ICECAP NOTE: Weatherbell.com now has underway the best model suite available anywhere. Dr Ryan Maue has joined Joe Bastardi and I blogging on Weatherbell and has created a super set of global model views that go way beyond what you find elsewhere. We have big plans to grow the set. If you buy your models elsewhere, you can do a lot better at much lower cost with Weatherbell. Also you will get to read the blogs of Joe Bastardi, Ryan Maue and Joe D’Aleo (a.k.a Dr. Dewpoint) on weather and climate issues. We each blog one or more times daily on weather and climate, hurricanes, severe weather threats and snowstorms, do videos and provide commercial forecasts for energy and agriculture, retail and industry. Here are two of my posts from this morning: Monsoon Mischief and Great Lakes Update - implications for the Winter.. But the models alone are worth the price of admission (less than a cup of coffee a day).
Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference - 50,000 participants from 188 nations - occurred in June without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue - boredom from being
repeatedly told the end is nigh.
This began two generations ago, in 1972, when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?
That year begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times ("one of the most important documents of our age") and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and “skeptical
environmentalist,” writing in Foreign Affairs, says it “helped send the world down a path of worrying obsessively about misguided remedies for minor problems while ignoring much greater concerns,” such as poverty, which only economic growth can ameliorate.
MIT’s models foresaw the collapse of civilization because of “nonrenewable resource depletion” and population growth. “In an age more innocent of and reverential toward computers,” Lomborg writes, “the reams of cool printouts gave the book’s argument an air of scientific authority and inevitability” that “seemed to banish any possibility of disagreement.”
Then - as now, regarding climate change - respect for science was said to require reverential suspension of skepticism about scientific hypotheses. Time magazine’s story about “The Limits to Growth” exemplified the media’s frisson of hysteria:
“The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips. Fantastic? No, only grim
inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’”
The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now - aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Lomborg says:
Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were
280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on.
The modelers missed something - human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Which did not just appear after 1972.
Aluminum, Lomborg writes, is one of earth’s most common metals. But until the 1886 invention of the Hall-Heroult process, it was so difficult and expensive to extract that “Napoleon III had bars of aluminum exhibited alongside the French crown jewels, and he gave his honored guests aluminum forks and spoons while lesser visitors had to make do with gold utensils.”
Forty years after “The Limits to Growth” imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Lomborg calls recycling “a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost.” He says that “we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource” -
forests - “that was never threatened in the first place.”
In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager in the form of a complex futures contract. He bet Paul Ehrlich (whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agricultural production) that by 1990 the price of any five commodities Ehrlich and his advisers picked would be lower than in 1980. Ehrlich’s group picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990.
The bet cost Ehrlich $576.07. But that year he was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize for ecological virtue. One of Ehrlich’s advisers, John Holdren, is Barack Obama’s science adviser.
In his recent press blitz, NASA’s James Hansen tries to tie extreme weather events, such the current drought affecting much of the central U.S., to anthropogenic global warming. But the real world argues otherwise.
Hansen is quite adept at timing global warming pronouncements with extreme weather events. Recall that it was during a similar hot, dry period back in the summer of 1988 that Hansen first testified to Congress that global warming from human greenhouse gas emissions was impacting current weather events- testimony which many credit as giving rise to the global-warming-is-going-to-be-bad movement. But then, as now, the tie-in between weather events and human changes to the atmospheric greenhouse effect is tenuous at best, and tie-ins to specific events are ill-supported and ill-advised. In the best case, the anthropogenic emissions-driven rise in global temperatures has a small ancillary impact on a specific extreme weather event, but in the vast majority of the cases, its role is nugatory and undetectable.
Such is the case with the impact of global warming on U.S. drought.
In his recent op-ed and article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (recall that the peer review process at PNAS is more like watered down “pal review") Hansen clearly states that U.S. droughts are being enhanced by global warming.
Hansen has a lot of weight in his corner on this one, because the standard measure of drought - the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) - has temperature incorporated into its equation. The higher the temperature, the greater the potential evaporation term, and thus the tendency towards drier conditions. But (obviously) precipitation amount is also included in the calculation of the PDSI. More precipitation pushes the index away from drought conditions. So just because temperature is on the rise does not mean that droughts must become more frequent - changes in precipitation could intervene and counteract the influence of a temperature increase.
Across the U.S., over the past century or so, both temperature and precipitation have been on the upswing. Figure 1 shows that U.S. annual PDSI from 1895 through 2011. The more positive the PDSI values, the wetter conditions are, the more negative the PDSI values, the drier things are. There is no statistically significant trend over the 117 period of record, although the non-significant tendency is upwards (towards wetter conditions), evidence that the increase in precipitation is more than offsetting the impact from rising temperatures in the U.S.
