September 2000

Models Fail to Predict ENSO

The prediction of the 1997-98 El Nio was hailed as a great success for computer climate models and seemed to validate their usefulness in forecasting future climate change. One article in Science (1998) proclaimed, “Models win big in forecasting El Nio.” A study published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (September 2000) tests this claim.

The study found that, “the current answer to the question posed in this articles title [How much skill was there in forecasting the very strong 1997-98 El Nio?] is that there was essentially no skill in forecasting the very strong 1997-98 El Nio at lead times ranging from 0 to 8 months.” Indeed, no models were “able to anticipate even one-half of the actual amplitude of the El Nios peak at medium range (6-11 months) lead.” And, “since no models were able to provide useful predictions at the medium and long ranges, there were no models that provided both useful and skillful forecasts for the entirety of the 1997-98 El Nio” [emphasis in original].

The authors are disturbed “that others are using the supposed success in dynamical El Nio forecasting to support other agendas,” citing the American Geophysical Unions Position Statement on Climate Change as an example. “The bottom line is that the successes in ENSO forecasting have been overstated (sometimes drastically) and misapplied in other arenas,” according to the study. There should be even “less confidence in anthropogenic global warming studies because of the lack of skill in predicting El Nio.”

One of the predicted consequences of global warming is the northward spread of infectious disease vectors. The ranges of the mosquitoes that carry malaria and yellow and dengue fever, it is claimed, will move northward as temperatures in the cooler northern regions warm up. These predictions are based on computer models that are driven by temperature changes only.

A new study in Science (September 8, 2000) tests these models against real world data for the global spread of malaria and has found them lacking in their ability to make accurate predictions. In other words, these approaches do not give accurate descriptions of the current distribution of global malaria.

According to the study, “The fit of these predictions to the current global malaria situation shows noticeable mismatches in certain places; false predictions of presence (e.g., over the eastern half of the United States) are accounted for by past control measures or by peculiar vector biogeography, whereas false predictions of absence are dismissed as model errors.”

The authors of the study take a multivariate approach to modeling the spread of malaria, taking into account various climatic variables including temperature, humidity and rainfall. The new approach, which gives a better representation of the current situation, “predicted remarkably few future changes, even under the most extreme scenarios of climate change,” according to the study.

A new website tracks the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which “is a long-lived El Nio-like pattern of Pacific climate variability.” The difference between the two oscillations is that El Nio persists from 6 to 18 months, whereas the PDO persists for 20 to 30 years.

NY Times Eats Its Words

The New York Times on August 29 retracted its ridiculous front-page story of August 19 that the North Pole was melting. The reporter, John Noble Wilford, had even asserted that open water appeared at the pole this summer for perhaps the first time in 50 million years, which was only off by 49,999,999 years.

Apparently, the pressure to backpedal was fueled by an AP story that again retailed the claims of Harvard Professor James J. McCarthy without consulting any Arctic experts. However, the Times tried to save face by running another article by Wilford on page 3 of its Science section that did its best to cloud the whole issue. Wilford asserted that regardless of his little mistake, the Arctic has warmed by 11 degrees in the last 30 years. And in a major story in the September 4 Time magazine, “The Big Meltdown”, junk science purveyor Eugene Linden claimed that there’s still plenty of evidence of the deleterious effects of global warming in the Arctic.

The temperature data tells a different story that the fact checkers at the Times and at Time (if they still employ any) may want to consult. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report, the Arctic has warmed, not by 11, but by 2.7 degrees F in the last 30 years. Moreover, the article looked at the past 30 years because 1969 was conveniently the coldest year since about 1920. The Arctic was warmer in 1935 than it is now. Over the past 70 years, the temperature trend has been essentially zero (see Virtual Climate Alert #29 at www.greeningearthsociety.org.)

The global warming propaganda juggernaut has been lying low this summer due to unusually cool temperatures and a relative lack of natural disasters. Indeed, the tropics this summer are cooler than they have been since satellites began measuring global temperatures in 1979.

