Randall Hoven, American Thinker
Just a bit over a month ago, December 14, we ran a blog piece on a NASA web page that said the sun is primarily responsible for climate change, and that whatever warming is caused by man’s contributions to greenhouse gases is swamped by the effects of the sun and other natural variables.
“The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system… According to scientists’ models of Earth’s orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling—perhaps the next ice age...Other important forcings of Earth’s climate system include such ‘variables’ as clouds, airborne particulate matter, and surface brightness. Each of these varying features of Earth’s environment has the capacity to exceed the warming influence of greenhouse gases and cause our world to cool.”
In commenting on my own blog item, I said, “The likely outcome is that NASA will either withdraw this statement, or ‘clarify’ its position ala the American Physical Society. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NASA link stopped working.”
Well, the NASA link stopped working. Here is the link that used to work. If you try it now, it says “page not found.”
Jim Boot looked into this. Luckily, he was wise enough to save a screen shot of the original NASA page. He notes that there is still a NASA page that has some of the same words, such as, “The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system… the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world’s climate system and makes possible life as we know it.”
But gone is the prediction of coming cooling. In fact, it now says, “Earth is currently in a period of warming. Over the last century, Earth’s average temperature rose about 1.1F (0.6C). In the last two decades, the rate of our world’s warming accelerated and scientists predict that the globe will continue to warm over the course of the 21st century.”
Compare the before and after NASA web pages.
Before: “our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling—perhaps the next ice age.”
After: “the rate of our world’s warming accelerated and scientists predict that the globe will continue to warm over the course of the 21st century.”
Do you want to vote on why the old page was removed and the message changed from cooling to warming?
(a) “NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review… lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.”
(b) “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA. We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”
Those were the choices when James Hansen claimed he was being muzzled. Dr. Hansen is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Did the muzzled become the muzzler? See post here.
Excerpt from FUTURE DROUGHTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GOVERNMENTS
Global warming is a reality that is with us today. We can expect that the impact of drought in Australia will get worse as global warming accelerates. CSIRO (2001) has projected increases in Australian temperatures of between 1C and 6C by 2070, much greater than the increases over the last 50 years. These temperature increases would lead to even greater evaporation and water stress during future droughts, much worse than in 2002. CSIRO (2001) has projected up to a 45% decrease in stream flow in the Murray-Darling Basin by 2070. Climate models have projected a marked increase in the frequency of extreme droughts under global warming conditions (IPCC, 2001). From WWF report authored by alarmist professor Karoly.
See in the following post by Jennifer Marohasy ”Time to Reject AGW - And Bob Brown” how Karoly and the greens are responsible for the country not being prepared for flooding despite warnings that the decadal cycles were changing and rains were coming.
By Jennifer Marohasy
EVER the opportunist, Bob Brown, Leader of the Australian Greens, yesterday blamed the Brisbane floods on the coal industry for causing global warming.
But there is no correlation between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and rainfall or flooding, as measured by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, anywhere in Australia.
There is, however, a correlation between patterns in the major atmospheric-oceanic oscillations and flood events.
Stewart Franks, a hydrologist at the University of Newcastle, has shown that the usefulness of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as a predictor of flooding depends on whether or not a more complex phenomenon also measured by sea surface temperatures known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is in a positive or negative phase.
In a series of peer-reviewed papers published in the best international journals since 2003, Professor Franks has shown that when the IPO is negative, as it was from 1946 to 1977, then there is a much greater chance that there will be flooding rains if a La Nina forms.
The IPO started to go negative in 1999, but an El Nino formed in 2001, and seven years of mostly drought followed - sustained by the El Nino conditions.
In February 2009, Professor Franks commented at this weblog that the Australian climate showed signs of entering another wet phase and warned that governments should prepare for a return to a 20-40 year period where La Nina dominates.
Just over a year later, in April 2010, the negative IPO now entrenched, a strong La Nina began to form and flooding rains followed.
Indeed the explanation for the recent devastating flooding is not carbon dioxide, but inadequate infrastructure and warning systems in the face of a combination of La Nina conditions during a negative IPO, a monsoon trough and already saturated catchments.
This graph from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on Brisbane flooding history. When you add the 2010 flood levels to the graph (as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. bothered to do, shown in red below) all of the sudden, the historical context for the flood being driven by global warming disappears.
See Better Planning for Extreme Floods Possible: A Note from Stewart Franks, February 27th, 2009.
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See also Christopher Booker’s “What was the role of warmists in the Queensland flood disaster?” here. Australia was told to prepare for droughts as a result of climate change, and let down its guard against flooding. Excerpts:
Ever more alarming facts are emerging to show how Brisbane’s floods were made infinitely worse by cockeyed decisions inspired by the obsession of the Australian authorities with global warming. Inevitably, the country’s warmist lobby has been voluble in claiming that such a “freak weather event” (as the BBC called it) is a consequence of man-made climate change. But far from being an unprecedented “freak event”, the latest flood was nearly a foot below the level of one in 1974 and 10 feet below the record set in 1893.
For years, Australia’s warmists have been advising the authorities that the danger posed to the country by global warming is not floods but droughts: not too much rain but too little. One result, in Brisbane, was a relaxation of planning rules, to allow building on areas vulnerable to flooding in the past. As long ago as 1999, this was seen as potentially disastrous by an expert Brisbane River Flood Study (which was ignored and for years kept secret). Instead of investing in its flood defences, Australia spent $13 billion on desalination plants. (Queensland’s was recently mothballed because of the excess of rain.)
