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Is Weather Becoming More Extreme?

Those who would like to see massive cuts in energy use associate bad weather with global warming in an effort to promote their cause. One popular doomsayer, Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat is On, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times (August 28, 1999) claiming that “The most likely cause of the intense downpour on Thursday in New York was global climate change.”

But is the weather really changing for the worse? An article in the USA Weekend (August 29, 1999) by two Weather Channel meteorologists, Colin Marquis and Stu Ostro, argues that the weather is pretty much the same as it has always been, only that our perceptions have changed.

One of the reasons why we may think the weather is wilder is the massive growth in media coverage. “Today, real-time multimedia communication means gripping images get beamed instantly from tornado alley into our living rooms or PCs. Its as if were all experiencing the bad weather, albeit vicariously,” say Marquis and Ostro.

The authors admit that it is getting warmer. But the change has been small, only 1 degree Fahrenheit this century. Moreover, they say, “it is important to remember that specific temperature records over land date back only about 120 years, and data over the oceans (70 percent of the globe) was quite sparse until about 25 years ago, when satellites became more versatile.” They go on to say, “precise measurements of temperature do not extend far into the past, a mere drop in the bucket when considering the realm of global climate change.”

The authors also believe that it is getting wetter. They cite a study by Tom Karl at the National Climate Data Center that found a 20 percent increase in heavy precipitation events for much of the U.S., Canada and Europe in the last century. (The increase may seem large but the paper actually found that there is only one additional day every two years that experiences rainfall of over 2 inches).

The number of land-falling hurricanes has fallen, according to the authors. There were 23 from 1940-69, but there have been only 14 since 1970. Damage from hurricanes has increased dramatically, however, from $36.8 billion from 1940-69 to $74.9 billion from 1970-96. This can be attributed entirely to the “nearly uninhibited growth continuing along the nations coasts.”

It is uncertain whether there has been an increase in tornadoes, say the authors. A dramatic increase in the number of reported tornadoes doesnt necessarily mean that there are more tornadoes. The authors believe that the numbers have increased due to more reporting, not more tornadoes. “Simply put,” they say, “there are more people to witness tornadoes.” Moreover, there are now storm chasers who were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s. There are literally hundreds of people who search out tornadoes and document them with palm-held camcorders.

Finally, Marquis and Ostro discuss the work of Richard Alley from Penn State University. He has shown “that global temperatures and precipitation in the last few thousand years have been as steady as any time during the last 100 millennia.” Long before man exerted any influence on the climate there were severe swings in both temperature and precipitation in periods as short as 10 years. “This evidence raises an interesting and provocative idea,” say Marquis and Ostro: “Perhaps wilder weather is actually more typical than benign weather. Whether humans are contributing to climate change or not, maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing back toward the wild side.”

More Benefits of CO₂

We all learned in grade school that plants need CO₂ to survive. Scientific research has confirmed this many times over. A new study by the Greening Earth Society argues that to feed the earths growing human population, CO₂ must continue to increase. According to the authors, Keith and Craig Idso, at the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, to meet the dietary demands of the projected world population of 8.9 billion people by 2050, we will need to depend on both enhanced crop production technologies as well as enhanced ambient CO₂ levels. The study can be found at www.greeningearthsociety.org.

Fingerprints Vanish in Analysis of 11 Climate Models

Global warming predictions are based on detection studies that use Coupled Global Climate Models (CGCMs) to find a human fingerprint in the climate system. Climate modelers attempt to imitate the natural variations of the climate system and then add manmade greenhouse gases to see how global temperatures respond.

A new study in the Journal of Climate (February 1999) throws doubt on the validity of these types of studies. According to the author Tim Barnett, of the Climate Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, modelers “have taken their estimates of natural variability from long control runs of CGCMs. This would be a valid procedure if the internally generated variability in the models was a realistic estimate of natural variability. Whether this is true or not is at the moment uncertain.”

