Science

Nature Ignores Science on Greenland Ice Shelf

A feature article, Rising Tide, in the March 11 issue of Nature claims that global warming is melting Greenlands ice so rapidly that the whole ice sheet may melt and cause sea levels to rise significantly. However, as the Greening Earth Societys World Climate Alert (http://www.co2andclimate.org/wca/2004/wca_14d.html) points out, the Nature article is at variance with published scientific research, which finds that Greenland warmed rapidly in the 1920s without causing disastrous melting of the ice sheet, but has been in a cooling trend since 1940. 

The most recent of a number of research articles that contradict Nature is Global Warming and the Greenland Ice Sheet, by P. Chylek, J. E. Box, and G. Lesins, which appears in the March issue of Climate Change.  The articles abstract says, Since 1940, however, the Greenland coastal stations data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend.   At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2C per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987.  This suggests that the Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the current global warming trend.

The authors found the most pronounced warming in the 1920s when the average annual surface air temperature rose between 2C and 4C in less than 10 yearsat a time when the change in anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases was well below the current level.

World Climate Alert points out, A 1C warming of the coastal stations would cause an increase in the melt area of 73,000 square kilometers, as Chylek et al. note.  Given the 1C to nearly 2C cooling found in the coastal stations, Chyleks team makes this conservative statement, The results are inconclusive for the ice sheet as a whole, owing to the large uncertainties when balancing very large, difficult to measure, offsetting quantities.  They add, Even the direction in which the mass of the Greenland ice sheet is currently changing is in dispute.  In other words, anyone who claims Greenland is melting wont find a lot of support in the scientific literature.

NASA Finds Global Climate Models Overestimate Warming

A NASA press release dated March 16 contains interesting news for those who have disputed the strength of positive water vapor feedback effects in global climate models.

The release states, A NASA-funded study found some climate models might be overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms.  Since water vapor is the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, some climate forecasts may be overestimating future temperature increases.

Ken Minschwaner, a physicist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, N.M., and Andrew Dessler, a researcher with the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., did the study.  It is in the March 15 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate.  The researchers used data on water vapor in the upper troposphere (10-14 km or 6-9 miles altitude) from NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).

Their work verified water vapor is increasing in the atmosphere as the surface warms.  They found the increases in water vapor were not as high as many climate-forecasting computer models have assumed.  Our study confirms the existence of a positive water vapor feedback in the atmosphere, but it may be weaker than we expected, Minschwaner said.

In most computer models relative humidity tends to remain fixed at current levels.  Models that include water vapor feedback with constant relative humidity predict the Earth’s surface will warm nearly twice as much over the next 100 years as models that contain no water vapor feedback.

Using the UARS data to actually quantify both specific humidity and relative humidity, the researchers found, while water vapor does increase with temperature in the upper troposphere, the feedback effect is not as strong as models have predicted. The increases in water vapor with warmer temperatures are not large enough to maintain a constant relative humidity, Minschwaner said. These new findings will be useful for testing and improving global climate models.

Warming Link to New Ice Age Shaky

While alarmist scientists and the journalists who write for them, Pentagon futurists, and Hollywood disaster movie-makers are all happy to present the possibility of global warming triggering another ice age, the science behind the assertion is less than solid.

The possibility is based on the idea that global warming will cause a freshening of the waters in the North Atlantic, so causing the Gulf Stream to weaken or even shut down.  This would mean warmer waters would not be present in the North Atlantic, causing a drastic lowering of temperatures in the areas that rely on the Gulf Stream to maintain a temperate climate (temperate Great Britain is on the same latitudes as inhospitable Labrador in Canada).

Yet the models on which climate alarmists rely for their catastrophic scenarios do not agree on the effects of global temperature rise on the Gulf Stream.  Researchers R. Bleck and S. Sun, writing in the journal Global and Planetary Change, tell how they revisited their model of the meridional overturning circulation (MOC).   In view of evidence presented in IPCC (2001), the researchers had expected the Atlantic MOC to weaken in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2.  They found that the Atlantic overturning stream function appears to be stable, concluding that, It is insensitive to global warming resulting from gradual CO2 doubling.

