A cursory review of articles about the upper atmosphere reveals many theories about the role of CO2 on temperatures aloft. By "Upper Atmosphere" we mean the region above the surface and below 100,000 feet. Actually, in this article, we will only concern ourselves with the region from 850 millibars to 100 millibars, which is about 5,000 feet to 55,000 feet.

In the early days of Global Warming, the theories predicted that the upper atmosphere would heat due to increases in CO2. Well, that didn't happen. One recent article by NASA says that the Thermosphere (above 100,000 ft) has cooled in recent years due to decreased solar activity and a reduction in ultraviolet light. That certainly seems reasonable. Another article stated that if the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere must cool, which makes no sense to me.

Other articles posit that as CO2 increases the level at which radiation escapes to space also increases and the upper atmosphere warms. That also made no sense to me.

I decided to take a look at temperatures aloft and reasoned that the difference between day and night temperatures in the upper atmosphere might reveal whether the nighttime atmosphere is cooling faster or slower than in previous years. If cooling slower the temperature curves at 00z and 12z would tend to converge and if cooling faster the curves would diverge. Simple, right?

If the blathering blowhards of the dinosaur media and the Chicken Littles of the Twitterverse are to be believed, the world has officially come to an end. And in a way, maybe it has. Not "the" world, of course, but their world.


That's because, as you will no doubt have heard by now, Trump just announced that the US will be pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

"I am fighting every day for the great people of this country," Trump boasted in his Rose Garden press conference announcing his decision on the agreement, adopted in Paris in December 2015. "Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord..."

...If only he had stopped there. However, after a brief applause break greeting the announcement of the withdrawal, the Dissembler-in-Chief completed the sentence thusly: "but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers." And then, just to make sure he added enough political hogwash to confuse everyone, he pressed on: "So we're getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine."

Ok, then. So the US is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement not because it is the leading edge of the $100 trillion carbon swindle wedge. Not because it is based on the fake science of fundamentally flawed models with fundamentally incorrect inputs. Not because it brings us one step closer to the Edmund Rothschild-articulated vision of a "global conservation bank" to steward over the world economy or the century-old technocratic dream of an energy-based economy where people will be assigned "carbon credits" and forced to ration their activities in response to the dictates of a de facto world government. No, not for these reasons, but because the "deal" wasn't "fair" for "American workers?" And the Trump Administration is going to immediately begin negotiations to re-enter the agreement?

Sigh.

Campers hoping to pitch a tent in Pinware River and Pistolet Bay provincial parks will have to wait a bit longer because the sites are inaccessible due to snow, with drifts as high as 20 feet in some places.

"It was impossible [to open this weekend] ... This is the first time I've ever seen this much snow," said Les Peddle, who has worked at the Pinware River site for 20 years.

"We have a building, an activity centre, in the day use area ... right now, the snow is still not down to the top of the door."

Pinware River Provincial Park is located in southern Labrador, while Pistolet Bay Provincial Park is on the tip of the Northern Peninsula.

Although Thursday is the first day of the summer month of June, there's no indication of balmy summer weather in sight. Daytime highs for the month are already unusually low, said Yle meteorologist Seija Paasonen.

"Between April and May we generally have the kinds of temperatures we are seeing now," Paasonen noted.

The weather forecast puts daytime highs Thursday and Friday at a chilly 10 to 11 degrees Celsius, while highs in central regions will runs from six to 7 degrees and from two to seven degrees Celsius up north.

According to Paasonen, at this time of year, average daytime highs in Helsinki should be around 17 degrees, and even up north, highs should be above 10 degrees.

Meanwhile new data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute indicate that across northern Finland - from Kainuu in the east to northern Ostrobothnia in the west - temperatures in May were nearly three degrees Celsius below the long term average.

The last time Finnish residents experienced a May as cold as this was in 1969 - nearly 50 years ago.

June 1st means summer, right? Oh wait - this is Sweden after all. Bring on the snow and hail! Last month in Sweden was a month of extreme weather.

The far northern parts of Norrland saw record-low temperatures, the lowest since 1968 according to preliminary figures from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI).

So surely, summer should be here by now? Well, think again - this is Sweden, after all. On June 1st, snow was falling over the small village of Kåbdalis in the northern county of Norrbotten.

"June 1st! From clear blue sky (and freezing cold) to snow storm in one minute. Yes, I do like snow. And I like winter. But maybe not in June," Kåbdalis resident Marie Nygårds wrote on Instagram.