Barnett sets out to see if model variability is realistic by comparing natural climate variability to the temperature variability in 11 different models, run for 100 model years. He finds that “differences of a factor of 2 or more are common for even the best behaved models.” He also states that “there is no model that consistently agrees well with the observations.”

Even more damning is the finding that it is difficult to distinguish “natural” model runs from those with anthropogenic forcing. Barnetts analysis shows that “CGCMs can, without any anthropogenic forcing, produce patterns that resemble those expected from anthropogenic causes. This, in turn, will make it more difficult to apply a fingerprint strategy to detect anthropogenic signal since the natural variability estimated from CGCMs and used in the detection scheme looks like the anthropogenic signal itself.”

Continental U.S. Getting Cooler

Green activists have been have been trying to convince the American public that global warming is underway by highlighting warmer temperatures and remaining silent when temperatures are on the cooler side. Much has been done to give the impression that things are heating up. A new study conducted by researchers at the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has found that the continental United States has become cooler, one-thirtieth of a degree per decade, since 1941, although the finding is probably not statistically significant.

The study also finds that nearly the entire U.S. has become significantly wetter, by nine-tenths of an inch more rainfall per decade since 1966. Each month has become wetter over the same period, with the fall becoming much wetter. The study confirms what has been found by several past studies, but it also contradicts others. According to David Easterling, principal scientists at the National Climatic Data Center, an NCDC study shows a cooling only in the Southeast United States. The NCDC study also covers a longer time span going back to 1900.

But, according to Rich Tinker, a co-author of the CPC study, argues that his research has been used by the CPC to devise “this years winter and spring predictions. They have been the most accurate on record (Omaha World-Herald, April 20, 1999).”

Etc.

• According to AAP Newsfeed (April 22, 1999), “renowned U.S. scientist on climate change (weve never heard of him, Eds.),” Professor Richard Turco called for global environmental regulations in a speech delivered on April 22. Turco argued that technology is out of control saying that “it is growing at such a pace, we have a problem in maintaining control over itwe either have to evolve with the technology or were going to be simply overtaken and swamped by it.”

The solution to the problem, according to Turco is to “develop global regulations and global environmental laws to control technology and its implementation.”

• John Wellner with the Toronto Environmental Alliance describes his Earth Day experiences in the April 27, 1999 issue of The Toronto Star. Wellner and his colleagues decided to hand out “informative traffic tickets” to cars entering the Toronto City Hall parking garage.” They greeted each car with a friendly “Happy Earth Day!”

Wellner was appalled at the reception he received. “Some drivers were friendly, albeit a little sheepish, but the majority were far from civil. Non-traditional environmental greetings like, Get out of my way! usually with a traditional expletive and, sometimes, succinctly, just the expletive were plentifulI guess they were late for their morning coffee, or something.”

Heres an alternative explanation. Maybe people are sick and tired of sanctimonious environmentalists telling them how to live their lives.

Announcements

• The Cooler Heads is sponsoring a science briefing for congressional staff and media on May 28. The briefing will feature Dave Malmquist of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, who will discuss “Climate Change and Sea Level Rise.” Further details will be forthcoming.

Whats Up (or Down) With Carbon?

Two new studies appearing in prestigious science journals may force scientists to rethink the global warming hypothesis. It has been an ongoing debate within the scientific community as to whether increases in atmospheric CO2 leads or follows rises in global temperature. In the March 12 issue of Science, researchers concluded that during three separate deglaciations temperature rise came first. Using ice core samples from the Antarctic they found that “carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 400 years after the warming of each of the last three deglaciations.” This is directly the opposite result that one would expect from simple global warming theories.

Another assumption made by climate scientists is that CO2 levels have remained constant over the last 11,000 years, a period known as the Holocene epoch, until the advent of the industrial revolution. An article in Nature (March 11, 1999), which shared many of the same authors as the Science article, argues that during this period atmospheric CO2 levels fluctuated significantly. This is no surprise given that we still do not fully understand the carbon cycle nor can we account for significant amounts of CO2 emitted by man a third of which seem to disappear without a trace.

