With Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) citing Hurricane Sandy as a reason to have another go at climate legislation, to say nothing of the media spin depicting Sandy as punishment for our fuelish ways, it’s useful to look at some actual science.

In a study published in the journal Climatic Change, scientists Michael Chenoweth and Dmitry Divine analyze the history of tropical cyclone activity in the Lesser Antilles from 1638 to 2009. The Lesser Antilles are the string of islands lying along the eastern Caribbean Sea.

The Lesser Antilles intersect the “main development region” for Atlantic hurricane formation, making storm data there “our best source for historical variability of tropical cyclones in the tropical Atlantic in the past three centuries,” the researchers explain.

Using instrumental data on wind speeds going back to 1900 plus wind-force and wind-induced damage reports for earlier periods, Chenoweth and Divine estimate the Lesser Antilles Accumulated Cyclone Energy (LACE) for each year along the 61.5°W meridian from 18 to 25° N latitude.

Storms forming in this area include most that do or could make landfall in the U.S. In the researchers’ words: “About 60% of all tropical cyclones moving from waters off of Africa pass through 61.5°W south of 25.0°N, the remaining 40% either moving north of 25.0°N, dying out or re-curving to the east of 61.5°W.” Chenoweth and Divine note that LACE is “highly correlated” with Carribbean basin-wide Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) since 1899.

So what did they find? In their words: “Our record of tropical cyclone activity reveals no trends in LACE in the best-sampled regions for the past 320 years. Likewise, even in the incompletely sampled region north of the Lesser Antilles there is no trend in either numbers or LACE.”

Chenoweth and Divine do find a “~50–70 year variability in ACE across the 18–25°N transect.” This wave-like pattern ”is possibly associated with the low-frequency variations in the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO), a mode of SST [sea surface temperature] variability that is global in extent but strongest in the Atlantic.” The scientists consider their data “sufficiently complete to be a reliable record back to 1785 and extends the evidence of this pattern further back in time.”

An obvious implication of the study, although not spelled out by the authors, is that natural variability dominates tropical storm activity in the Atlantic to the point that any global warming influence, if it exists, is still undetectable.

For a more detailed review of the study, visit the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Also informative is World Climate Report’s review of Chenoweth and Divine’s 2008 study on tropical cyclones in the Lesser Antilles.

A favorite doomsday scenario of the anti-carbon crusade hypothesizes that global warming, by melting frozen Arctic soils on land and the seafloor, will release billions of tons of carbon locked up for thousands of years in permafrost. Climate havoc ensues: The newly exposed carbon oxidizes and becomes carbon dioxide (CO2), further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Worse, some of the organic carbon decomposes into methane, which, molecule for molecule, packs 21 times the global warming punch of CO2 over a 100-year time span and more than 100 times the CO2-warming effect over a 20-year period.

The fear, in short, is that mankind is fast approaching a “tipping point” whereby outgassing CO2 and methane cause more warming, which melts more permafrost, which releases even more CO2 and methane, which pushes global temperatures up to catastrophic levels.

In a popular Youtube video, scientists flare outgassing methane from a frozen pond in Fairbanks, Alaska. A photo of the pond, with methane bubbling up through holes in the ice, appears in the marquee for this post. Are we approaching the End of Days?

New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin ain’t buying it (“Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalyplse Not,” 14 Dec. 2011), nor does his colleague, science reporter Justin Gillis (“Artic Methane: Is Catastrophe Imminent?“ 20 Dec. 2011).

Revkin excerpts a recent paper on the subject published by the American Geophysical Union:

[T]he authors found that roughly 1 meter of the subsurface permafrost thawed in the past 25 years, adding to the 25 meters of already thawed soil. Forecasting the expected future permafrost thaw, the authors found that even under the most extreme climatic scenario tested this thawed soil growth will not exceed 10 meters by 2100 or 50 meters by the turn of the next millennium. The authors note that the bulk of the methane stores in the east Siberian shelf are trapped roughly 200 meters below the seafloor . . .

Revkin also checked in with Ed Dlugokencky, a top methane researcher at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, who told him:

[B]ased on what we see in the atmosphere, there is no evidence of substantial increases in methane emissions from the Arctic in the past 20 years.

