By Patrick J. Michaels
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
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The recent publication of two articles in Nature magazine proclaiming a link to rainfall extremes (and flooding) to global warming, added to the heat in Russia and the floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010, and the back-to-back cold and snowy winters in the eastern U.S. and western Europe, have gotten a lot of public attention. This includes a recent hearing in the House of Representatives, despite its Republican majority. Tying weather extremes to global warming, or using them as “proof” that warming doesn’t exist (see: snowstorms), is a popular rhetorical flourish by politicos of all stripes.
The hearing struck many as quite odd, inasmuch as it is much clearer than apocalyptic global warming that the House is going to pass meaningless legislation commanding the EPA to cease and desist from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. “Meaningless” means that it surely will not become law. Even on the long-shot probability that it passes the Senate, the President will surely veto, and there are nowhere near enough votes to override such an action.
Perhaps “wolf!” has been cried yet again. A string of soon-to-be-published papers in the scientific literature finds that despite all hue and cry about global warming and recent extreme weather events, natural climate variability is to blame.
Where to start? How about last summer’s Russian heat wave?
The Russian heat wave (and to some degree the floods in Pakistan) have been linked to the same large-scale, stationary weather system, called an atmospheric “blocking” pattern. When the atmosphere is “blocked” it means that it stays in the same configuration for period of several weeks (or more) and keeps delivering the same weather to the same area for what can seem like an eternity to people in the way. Capitalizing on the misery in Russia and Pakistan, atmospheric blocking was added to the list of things that were supposed to be “consistent with” anthropogenically stimulated global warming which already, of course included heat waves and floods. And thus the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 became part of global warming lore.
But then a funny thing happened - scientists with a working knowledge of atmospheric dynamics started to review the situation and found scant evidence for global warming.
The first chink in the armor came back in the fall of 2010, when scientists from the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presented the results of their preliminary investigation on the web , and concluded that “[d]espite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave.”
The PSD folks have now followed this up with a new peer-reviewed article in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that rejects the global warming explanation. The paper is titled “Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?” Turns out that there wasn’t.
To prove this, the research team, led by PSD’s Randall Dole, first reviewed the observed temperature history of the region affected by the heat wave (western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Baltic nations). To start, they looked at the recent antecedent conditions: “Despite record warm globally-averaged surface temperatures over the first six months of 2010, Moscow experienced an unusually cold winter and a relatively mild but variable spring, providing no hint of the record heat yet to come.” Nothing there.
Then they looked at the long-term temperature record: “The July surface temperatures for the region impacted by the 2010 Russian heat wave shows no significant warming trend over the prior 130-year period from 1880 to 2009.... A linear trend calculation yields a total temperature change over the 130 years of -0.1C (with a range of 0 to -0.4C over the four data sets [they examined]).” There’s not a hint of a build-up to a big heat wave.
And as to the behavior of temperature extremes: “There is also no clear indication of a trend toward increasing warm extremes. The prior 10 warmest Julys are distributed across the entire period and exhibit only modest clustering earlier in this decade, in the 1980s and in the 1930s.... This behavior differs substantially from globally averaged annual temperatures, for which eleven of the last twelve years ending in 2006 rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record since 1850...”
With regard any indication that “global” warming was pushing temperatures higher in Russia and thus helped to fuel the extreme heat last summer, Dole et al. say this: “With no significant long-term trend in western Russia July surface temperatures detected over the period 1880-2009, mean regional temperature changes are thus very unlikely to have contributed substantially to the magnitude of the 2010 Russian heat wave.”
Next the PSD folks looked to see if the existing larger-scale antecedent conditions, fed into climate models would produce the atmospheric circulation patterns (i.e. blocking) that gave rise to the heat wave. The tested “predictors” included patterns of sea surface temperature and arctic ice coverage, which most people feel have been subject to some human influence. No relationship: “These findings suggest that the blocking and heat wave were not primarily a forced response to specific boundary conditions during 2010.”