Its interesting how the press handled the studies. The Washington Post (March 15, 1999) basically got the story right, acknowledging that the studies may force a new understanding of the “relationship between airborne carbon dioxide and climate change.” But Anthony J. Broccoli of the NOAAs Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is worried that “greenhouse skeptics will probably jump on this paper as proof” that there is no link between global warming and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. He claims, according to the Washington Post that “the new findings are completely consistent with a positive CO2-temperature feedback” system in which changes in one prompt changes in the other.”

The Associated Press did two articles about the Science study. On of the articles explained correctly that rises CO2 follow rises in temperature. The other article, however, got the story almost completely backwards. AP science writer Joseph B. Verrengia wrote, “a new study suggests carbon dioxide levels in Earths atmosphere fluctuated after the Ice Age, helping to warm the climate and trigger the spread of deserts.” Fred Singer points out that the study shows a “transition from a warm and wet Climate Optimum, 6000 years ago, to a cooler and dryer climate, i.e., the droughts and deserts correlate with cooling.” Unfortunately, nine newspapers ran the article that bungled the story and none pick up the one that got it right.

IPCC Plans to Use Fewer Climate Models in its Next Assessment

The IPCC could be gearing up to start another major controversy. Of the thirty-three general circulation models in existence, it is currently planning on using only three. Depending on the three they choose this could have the effect of raising estimates of warming over the next several decades.

A clue to the direction that the forecast is heading is the elimination of the newest model produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The NCAR model, according to University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels, has “better resolution vertically and horizontally, improved methods of moving heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere, and a more sophisticated treatment of clouds and the oceans.” As a result it only predicts 2.3 degrees C of warming for a doubling of CO2 and a 1.3 degrees warming over the next 100 years, lower than any model to date. Moreover, the NCAR model, unlike other models, is completely transparent (World Climate Report, March 1, 1999).

Etc.

• USA Today (March 17, 1999) is reporting that shark attacks are down in 1998 for the third straight year. Some researchers think it may have something to do with climate change. Chalk it up as another benefit of global warming.
  
• The following is an excerpt from a “letter to the editor” from an astute observer of the press: “I could scarcely believe my ears yesterday morning when I heard Kate Adie, introducing “From Our Own Correspondent” on Radio 4, say that scientists were blaming the heavy snow in the Alps and the avalanche at Chamonix on global warming. Oh, puhleeze!

“Are these the same scientists who, after the virtually snow-free Alpine winters of 1988-89, 1989-90, 1991-92 and 1994-95, were warning us that global warming meant much less snow in the Alps in future decades? The European winter holiday industry, they said, would have to up sticks to Scandinavia.”

“Please, Kate, the next time you have some unusual weather to report, see if you can do it without mentioning global warming.”

Announcements

• The Cooler Heads Coalitions is sponsoring a briefing for congressional staff and media on March 19, 1999 to discuss the Ecological Benefits of Carbon Dioxide. The briefing will feature Keith Idso with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. The briefing will be held the Rayburn House Office Building room 2325 at 12:00 noon to 1:30 p.m.
  

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced the release of the draft inventory for U.S. emissions for the years 1990 to 1997 as required by the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Comments from the public will be accepted until April 9, 1999. Comments received after that date will be considered for the next edition of the report. The draft is available at www.epa.gov/globalwarming/inventory.
  
• The transcripts from the Cooler Heads science briefings for congressional staff and media and CEIs Costs of Kyoto lectures are available on CEIs website at www.cei.org. Transcripts currently available include, Climate Change: Insights from Oceanography, by Dr. Roger Pocklington; Global Warming: Evidence from the Satellite Record, by Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer; Global Warming and Vector-Borne Disease: Is Warmer Sicker? by Dr. Paul Reiter; Kyoto & Our Collective Economic Future: Economic & Energy Underpinnings, by Mark P. Mills; Emissions Credits: The Supply and Demand Gap, by Robert Reinstein; and Hot Times or Hot Air: The Sun in the Science of Global Warming, by Sallie Baliunas.