News for the alarmists is worse from their favorite model, that from the UKs Hadley Centre, which proved no more capable of predicting past climate than a table of random numbers when used for the flawed National Assessment on Climate Change.   Wu et al. report in Geophysical Research Letters that their examination of thermohaline circulation (THC) was expected to show a weakening of the stream.  However, as they write, they do not find a decreasing trend of the North Atlantic THC.  Instead, Accompanying the freshening trend, the THC unexpectedly shows an upward trend, rather than a downward trend.  In other words, according to the Hadley Centre model, global warming may well strengthen the Gulf Stream.

Lindzen Summarizes Current State of Climate Science

Writing in Ottawas Hill Times (Feb. 23), Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, summarizes the current state of global warming science and cautions against incorrect interpretations of what reviews such as that from the National Academy of Sciences (2001) were trying to do.

He writes, [I]t is quite wrong to say that our NAS study endorsed the credibility of the IPCC assessment report.  We were asked to evaluate the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), the only part of the IPCC reports that is ever read or quoted by the media and politicians.  The SPM, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world’s foremost climate scientists.  In fact, it is no such thing.  Largely for that reason, the NAS panel concluded that the SPM does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government.
 
The full IPCC report, most of which is written by scientists about specific scientific topics in their areas of expertise, is an admirable description of research activities in climate science.  It is not, however, directed at policy.  The SPM is, of course, but it is also a very different document.  It represents a consensus of government representatives, rather than of scientists.  As a consequence, the SPM has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.
 
Similarly, in the case of our NAS report, far too much attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report.  The summary claimed that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Yet, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long term trends, a crucial point that the summary neglected to mention.  Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled.

Case for Greenhouse Gas Forcing Suffers Further Blow

In an article in the March Scientific American, James Hansen, father of global warming alarmism (along with then-Senator Al Gore, Jr.), implicitly acknowledges that climate models have failed to reflect accurately what is causing the small warming trend recently observed.

Hansen summarizes, Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models.

This would surely qualify as validation of the climate models if the models included all the forcings Hansen claims.  In fact, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear, most climate models rely primarily on greenhouse gas forcings and include little or no estimate for the other forcings Hansen now considers so important.  In other words, if the Earth is warming at a rate predicted by the models, this is more coincidence than anything else, because the models clearly overestimated the effect of greenhouse gas forcings.

Underlining the greater importance of other factors, Richard Somerville (a professor of meteorology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and the organizer of a symposium on aerosols at the AAAS meeting in Seattle, titled “Our Hazy Atmosphere: Aerosols and Climate) announced in a press release, It has become clear that local effects on the heat budget from aerosols can be substantially larger than those from greenhouse gases.  I believe we are at a very early stage of understanding the effect of aerosols.  Aerosols come from all kinds of sources: dust blown off the Sahara by wind, particles emitted from smokestacks, gas from volcanoes.  There are many, many complicated interactions with aerosols that we are just beginning to learn about.

More Problems with Hockey Stick

To add to the problems surrounding the failure to reproduce the long-term historical data in the hockey stick graph on which much of global warming alarmism depends (see last few issues), new questions have been raised about the end of the curve (the blade of the hockey stick).

Writing in Geographical Research Letters (Feb. 14), Willie Soon, David Legates, and Sallie Baliunas found that they were unable to reproduce exactly the extremely sharp upturn depicted in the IPCC graph using any of three standard methods for analyzing trend data.  While they still found an upturn, their analysis found a difference of around 0.25 C., which appeared to be at least in part due to unjustified data-padding.

