Search
Close this search box.

Now they are coming for your tires! Researchers say ‘tire emissions’ pose a threat to global health, & EVs could make ‘the problem worse’ – ‘Regulators are already scrambling to tackle this issue’

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds – Researchers say tire emissions pose a threat to global health, and EVs could make the problem worse. BY LEWIN DAY When contemplating the emissions from road vehicles, our first thought is often about the various gases coming out of the tailpipe. However, new […]

STUDY: ‘Floods have become less deadly: an analysis of global flood fatalities 1975–2022’ – ‘The average number of fatalities per event has declined over time’

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-024-06444-0 Floods have become less deadly: an analysis of global flood fatalities 1975–2022 Published: 27 February 2024 – Natural Hazards Abstract Floods are amongst the most frequent disasters in terms of human and economic impacts. This study provides new insights into the frequency of loss of life at the global scale, mortality fractions of the population […]

New Paper: ‘Regulators Should Value Nonhuman Animals’ – Seeks ‘to estimate the number of dog-years saved by a regulation’

By Cass R. Sunstein – Harvard Law School; Harvard University – Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) – Date Written: February 17, 2024

Excerpt: “If a regulation prevents dogs, horses, or cats from being killed or hurt, the benefits should be specified and quantified.  .. .Outside of federal rulemaking, an academic study finds that a Value of a Statistical Dog Life is $10,000. If the goal is to come up with some number, it would be an advance to use that one, perhaps as a plausible lower bound. But there is a natural objection. Is the life of a dog plausibly 1/1,000 that of the life of a person? … At a minimum, agencies should attempt to quantify benefits and costs to nonhuman animals even if they cannot monetize them. With the help of contingent valuation studies, they should also attempt to monetize those harms.”

Climate PSYOP: Peer-reviewed Study: ‘Addressing climate change with behavioral science’ – ‘Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change’

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

SCIENCE ADVANCES – 7 Feb 2024 – Vol 10Issue 6 –DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
“Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change…A growing body of research across the behavioral sciences has been investigating intervention strategies aimed at boosting sustainable intentions and behaviors such as recycling, public transportation use, and household energy saving (389). For instance, communications aimed at reducing the psychological distance of climate change, by making it feel more geographically, socially, and temporally close, were effective at increasing climate concern and amplifying self-reported intentions to engage in mitigating behaviors, such as reducing energy consumption.” 

Carbon Dioxide Causes Much Less Warming Than is Commonly Believed, New Paper Finds

Chris Morrison of the Daily Sceptic: Three scientists, including Atmospheric Professor Yi Huang of McGill University, have reduced by nearly 40% the basic amount of warming caused by a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – a figure commonly used to promote the global warming scare. In addition they cast doubt on the ability of CO2 to heat the atmosphere beyond the levels already passed in the pre-industrial age. “Transmissivity in the CO2 band centre is unchanged by increased CO2 as the absorption is already saturated,” they note…It is published by the American Meteorological Society in its Journal of Climate.

Another sensational finding is that higher levels of CO2 seem to actually cool Antarctica. “The [doubled CO2] forcing in polar regions is strongly hemispheric asymmetric and is negative in the Antarctic,” write the scientists.

The main paper is behind a paywall but an excellent summary of its contents is provided by the science blog No Tricks Zone. The science is complex with the ‘Abstract’ explaining that the paper evaluates the “spatiotemporal variation of the instantaneous, longwave CO2 radiative forcing at both the TOA [top of the atmosphere] and surface”. In plain terms, the work investigates the rise in temperature at three levels in the atmosphere as the Earth adjusts its thermal balance from heat trapped by so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases. Using a watts per square metre formulation (3.7 W/m2), it is commonly held by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a doubling of CO2 will lead to a rise in temperature at the TOA of 1.2°C. The scientists have reduced this number to 2.26 W/m2, a 39% reduction down to a temperature rise of 0.72°C. At the surface, the rise is only 0.55°C. Large parts of the globe are measured at 0 W/m2 including below zero for Antarctica.

Study: ‘Global greening is an indisputable fact…the rate of global greening increased’ from 2001-2020 – Published in journal Global Ecology & Conservation

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262 Global Ecology and Conservation Volume 49, January 2024, e02791 Highlights • The global greening is an indisputable fact. • The rate of global greening increased slightly. • The drought has only slowed the global greening, but not caused the global browning. Abstract Increases or decreases in remote sensing-based vegetation greenness are usually referred to […]

Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data, Climate Experts Say

https://dailynewsfromaolf.substack.com/p/trillions-spent-on-climate-change?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=1300612&post_id=141208377&utm_campaign=677727&isFreemail=true&r=1g0x4t&utm_medium=email By Katie Spence To preserve a “livable planet,” the Earth can’t warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the United Nations warns. Failure to maintain that level could lead to several catastrophes, including increased droughts and weather-related disasters, more heat-related illnesses and deaths, and less food and more poverty, according to NASA. To avert the […]

Analysis: ‘Hurricanes have not become more intense’ since 1980 based on ACE or Accumulated Cyclone Energy combining frequency & intensity

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-tropical-cyclones By ROGER PIELKE JR. This post is co-authored with Ryan Maue, whose Weather and Climate Substack I highly recommend. —RP Excerpts: In 2012, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue and I published in the Journal of Climate the first climatology of global landfalling tropical cyclones of at least hurricane strength. Since then, Ryan and I have updated the time series every […]

‘Landification’ – or ‘land emergence’: Even with sea level rise, around the world coastal land area has increased 13,000 square miles or about size of Belgium!



Kip Hansen: “Land emergence”  — or the gaining of dry land…Compare these two versions:  Google Translate version of the Japanese page with the English version provided by the publisher.

#

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: “If sea level rise is ongoing and inexorable, then all else equal, the areal extent of global land areas should be shrinking, especially in low-lying continental areas and among tropical islands…However, from 1985 to 2015 — a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) — the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium home to more than 11 million people.”

The literature on landification is in strong consensus that global land areas, even along coasts, are generally increasing in areal extent. For example, Mao et al. 2021 looked at global shorelines and found that instead of retreating on a global scale they are generally expanding:

At almost all latitudes and longitudes landification is winning out over erosion and SLR. Figure 9 from Mao et al. 2021.