In fact, the climate models exhibited no predilection for projecting increases in the frequency of atmospheric blocking patterns over the region as greenhouse gas concentrations increased. Just the opposite: “Results using very high-resolution climate models suggest that the number of Euro-Atlantic blocking events will decrease by the latter half of the 21st century.”
At this point, Dole and colleagues had about exhausted all lines of inquiry and summed things up:
Our analysis points to a primarily natural cause for the Russian heat wave. This event appears to be mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained an intense and long-lived blocking event. Results from prior studies suggest that it is likely that the intensity of the heat wave was further increased by regional land surface feedbacks. The absence of long-term trends in regional mean temperatures and variability together with the model results indicate that it is very unlikely that warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed substantially to the magnitude of this heat wave.
Can’t be much clearer than that.
But that was last summer. What about the past two winters? Both were very cold in the eastern U.S. with record snows events and/or totals scattered about the country.
Cold, snow, and global warming? On Christmas Day 2010, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Judah Cohen, a long-range forecaster for the private forecasting firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, outlining his theory as to how late summer Arctic ice declines lead to more fall snow cover across Siberia which in turn induces atmospheric circulation patterns to favor snowstorms along the East Coast of the U.S. Just last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists held a news conference where they handed out a press release headlined “Climate Change Makes Major Snowstorms Likely.” In that release, Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, laid out his theory as to how the loss of Arctic sea ice is helping to provide more moisture to fuel winter snowstorms across the U.S. as well as altering atmospheric circulation patterns into a preferred state for big snowstorms. Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters chimed in with “Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet.”
As is the wont for this Wisdom, let’s go back to the scientific literature. See what Pat found in the second part of this story here.
By the way, the very same enviro extremist group - Union of Concerned Scientists - in 2007 at a highly promoted conference at Mt. Washington in New Hampshire warned ski areas that retreating cold due to global warming would lead to decreasing winter snows even in the mountains and that they would be best advised to get out of the business while they still could. A few short months later, the winter of 2007/08 set in with all time record seasonal snows across the northern half of New England and the best skiing conditions in the northeast and western United States ever observed. When the snow records continued to fall in 2009/10 in the Mid-Atlantic and again heavy snows pounded major cities even in the south this winter, they had a press conference to announce the exact opposite - global warming means more snow. The mainstream media never questioned this flip-flop attempt to make their failing theory unfalsifiable.
ICECAP NOTE: Before reading this Washington Times post on how the enviros try to save their agenda through court action in court friendly states, read this Andrew Thomas piece in the American Thinker about the warmist cult and their real agenda.
Washington Times
Leftists are rushing to the judiciary as a refuge against efforts to undermine their global-warming tax schemes. In the current economic environment, the idea of massive hikes in the price of gasoline and other sources of energy has become radioactive. In response, the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont are hoping activist judges will enact policies that elected, accountable representatives are increasingly afraid to touch.
Congress moved this week to overturn an Environmental Protection Agency ruling meant to bring about carbon-dioxide rationing. At the same time, the seven left-leaning states argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that they have the right to sue out-of-state corporations as “public nuisances” for their crime of emitting a harmless, colorless gas that’s essential for life on this planet.
According to the complaint, carbon-dioxide emissions from various power plants around the country “increase smog and heat-related mortality”; “raise sea levels, thereby inundating low-lying property such as much of New York City’s infrastructure”; “lower water levels in the Great Lakes, harming commercial shipping and hydropower production in New York”; and “make it impossible for several species of hardwood trees to survive in Vermont, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island.” It goes on to claim “even one degree of global warming will double the number of heat-related deaths in New York City, to 700 per year.”