NRC Sees Shortcomings in Global Warming Science

Global warming skeptics have argued for years that the science is riddled with uncertainties, errors and outright ignorance about the climate system. While those who use the threat of global warming to advance political agendas have dismissed this argument, scientists who believe that man is warming up the planet readily admit to these problems.

The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences has just released a report, The Atmospheric Sciences: Entering the Twenty-First Century, which discusses in great detail the shortcomings of climate science. The NRC admits that there are large natural variations in the climate system, which make it very difficult to locate a human fingerprint. It argues, for example, that paleoclimatic and computer data show that the climate has varied significantly in the past, and that we can expect it to vary in the future, “irrespective of human impacts on climate.”

The report also admits, “current observational capabilities and practice are inadequate to characterize many of the changes in global and regional climate.” And that “significant progress in characterizing and predicting seasonal-to-century time-scale variability in climate, including the role of human activities in forcing variability, is likely to take a decade or more.” For at least ten years, similar reports have claimed that it would take a decade to fully understand the climate system.

The report also discusses problems with the computer models. One the most important but least understood aspects of global warming is cloud feedback mechanisms. According to the report, “intercomparison of the magnitude of cloud feedback in a number of global climate models indicates a fourfold range of uncertainty, with some models predicting strong positive cloud feedback and others a weak negative feedback to the climate system.”

In contrast to the statement by the American Geophysical Union, which stated that sufficient knowledge exists to take action now, the NRC argues that “current observational systems are far from adequate in addressing the questions being posed by scientists and policy makers concerning climate change.”

Another major problem, according to the report, is the poor quality of the surface temperature record. Even in the United States, which probably has the best surface temperature record in the world, serious problems exist. There is no reference temperature network; there are problems with maintaining the homogeneity of minimum and maximum temperature readings; and discontinuities resulting from inadequate overlap during changes in instrumentation have occurred. In addition, data corrupted by urban heat island effects, changes in local conditions and a failure to calibrate new instruments with old, remains uncorrected. The report can be found at www.nas.edu.

Coral Bleaching May be Naturally Caused

Coral bleaching is one of a myriad of ecological phenomena that has been blamed on global warming. A new study in Science (February 5, 1999) argues that the observed bleaching is probably due to natural causes. Coral bleaching occurs when a symbiotic algae, known as zooxanthellae, is expelled from the coral. The researchers monitored the Acropora formosa coral in a shallow lagoon in Mauritius for six years. They found that there is a strong seasonal cycle with bleaching occurring almost entirely in the spring and summer. In fact the density of the algae during the “autumn and winter are three times the densities in spring and summer.” The study concludes that “bleaching events in corals within such lagoons may be frequent and part of the expected cycle of variability.”

Etc.

• An article appearing in the EM-Environmental Manager (December 1998) characterized the debate between global warming proponents, made up of various environmental activist groups and government agencies, and skeptics, primarily the Cooler Heads Coalition, as “greens” versus the “red, white and blues.”

Announcements

• The Cooler Heads Coalitions is sponsoring a briefing for congressional staff and media on February 22, 1999 to discuss the Credit for Early Action Act. The briefing will feature Marlo Lewis, Vice President at CEI and Mark Mills of Mills-McCarthy and Associates and a CEI adjunct scholar. The briefing will be held the Cannon House Office Building room at 12:00 noon to 1:30 p.m.
  