In the arctic mining town of Kiruna, also in the Norrbotten county, residents got to experience a mix of weathers: "Hail, snow, thunder, +2 in Kiruna," Ulrica Strålind wrote on Instagram.

A communications group at Yale University has put out a video that seems to be a rebuttal to a Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams poking fun at climate scientists and their misplaced confidence in models. The video is full of impressive-looking scientists talking about charts and data and whatnot. It probably cost a lot to make and certainly involved a lot of time and effort. The most amazing thing, however, is that it actually proves the points being made in the Dilbert cartoon. Rather than debunking the cartoon, the scientists acted it out in slow motion.

The Dilbert cartoon begins with a climate scientist saying "human activity is warming the earth and will lead to a global catastrophe." When challenged to explain how he knows that, he says they start with basic physical principles plus observations about the climate, which they then feed into models, pick and choose some of the outputs, then feed those into economic models, and voila. When asked, what if I don't trust the economic models, the scientist retreats to an accusation of denialism.

It is colder right now than throughout almost all of history. I understand that you've been lead to believe that global warming is a problem, but that is not true. Please look at this chart. The blue line shows temperatures for the past 600 million years.

Look at the far right side of the chart (today), and you'll see that temperatures have plunged to their lowest point in almost 250 million years.

There have been only two periods in the past 600 million years when it has been colder than today.

We are now living through one of the coldest periods in geologic history. The last few year's minor rise in temperature is too minuscule to even show up on the chart.

Anyone who tries to tell you that we're enduring "unprecedented global warming" is lying or woefully misinformed.

Your father's instincts about the global warming hoax are absolutely spot on. Please, please do not try to push him in the opposite direction.

If you were feeling a little chilly this morning it's no surprise — it was our coldest start to winter since 1943, with the mercury plummeting to a frosty 2.9C in Adelaide.

Elsewhere in the state it was even colder, with Yunta -4.7C, Renmark -3.2C and Loxton, Snowtown and Murray Bridge -1.9C, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Cold morning for #SAweather: Yunta -4.7 °C, Renmark -3.2 ° C, Loxton, Snowtown and Murray Bridge -1.9 °C https://t.co/OazoPRe4P8 pic.twitter.com/3lgum4rTyF

— BOM South Australia (@BOM_SA) May 31, 2017

President Trump just announced that the U.S. will "withdraw" out of the Paris Climate Accord. But "begin negotiations to re-enter".

Trump said:

"We will cease honoring all non-binding agreements", and "will stop contributing to the green climate fund".

"I can not in good conscience support a deal that harms the United States".

"The bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair to the United States".

"This agreement is less about climate and more about other countries getting a financial advantage over the United States".

"The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries."

"Fourteen days of carbon emissions alone would totally wipe out the U.S. contribution to reduction by 2030"

The Paris Accord is a BAD deal for Americans, and the President's action today is keeping his campaign promise to put American workers first. The Accord was negotiated poorly by the Obama Administration and signed out of desperation. It frontloads costs on the American people to the detriment of our economy and job growth while extracting meaningless commitments from the world's top global emitters, like China. The U.S. is already leading the world in energy production and doesn't need a bad deal that will harm American workers.

The only recent attempt at a global Holocene temperature reconstruction available today is the one by Marcott, et al. (2013), the paper abstract can be viewed here. His reconstruction is shown in figure 1.

The Y axis is a reconstructed global temperature anomaly from the 1961-1990 mean. "Years BP" are years before 1950. This reconstruction shows a fairly flat Holocene Climatic Optimum (or HCO, also called the Holocene Thermal Optimum, see description here) temperature anomaly of +0.4°C from 9500 BP to 5000 BP, declining to a low of -0.4°C about 300 BP (1650 AD) in the Little Ice Age (LIA). This 0.8°C difference between the HCO and the LIA is smaller than the generally accepted difference of 1°C to 1.5°C.

This is documented in some detail by Javier here. The higher accepted difference is clear in glacial records as shown by Koch, et al., 2014 (link). It can also be seen in the biosphere as shown by Kullman 2001 (link); Pisaric et al. 2003 (link); MacDonald et al. 2000 (link); Tinner, et al. 1996 (link) and Thouret et al. 1996 (link)). Further, the marine biosphere also shows a larger temperature difference as seen in Werne et al., 2000 (link) and Rosenthal et al., 2013 (link).