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The Queensland floods are not related to anthropogenic global warming
By Cliff Ollier
The Queensland floods are a disaster that demands our sympathy and earnest attempts to prevent similar damage in future. But to do this properly we need to see the floods in the perspective of time, and see the history of flooding. This is best done by concentrating on the Brisbane region simply because it has the longest historical record.
This record has been admirably collated by the Bureau of Meteorology, and the details can be seen at this site, which gives a blow-by-blow summary of the floods.
Below are shown the records for Brisbane and the Bremer River at Ipswich. The variation between the two is itself of interest, showing how different records can be at relatively close locations.
This history is a necessary background to the following discussion.
Enlarged here.
One of the sidelines of disasters like the Queensland floods is that the leaders of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Campaign will try to relate the disaster to Global Warming, caused by increasing man-made carbon dioxide. This has been done for the Queensland floods by, for example, David Karoly who for some reason gets a lot of coverage in the press and Television in Australia (though he has no expertise in this area), and Michael Steketee, the resident AGW specialist in The Australian.
There are at least three arguments against relating the Queensland floods to Anthropogenic Global Warming.
1. Even other people in the Global Warming game realize there is no relationship between broad disasters and carbon dioxide. The leading AGW institution is the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Christopher Monckton wrote of an article in The Australian in January 2011:
“Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, [I refer only to point 18] which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming; it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.”
2. The second problem is that this is not an isolated event. There was another flood of about the same dimensions in 1974. There was no peak of CO2 at that time. It was not an especially warm year, so Global Warming cannot be invoked (1998 was a hotter year, but no flood).
But there were even greater floods in 1841 and 1893. This is well before any possible Anthropogenic Global Warming, which began, according to its adherents, in 1945.
And there were many other floods of lower magnitude, long before the supposed advent of Anthropogenic Global Warming as shown in the BoM graphs.
3. A third problem is that just a few years ago, global warming was blamed for causing droughts. This opinion was extolled during the last drought especially by Tim Flannery, another non-expert.
In 2003 Professor Karoly published, under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, a report that claimed that elevated air temperatures, due to CO2, exacerbated the drought.
“...the higher temperatures caused a marked increase in evaporation rates, which sped up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed...”
and
“This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950.... This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.”
So Anthropogenic Global Warming can apparently be used to explain any current disaster. Any hypothesis (like AGW) that uses the same mechanism to explain opposite effects is untestable, and therefore not science. Its models are totally useless for prediction.
In brief, there is no reason whatever to associate the Queensland floods with global warming (if it is occurring at all). It is even more ridiculous to blame it on a trivial increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Unfortunately the floods will come again. You might like to look at the data on the BoM website and try to determine the return interval for yourself. It is really a bit of a guess.
But the citizens of Queensland would be well advised to implement adaptation policies that have a more realistic impact than trying to reduce CO2 production in the vain hope that it will, like repeating some magic spell, make the nasty problem go away.
Emeritus Professor Cliff Ollier is a geologist and geomorphologists. He is the author of ten books and over 300 scientific papers. He has worked in many universities including ANU and Oxford University, and has lectured at over 100 different universities.
A few days ago, we posted a story about the alarmists stepping up a propaganda campaign WITH YOUR OWN TEX DOLLARS to restart the failing global warming/climate change agenda. The NSF which criminally has refused to fund experienced and knowledgable climate scientists (story coming soon) from doing needed research on real issues but lavishly funding alarmist scientists and psuedo-scientists. They are pushing the scientists attending the national annual meetings of the AGU and soon AMS and in the journals into coming into line with the alleged consensus position. We hope congress will look into this perversion of science by the NSF and the universities.
Climate Quotes
The National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a program in 2010 called Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP). In this program they funded different opportunities to educate about climate change by giving funds (awards) to colleges who drafted proposals on how they would spend the money. One such proposal caught my eye. The program is entitled “Making the Global Local - Unusual Weather Events as Climate Change Educational Opportunities” and it is taking place at George Mason University (GMU). Here is the program description:
This project will focus on establishing a national network of on-air broadcast meteorologists, climate scientists, university research programs, and key climate and weather science organizations, to engage, train, and empower local broadcast meteorologists to educate and inform the American public about climate.
Training meteorologists to educate the American public about climate change? That sounds strange, but I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they simply want meteorologists to give the facts without any pre-conceived position on the subject. However, I dug a little further and found a job description for this program. I’ve taken a screen capture, take note of the highlighted area (click if needed):
Did they really just say that? Let’s look again:
The project will integrate informal learning, mass communication, and experiential learning theories to develop and test new pedagogical approaches to informal science education through frequent mass media exposure, linked to realworld experience (i.e., the local weather). It will also adapt and test conflict resolution theory and practice to engage meteorologists who reject the scientific consensus and climate scientists in constructive dialogue.
Adapt and test conflict resolution theory? Practice to engage meteorologists who reject the scientific consensus?
This is taxpayer’s money funding this stuff. Taxpayers are funding a program to “practice to engage meteorologists who reject the scientific consensus”. I contacted Anthony Watts and he wrote this post about it.
See post here.