The inventor of the hockey stick, Michael Mann, responded by launching an ad hominem attack on Willie Soon (UPI, Jan. 26): The researcher has produced very poor work in the past, and isn’t taken seriously in the climate community, Mann told UPI.  This sounds like another in their installation of just bad work.  He added: I’m amazed this paper got into print. They don’t even try to determine what method we used.  Our method was described in more detail in other papers.

Hoffa Says Kerry Will Drill for Oil All Over the United States

The Teamsters Union has endorsed Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for president.  On February 18, Chris Matthews interviewed Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. on Hardball and asked him about Kerrys votes against oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the Teamsters top legislative goals.  Here is an excerpt from the interview:

MATTHEWS: How about ANWR? You guys want to see ANWR because you want to see guys working in your business.  I guess theres a lot of Teamsters jobs up there lined up and organized, if you could put a pipeline up to the Alaska wilderness.  He [Kerry] is against that.

HOFFA: Well, we talked about that.   He says, look, I am against ANWR, but I am going to put that pipeline in and were going to drill like never before.

MATTHEWS: But he is against drilling up there.  What are they going to run through the pipeline?

HOFFA: Well, they are going to drill all over, according to him.  And he says, were going to be drilling all over the United States.  And he says that is going to create more jobs.

MATTHEWS: It just seems amazing that he has turned around on NAFTA, turned around on WTO, turned around on ANWR, anything to get the Teamsters.

HOFFA: Oh.

This excerpt has been tidied up to remove crosstalk.  The full interview transcript is available on the MSNBC site at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4302564/.  The League of Conservation Voters has also endorsed Senator Kerry for president.

Wind Turbines More Deadly to Birds than Thought

According to a new study reported in the Oakland Tribune (Jan. 30), wind turbines have proved more deadly to avian life in the Altamont Pass region of California than previously thought.  The study also suggests that a 1998 plan to reduce fatalities by replacing older machines will not work.
 
The Tribune says that, The study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, estimates that about 500 birds of prey are killed by wind farms in the Altamont each year, including red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls and golden eagles. Previous estimates, based in part on studies paid for by wind farm operators, put the number at between 160 and 400 raptors a year.

The study also found that the repowering plan, thought to be more bird-friendly by reducing the total number of wind turbines and providing handy perches, would not achieve its goals as the modern machines could prove to be more lethal than those they would replace.

Repowering would drastically reduce the number of wind turbines, but result in a slight net increase in the total area “swept” by the larger machines’ longer blades. The study concluded that bird deaths are tied more closely to this factor than the total number of turbinesa finding that contradicts an earlier, industry-sponsored study.

The study also found that existing wind turbines with tubular towers killed birds at a higher rate than models with lattice towers, and that siting new turbines to avoid bird kills may be difficult.

Observers found raptors were attracted to prey such as ground squirrels, gophers and rabbits that make their homes around wind turbines.  Different species of raptors employ varied hunting methods, so what helps one birdnot placing wind turbines on ridge tops, for examplemay harm another, the study said.

Hockey Stick Update from McIntyre and McKitrick

On January 22, Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre posted the following update on Professor McKitricks website:

Despite the long quiet on this page, the past 7 weeks have been very busy for us.  A number of people have written to ask about progress on Part II, while others have interpreted the 7 week gap as a sign that maybe we ran out of material.  No, there is a lot of material, and the challenge has been to sift through it and put it into coherent form.  There are now some new journals involved in handling material that arose from our paper, and we have held back releasing any of the Part II contents connected to these review processes. 

Professor Mann’s response focuses on the role of 3 (out of 22) key indicators available in the 15th century portion of the data base.  His calculations show that without these series the MBH98 results would look like ours, and his assertion is that we improperly “omitted” the series in question.  Our response will establish that the series in question are in fact inadmissible.  Of course the discovery that the 1998 conclusions rest so sensitively on only 3 series already points to the lack of robustness of this famous graph.  But there is much more to be said, when the time comes.

The entire controversy can be accessed at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html.