Figure 1. U.S. annual average palmer Drought Severity Index value, 1895-2011 (data source: National Climatic Data Center). (enlarged)
But what we are really after is not the impact of U.S. temperatures on U.S. drought, but, from Hansen’s assertion, the impact of global temperatures on U.S. drought.
We can examine this by first assessing the influence of global temperatures on U.S. temperatures. By using a simple linear regression, we find that about one-third of the variability in U.S. temperatures is explained by global temperature variations. Figure 2 shows the observed annual U.S. temperatures from 1895 through 2011 and that part of them which is explained by global temperatures. Notice that global temperatures can capture the trend in U.S. temperatures, but little of the year to year variation. But hey, c’est la vie-as we have stressed for years, local and regional conditions largely march to a tune that is different than the one being drummed by global average conditions.
Figure 2. The observed annual U.S. temperatures from 1895 through 2011 (light gray) and that part of them which is explained by global temperatures (black). Global temperatures explain about 33% of the variance in U.S. temperaures (temperature data source: Goddard Institute for Space Studies). (enlarged)
In order to see how much of the global temperature signal that is present in the U.S. PDSI history, we can regress that part of the U.S. temperature record that is related to global temperatures (the inner (black) curve in Figure 2) with the U.S. PDSI history (Figure 1). No significant relationship emerges from this analysis (the explained variance between the global signal in the U.S. temperature record and the U.S. PDSI history is less than 1%) (Figure 3, left).
In other words, global warming does not influence U.S. drought.
Now, let’s take a look at how much of the U.S. drought record is related to the non-global warming part of the U.S. temperature record. Doing this analysis, we find the influence to be a statistically significant 20% (Figure 3, right). The other 80% likely has to do with various and sundry influences on precipitation variability.
Figure 3. (left) Scattergram of U.S. annual PDSI values and the global warming influence on U.S. average annual temperatures, 1895-2011. (right) Scattergram of U.S. annual PDSI values and the non-global warming influence on U.S. average annual temperatures, 1895-2011.(enlarged)
The bottom line result here is that the influence of temperature on the U.S. PDSI (drought) history is one that is being driven by natural variability not global warming.
In other words, the situation is as it always has been. And the 2012 drought conditions, and every other drought that has come before, is the result of natural processes, not human greenhouse gases emissions.
NOAA announced July was the warmest month ever for the contiquous US (lower 48) even though global temperature anomalies is actually fell almost a tenth of a degree according to satellites. Of course the media alarmists and liberal senate loons like Reid, Sanders and Kerry jumped on it, the causes were natural and the records were only there because NOAA has been lncentivized to jigger the data to support the green agenda.
See two important posts that show you why though it was a hot July thanks to a drought produced by the second strongest La Nina since 1900 and the warm Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which produced the heat and drought years of the 1930s, 1950s, 1990s. it was not the hottest month. Steve Goddard on Real Science here and Watts up with That here.
July 2012 Hottest Ever in the U.S.? Hmmm...I Doubt It
August 8th, 2012 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Using NCDC’s own data (USHCN, Version 2), and computing area averages for the last 100 years of Julys over the 48 contiguous states, here’s what I get for the daily High temps, Low temps, and daily Averages (click for large version):
As far as daily HIGH temperatures go, 1936 was the clear winner. But because daily LOW temperatures have risen so much, the daily AVERAGE July temperature in 2012 barely edged out 1936.
Now, of course, we have that nagging issue of just how much urban heat island (UHI) effect remains in the data. The NCDC “homogenization” procedures are not really meant to handle long-term UHI warming, which has probably occurred at most of the 1218 stations used in the above plot.
Also, minimum temperatures are much more influenced by wind conditions and other factors near the surface…Max temperatures give a much better idea of how warm an air mass is over a deep layer.’
Also, I thought one month doesn’t make a climate trend? If we look at the 5-year running mean of the daily averages for July’s over the last 100 years, we see that while recent Julys have indeed been warm, it is questionable whether they rival the 1930s:
So, all things considered (including unresolved issues about urban heat island effects and other large corrections made to the USHCN data), I would say July was unusually warm. But the long-term integrity of the USHCN dataset depends upon so many uncertain factors, I would say it’s a stretch to to call July 2012 a “record”.
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See how the Atlantic returned to the warm mode it was in during the 1930s to 1950s when hot summers were the rule.
AMO predisposes the northern continents to warmth and El Nino and La Ninas determine where the heat will focus. The second strongest La Nina in the record in 2010/11, led to record heat and drought in 2011 in Texas which spread northwards during the warm 2011/12 La Nina winter and spring. It is what supercharged the heat much as the same scenario as in the 1930s and 1950s, both decades of multi year drought. Dry ground adds 10F or more to the daily maximum temperatures, especially if vegetation is desiccated.
