Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #625 – Watts Up With That?

The Week That Was: 2025 01-04 (January 4, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “… as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”— Albert Einstein (1921)

Number of the Week: 30 years and 64 years before

THIS WEEK:

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Scope: This Week begins with Roy Spencer’s report that 2024 was the warmest year in the 46-year UAH record of atmospheric temperature trends. Jo Nova presents data showing China is the world’s greatest emitter of accumulated CO2 from coal. Discussed is a paper showing that breeding may produce plants that are more efficient in using carbon dioxide for photosynthesis without any increase in fertilizer needs. Roger Pielke describes the imaginative efforts of some groups to attribute severe weather events to CO2. A 2021 paper that changes in global temperatures over millions of years are caused by CO2 is discussed with some of the faults presented. Bjorn Lomborg describes some of the consequences of the false claim that wind and solar produce cheap energy.

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The Warmest Year: Roy Spencer reports that 2024 was the warmest year in the 46-year satellite record of lower atmospheric temperature trends reported by the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The data collection dates back to December 1978. Spencer provides a chart showing a ranking of the years using the annual difference from the average annual temperature for the entire record. 2024 was significantly above the previous warmest year of 2023. 2024 is almost 0.77°C above the mean while 2023 was only 0.43°C. The coldest year was 1985, with the temperature about 0.5°C below the mean. The high temperatures appear to be influenced by El Niños, and the low temperatures by volcanos erupting.

Spencer writes:

“The Version 6.1 global area-averaged temperature trend (January 1979 through December 2024) remains at +0.15 deg/ C/decade [0.27°F] (+0.22 C/decade over land, +0.13 C/decade over oceans).”

The full report from the Earth System Science Center is not yet available, thus TWTW is reluctant to speculate on what it may say. Certainly, there are two possible explanations for this warming. One explanation is the string of three El Niños from 2022 on. These put more water vapor into the lower atmosphere resulting in less heat loss to space. The second is a decline in cloud cover. This explanation is discussed in “Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo” by Helge F. Goessling, et al., published by AAAS Science. The abstract states:

“In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5K above the pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17K. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic warming and the El Niño onset fall short by about 0.2K in explaining the temperature rise. Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming.”

Previous papers have pointed out a warming of the oceans, particularly in the tropics. Since infrared radiation cannot penetrate the ocean surfaces beyond a few millimeters (small fractions of an inch) increasing atmospheric CO2 cannot be an explanation of ocean warming over a few years, but increased sunlight at sea level can. The full Earth System Science Center report should be out shortly. When it is released TWTW will discuss this subject further. See links under Measurement Issues – Atmosphere for the temperature trend report and under Challenging the Orthodoxy for the Goessling paper.

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China # 1? China has outstripped the US and the EU in annual carbon dioxide emissions. Thus, environmental organizations emphasize historic emissions rather than current emissions. They ignore that some of the emissions disappear into the environment. According to the annual fluctuation recorded at Mauna Loa and elsewhere part of the annual increase in CO2 is absorbed during the plant growing seasons, particularly in the Northen Hemisphere, there are strong drop-offs in concentrations every spring and summer. From the data it may be possible to estimate the CO2 lost to the environment and subsequently calculate a half-life for CO2 emissions. Much of this loss is going to vegetation. Trees are growing more rapidly than before, and the planet is greening.

Our World in Data gives charts that can be changed by the reader. For example, the Cumulative CO2 emissions by source, World, can be edited by country or region. In the general chart, Coal is the dominant source of CO2, followed by Oil, Gas, Flaring, Cement, and Other.

Jo Nova used these charts to show that by 2023, China has the greatest cumulative emissions from coal, mostly since 1950, and these emissions exceed that to the US, the EU, and the UK, separately, even though UK and Western country emissions start in 1750, and by 1950 were remarkably high. Thus, the Western anti-coal movement is punishing developed countries for past “sins” while ignoring developing countries for current “sins.” Nova writes:

“The point of this post is to highlight how absurd the situation is. The white guilt for ‘climate change’ is the point — not the gigatons of CO2. No one really gives a damn about carbon dioxide, or they would be trying to solve ‘the China problem’ as if life on Earth depended on solving it.

The whole planet and every koala will die, but no one has the time to add up a few sums and start talking about trade embargos, or boycotts, or even writing a strong letter to President Xi…”

Nova also shows that the US exceeds the EU, China, and other countries in total cumulative CO2 emissions. See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy for Nova’s calculations and https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ for trends in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa.

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Benefits of Increasing CO2: As mentioned in the last TWTW, Paul Homewood linked to an article describing a new study. According to the article:

The growth of maize [corn], sugarcane and sorghum has been greatly boosted by modifying the plants to take advantage of higher carbon dioxide levels now found in the air.