• The transcripts from the Cooler Heads science briefings for congressional staff and media and CEIs Costs of Kyoto lectures are available on CEIs website at www.cei.org. Transcripts currently available include, Climate Change: Insights from Oceanography, by Dr. Roger Pocklington; Global Warming: Evidence from the Satellite Record, by Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer; Global Warming and Vector-Borne Disease: Is Warmer Sicker? by Dr. Paul Reiter; Kyoto & Our Collective Economic Future: Economic & Energy Underpinnings, by Mark P. Mills; Emissions Credits: The Supply and Demand Gap, by Robert Reinstein; and Hot Times or Hot Air: The Sun in the Science of Global Warming, by Sallie Baliunas.

Updated Satellite Data Presented

With the end of 1998, much has been made of the record high temperatures from the last year. In an ironic twist, satellite temperature data, which also showed a temperature spike in 1998, was suddenly cited as credible evidence even though it had been harshly criticized as either flawed or irrelevant in the past. At the recent 10^th Symposium on Global Change Studies at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, Dr. John Christy of the Univeristy of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, and Dr. William Braswell of Nichols Research Corp., discussed the updated version of the satellite temperature data.

Dr. Christy stated that “1998 was particularly interesting. While two previous strong El Nios occurred in the past 20 years, this is the first one that occurs without a simultaneous volcanic eruption.” El Nio events in 1991 and 1983 were both accompanied by volcanic eruptions of Mt. Pinatubo and El Chichon respectively. The eruptions ejected huge amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere which served to dampen the warming effects of El Nio.

“Obviously,” said Christy, “El Nios are part of the natural weather cycle, and shouldnt be discounted. When one looks at long-term trends, however, we shouldnt assign excess importance to individual unusual or extreme short-term events, such as this El Nio or the cooling that followed the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in 1991.”

Dr. Spencer spoke about the adjusments to the data that were necessitated by findings that were published in Nature. Regarding the study, Spencer pointed out that “when the need for some of the corrections was first noticed, people applied them to the entire dataset. However, this isnt correct, as the data are compiled from nine different satellites, each with its own necessary adjustments.” The data was adjusted to account for orbital decay, diurnal drift, and instrument-body temperature feedback.

Christy addressed another criticism. “The tropical region was the region criticized in the past year as being the region of greatest errors in the MSU (microwave sounding units). However, a direct comparison of the data shows that the agreement (with independent measures taken with balloon-borne instrumentation) is astounding between these different tropical temperature data sets,” Christy said. The 20 year satellite record has shown no warming trend until the major warm El Nio even of 1998 (www.ssl.msfc.nasa.gov).

There were several other interesting papers presented at the AMS meeting. Duane J. Gubler at the US Department of Health and Human Services argued that even though there has been a “dramatic global resurgence of dengue and other vector-borne diseases in the past 20 years” there is little evidence to suggest that it may be a result of global warming. “Most vector-borne diseases exist in complex transmission cycles involving three hosts.” There are many factors which can effect the transmission of vector-borne diseases and it is the complex interaction of all these factors [that] determine transmission.

Abdel R. Maarouf at the University of Toronto discussed temperature-related mortality. In Canada, for example, the number of deaths from the 1995 heat wave “were not significantly different from normal.” Maarouf analyzed long-term mortality statistics and found “a very pronounced seasonal pattern, with the highest rates in winter and the lowest rates in summer. Predictions from global warming computer models suggests that in the event of manmade global warming Canada would experience “much greater warming in winter than in summer, in mid and high latitudes.” Maarouf concludes that “based on temperature variations only, climate change would be associated with a significantly reduced winter mortality, thus offsetting any potential increase in heat-related summer mortality.”

Finally, William Gray at Colorado State University, showed that global atmospheric circulation experiences distinct multi-decadal variations which effect hurricane activity, El Nio events, sea-surface temperatures, global mean temperatures and many other related weather anomalies.

For example, the period from the mid-1940s to late 1960s experienced a different general circulation patterns than the period of 1970-1994. Gray hypothesizes that these differences are due to variations in the strength of the global ocean thermohaline circulation, in particular the Atlantic portion, which fluctuate on 20-50 year time scales, according to ice core data going back thousands of years.