The Weather Channel Travels to the Far Corners of the Earth to Explore the World’s “Tipping Points”
New global production to premiere October 2013
August 03, 2012 11:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time
LOS ANGELES - (BUSINESS WIRE) -The Weather Channel Companies announced today that it is the U.S. partner on the global production of “Tipping Points,” a landmark TV series that will explore the emerging tipping points of our changing climate system that have recently drawn concern from scientific communities worldwide for their fragile and near-crisis state. The groundbreaking docu-series will follow a group of pre-eminent scientists as they venture off the grid to explore the perilous tipping points making our weather systems more extreme and unpredictable. Produced by Unboxed Media, “Tipping Points” premieres in October 2013 and will feature 6x 60min. episodes on The Weather Channel, as well as additional content across weather.com, mobile, tablet and social media platforms.
“We believe this is one of the most important series being produced today, and The Weather Channel is in the unique position to be an authority on changes in climate and weather”
The series will explore the global impact of our changing climate system, how climate and human populations interconnect and the profound impact they have on each other. Scientists will explore the elements destabilizing our climate system and how changes in a remote area can - and do - dramatically impact those on other continents, thousands of miles away.
The phenomena of “tipping points” follows the concept that, at a particular moment in time, a small change can have a large, long-term consequence on a fragile climate system already in a state of flux. Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Further, when the situation is pushed past the “tipping point,” it will potentially lead to a chain reaction, putting other ecosystems around the globe in peril.
“Tipping Points” will feature several of the most critical examples, including the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, total melting of the Himalayan icecap glaciers, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, shutdown of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, and the rapid melt of the Permafrost in Siberia.
“We believe this is one of the most important series being produced today, and The Weather Channel is in the unique position to be an authority on changes in climate and weather,” said Michael Dingley, senior vice president, content and development, The Weather Channel Companies. “‘Tipping Points’ will not only show how our changing climate system affect local communities in exotic and distant locales like the Amazon or Siberia, but how it impacts and is relevant to people even right here in the U.S., be it Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon and every community in between. We need to explore and understand what can be done to stem the tide of change before we do irreparable damage, and ultimately put our own lives at risk.”
The series is hosted by polar explorer and climate journalist Bernice Notenboom, who will be joined by a number of leading international environmental scientists in each episode such as Torben Christensen, Peter Cox, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Matthew England, James Hansen, Tim Lenton, Yadvinder Malhi, Konrad Steffen, Katey Walker, Jay Zwally, and more. Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist for The Weather Channel, will serve as contributing science editor on the project.
The Weather Channel owns the U.S. rights as the sole U.S. network to air the series. The global partnership includes international networks NHK Japan, ARD Group Germany, Canvas Belgium, VPRO Holland, and The Australia Network.
“Tipping Points” is the latest to join The Weather Channel’s growing original content slate, which includes “Coast Guard Alaska,” “Iron Men.” “Lifeguard!,” “Ice Pilots,” “Hurricane Hunters,” “Hawaii Air Rescue” (Sept. 5), and “Coast Guard Florida"(Oct. 10), as well as the “Braving the Elements” docu-series anthology, which includes “Turbine Cowboys,” “Pyros,” “Iceberg Hunters” (Sept. 18), and “Reefmakers” (Oct. 9).
or images of “Tipping Points”: http://press.weather.com/image-gallery/tipping-points/
About The Weather Channel Companies
The Weather Channel companies (TWCC) are made up of The Weather Channel television network, The Weather Channel digital properties, WSI, and Weather Underground. The Weather Channel is based in Atlanta and is seen in more than 100 million U.S. households. TWCC also operates Weatherscan, a 24hour all-local weather network; The Weather Channel Radio Network; and The Weather Channel HD. The most popular source of weather news and information, TWCC properties reach 60 million monthly Web consumers (weather.com and Desktop) and 30 million monthly mobile users (mobile Web and applications) and offers the second most popular mobile app on all smartphones. WSI, headquartered in Andover, MA, primarily provides business-to-business weather services, particularly for the media, aviation, marine and energy sectors. Online weather service Weather Underground is based in Ann Arbor, MI, and San Francisco, and has developed the world’s largest network of personal weather stations. TWCC is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. For more information, visit www.weather.com/press.
The list of topics and so called experts are laughable. The original founders of The Weather Channel (100+) met for a 30th anniversary reunion in Atlanta in April. There will be no weather channel around for the 40th given their direction. Be sure to let them know what you think of their idea.
“During the heat wave of late June and early July, high temperature extremes became newsworthy. Claims that there were thousands of records broken each day and that “this is what global warming looks like” got a lot of attention.