Gillis addresses the most alarming aspect of the ‘methane time bomb’ scenario — the risk that global warming will melt billions of tons of frozen methane formations known as hydrates and clathrates on the seafloor. He reports:

While examples can already be found of warmer ocean currents that are apparently destabilizing such deposits—for example, at this site off Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic—the scientists explained that a pervasive ocean warming sufficient to destabilize a lot of methane hydrates would almost certainly take thousands of years.

And even if that happened, many scientists say that the methane released would largely be consumed in the sea (by bacteria that specialize in eating methane) and would not reach the atmosphere. That is what seems to be happening off Svalbard.

“I think it’s just dead wrong to talk about ‘Arctic Armageddon,’ ” said William S. Reeburgh, an emeritus scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who spent decades studying such matters and says the likely consumption of methane within the ocean should not be underestimated. “Most of this methane is never going to see the atmosphere.”

And now for my two cents. The Arctic was warmer than present for thousands of years during both the Holocene Climate Optimum (roughly 9,000 to 5,000 years ago) and the Last Interglacial Period (roughly 130,000 to 100,000 years ago).

The chart below, from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (chapter 6, p. 462), shows that most places above 30N experienced greater-than-present warmth during the Holocene Optimum.

Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger,* writing in World Climate Report, note that the IPCC chart does not show the full extent of Holocene Optimum Arctic warmth. The IPCC’s data for North Eurasia comes from a paper by UCLA’s Glen McDonald. Chip and Pat quote the paper’s abstract:

Radiocarbon-dated macrofossils are used to document Holocene treeline history across northern Russia (including Siberia). Boreal forest development in this region commenced by 10,000 yr B.P. Over most of Russia, forest advanced to or near the current arctic coastline between 9000 and 7000 yr B.P. and retreated to its present position by between 4000 and 3000 yr B.P. Forest establishment and retreat was roughly synchronous across most of northern Russia. Treeline advance on the Kola Peninsula, however, appears to have occurred later than in other regions. During the period of maximum forest extension, the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0°C warmer than modern. The development of forest and expansion of treeline likely reflects a number of complimentary environmental conditions, including heightened summer insolation, the demise of Eurasian ice sheets, reduced sea-ice cover, greater continentality with eustatically lower sea level, and extreme Arctic penetration of warm North Atlantic waters. The late Holocene retreat of Eurasian treeline coincides with declining summer insolation, cooling arctic waters, and neoglaciation.

Average July temperatures along the Russian coastline “may have been 2.5° to 7.0°C warmer than modern” for two millennia. Such warmth was associated with ”extreme Arctic penetration of warm North Atlantic waters.” Yet the greenhouse effect did not gallop away. Either clathrates did not melt en masse, or the bugs ate most of the methane before it could reach the atmosphere.

Turning to the Last Interglacial Period, Michaels and Knappenberger, in a separate post, review a study by the Circum-Arctic PaleoEnvironments (CAPE) project. The CAPE researchers conclude that summer air temperatures were “4-5°C above present over most Arctic lands” for thousands of years.

So if Arctic warmth were capable of detonating a methane time bomb, it should have happened during the Last Interglacial. What do the data tell us?

Vostok ice core data do show a correlation between changes in global temperature and atmospheric levels of both CO2 and methane. However, despite the sustained Arctic warmth of the Last Interglacial, there was no de-stabilizing, self-perpetuating spike in atmospheric methane levels. Global temperatures largely determined methane levels, not the other way around.

Atmospheric data going back 420,000 years indicate that the climate is more stable than alarmists assume. Even greater-than-present Arctic warmth sustained over thousands of years did not turn the permafrost or the seafloor into a climate-disrupting methane bomb.

* Pat and Chip have been covering the permafrost scare since 2007 (here, here, and here).

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth bombarded audiences with image after image of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, and drought, creating the impression of a world in climate chaos. Gore blamed the alleged upsurge in extreme weather on global warming, that is, mankind’s sins of emission. One of Gore’s mighty pieces of evidence was a dramatic increase in insurance payments for weather-related damages. As he writes in his best-selling book of the same title:

Over the last three decades, insurance companies have seen a 15-fold increase in the amount of money paid to victims of extreme weather. Hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters have caused these losses [An Inconvenient Truth, p. 101].

