We have a new article published Teleconnections in the Earth System. “It illustrates the large-scale connectivity of the atmosphere-ocean coupled system and generalizes the concept to regional scales and to other components of the earth system. Connections at a distance, or teleconnections, can occur by the direct transfer of mass by changes in regular circulations or by propagating waves initiated by a variety of mechanisms. Questions as to what extent recognized teleconnection patterns can be associated with identifiable forcing mechanisms, to what extent these patterns are interrelated and how they might cause, react to, or interact with changing forcing such as changes in atmospheric composition, landcover, or the distribution of sea ice to produce climate changes are examined.”

“Questions remain as to what extent recognized teleconnection patterns can be associated with an identifiable forcing mechanism, to what extent these patterns are interrelated and how they might cause, react to, or interact with changing forcing such as changes in atmospheric composition, landcover, or the distribution of sea ice to produce climate changes? “

This article provides further substantiation to the Climate Science weblog of July 28 2005 entitled What is the Importance to Climate of Heterogeneous Spatial Trends in Tropospheric Temperatures? where it is written:

“...regional diabatic heating due to human activities represents a major, but under-recognized climate forcing, on long-term global weather patterns. Indeed, this heterogeneous climate forcing may be more important on the weather that we experience than changes in weather patterns associated with the more homogeneous spatial radiative forcing of the well-mixed greenhouse gases.”

Read full post here.

A growing contingent of scientists has been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.

Conversely, radical increases in global temperatures or rising sea levels proclaimed by Al Gore and his ilk aren’t facts. They’re merely guesses, some of them hysterical, about conditions decades or centuries into the future and based on assumptions about innumerable variables, many of which are beyond our scientific comprehension and expertise.

Climate change is a natural and age-old phenomenon on this planet recurring in roughly 1,500-year cycles and predating humanity by millions of years. Ice ages have come and gone. Compared to the overwhelming influence of the sun and the impact of nonhuman influences on this planet - ocean-generated water vapor, animal life, vegetation, etc. - the notion that the puny contribution of mankind is the principal cause of climate change is a grand conceit.

Human activity constitutes a small fraction of the myriad influences on climate. Marginal changes in human activity within our technological and practical economic means represent an even smaller fraction of that small fraction. The trillions of dollars the world would spend on wasteful schemes to avert a delusional global warming doomsday may be the greatest fool’s errand in history. Count me among the global warming skeptics. If I’m still around in a hundred years, I’ll delight in saying, “I told you so.”
Read more here.

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month. Here is what you see in visible light:

See full size view here

Why NOAA allows installations like this I’ll never understand. And this station is a USHCN climate station of record, used in who knows how many climate studies. See an infrared shot that shows the warming induced by the concrete pad even though the skies were overcast and there had been some light rain here.

Earth did warm slightly over the last quarter century, as it emerged further from the Little Ice Age, and humans likely played a role. However, literally hundreds of climate scientists say catastrophic climate change and dominant human influence are over-hyped myths. Our planet has experienced numerous climate shifts, they point out, including prolonged ice ages, a 400-year Medieval Warm Period and a 500-year Little Ice Age. Climate scientists still don’t understand what caused these events – or the temperature roller coaster of the last century, as carbon dioxide levels rose steadily: temperatures climbed from 1910 to 1945, fell between 1945 and 1975, and increased again from 1975 to 1998, notes Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director of the International Arctic Research Center. These inconvenient facts have forced alarmists to rely on computer models that generate Frankenclime monsters realistic enough to scare people into believing climate Armageddon is nigh.

Climate models do help scientists evaluate possible consequences of changing economic growth, emission, cloud cover and other variables. But they can’t reproduce the actual climate of the past century. They cannot make accurate predictions, even one year in the future, much less fifty. They do not represent reality, and should not be relied on to guide public policy. Models reflect the assumptions and hypotheses that go into them - and our still limited understanding of complex, turbulent climate processes that involve the sun, oceans, land masses and atmosphere. They do a poor job of dealing with the effects of water vapor, precipitation and high cirrus clouds on temperatures and climate, because the underlying physics aren’t well understood, notes MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen.

Like the UN’s politicized climate control panel, the IPCC, models also place too much emphasis on carbon dioxide. They pay insufficient attention to extraterrestrial factors like changes in the Earth’s irregular orbit around the sun, solar energy levels, and solar winds that appear to influence the level of cosmic rays reaching Earth, and thus the formation of cloud cover and penetration of infrared radiation from the sun. They likewise fail to incorporate the profound effects that periodic shifts in Pacific Ocean currents have on temperatures and sea ice in the Arctic.

Read more here.

In a paper recently published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, Javier Seoane and Luis Carrascal of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain, write that “global climatic change has been proposed as one of the most likely environmental processes governing population trends,” stating more specifically that “it has been hypothesized that species preferring low environmental temperatures, which inhabit cooler habitats or areas, would be negatively affected by global warming as a consequence of the widely accepted increase of temperature during the last two decades,” while additionally noting that “this effect is assumed to be more intense at higher latitudes and altitudes because these areas seem to be changing more rapidly.” Hence, they devised a study “to assess whether population changes agree with what could be expected under global warming (a decrease in species typical of cooler environments),” focusing on birds.