Return to Global Cooling Alarmism

Following the derision that greeted former Vice President Al Gores pronouncements on global warming during the coldest snap for many years, environmental alarmists have been quick to revive long-buried claims of an imminent ice age (caused by global warming this time).

According to a report in Londons Independent (Jan. 25), Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.  A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change of remarkable amplitude in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.  The developmentdescribed as the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments, by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the researchthreatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe’s weather mild.

The Independent drew comparison with the Younger Dryas period, saying, This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal.  Europe could not sustain anything like its present population.  Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.

The newspaper eventually revealed, Some scientists say that this is the worst-case scenario and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world’s climate “flickering” between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilization.  However, no mention was made of earlier research indicating that the strength of the Gulf Stream has varied considerably in the past, possibly cyclically.

Etc.

R.I.P., John Daly

The Cooler Heads Coalition was deeply saddened to hear of the sudden death of John Daly, custodian of the invaluable web site, Still Waiting for Greenhouse, on January 29.

Johns daughter, Rachel, posted the following on the site (http://www.john-daly.com):

It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John Daly.  Condolences may be sent to John’s e-mail account (daly@john-daly.com).  As a lasting tribute to John, weare endeavouring to keep this web site not only active, but also up to date.  If anyone is able to contribute to this in any way, please contact me by email (daly@john-daly.com) and type Rachel in the subject heading.

 Sea Level Rise Disproved

Two new studies by Swedish scientist Nils-Axel Mrner in the journal Global and Planetary Change reveal that the much-hyped threat of sea level rise as a result of global warming appears to be illusory.

In the first paper, Estimating future sea level changes from past records, Mrner looks at sea level oscillation over the last 5000 years. He finds that In the last 300 years, sea level has seen oscillation close to the present with peak rates in the period 1890-1930. He goes on to state, Satellite altimetry indicates virtually no change in the past decade. From model runs based on these data, he concludes, This implies that there is no fear of any massive future flooding as claimed in most global warming scenarios.

In the second paper, New perspectives for the future of the Maldives , Mrner and his colleagues conclude that one of the island nations most cited in fears that they might vanish beneath the waves has experienced higher sea levels in the past: The people of the Maldives have, in the past, survived a higher sea level of about 50-60 cm. The present trend lacks signs of a sea level rise. On the contrary, there is firm morphological evidence of a significant sea level fall in the last 30 years. This sea level fall is likely to be the effect of increased evaporation and an intensification of the NE-monsoon over the central Indian Ocean .

Soots Role in Warming Confirmed

New research by James Hansen and his colleagues at NASAs Goddard Institute has confirmed the major part played by atmospheric soot in the recent warming trend. According to NASA, emissions of black soot alter the way sunlight reflects off snow, and may therefore be responsible for 25 percent of observed global warming over the past century.

Hansen and colleagues found that, Soot’s effect on snow albedo (solar energy reflected back to space), which has been neglected in previous studies, may be contributing to trends toward early springs in the Northern Hemisphere, thinning Arctic sea ice, melting glaciers and permafrost. According to the NASA press release, Hansen said that Soot’s increased absorption of solar energy is especially effective in warming the world’s climate. This forcing is unusually effective, causing twice as much global warming as a carbon-dioxide forcing of the same magnitude.

Hansen stressed that, in his opinion, greenhouse gases remained the primary cause of climate warming over the past century. The Associated Press coverage of the story (Dec. 23) revealed the emerging and uncertain nature of climate change: Scientists thought until recently that only carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have global reach and effect. They now are finding the same thing with these microscopic, suspended particles of pollutants, generically known as aerosols, that settle on ground hours later.

The AP story also commented on the role of diesel engines in producing soot, noting that, The Bush administration in 2001 ordered pollution cuts from heavy-duty diesel engines and diesel fuel used in highway trucks and buses. This year it proposed requiring a 90 percent reduction in pollution from diesel-powered construction and other off-road equipment, starting with 2008 models. The European Union, by contrast, encourages the use of diesel fuel through tax and other policies.