This was done by simply increasing the activity of two genes, says Coralie Salesse-Smith at the University of Illinois. The finding should lead to the creation of new varieties whose yields go up as CO2 levels continue to rise.

This is significant because the plants are C4 plants which evolved during an atmospheric low in CO2, and use an enzyme called PEP to fix carbon dioxide into a four-carbon molecule called malate. C4 plants have smaller microscopic pores on the surface of their leaves (called stomata) to reduce water loss than earlier C3 plants that evolved when the atmosphere was far richer in CO2 than today. Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) posted an essay describing the difference between C3 and C4 plants. It begins:

“Photosynthesis is the process that plants use to turn light, carbon dioxide, and water into sugars that fuel plant growth, using the primary photosynthetic enzyme Rubisco.

The majority of plant species on Earth uses C3 photosynthesis, in which the first carbon compound produced contains three carbon atoms. In this process, carbon dioxide enters a plant through its stomata (microscopic pores on plant leaves), where amidst a series of complex reactions, the enzyme Rubisco fixes carbon into sugar through the Calvin-Benson cycle. However, two key restrictions slow down photosynthesis.

1. Rubisco aims to fix carbon dioxide, but can also fix oxygen molecules, which creates a toxic two-carbon compound. Rubisco fixes oxygen about 20 percent of the time, initiating a process called photorespiration that recycles the toxic compound. Photorespiration costs the plant energy it could have used to photosynthesize.

• When stomata are open to let carbon dioxide in, they also let water vapor out, leaving C3 plants at a disadvantage in drought and high-temperature environments.

However, plants have evolved another form of photosynthesis to help reduce these losses in hot, dry environments. In C4 photosynthesis, where a four-carbon compound is produced, a unique leaf anatomy allows carbon dioxide to concentrate in ‘bundle sheath’ cells around Rubisco. This structure delivers carbon dioxide straight to Rubisco, effectively removing its contact with oxygen and the need for photorespiration. What’s more, this adaptation allows plants to retain water through the ability to continue fixing carbon while stomata are closed.

C4 plants—including maize, sugarcane, and sorghum—avoid photorespiration by using another enzyme called PEP during the first step of carbon fixation. This step takes place in the mesophyll cells that are located close to the stomata where carbon dioxide and oxygen enter the plant. PEP is more attracted to carbon dioxide molecules and is, therefore, much less likely to react with oxygen molecules. PEP fixes carbon dioxide into a four-carbon molecule, called malate, which is transported to the deeper bundle sheath cells that contain Rubisco. The malate is then broken down into a compound that is recycled back into PEP and carbon dioxide that Rubisco fixes into sugars—without having to deal with the oxygen molecules that are abundant in the mesophyll cells.”

RIPE is working on ways to increase efficiency in photosynthesis in C3 crops but improvements in efficiency of C4 plants are also welcome.

The paper at issue is “Increasing Rubisco as a simple means to enhance photosynthesis and productivity now without lowering nitrogen use efficiency” published by the New Phytologist. The summary states:

“Global demand for food may rise by 60% mid-century. A central challenge is to meet this need using less land in a changing climate. Nearly all crop carbon is assimilated through Rubisco, which is catalytically slow, reactive with oxygen, and a major component of leaf nitrogen. Developing more efficient forms of Rubisco, or engineering CO2 concentrating mechanisms into C3 crops to competitively repress oxygenation, are major endeavors, which could hugely increase photosynthetic productivity (≥ 60%). New technologies are bringing this closer, but improvements remain in the discovery phase and have not been reduced to practice. A simpler shorter-term strategy that could fill this time gap, but with smaller productivity increases (c. 10%) is to increase leaf Rubisco content. This has been demonstrated in initial field trials, improving the productivity of C3 and C4 crops. Combining three-dimensional leaf canopies with metabolic models infers that a 20% increase in Rubisco increases canopy photosynthesis by 14% in sugarcane (C4) and 9% in soybean (C3). This is consistent with observed productivity increases in rice, maize, sorghum, and sugarcane. Upregulation of Rubisco is calculated not to require more nitrogen per unit yield and although achieved transgenically to date, might be achieved using gene editing to produce transgene-free gain of function mutations or using breeding.”

TWTW comment: Rubisco is an enzyme, a molecule produced by the plant to act as a biological catalyst to speed up specific chemical reactions without being consumed by them. The human body is thought to have about 75,000 different enzymes, generally proteins. Plants have hundreds to thousands of different enzymes depending on the species. Rubisco is the one critical for photosynthesis.

