. –Lewis Page, The Register, 30 September 2015
Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown cooling process which may pose a serious threat to man-made global warming theory. Though the cooling effects of isoprene are well known, what is new is the discovery that the oceans are producing much more of it than has been accounted for in the alarmists’ climate models. Climate skeptics have, of course, long argued that the models used by alarmists to predict future climate change are fatally flawed because they exaggerate the influence of man-made carbon dioxide and fail to take into account other unknown or ill-understood factors. “Here is more evidence of what we have known for some time: that climate models simply do not mirror the reality of a [complex] system ‚Äì and that they should never have been trusted in the first place,” says Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. –James Delingpole, Breitbart London, 1 October 2015
The oceans seem to produce significantly more isoprene, and consequently affect stronger the climate than previously thought. Isoprene is a gas that is formed by both the vegetation and the oceans. It is very important for the climate because this gas can form particles that can become clouds and then later affect temperature and precipitation. Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water. The atmospheric chemists from France and Germany, however, could now show that isoprene could also be formed without biological sources in surface film of the oceans by sunlight and so explain the large discrepancy between field measurements and models. The new identified photochemical reaction is therefore important to improve the climate models. —Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, 30 September 2015
For years, scientists and activists have predicted the Arctic would be ice-free during the summers and winter sea ice levels would continue to decline. But what they didn’t count on was sea ice remaining too thick for ships to regularly travel through. The first-ever study measuring sea ice thickness in the Northwest Passage has found Arctic sea ice is still too thick for ships to safely travel through it year-round. Scientists found that “even in today’s climate, ice conditions must still be considered severe.” –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 30 September 2015
The Conservative British government response to the climate crisis in the lead up to the Paris Summit is to argue in public that it’s the market that should lead the changes required. The government’s attitude, as expressed in a number of recent much criticised attacks on renewable energy and energy efficiency is emboldening climate sceptics in the country such as Benny Peiser, who runs the cunningly named Global Warming Policy Foundation, and who issued a statement this week calling for energy-intensive industries such as iron and steel to be relieved of carbon taxes. This is an effort by him to influence the new consultation. –David Thorpe, The Fifth Estate, 1 October 2015