Extinct Argument

An article published in Nature magazine (Jan. 9) garnered alarmist headlines all over the world alleging that the study warned that over a million species would be doomed to extinction by the middle of the next century because of global warming.

The study, Extinction risk from climate change, however, suggested no such thing (although some of the authors tried to promote it by making this outlandish claim). It found that 15 to 37 percent of species in its sample of 1,103 species in 18 habitats around the world might become extinct if global warming causes their habitats to shrink. Of the 1,103 species studied, 243 were South African evergreen plants.

This is an extremely small and non-random and therefore statistically insignificant sample from which to extrapolate the risks of extinction faced by the millions of species that currently exist. The modeling process was also suspect. The New York Times (Jan. 7) was careful to point to the pessimistic nature of the models, quoting emeritus professor Daniel Botkin of UC Santa Barbara as saying, The analysis was based on a lot of steady state assumptions that lead it to the most pessimistic forecast, including the notion that things will stay as they are in terms of the ways animals migrate and respond to temperature change.

The study also failed one important reality check. Although there have been several episodes of mass extinction over geologic time, it is thought that none has occurred as a result of gradual warming. Experts do not even believe that the onsets of ice ages in recent time have caused extinctions on the scale extrapolated from the current study.

Etc.

Cooler Heads Coalition to Move?

An article in London s Independent (Jan. 6) criticized the Cooler Heads Coalition for its location. Reporting on the threat supposedly posed to the island nation of Tuvalu by rising sea-levels, the article says, But there are sceptics, notably those running the globalwarming.org website – funded by the right-wing Cooler Heads Coalition, who think that global warming isn’t scientifically provable. (Notably, none of the Cooler Heads members lives in any of the threatened island states, or shows any signs of moving there; they’re all safely ensconced in the US. ).

Many a True Word

A Washington Post Style section article (Dec. 29) about the lack of worry Christmas shoppers felt over the threat of terrorism contained an interesting insight into exactly how the Kyoto Protocol is viewed by the general public.

Reporter Joel Achenbach wrote that if you asked people about the terrorism risk and you’d get shrugs and head shakes and a few funny looks, as though you’d brought up something a little bit out of left field, like the Kyoto Treaty or the One-China Policy.

Cold Kills Hundreds in India and Bangladesh

South Asia has experienced a particularly cold winter this year, with the result that at least 380 people have died as a direct result, according to Agence France Presse (Jan. 4).

In India , 261 have died so far. AFP comments, Most of the cold deaths in India have been recorded in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which saw a weekend low of four degrees Celsius (39.2 F), registered at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi.

The causes of the deaths have mostly been linked to poverty and lack of access to energy it appears, Homeless people in Bangladesh lit waste to keep themselves warm, as the government and voluntary and political groups distributed warm clothes for the poor, officials said.

Hit by the Hand that Fed Them?

New Zealand s rent-seeking forest owners suffered an unexpected blow when the island nations government nationalized carbon credits at the end of last year.

New Zealands National Business Review reported (Dec. 30), A group representing the owners of forests planted after 1989, the only forests eligible to earn lucrative carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol, says the government is stealing $2.6 billion from them by fiat. In New Zealand , the government plans to hold the earnings for its own programmes and estimates the value of the credits during the first Kyoto commitment period, 2008 to 2012, to be worth $2.6 billion. Forest owners associations like the epyonymous Forest Owners Association (FOA) are on record as claiming that the decision to nationalise the income from carbon credits is an infringement of property rights, but the newly formed Kyoto Forest Owners Association (KFOA) says the decision is possibly the largest private property theft in New Zealands history.

The Review went on to relate how a KFOA spokesman had told a local newspaper exactly why his colleagues had sought these rents in the first place: A lot of investors had gone in partly because of this (carbon credits)and they had not expected to have the government take their return by fiat. After all, we grew them (the carbon sinks) in our trees–they are ours to do with what we like–they are not the Government’s, Mr. Dickie said.