In recent weeks we have posted stories about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and ENSO and their effects on temperatures and Greenland and Arctic ice.

In this story, we look at how these same ocean cyclical oscillations influence the relative frequency of tropical storms, the number of strong storms and the most likely storm tracks and areas affected.

In recent months we have seen two prominent scientists (MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and NOAA’s Tom Knutson of the fluid dynamics lab at Princeton) who had earlier published papers linking global warming with increased Atlantic hurricane frequency and strength change their position on the basis of new data or models. We applaud these scientists for being willing to change their opinion when presented with conflicting data.

We believe these varying cycles of activity and tracks relate mainly to natural cyclical changes in the oceans. Dr. Bill Gray has shown how the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes and major hurricanes increase dramatically during the warm AMO phase (the case since 1995). We can see that surface pressure during hurricane season tends to be lower in the western Atlantic and Gulf when the Atlantic is in its warm mode (positive AMO).

See full size here

In the cool PDO, there are more La Ninas and La Ninas favor more hurricanes due to less shear and storms threaten not only the Gulf as we find in El Ninos but are much more common along the East Coast from Florida to the Carolinas to New England.

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If La Nina holds on and the AMO, which has weakened, rebounds (as it did in the La Nina summer of 1955), both the Gulf and the East Coast need to be wary this summer and fall more than in most years. See why here.


See Hurricane Hugo full size here

The 2008 winter was the coldest in 40 years for the upper Midwest, Plains states and most of Canada. Minnesota newspapers report that this year’s opening of the locks to Mississippi barge traffic, delayed by three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940. Eau Claire, where “old-fashioned winters” have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada.

Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall. Antarctic pack-ice far exceeded what Captain Cook saw on his 18th century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself the miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. At the opposite pole, flow-ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean, and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, making up for the much heralded melt-back last summer.

Past cool periods, identified with the late stages of the “Little Ice Age” and with the Maunder and Dalton climate minima, closely correlate with low sunspot numbers (astronomers have kept close tabs on sunspots since Galileo’s time). Some solar-physicists are now saying if the current cycle doesn’t begin to produce spots soon, we can expect a cool-down like the 19th-Century Dalton minimum - or worse. Decades-long cooling in the past brought crop failures to Europe from repeated summer frosts and restricted growing seasons.

With grain shortages already staring us in the face, we’d be advised to begin thinking about a global cool-down instead of a warming that may or may not continue. We might consider ways to transform semi-desert into arable land and to develop seed with shorter maturing cycles suitable for a sub-boreal grain belt. If cooling should begin in earnest, we will quickly forget global warming as we face the new challenges ahead. Read more here.

I have previously written about the work of Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s National Post. He has been regularly charting in his column the ever-increasing number of climate scientists around the world who have been either crying foul about the man-made global warming scam or, having initially signed up to it, have been having second thoughts about it. This was a journey of discovery for him, to put it mildly; he had previously been inclined to believe the claims that ‘deniers’ were oil industry stooges, since he himself had worked for an anti-nuclear energy group and so was duly cynical about the way that industry’s scientists could twist the truth to suit their paymasters. But then to his astonishment he discovered that, when it came to MMGW, the scientists who were corrupt weren’t pushing the boat out for big business but for its holier-than-thou green challengers.

Now he has written a book, provocatively entitled The Deniers, in which he shows that not only is the fabled climate change ‘consensus’ itself a sham but the so-called MMGW ‘deniers’ are by far the more accomplished and distinguished scientists than those pushing the theory as a settled and incontrovertible truth. A number of them indeed, are so eminent they were used as experts by the IPCC - but then came to realise that this was an innately corrupted process and that even some of their own work was being abused and distorted in order to promulgate the false doctrine of MMGW. 

Meanwhile, the carbon really has hit the fan with the highly inconvenient truth that global temperatures are not only currently static but are predicted not to rise at all for the next decade. Andrew Bolt links to a debate on the Politics and Environment blog between climate change believers who are trying to reconcile the IPCC predictions with reality. Officially, the greens are claiming that the prediction that rising CO2 inevitably meant rising temperatures always allowed for, er, pauses. Of a decade. But in the P&E debate, there is the distant clang of a spade being called a spade: The IPCC projections remain falsified. Where now is that fabled ‘consensus’ when it is urgently needed to defend all those reputations which depend upon it?  You’d have to have a heart of Antarctic ice not to laugh.

Read more here.

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Petition Project of 2001 by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.

The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because “increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony - such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series — were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.

Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto’s corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. “E-mails started coming in every day,” he explained. “And they kept coming.” The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. “We decided to do the survey again.”

Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who’s who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, “much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you’d ordinarily expect,” he explained. He’s processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go - most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org.

Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism? “I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming,” he says, “and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren’t alone.”

See more here. If you wish to sign the petition and think you qualify go here and print sign and mail it in with brief reasons why you think so.  Also a national coalition of pastors, Christian leaders, and policy makers announced the Thursday, May 15, of the “We Get It!” campaign aimed at enlisting one million Christians on a new, historic statement on environment and poverty. See more here.

With all of the pending disasters blamed on global warming blasting their way through the media, I can understand why many might fear the future climate. We are told emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), are destroying not only polar bears and petunias, but the planet as a whole. If we don’t “stop global warming,” The End will surely come. I am a climate scientist. My research and that of many others does not lead me to be afraid for the climate’s future. However, I am fearful for other reasons:

• I fear for my science. The truth is, our climate system is so complex that we cannot predict its state even into next month. Nonetheless, I see high-profile individuals (usually untrained in science) making claims with unwavering confidence about the climate’s trajectory and a looming catastrophe. I do not see the humility this science demands. In fact, I suspect an anthropologist, isolated from the media, would observe this global-warming fervor as a religion complete with anointed authority figures, sacred documents, creeds, sins requiring absolution, castigation of heretics and even an apocalypse. But science doesn’t work by arguments-from-authority or depth-of-feeling. Lord Kelvin said, “All science is numbers.” Our scientific discoveries should be the same, whether one is a Baptist, Buddhist or Bahai. However, if I’ve learned one thing in this business, it is that we scientists are mere mortals, and we succumb to pride as easily as anyone else. Claiming to know exactly how the climate works and what it will do decades from now has as much to do with belief as science.

• I fear for humanity. When people speak about “doing something about global warming,” please listen carefully. What they advocate are “solutions,” which lead to rationing of energy while having no climate impact. A hidden consequence of these “solutions” is to make energy more expensive-a regressive burden disproportionately inflicted upon the poorest among us. Is this what we should promote?  Is this the message of Christ?  One fact I learned as a missionary in Africa is this: Without energy, life is brutal and short. Denying energy expansion in the developing world, which many advocate, is to condemn them to suffering and poverty.

The simple truth is that whatever the climate does-and our research at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does not support predictions of an impending disaster-the regulations proposed to date and promoted by the green agenda will have no measurable effect. Read more here.

John Christy earned a master’s degree from Golden Gate Seminary and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois. He is the distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth Systems Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, studying global climate since 1987. He and his wife, Babs, served as Southern Baptist journeyman missionaries in Kenya 35 years ago. His website is here.