Gore presented a chart similar to this one:

Seeing is believing, right? The problem, of course, is not merely that correlation (warmer weather/bigger losses) does not prove causation. More importantly, the economic data depicted in the chart have not been adjusted (“normalized”) to offset increases in population, wealth, and the consumer price index.

Consider this fact: More people today live in just two Florida counties, Dade and Broward, than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas to Virginia in 1930. Florida’s population grew by more than 17.5% in the past decade alone and today is 48% larger than in 1980. There’s tons more stuff in harm’s way than there used to be. No wonder damages are bigger than in the good old days!

Most studies that “normalize” economic loss data find no evidence of a trend towards more violent or destructive weather. Here, for example, is a chart from a study on normalized hurricane damages by Pielke, Jr et al. 2008:

Figure description: U.S. hurricane damages, 1900-2005, if all hurricane strikes had hit the same locations but with year 2005 population, wealth, and consumer price index.

A study published earlier this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Bouwer, L.M. 2011. Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?) examines 22 previous studies on the oft-asserted link between climate change and weather-related damages.

Here’s what the researcher, Laurens M. Bouwer of the Institute for Environmental Studies in the Netherlands, found:

All 22 studies show that increases in exposure and wealth are by far the most important drivers for growing disaster losses. Most studies show that disaster losses have remained constant after normalization, including losses from earthquakes (see Vranes and Pielke 2009). Studies that did find increases after normalization did not fully correct for wealth and population increases, or they identified other sources of exposure increases or vulnerability changes or changing environmental conditions. No study identified changes in extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change as the main driver for any remaining trend.

Bouwer concludes:

The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

CO2Science.Org has an excellent review of the Bouwer study. On a related issue, World Climate Report reviews a recent study finding no long-term increase in the number of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes over the past 130 years. The apparent increase in storm frequency turns out to be an artifact of the data, that is, a product of the increase in spatial coverage and accuracy of hurricane monitoring systems.

A study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society reports that an extinct species of giant ant (Titanomyrma lubei, from the Greek word “Titan”) lived in Wyoming during the Eocene Epoch, about 50 million years ago. As colorfully described by Physorg.Com, the ant “had a body just over five centimeters long — comparable to a hummingbird — a size only rivaled today by the monstrously large queens of an ant species in tropical Africa.”

So how did this ‘monstrous’ ant come to live in Wyoming, a place not usually associated with tropical conditions? The Eocene included “brief, cyclic warming events of approximately 2-4°C” with Arctic temperatures shooting up by as much as 5-10°C. This combined with early Eocene “land bridges” enabled “thermophilic” (heat loving) ants to “cross between Europe and North America via the Arctic.”

One of the study’s authors, Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Canada, opined that the intercontinental migration of the titanic prehistoric ant may shed light on species migration in an era of greenhouse warming. Archibald told Physorg.Com:

As the Earth’s climate changes, we are seeing tropical pest species extend their ranges into mid-latitudes and dragonflies appear in the Arctic. Understanding the details of how life forms adapted to global warming in the past will be of increasing importance in the future.

Just out of curiosity, though, why is it that big ants live in hot climates? The study does not address this question, but the authors surely thought about it. According to Physorg.Com, “The researchers also looked at the habitats of the largest modern ants, and found that almost all live in the tropics, indicating that there might be something about being big that requires ants to live in hot temperatures.”

Maybe, just maybe, hot, wet climates — tropics — are more bioproductive, and a more bioproductive food chain is necessary to sustain colonies of large insects. A bioproductive planet is a good thing, right?

Climate doomsters warn that global warming will ravage the biosphere by increasing drought and desertification. Although the science on this is far from settled, there is empirical evidence that the world is greening. As summarized on WorldClimateReport.Com,  a recent satellite study found a significant net increase in terrestrial vegetation since the early 1980s.

Spatial distribution in linear trends in estimated Leaf Area Index (half the total leaf area per ground unit) from July 1981 through December 2006 (Liu, S., R. Liu, and Y. Liu. 2010. Spatial and temporal variation of global LAI during 1981–2006. Journal of Geographical Sciences, 20, 323-332)

In the map above, red areas indicating increased vegetative growth clearly dominate the blue areas indicating diminished growth.