When the circulation is stronger, North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are warmer than normal and vice versa. Gray predicts that we will see an increase in the frequency of intense hurricanes as a result of warmer sea-surface temperatures due to a stronger thermohaline circulation. Abstracts of these papers can be found at www.ametsoc.org/AMS/meet/meet_79page.html.

Temperature Accuracy too Good to be True?

Newspapers across the United States are reporting that 1998 was the hottest year on record. That may be true (though it may not, as well show below), but what is truly astounding is the degree of accuracy that is being claimed by NASA. According to NASA 1998s global average temperature was 58.496 degrees F, higher than the previous record of 59.154 degrees F recorded in 1995.

The Electricity Daily (January 19, 1999) makes a back of the envelope estimate that it would take about 8 billion temperature sensors, evenly distributed over the globe, to ascertain the global average temperature to within a degree of accuracy. “Especially since temperature can vary 50 degrees in one day, and 100 degrees in a year, in many places,” it says. In reality there are only 7,000 sensors, about one per 30,000 square miles, and most of these sensors are clustered in the U.S. and Europe, leaving much of the globe entirely unmeasured.

Moreover, the temperature record upon which global warming advocates base their claims goes back to 1880 “when most of the globe was scientifically uninhabited.” The coverage in those days was about “one questionable station per million square miles in many cases.” The conclusion, “basically we have no worldwide mean temperature data. Period . . . . We know nothing about global mean temperature. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all.”

Etc.

The UKs Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, told an audience at the first of a series of nationwide seminars that the Government would place greater emphasis in environmental studies in schools. Designed to promote a climate change consulation paper by the Department of Environment and Transport, Prescott reported, according to the Hull Daily Mail (January 9, 1999), “that parliament had approved a “Childrens Parliament, a body of young people with direct input into parliament, to have their say in the Governments future proposals.” According to the Deputy Prime Minister, “The way to bring the country into line with the rest of Europe is through education. The way to bring adults into line is by getting the children on-side. The power of our young people cannot be underestimated.”

Announcements

• The Competitive Enterprise Institute has released a monograph, titled Doomsday Dj vu: Ozone Depletions Lessons for Global Warming. Author Ben Lieberman argues that rather than serving as a successful model for the Kyoto Protocol, the Montreal Protocol should serve as a cautionary tale. Its mistakes would be greatly amplified if repeated under the Kyoto Protocol. The study can be obtained from CEIs website at www.cei.org or by contacting CEI at (202) 331-1010.
  
• The transcripts from the Cooler Heads science briefings for congressional staff and media and CEIs Costs of Kyoto lectures are available on CEIs website at www.cei.org. Transcripts currently available include, Climate Change: Insights from Oceanography, by Dr. Roger Pocklington; Global Warming: Evidence from the Satellite Record, by Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer; Global Warming and Vector-Borne Disease: Is Warmer Sicker? by Dr. Paul Reiter; Kyoto & Our Collective Economic Future: Economic & Energy Underpinnings, by Mark P. Mills; Emissions Credits: The Supply and Demand Gap, by Robert Reinstein; and recently released, Hot Times or Hot Air: The Sun in the Science of Global Warming, by Sallie Baliunas.

More on the Effects of CO₂ on Plant Life

It has been argued that the benefits to plant life of carbon dioxide may only be short term, that they are self-limiting. One of the hypotheses along these lines argues that dead plant tissue (litter) from plants grown in a carbon dioxide rich environment will decompose more slowly because there is less nitrogen in the plant tissue. Since the litter will have lower nitrogen content and decompose more slowly, “then decomposing organisms would have food of lower quality, and the transfer of organically bound nitrogen to the pools of mineral nitrogen available for plant growth could slow.” This leads to a “negative feedback on net plant productivity in the future.”

