October 2004

 The British weather forecaster Metcheck, which has a better record than the UK Meteorological Office in forecasting the weather recently, has predicted a very cold winter for the United Kingdom this year.

According to The Times of London (Oct. 13), Starting next week, a series of cold snaps and plummeting temperatures will bring to an end all speculation of a late blooming Indian summer.  Instead, bitterly cold winds in the South and even snowfall in the North will quash the hopes of the thousands who banked on global warming to get them through the year without central heating.  Although this winter is not expected to be as cold as the winters of 1947 and 1963, which almost brought the country to a standstill, Metcheck is predicting at least four cold snaps, the first beginning next Monday, then one a month in November, December, and January.

Senior Forecaster Andrew Bond told the Times, The UK has been relatively fortunate over the past few years with mild or very mild winters.

 Paleoclimatologists have warned that the American West could be in for a long period of severe drought, but in doing so have had to accept the existence of the Medieval Warm Period.

Edward Cook of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and colleagues wrote in the October 8 issue of Science magazine, The western United States is experiencing a severe multiyear drought that is unprecedented in some hydroclimatic records.  Using gridded drought reconstructions that cover most of the western United States over the past 1,200 years, we show that this drought pales in comparison to an earlier period of elevated aridity and epic drought in AD 900-1300, an interval broadly consistent with the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.  If elevated aridity in the western United States is a natural response to climate warming, then any trend toward warmer temperatures in the future could lead to a serious long-term increase in aridity over western North America.

 The researchers say that the key to the drought lies in the weather pattern called La Nina, which is characterized by the upwelling of cold water from the bottom of the Pacific in eastern tropical waters.  Climate models show this reduces rainfall in the West (Reuters, Oct. 7).

The current drought, however, may not be as severe as currently depicted.  In an article accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Pure and Applied Geophysics, Roger Pielke, Sr. and colleagues find that, The consequences of the most recent drought have been exceptional for some uses (e.g. suburban watering; wells, cattle grazing), but the precipitation deficit for most areas in Colorado was not exceptional (although quite dry).  The reason for the heightened consequences (and awareness in the media) is that there is more competition for the available water, due to population growth.  This is a human caused shortage due to the population requirements and competition with agricultural uses, not an unprecedented precipitation shortage. 

Floridas bad luck in being hit by four hurricanes this summer has been pounced on by alarmists.  Mark Lynas, whose main claim to fame is to have shoved a pie in the face of Bjrn Lomborg, wrote gleefully in The Washington Post (Sept. 19), It almost seems as though the storm was trying to deliver a forceful reminder of the reality of climate change and the need to act now to address it.  Later on, he referred to natures fury.

Scientific experts, however, agree that global warming is not a factor in the current spate of hurricanes.  Nor is the trend likely to get worse.  Scientists from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, told the Post (Sept. 3), It’s a fact that nobody so far has been able to show from the observed storms a tendency to have more intense storms.  Kerry Emmanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told UPI on September 20 after another hurricane had hit, The intensity of current hurricanes such as Ivan cannot be attributed to global warming.

One widely reported study (by Knutson and Kuleya, published in the Journal of Climate) did suggest that, A greenhouse gas ­induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms.  However, the study appears flawed in that, to begin with, it estimated growth in greenhouse gas concentrations at 1 percent per year, rather than the currently occurring 0.4 percent per year, which results in much higher concentrations by mid-century, which is when the risk of destructive storms is supposed to increase.

The study is also testable against the historical record.  Sea surface temperatures have been increasing since the 1880s.  There is no correlation in the Global Historical Climatology Networks record between sea surface temperature increase and hurricane intensity.

Once again (see previous issue), a new study finds that the hockey stick reconstruction of past temperatures produced by Michael Mann and colleagues is based on methodological errors and shortcomings.  In Re-constructing Past Climate from Noisy Data (Science Express, Sept. 30), Hans von Storch and colleagues first looked at the likelihood of being able to get an accurate climate signal from historical proxy data (tree rings, boreholes, ice cores, etc.) by estimating the amount of statistical noise inherent in such data.  They discovered that the amount of noise was such that it was likely that hockey-stick like reconstructions had severely underestimated past climate variability. 

This would explain why the hockey stick, which claims to show that the global mean temperature during the first 900 years of the last millennium was relatively stable and then rose sharply in the twentieth century, failed to show evidence of the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age, for which there is a great deal of historical and paleo-climatological evidence.  The hockey-stick graph was featured prominently in the IPCCs Third Assessment Report, published in 2001.

In a commentary on von Storch et als paper, T. J. Osborn and K. R. Briffa, prominent paleo-climatologists from the University of East Anglia, stress the importance of the findings.  They say, The message of the study by von Storch et al. is that existing reconstructions of the NH temperature of recent centuries may systematically underestimate the true centennial variability of climate and, If the true natural variability of NH [northern hemisphere] temperature is indeed greater than is currently accepted, the extent to which recent warming can be viewed as unusual would need to be reassessed.

In an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, von Storch commented, We were able to show in a publication in Science that this [hockey stick] graph contains assumptions that are not permissible.  Methodologically it is wrong: rubbish.  Von Storch also pointed out the IPCCs role in cutting off questioning on the subject: It remains important for science to point out the erroneous nature of the Mann curve.  In recent years it has been elevated to the status of truth by the U. N. appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.

Von Storch also commented on Manns defense of his now thoroughly discredited research.  His influence in the community of climate researchers is great, he said.  And Mann rejects any reproach most forcefully.  His defensiveness is understandable.  Nobody likes to see his own child die.  But we must respect our credibility as research scientists.  Otherwise we play into the hands of those skeptics of global climate change who imagine a conspiracy between science and politics.