Marlo Lewis

“The weather patterns that steered deadly Superstorm Sandy into the East Coast last year may be on the decrease, thanks to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” states the press release for a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The release continues:

While the atmospheric conditions that pushed Sandy into the New Jersey coast in October 2012 will still occur in the North Atlantic, a team of researchers led by Elizabeth Barnes, assistant professor in the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science, has found that those conditions will occur less often, making it less likely that any future superstorms that form will be steered into the United States.

“Using state-of-the-art climate models, we project that there will be a decrease in the frequency and persistence of the westward flow that led to Sandy’s unprecedented track,” Barnes said. “That implies that future atmospheric conditions are less likely than at present to propel tropical storms westward into the coast.”

Two anomalous weather patterns slammed Sandy into the Northeast, according to Barnes. First, the jet stream shifted toward the south. Second, a “wave breaking” and blocking event in the upper atmosphere blocked the normal west-to-east wind, “causing the wind to blow back towards North America rather than out to sea.” When Sandy “met the block and the westward wind flow, it accelerated toward the New Jersey Coast with winds in excess of 80 miles per hour.” In the PNAS study, “the models show a lessening of the frequency of the breaking-and-blocking pattern with a poleward shift of the jet-stream in the future, and that this is found for the Southern Hemisphere as well.”

There may be no greater heresy in this enlightened age than the notion that global warming will avert weather disasters. But there’s evidence it has already begun.

In June, Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger, in a column on MasterResource.Org, described several “Billion Dollar Weather Events Averted by Global Warming.” Not unlike the Barnes PNAS study, Knappenberger found that wind patterns “consistent with” global warming prevented two tropical storms from developing into full-blown hurricanes and prevented two others from hitting the U.S. East Coast. Here’s an excerpt: [click to continue…]

In case you missed it, I want to call your attention to an important essay by Werner Brozek posted last week on Anthony Watts’s blog, Watts Up with That (WAWT).

NASA supports two main satellite-based global temperature monitoring systems: the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) program headed by John Christy and Roy Spencer, and the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) program headed by Frank Wentz.

Climate activists have generally been boosterish about RSS and negative about UAH. The RSS found a mid-troposphere warming trend from the start of its satellite record in July 1987 whereas the UAH found a cooling trend from 1979 through 1995.

In 1998, Wentz published a study in Nature arguing that uncorrected instrument error associated with satellite orbital decay injected a spurious cooling bias into the UAH dataset. Spencer and Christy accepted the criticism, made the adjustment, and since 1998 their dataset has shown a long-term warming trend. However, at least through 2004, the UAH record showed less warming (0.09°C/decade) than the RSS record (0.12°C). So activists continued to take potshots at Spencer and Christy, implying (or asserting) that their political biases accounted for the discrepancy.

Ah, but how quickly the wheel turns! During the 2000s, the divergence began to go the other way as the RSS record showed less warming than the UAH record.

Which brings us back to Brozek and his post in WUWT.  Brozek shows there has been no warming in the RSS data from Dec. 1996 through July 2013 — a 200 month warming pause.

Figure explanation: “The graphic above shows 3 lines. The long line shows that RSS has been flat from December 1996 to July 2013, which is a period of 16 years and 8 months or 200 months. The other slightly higher flat line in the middle is the latest complete decade of 120 months from January 2001 to December 2010. The other slightly downward sloping line is the latest 120 months prior from present. It very clearly shows it has been cooling lately, however this cooling is not statistically significant.” [click to continue…]

Earlier today I received an email out of the blue from a Russian journalist inquiring what the impact on the Chinese economy might have been if, at the Kyoto climate conference of Nov.-Dec. 1997, Beijing had agreed to limit China’s greenhouse gas emissions and actually implemented such limits. Here’s the gist of my response:

The average emissions limitation for Annex I (industrial) counties under the Kyoto Protocol is a 5% reduction below 1990 levels during a 2008-2012 commitment period. China’s CO2 emissions in 1990 were about 2.4 billion metric tons per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). China’s emissions in 2012 were 8.994 billion metric tons – 274% larger. China could not comply with the Kyoto Annex I target without de-industrializing its economy.

What about the impacts of milder versions of the Annex I target such as limiting China’s emissions growth to, say, 15%, 20%, or 25% above 2005 levels (the year Kyoto entered into force)? Even these ‘soft’ Kyoto targets, if actually implemented, would have devastated China’s economy.

A recent report (p. 16) commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy notes that the increase in China’s coal consumption more than tripled from 3.6% per year during 1980-1999 to 12.2% per year during 2000-2012. Oil and gas consumption also increased dramatically. According to the EIA’s country report on China, oil consumption in China increased from about 6.5 million barrels per day in 2005 to 12 million barrels per day in 2012 — an 84% increase; gas consumption increased from 2.0 trillion cubic feet in 2005 to 4.6 trillion cubic feet in 2011 – a 130% increase.

Yes, China in recent years has also made large investments in hydropower, nuclear, and renewables. Nonetheless, as of 2009, fossil fuels accounted for 93% of the country’s energy consumption. China’s economic development is overwhelmingly fossil-fueled.

[click to continue…]

A visitor to Anthony Watt’s blog, Watts Up With That, who identifies himself simply as “Craig,” today posted one of the funniest comments I’ve ever seen in a debate where 97% of scientists seem to have no sense of humor. Enjoy!

STUDY: Climate change causing climate models to become less reliable

A groundbreaking new study has shown that climate change is the underlying cause of increasingly frequent and severe climate model failures. Researchers at Pennsylvania State Community College have discovered a critical link between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration and general circulation model errors.

“Climate change has made it increasingly difficult to predict climate change,” says Dr. Manyard Michael, the lead scientist behind the study. “The current 16 year pause in global warming illustrates just how serious this situation has been; if not for climate change, we now know that we would have been able to accurately predict the current break in warming and clearly show that climate change is actually accelerating faster than forecast – not stopping as climate change is making it appear to those outside of the climate science community.” Dr. Michael also noted that they stumbled on this important finding almost by accident. “We just happened to notice that the higher carbon dioxide concentrations climbed, the more we had to adjust the data to get the results we knew to be right, and the more we adjusted the data, the bigger the error in the models. It’s a very strong positive feedback.” [click to continue…]

“Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming?” That is the title of a new discussion paper by Hans von Storch, Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg.

Storch stated the problem his paper explores in a recent (June 20, 2013) interview with Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?

STORCH: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

The abstract of Storch’s new paper outlines three possible causes of the divergence between observations and model projections of near-surface global annual mean temperatures:

Of the possible causes of the inconsistency, the underestimation of internal natural climate variability on decadal time scales is a plausible candidate, but the influence of unaccounted external forcing factors or an overestimation of the model sensitivity to elevated greenhouse gas concentrations cannot be ruled out. The first cause would have little impact of the expectations of longer term anthropogenic climate change, but the second and particularly the third would. [click to continue…]