The paper in the New Phytologist discusses the hope that the new pathway of changing the efficiency of Rubisco will not be subject to the regulatory delays faced by bioengineering plants. It then discusses how Rubisco limits both C3 and C4 photosynthesis and the improvements in CO2 uptake shown in both C3 soybean and C4 sugarcane plants. With proper breeding, improvements in Rubisco may not require increased nitrogen fertilizer. (Nitrogen fertilizer releases Nitrous Oxide, a greenhouse gas that is greatly overrated in its warming potential by the UN IPCC and its collaborators.) The stated conclusions and future perspectives of the paper are (references given in the paper):

“Given the strong limitation that Rubisco imposes on maximum photosynthetic rates in both C3 and C4 crops, it has been and will remain a key target for improvement. As highlighted above, new approaches and tools will accelerate improvement in this key and essential endeavor. However, in terms of technology readiness, both improvement of Rubisco kinetics and introduction of CCMs [CO2-Concentrating Mechanisms] into crops remain in the discovery phase, Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1 and 2 as defined (USDA-NIFA, 2018). Since most improvements here are transgenic, and necessarily so with CCMs, these would require lengthy deregulation under current legislation, suggesting a 20–30 yr time window until these improvements could enter seed systems in volume. Given the major limitation that Rubisco imposes on yield potential, and the large increases in yield per unit land area needed to reach projected future demand, it is critical that these endeavors are accelerated and realized. While a less sophisticated solution, we have shown here that simply increasing Rubisco content can readily be achieved and is able to increase yield, serving as a shorter-term solution to overcoming the limitations imposed by this central enzyme. It has been reduced to practice in single-site field trials of both a C3 and a C4 crop (TRL4), making it ready for wider scale testing (TRL 5) and entry into seed systems on a shorter timescale. Timescales would be further reduced by achieving upregulation through scarless edited mutation of the Rubisco promoter or 5′UTR regions. Finally, we have shown a 20% increase in Rubisco content would not lower crop nitrogen use efficiency and could substantially increase yield per unit land area, making this one potential solution in decreasing pressure to expand the agricultural footprint to meet rise in demand. Further, this approach would be equally applicable to bioenergy and bioproduct feedstocks that can be grown on marginal land unsuitable for food crops, in particular sustainable perennials such as C4 Miscanthus and switchgrass or fast-growing woody coppice crops such as willows and poplars (Sannigrahi et al., 2010; Somerville et al., 2010; Baker et al., 2022; He et al., 2024). Increasing Rubisco provides a means to achieve a moderate increase in photosynthesis and yield in the short term. It is thus not an alternative to the much-needed larger increases required in the medium and longer term by improving Rubisco kinetics, introducing CCMs and other synthetic opportunities to increase photosynthesis and productivity in crops.”

This is promising news because based on geological evidence, the world will get colder, even if it is not the onset of a new Ice Age, and the growing seasons of Earth great grain belts will get shorter. Real famine from climate change (cooling) is likely, though no one knows when. Any increase in plant productivity is welcome. No doubt, many so-called environmental groups will object, as usual, whether valid or not, to any promising improvements for humanity.

See links to Social Benefits of Carbon Dioxide (extensive references in the link to the paper) and https://ripe.illinois.edu/blog/difference-between-c3-and-c4-plants for the RIPE project description of the difference between C3 and C4 plants.

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Attributing Weather Events to CO2 Increase: A long-time effort by World Weather Attribution and similar groups is blaming severe weather events on CO2 increases. CO2 is a trace gas, only about 420 parts per million in volume today, and is secondary in its effect to water vapor. Without water vapor and the greenhouse effect, the land masses of Earth would get too cold at night to support life. But that fact is not considered by the UN IPCC and its collaborators, particularly those attributing severe weather events to a slight warming that CO2 may cause.

At one time, World Weather Attribution claimed it derived its attributions from the frequency statistics forming the Gauss-Markov theorem. Ross McKitrick, 2022 co-recipient of SEPP’s Fredrick Seitz Award, demonstrated that the authors of a key paper supporting this type of attribution misunderstood the conditions of the Gauss-Markov theorem. Thus, World Weather Attribution, and similar groups are using other tricks to make dubious claims.

Roger Pielke Jr is posting a series on Weather Attribution Alchemy on his blog. As he states, “hurricanes are a poster child of climate politics.” The first two parts were “Weather Attribution Alchemy” and “Attribution Stealth Advocacy at the NAS.” The current installment is “Tricks of the Trade.” In it Pilke describes Attribution Inflation, Begging the Question (assuming the conclusion that is to be proven), and Ignoring Evidence (a common characteristics with all those involved with the UN IPCC and its collaborators). Pielke provides examples of all these tricks and concludes with:

“What is Going on Here?

Extreme event attribution is puzzling.

The most charitable explanation for the proliferation of dodgy attribution claims is that there is a demand for them, including by many in the media and on the climate beat. That demand will be filled by someone — even if the “science” is more like pseudo-science.

A less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy. We might call that pseudo-scientific gaslighting.