The researchers, Liu et al., attribute the upward trend in the Northern latitudes to global warming:

The growth of the vegetation in these middle and high latitude areas is mainly limited by temperature. Many studies correlating NDVI [Normalized Difference Vegetative Index] with land surface temperature indicate warming might be the most important factor accounting for the LAI [Leaf Area Index] increase in this area. Warming, causes longer active growing season length and higher growth magnitude, therefore leads to increase in LAI in this area.

So do we have to worry about an invasion of giant ants from Africa into Wyoming via Europe and the Arctic? The authors of the Royal Society study don’t say. Could the Orkin Man wipe out a colony of ‘monstrous’ ants in your backyard? If he wants to keep your business, he’ll figure out how to do it!

One thing seems clear. Global warming, like any change of any sort, has benefits and costs, winners and losers. Warming is extending the northward range of some pests. It is also extending growing seasons and increasing leafy biomass in more places than not. Tropical climates sustain giant ants. They are also immensely bioproductive and biodiverse. If they weren’t, people would not care so much about saving the rain forests.

If you’ve been following the global warming debate for any length of time, you know how boringly predictable the “consensus” narrative has become. Global warming is good for bad things — poison ivy, ticks, toxic algae blooms, malaria-carrying mosquitoes – but bad for good things – polar bears, ski resorts, Vermont’s maple sugar industry, and the weather patterns on which agriculture (hence human survival) allegedly depend.

And supposedly, one of the cures for global warming is to “repower” America with zero-carbon energy, especially electricity generated from wind turbines.

But that creates a bit of a conundrum for warmists. If global warming is going to play havoc with the weather, how do we know that the best locations for siting wind farms today will remain optimal (or even marginally productive) in the allegedly topsy turvy greenhouse planet of tomorrow?

Never fear! A new study funded by the National Science Foundation finds that global warming will not significantly change America’s wind patterns over the next 50 years.  From the NSF’s press release:

Rising global temperatures will not significantly affect wind energy production in the United States concludes a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

But warmer temperatures could make wind energy somewhat more plentiful say two Indiana University (IU) Bloomington scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

. . .

They found warmer atmospheric temperatures will do little to reduce the amount of available wind or wind consistency–essentially wind speeds for each hour of the day–in major wind corridors that principally could be used to produce wind energy.

. . .

“The models tested show that current wind patterns across the US are not expected to change significantly over the next 50 years since the predicted climate variability in this time period is still within the historical envelope of climate variability,” said Antoinette WinklerPrins, a Geography and Spatial Sciences Program director at NSF.

“The impact on future wind energy production is positive as current wind patterns are expected to stay as they are. This means that wind energy production can continue to occur in places that are currently being targeted for that production.”

“The greatest consistencies in wind density we found were over the Great Plains, which are already being used to harness wind, and over the Great Lakes, which the U.S. and Canada are looking at right now,” said [Principal Investigator Sara] Pryor.

Such predictions could prove crucial to American policymakers and energy producers, many of whom have pledged to make wind energy 20 percent of America’s total energy production by 2030. Currently only about 2 percent of American energy comes from wind.

So the world is not coming to an end after all – at least not if you are an investor in taxpayer-subsidized, state-mandated wind energy. Global warming will change the monsoon season in southeast Asia. It will cause drought and desertification in Africa. It will flood millions of people out of their homes in Bangladesh. But it will not — repeat not — change U.S. wind patterns. In fact, global warming will have a “positive impact” on the wind patterns “currently being targeted” for wind-energy “production.”

Climate change “threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth,” according to Al Gore. But climate change will not disturb U.S. wind patterns and may even improve them. How convenient for corporate rent seekers and their congressional patrons!

Verily, Gaia is great. She not only whips up hurricanes and tornadoes to punish our sins of emission, she also insulates the wind from our corrupting influence so that green job creators can begin the process of planetary healing.

Okay, if you find that farfetched, try this thought experiment. What would happen if the NSF study concluded that climate change would significantly reduce the efficiency of wind energy production in the Great Plains? Those same rent seekers and their congressional buddies would be up in arms.

And who funds NSF? Congress, of course. Anyone see a pattern here? Bob Dylan said it long ago: “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”