At a forum on Litter Quality and Decomposition under Elevated Atmospheric CO₂ at a meeting held in Capri, Italy, plant physiologists, ecologists and soil scientists concluded that this hypothesis is not valid. “Most experiments, carried out in various ecosystems such as forests, agro-ecosystems, grasslands and a salt marsh, have reported little change in litter chemistry and no significant difference in decomposition rates under different CO₂ concentrations.”

A possible positive feedback on plant productivity was also reported at the meeting. A slower initial decomposition may actually promote more complete long-term decomposition. High nitrogen content causes rapid initial decomposition and retards long-term decomposition. This can lead to “a more fertile habitat resulting from increased root litter in CO₂ enriched grasslands,” for instance (Nature, November 5, 1998).

Mammoth Icebergs Are Not Unusual

In October the press reported that an iceberg the size of Delaware had broken free of Antarctica. The event, it was argued is another “possible indicator of global warming” (The Washington Post, October 16, 1998). As is usually the case with most stories touting global warming, this was an entirely natural occurrence. Very large icebergs break away from Antarctical all the time. The following was reported on the Junk Science webpage (www.junkscience.com).

“For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as “The Bowditch.”)

“The text reads In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic.

“Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little ice cube noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant. So last week’s iceberg was not so extraordinary — except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.”

Global Warming/Hurricane Link Debunked

The Cooler Heads coalition sponsored a science briefing for media and congressional staff on October 9, featuring Dr. William Gray, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. Gray, the foremost expert on hurricanes in the U.S., spoke about the link between global warming and hurricanes.

According to Gray, hurricane activity follows a natural 20 to 40 year cycle that is correlated to changes in ocean currents. The 1940s and 1950s, for example saw many land-falling tropical storms. From 1947-1960 there were 14 land-falling storms, but from 1960-1988 there were only 2. We are now in a period of heightened hurricane activity.

The mechanism that controls the Earths most important and largest ocean current, known as the thermohaline circulation, is salinity. The Atlantic Ocean is much saltier than other oceans because there is more evaporation than rain. This salty (and warmer) water travels north where it sinks due to its higher density, cools and returns to the south. There it warms and becomes saltier, beginning the process once again.

When salt content is high the ocean current is strong, pushing the salt particles through the system rapidly, preventing the build up of salt. This weakens the ocean current leading to greater salinity which in turn strengthens the current again. This occurs in 20 to 40 year cycles, according to Dr. Gray, is entirely natural, and has been occurring for thousands of years. When salinity is high and the thermohaline circulation is strong this warms up the North Atlantic and hurricanes become more frequent and more intense. When the circulation is weak the opposite is true.

Dr. Gray also addressed the problems of climate modeling. He said that numerical modeling has been a great success for forecasting the weather for five to ten days into the future. This is because forecasters can measure the wind patterns that are there in the present and ride those out for a few days. After a while, however, the current energy fields no longer hold and predictive power plummets. Another problem is the “butterfly effect” where small modeling errors either in the measurements or in the physics grow over time becoming nonlinear and the whole thing “blows up on you.”

The greatest problem with the models, however, is the failure to correctly model water vapor feedback, Gray said. Water vapor feedback accounts for 85-90 percent of the warming in the models, according to Dr. Gray. James Hansen a well-known climate modeler assumes that upper level humidity goes up 50 to 60 percent in his model. Dr. Gray believes that as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases there is a slight reduction in water vapor to balance the carbon dioxide pick up.

Finally, Dr. Gray made some predictions. He believes that we are entering a period of weakened thermohaline circulation which means that we will see fewer land-falling hurricanes and a slight decrease in global temperatures over the next 2 to 4 decades. He also predicted that there will be fewer El Nio events over the next 20 to 30 years.

New Evidence Shows Abrupt Global Climate Change

The global warming debate has several facets. One of the most important is the detection of the human signal amongst the surrounding natural variation. The problem is that the variation is much larger than the predicted human-induced warming. Paleoclimatic research, for example has found very large and rapid temperature changes over the last 100,00 years, providing a puzzle for climatologists. So far, however, the evidence has pointed to a seesaw effect where the Earths polar regions experience temperature change at different times, shifting back and forth.

