Science

 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. 

 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.

 Readers may remember the controversy over the mistake made in a recent paper by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels, which hinged on an error in calculation of the cosine of latitudes.  In this context, they may be interested to see this comment from the paper by Von Storch et al. (see last issue) that shattered any remaining credibility held by Michael Manns hockey stick:

Monthly nearsurface temperature anomalies were standardized and subjected to an Empirical Orthogonal Function Analysis, in which each grid point was weighted by (cos f)^1/2, where f is the latitude (Mann et al. 1998 erroneously use a cos f weighting).

Hong Kongs air quality is suffering as China continues to emphasize economic growth.  According to a Reuters article (Sept. 21), the autonomous regions air pollution hit a record high on September 14.  Most of the pollution, says Reuters, is attributable to coal-fired power plants in China along with traffic fumes.

Although Hong Kong itself has converted taxicabs to run on liquefied petroleum gas, Double-digit growth in individual car ownership in the neighboring province of Guangdong compounds the problem.  In power generation, CLP Holdings burned 50 percent more coal in 2003 than the previous year and also cut its use of gas as it discovered overestimates in reserves in the South China gas field.

Reuters also points out that, Chinas leaders are aware of the environmental price of breakneck growth but their main priority is to ensure a strong economy to help ease a labor glut.

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.

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.

Jeffrey Sparshott’s otherwise excellent article “Putin Cabinet approves signing of Kyoto protocol” (Business, Friday) unwittingly promotes the alarmist view that carbon dioxide emissions (one of the “greenhouse-gas emissions” he mentions)are necessarily “pollution” and, consequently, that the United States is the “world’s heaviest polluter.”

The destruction caused by four hurricanes in Florida and the Caribbean this summer has provoked sensational claims of climate changes caused by the capitalist economic system. The ratification of the Kyoto protocol by the Russian government risks not only damaging and economic costs for the global economy that are not fully understood. The protocol itself is also based on highly contentious interpretations of scientific evidence that are the object of serious criticism. These are the conclusions of a report issued on Thursday 30 September by a Brussels based think-tank. The report titled Earth warming myth http://institutmolinari.org/pubs/note200410.pdf published as part of the Institut Economique Molinari’s Economic Notes series examines the debate surrounding differing theories about global warming, and considers the costs of implementing the terms of the Kyoto protocol on the world economy.

Commenting on the report, Ccile Philippe, the institute’s President stated:

“To insist that current climate changes are the result of man-made global warming is no more plausible than blaming the government for rainfall. The measures proposed by the Kyoto protocol will cool down the global economy, without necessarily protecting the environment.”

 The debate within the scientific community concerning climate change is far from settled. More than 18,000 scientists have signed the petition launched by the Oregon institute of sciences and medicine, in the USA, to demonstrate opposition to the Kyoto protocol.

 Ccile Philippe sums up the debate:

“One wonders what the basis is for a treaty that proposes to swallow billions of dollars in resources to struggle against the ill-defined cause (the production of CO2 emissions) of a problem that may not exist (global warming). If it is clear that the emission of “greenhouse gases” has increased, we are far from knowing today what the real effects could be. The cost of restricting these emissions is however, all too clear.”