However, these headlines were not based on climate science. As shown in Figure 1.3 of my testimony it is scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like, since events even worse than these have happened in the past before greenhouse gases were increasing like they are today.
Now, it gives some people great comfort to offer a quick and easy answer when the weather strays from the average rather than to struggle with the real truth, which is, we don’t know enough about the climate to even predict events like this.
A climatologist looking at this heat wave would not be alarmed because the number of daily high temperature records set in the most recent decade was only about half the number set in the 1930s as shown in my written testimony. I suppose most people have forgotten that Oklahoma set a new record low temperature just last year of 31 below. And in the past two years, towns from Alaska to my home state of California established records for snowfall. The recent anomalous weather can’t be blamed on carbon dioxide.”
1. It is popular again to claim that extreme events, such as the current central U.S. drought, are evidence of human-caused climate change. Actually, the Earth is very large, the weather is very dynamic, and extreme events will continue to occur somewhere, every year, naturally. The recent “extremes” were exceeded in previous decades.”
2. The average warming rate of 34 CMIP5 IPCC models is greater than observations, suggesting models are too sensitive to CO2. Policy based on observations, where year-to- year variations cause the most harm, will likely be far more effective than policies based on speculative model output, no matter what the future climate does.
3. New discoveries explain part of the warming found in traditional surface temperature datasets. This partial warming is unrelated to the accumulation of heat due to the extra greenhouse gases, but related to human development around the thermometer stations. This means traditional surface datasets are limited as proxies for greenhouse warming.
4. Widely publicized consensus reports by “thousands” of scientists are misrepresentative of climate science, containing overstated confidence in their assertions of high climate sensitivity. They rarely represent the range of scientific opinion that attends our relatively murky field of climate research. Funding resources are recommended for “Red Teams” of credentialed, independent investigators, who already study low climate sensitivity and the role of natural variability. Policymakers need to be aware of the full range of scientific views, especially when it appears that one-sided-science is the basis for promoting significant increases to the cost of energy for the citizens.
5. Atmospheric CO2 is food for plants which means it is food for people and animals. More CO2 generally means more food for all. Today, affordable carbon-based energy is a key component for lifting people out of crippling poverty. Rising CO2 emissions are, therefore, one indication of poverty-reduction which gives hope for those now living in a marginal existence without basic needs brought by electrification, transportation and industry. Additionally, modern, carbon-based energy reduces the need for deforestation and alleviates other environmental problems such as water and air pollution. Until affordable energy is developed from non-carbon sources, the world will continue to use carbon as the main energy source as it does today.
It is a privilege for me to offer my views of climate change based on my experience as a climate scientist. My research area might be best described as building datasets from scratch to advance our understanding of what the climate is doing and why. This often involves weeks and months of tedious examination of paper records and then digitizing the data for use in computational analysis. I have used traditional surface observations as well as measurements from balloons and satellites to document the climate story. Many of my datasets are used to test hypotheses of climate variability and change. In the following I will address five issues that are part of the discussion of climate change today, some of which will be assisted by the datasets I have built and published.
1. EXTREME EVENTS
Recently it has become popular to try and attribute certain extreme events to human causation. The Earth however, is very large, the weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet in every year. Since there are innumerable ways to define an extreme event (i.e. record high/low temperatures, number of days of a certain quantity, precipitation total over 1, 2, 10… days, snowfall amounts, etc.) this essentially assures us that there will be numerous “extreme events” in every year because every year has unique weather patterns. The following assesses some of the recent “extreme events” and demonstrates why they are poor proxies for making claims about human causation.
Extreme High and Low Temperatures
Another extreme metric is the all time record high temperature for each state. The occurrence of the records by decade (Figure 1.1 below) makes it obvious that the 1930s were the most extreme decade and that since 1960, there have been more all-time cold records set than hot records in each decade.
However, there are only 50 states, and this is a number that isn’t large enough to give the best statistical results. Below are the year-by-year numbers of daily all-time record high temperatures from a set of 970 weather stations with at least 80 years of record (NOAA/NCDC/USHCNv2). There are 365 opportunities in each year (366 in leap years) for each of the 970 stations to set a record high (TMax). These have been added up by years and displayed in the Fig. 1.2 below. Note the several years above 6000 events prior to 1940 and none above 5000 since 1954. The clear evidence is that extreme high temperatures are not increasing in frequency, but actually appear to be decreasing. The recent claims about thousands of new record high temperatures were based on stations whose length-of-record could begin as recently as 1981, thus missing the many heat waves of the 20th century. Thus, any moderately hot day now will be publicized as setting records for these young stations because they were not operating in the 1930s. The figure below gives what a climatologist would want to know because it uses only stations with long records.