According to Dr. John Christy, of Earth System Science Laboratory at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, “Based on the satellite record, which started in 1979, the equatorial tropics experienced its coolest year in 1999, when the composite temperature was 0.34 degrees Celsius below the 20-year average for that region.”

Moreover, “That trend has continued through the first eight months of this year, with temperatures in the tropics 0.39 degrees C cooler than normal,” he said. These cooler temperatures can be attributed to La Nia, which is a cooling of the Pacific Ocean, just as the warmer than average temperatures in 1997 and 1998 can be attributed to the El Nio Pacific Ocean warming event.

The Northern Hemisphere, on the other hand, has been warmer than normal this year. “That has been the trend over the past 20 years,” Christy said. “During that time weve seen a 0.25 degree C per decade warming in the Northern Hemisphere, a very slight cooling in the tropics, and enough cooling in the Southern Hemisphere to almost offset the warming in the north.”

The World Wildlife Fund has released a strident report that claims, “Global warming could fundamentally alter one third of the plant and animal habitats by the end of this century, and cause the eventual extinction of certain plant and animal species.”

“In the northern latitudes of Russia, Canada and Scandanavia,” claims the report, “up to 70 percent of habitat could be lost” due to rapid warming.”

According to Adam Markham, Executive Director of Clean Air-Cool Planet, and one of the reports co-authors, “As global warming accelerates, plants and animals will come under increasing pressure to migrate to find suitable habitat. Some will just not be able to move fast enough.”

The report also claims that species that are isolated, such as those found on islands or in “fragmented habitats” are most at risk. But these species are most at risk due to their isolation not from global warming. Indeed, island species have always been at greater risk from extinction than non-island species.

The report claims, “Already, Costa Ricas golden toad has probably become extinct. Birds such as the great tit in Scotland and the Mexican jay in Arizona are beginning to breed earlier in the year; butterflies are shifting their ranges northwards throughout Europe; and mammals in many parts of the Arctic including polar bears, walrus and caribou are beginning to feel the impacts of reduced sea ice and warming tundra habitat.”

Some of these changes, although true, are actually beneficial to species. The change in butterfly ranges isnt a shift but an expansion. A study in Nature by Parmesan et al, which analyzed the distributional changes of European butterflies, found that “nearly all northward shifts [of butterfly ranges] involved extension at the northern boundary with the southern boundary remaining stable,” thus increasing butterfly habitat and enhancing survivability.

Another study in Nature by Thomas and Lennon found that British bird distributions from 1970 to 1990 experienced a similar habitat expansion. Northern habitat boundaries shifted 19 kilometers while the southern boundary remained stable.

A study that appeared in the Canadian Field-Naturalist by Norment et al studied bird surveys taken along the Thelon River and its tributaries in the Canadian Northwest Territories from the 1920s through much of the 1990s. They found that three bird species had expanded their range southward, nine bird species had expanded their range northward and sixteen bird species were new to the area. Moreover, mammals such as red squirrel, moose porcupine, river otter and beaver had also recently established themselves in the area.

Finally, a review of the scientific literature by Keith and Sherwood Idso, which appeared in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, found that atmospheric CO₂ enrichment increases the temperature at which plants function optimally, negating the need for migration.

The WWF study can be found at www.panda.org/climate. Full citations and reviews of the scientific papers cited above can be found at www.co2science.org.

• The New York Timess embarrassing retraction of its “The North Pole is Melting” story inspired a top ten list by David Letterman on the August 30 Late Show.

Top Ten Signs the New York Times is Slipping

10. Instead of “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” slogan is “Stuff We Heard From A Guy Who Says His Friend Heard About It.”

9. President does something on the TV show “West Wing,” next day it’s on front page.

8. It’s 108 pages, and there’s not one single vowel.

7. For every story, accompanying photo is Tony Danza.

6. Obituary has become list of people editors wish would die.

5. Dick Cheney consistently referred to as “the dude from those Wendy’s commercials.”

4. Notice on sports page: “All scores are approximate.”

3. Only ad in job classifieds: “Wanted — someone who knows how to put together a damn newspaper.”

2. For last two weeks, edited by a disoriented Anne Heche.

1. They’re endorsing George W. Bush.