New research published in Science (October 2, 1998) has found evidence that the abrupt warming that occurred in the North Atlantic about 12,500 years ago, also occurred in Antartica. Ice core samples from Taylor Dome, in the western Ross Sea sector of Antarctica show that the temperature there warmed by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a very short time. This corresponds with a 59 degrees warming that occurred over 50 years in the Arctic, suggesting that the temperature change was global.

According to James White, a climatologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a co-author of the study, “We used to suspect that some of these big changes that occurred naturally in the past were only local. Since we see the same thing at opposite ends of the Earth, it does imply that the warming was a global phenomenon.” These findings “throw a monkey wrench into paleo-climate research and rearrange our thinking about climate change at that time,” White said (Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1998).

Christy and Spencer Respond to Critics

For the last 18 years, John Christy at Earth Systems Science Laboratory (ESSL), University of Alabama, Huntsville and Roy Spencer at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center have constructed a global temperature record using measurements from microwave sounding units aboard satellites. These data have confounded the warming predictions of climate models, and in fact show a cooling trend from 1979 to 1997.

Recently, the accuracy of these data have been challenged in the peer reviewed literature, the most important criticism coming last month (Cooler Heads, August 19, 1998) from Frank Wentz and Matthias Schabel (WS) of Remote Sensing Systems. They claimed that the satellite data is distorted by orbital decay. Christy and Spencer, along with Elena Lobl, (CSL) also of ESSL, in a new study published in the Journal of Climate (August 1998) painstakingly trace their methodology in constructing the temperature record. While the CSL paper was submitted prior to the publication of the WS paper, it does address the WS papers criticisms.

CSL show how they intercalibrate each of the eight satellites separately to remove the biases that result from various factors. Specifically, CSL performed the adjustment to account for drift-error and cyclic fluctuations. This is relevant to the WS article in that the analysis by CSL removed a large part of the bias created by orbital decay, even though they were not aware of it at the time.

CSL also responded to a paper in Nature (March 13, 1997) by James Hurrell and Kevin Trenberth (HT) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The HT article claimed to have discovered spurious downward jumps in the satellite record that resulted from changing the satellites. Removing the jumps changes the temperature trend from negative to positive, according to HT. After careful analysis, however, CSL “found no such jumps by comparison with independent satellite and traditional atmospheric measurements.”

Water Vapor Still Not Resolved

One of the most important and least understood components of the global warming hypothesis is the role of water vapor feedback. Water vapor is by far the most powerful greenhouse gas and accounts for nearly all of the natural greenhouse effect.

According to global warming proponents, increases of carbon dioxide will warm the planet by slightly increasing evaporation and water vapor in the troposphere. This increase in tropospheric water vapor is what accounts for most of the warming in global warming projections.

The problem is that nobody knows for sure whether this feedback is positive (enhancing the effects of increased carbon dioxide) or negative (canceling the effects of carbon dioxide). Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the feedback will be negative, and that increased carbon dioxide will actually dry out the upper troposphere. A study last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (June 1997) by Roy Spencer of NASA and William Braswell of Nichols Research Center found that the tropical free troposphere is much dryer than represented in the climate models an early indication that Lindzen may be right.

An article in Science (August 21, 1998) discusses the difficulties in detecting a trend in the water vapor content of the troposphere. The entire enterprise is plagued with inadequate instrumentation and conflicting agreement between types of instruments. A change to better sensors may also give the false impression “that the upper troposphere is drying simply because of the better instrumentation.”

The author of the article, David Rind of NASA, concludes, “so far, there has been no evidence to indicate that a strong negative water vapor feedback in the upper troposphere will in fact arise as climate warms. However, without our being able to observe upper tropospheric and stratospheric water vapor with sufficient accuracy over a long enough time period to see ongoing trends, some uncertainty will remain in this most important of climate sensitivity feedbacks.”