Never mind that none of these calamities have actually happened, or that if they did, there would be no link to the companies under legal assault. Never mind that if the power companies were to cease operations, it’s likely heat-related deaths from the lack of air conditioning would be far more real than the casualties from these imaginary catastrophes. Still, it’s enough for the ‘60s-era radicals who traded their tie-dyed T-shirts for judicial robes that someone claiming to be a scientist says it’s true. That includes people like Pennsylvania State University Prof. Michael E. Mann, who created the famous hockey-stick graph that served as the centerpiece of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global-warming infomercial, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Ever since the Climategate e-mail scandal exposed how Mr. Mann’s graph used “a trick” to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, public support also has declined for the fable that cosmic irritation at mankind’s exhalations has made things hotter by an imperceptible one-third of one degree over the course of a decade. In 2000, media-driven climate hysteria peaked with 72 percent of those surveyed by Gallup indicating they were worried about global warming. That number fell to 51 percent in a Gallup poll released Monday, with four in 10 Americans saying the seriousness of global warming was being exaggerated.
Lawmakers sense this skepticism in their constituents and can no longer get away with pursuing policies that sacrifice jobs and economic prosperity on the pagan altar of warmism. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 34-19 on Tuesday to adopt the “Energy Tax Prevention Act” which denies the EPA any authority to regulate water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and other naturally occurring gases as if they were actual pollutants. On Tuesday, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, promised a vote on the Senate version of the bill introduced by Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, and his 43 co-sponsors, only to retreat the next day when it became apparent Mr. Inhofe had more support than expected.
It’s time for the Supreme Court to put the states’ bogus argument on ice.
Read more and comments.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, March 16, 2011
Contact: Christopher Horner, chris.horner@atinstitute.org
Today, American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center announced it would appeal a NASA decision to withhold from the public documents for its high-profile global warming activist, astronomer Dr. James Hansen.
Two months ago ATI sought records detailing whether and how Dr. Hansen and his office, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), has complied with federal ethics and financial disclosure laws and regulations, and NASA Rules of Behavior. Specifically ATI is curious whether Dr. Hansen has filed applications for outside employment, like speeches, books (emails obtained already indicate NASA staffed worked on this), cash awards and other gifts, and other support.
“NASA’s denial of our request represents the height of arbitrary and capricious application of the law,” said Christopher Horner, senior director of litigation for the ATI Environmental Law Center. “We look forward to seeing, through these requested records, just how NASA is complying with ethics laws, and why they went to such extraordinary rhetorical lengths to hide the files.”
From earlier records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, Horner learned that Dr. Hansen’s protege, Gavin Schmidt, was for years not held to ethics requirements that employees seek and obtain waivers for such outside employment - such as Schmidt’s extensive work on the global warming activist Web site RealClimate.org during business hours. Logic follows that since Dr. Hansen allowed Schmidt to ignore disclosure rules, that Dr. Hansen himself may well also be ignoring them.
NASA denied ATI’s request for Dr. Hansen’s records in part because of a FOIA exemption that “permits the Government to withhold all information about individuals in ‘personnel and medical files’ when the disclosure of such information ‘would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’” Also in NASA’s denial was the claim that ATI “failed to make the requisite showing with respect to Dr. Hansen’s outside activity, namely, how these specific documents would contribute to the public’s understanding of the operations or activities of the Government, or how it would shed light on NASA’s performance of its statutory duties, such that the public’s disclosure outweighs Dr. Hansen’s privacy interest.”
In ATI’s appeal Horner argues “whether NASA holds its employees to compliance its employees to comply with ethics laws sheds light on NASA’s performance of its operations and performance of statutory duties.” Further, in records previously obtained that pertained to Schmidt, NASA has already shown that it has been operating out of compliance with regard to ethics disclosure obligations. In fact, NASA revealed this by releasing the very files (NASA Form GSFC 17-60) of which it now, selectively, insists would constitute a ‘clearly unwarranted violation’of an employee’s personal privacy—so long as that employee is James Hansen.
NASA’s budget for Fiscal Year 2010 was $18.7 billion. Its budget for earth science research, which includes climate studies, was $1.4 billion.
See ATI’s Appeal of NASA’s denial for Dr. James Hansen’s records relating to compliance with ethics and financial disclosure laws.
To view Exhibits related to ATI’s Appeal to NASA, visit.
For an interview with Christopher Horner, senior director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center, contact him at chris.horner@atinstitute.org or call (202)670-2680.
See more on this Pajamas Media story and this Spectator blogpost.