The issues I document above are fairly obvious — and I invite contrary views, which I am happy to publish here at THB.”[The Honest Broker]

It is sad to see entities in once distinguished academic institutions reduced to such tricks. World Weather Attribution is in the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. It has clearly stated that its purpose is to alarm the public about the imagined dangers of increasing CO2. This is clearly political, not scientific nor promoting knowledge. But as Pielke states, these tricks extend to other academic institutions as well, such as MIT. See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.

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Omitting Key Facts: The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2021, published a paper by James W.B. Rae, et al. “Atmospheric CO2 over the Past 66 Million Years from Marine Archives.” The paper builds on the paper by Westerhold et al. (2020) paper “An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years.” It is the data record of the Westerhold paper that Willis Eschenbach unraveled, revealing periods of millions of years when temperatures were roughly stable, but CO2 varied from roughly one-half of what it is today to over twice of what it is today. Geoscientist Tom Gallagher took the work by Eschenbach and clearly showed that changes in ocean currents, forced by plate tectonics, better explain changes in Earth’s historic climate than changes in CO2. All too typically, the Rae paper ignores plate tectonics and changes in ocean currents.

Other deficiencies in the Rae paper include omitting the work of John Tyndall who demonstrated experimentally that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide is only secondary. Further, the Rae paper cites Arrhenius S. (1896) “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground.” Arrhenius grossly misunderstood the work of Tyndall and admitted it in a 1906 paper significantly reducing his views of the influence of CO2 on temperatures. The Rae paper omits this self-correction.

Of course, the Rae paper makes no mention of the work of van Wijngaarden and Happer on atmospheric radiation transfer, which explains how greenhouse gases work, using the most up to date database on Earth’s atmosphere. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy – Radiation Transfer for the work of van Wijngaarden and Happer and Defending the Orthodoxy for the work of Rae, et al. including its citations.

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Unknown Costs: Consumers in Germany and the UK are painfully discovering that the promise of free, clean energy is false. In his essay in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg writes:

“As nations use more and more supposedly cheap solar and wind power, a strange thing happens: Our power bills get more expensive. This exposes the environmentalist lie that renewables have already outmatched fossil fuels and that the ‘green transition’ is irreversible even under a second Trump administration.

The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing. Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup. Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.

This means the real energy costs of solar, and wind are far higher than what green campaigners claim. One study shows that in China the real cost of solar power on average is twice as high as that of coal. Similarly, a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows that solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels. Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark, all of which increasingly rely on solar and wind power, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.

The International Energy Agency’s latest data (from 2022) on solar and wind power generation costs and consumption across nearly 70 countries shows a clear correlation between more solar and wind and higher average household and industry energy prices. In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour (in today’s money). For every 10% increase in solar and wind share, the electricity cost increases by more than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. This isn’t an outlier; these results are substantially similar to 2019, before the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.”

Lomborg shows a chart comparing electricity prices with the percentage of electricity from wind and solar. Then he states:

“Take Germany, where electricity costs 30 cents a kilowatt-hour—more than twice the U.S. cost and more than three times the Chinese price. Germany has installed so much solar and wind that, on sunny and windy days, renewable energy satisfies close to 70% of Germany’s needs—a fact the press eagerly reports. But the press hardly mentions dark and still days when these renewables deliver almost nothing. Twice in the past two months, when it was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than 4% of the daily power Germany needed.

Current battery technology is insufficient. Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes. That leaves more than 23 hours of energy powered mostly by fossil fuels. Last month, with cloudy skies and nearly no wind, Germany faced the highest power prices since the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with wholesale prices reaching a staggering $1 a kilowatt-hour.”

Lomborg explains how poor countries are especially hurt by the deceit that green energy is cheap. then concludes with:

“This sets the backdrop for U.S. authorities’ recent bribery allegations against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani. Since most Indian states don’t want to ‘risk ‘intermittent’ renewables,’ according to Reuters, he allegedly had to bribe government officials to get them to buy power from his $6 billion solar power project. Mr. Adani’s case confirms what the data already show: Solar and wind are bad business and make our power much more expensive.”

See Article # 1.

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Number of the Week: 30 years and 64 years before. The UK Met Office has drastically lowered its once world-class standards. In recent years, independent UK researchers have been discovering that the Met Office has been reporting temperatures from locations that are only Class 4 or 5 (such as “close to other sources of heat” such as runways and taxiways in busy airports). Others have revealed that some weather stations do not exist, such as the reported location on an urban beach.

Chris Morrison in the Daily Sceptic reports”

“The U.K. Met Office claims to have a continuous record of temperatures at Stornoway Airport going back to 1873. This is truly remarkable since manned powered flight was not achieved until 1903 and the actual airport was built in 1937.”

The airport record began 30 years before the first powered, controlled flight with a person on board occurred and 64 years before the airport was built. See link under Communicating Better to the Public – Make things up.

Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science

Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013