This work revealed, in their words, that “one-half of the study species showed significant increasing [our italics] recent trends despite the public concern that bird populations are generally decreasing,” while “only one-tenth showed a significant decrease."In discussing their findings, Seoane and Carrascal state that “the coherent pattern in population trends we found disagrees [our italics] with the proposed detrimental effect of global warming on bird populations of western Europe.” And they are not the only ones to have come to this conclusion. They note, for example, that “one-half of terrestrial passerine birds in the United Kingdom exhibited increasing recent trends in a very similar time period (1994-2004),” citing Raven et al. (2005); and they note that “there is also a marked consistency between the observed increasing trends for forest and open woodland species in the Iberian Peninsula and at more northern European latitudes in the same recent years,” citing Gregory et al. (2005). Likewise, they write that “Julliard et al. (2004a), working with 77common bird species in France, found that species with large ecological breadth showed a tendency to increase their numbers throughout the analyzed period.”

“It should be clear from these several observations that the supposedly unprecedented warmth of the last two decades has not led to what Seoane and Carrascal call “the proposed detrimental effect of global warming on bird populations of western Europe.” In fact, it appears to have done just the opposite, with a little help, we might add, from one of man’s and nature’s very best friends: the contemporary rise in the air’s CO2 content. Read more here.

There is an interesting exchange of views by Bill Gray, Tom Knudson and Steve Lyons at the Bahamas Weather Conference (Thanks to Bob Ferguson for alerting us to this short video.)

Climate Science has just one comment on this video. Tom Knudson claims that the global climate models can be used to test theory (such as his claim on the dominance of CO2 as the driver of climate change).

However, Tom Knudson makes the very serious mistake of stating that models can test his claim.  The models are hypotheses and cannot test anything! They can be used to improve our understanding of how a system works, but their results must be tested against real-world observational data.

See larger image here. The complexity of the atmospheric processes climate models try to deal with, many of them poorly understood or given wrong feedback signs

His failure to properly communicate what models really should be used for, unfortunately, permeates popular and media preceptions of the climate change issue, and is resulting in very poor policy decisions (e.g., see the April 15th, 2008 post on Prometheus entitled ”Biofuels and Mitigation/Adaption").

Wow. What a week. I just got back from a seminar led by Rutgers University professor Dr. Alan Robock on his new research into nuclear winter. He started out by stating that “This is worse than global warming.”
Yikes! Just what I needed to hear, another disaster scenario to add to the list!!

Dr. Robock led us on a horror tour as he stepped through the course of events that would unfold if only a small fraction of today’s global nuclear arsenal was deployed in a regional conflict in southern Asia. After the initial devastation from the actual explosions, cities would go up in flames and the resulting firestorms would loft dust and smoke high into the earth’s upper atmosphere. Here, atmospheric currents would pick them up and spread the aerosol load throughout the world. This shield of dust and smoke would remain in place for upwards of a decade, blocking about a significant amount of the sun’s warming rays (while at the same time, through its destruction of the ozone layer, allow in more harmful solar ultraviolet radiation) and ushering in a nuclear autumn. Large-scale crop failures would result and lack of food would begin to take its toll in regions of the earth that were far removed from the direct conflict.

A larger-scale nuclear conflict, say between the U.S. and Russia, would be even many times worse. A full out nuclear winter would result, in which many places in the northern mid-latitude land areas would not see above freezing temperatures for several summers in a row. Needless to say there wouldn’t be much food around leading to massive desperation and starvation. (For more on Dr. Robock’s work on this topic, including some very scary PowerPoint slides).

No matter where I turn, I am met with another barrage of imminent doom. Although I can’t be sure of exactly what manner it will take, it is overwhelmingly clear that human society is very quickly headed to a violent and disturbing end. If nuclear war doesn’t get us, nuclear winter will. If we manage to avoid that, global warming will turn us into cannibals and/or refugees. And I haven’t even mentioned bird flu, ebola, or some other epidemic disease that is poised to strike us down. The only thing I can think to do, is say the heck with it all. If a horrible fate awaits us in the very near future, then until then, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” I am going to live my life (or whatever is left of it) to the fullest. Forget business-as-usual, I am going to step things up a notch. So go ahead, Supersize it! Read more here.

In the peer reviewed literature, I have emphasized that the IPCC multi-decadal global climate runs, while they refer them as “projections” and also “scenarios” are actually model sensitivity studies since all of the important climate forcings and feedbacks are not included; e.g. see here and here.

Now, from an unlikely source (Real Climate) have come the statements “A scenario only illustrates the climatic effect of the specified forcing - this is why it is called a scenario, not a forecast. To be sure, the first IPCC report did talk about “prediction” - in many respects the first report was not nearly as sophisticated as the more recent ones, including in its terminology.” “One should not mix up a scenario with a forecast - I cannot easily compare a scenario for the effects of greenhouse gases alone with observed data, because I cannot easily isolate the effect of the greenhouse gases in these data, given that other forcings are also at play in the real world.”

Real Climate states that the scenarios can “become obsolete, and cannot be verified or falsified by observed data, because the observed data have become dominated by other effects not included in the scenarios.

This is the definition of a sensitivity experiment! In other words, policymakers are being given global and regional multi-decadal model results by the IPCC which are not predictions but sensitivity model runs since a variety of important first order climate forcings and feedbacks are not included in the models! [e.g. as reported in Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. ]. Real Climate now has finally reported to us this serious limitiation to the interpretation of the results from climate models. See full post here.