*Bad week for Global Warming
Apparently the debate isn't over:
Global Warming and James Hansen's Hacks
If you follow the global warming debate, you "know" that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the U.S. lower 48 since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the very hottest being 1998.
But whaddya know! Those figures are wrong. Data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) now show the hottest year since 1880 was 1934. Nineteen-ninety-eight dropped to second, while the third hottest year was way back in 1921. Indeed, four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, while only three were in the past decade.
The real 15 hottest years are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before the chief "greenhouse gas," atmospheric carbon dioxide, began its sharp rise; seven occurred afterwards.
Global warming scientists fudge data
Jones, in conjunction with several other scientists published a paper purporting to use long-term data from 84 weather stations in China. The authors claimed these stations were chosen on the basis that they had not been changed or relocated since 1954 so that their data stream would provide a reliable record of temperatures over a 30+-year period.
But when checking over the claims made by Dr. Jones, Wang and their associates, Keenan discovered discrepancies that he says couldn't possibly be accidental. So the only logical conclusion is that Jones and his cohorts lied. Keenan's charge stemmed from the fact that the United States Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a joint report, which stated that 49 of the 84 weather stations had no history as to location, or instrumentation changes available. The remaining 35 stations, Keenan discovered, had indeed had changes in instrumentation and movement, in one case, movement as much as 41 kms.
Global warming? Look at the numbers
McIntyre has become the bane of many warmers' religious-like belief in climate catastrophe. In 2003, along with economist Ross McKitrick, McIntyre demolished the Mann "hockey stick" --a graph that showed stable temperatures for 1,000 years, then shooting up dangerously in the last half of the 20th Century.
The graph was used prominently by the UN and nearly every major eco lobby. But McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated it was based on incomplete and inaccurate data.
To NASA's credit, when McIntyre pointed out their temperature errors they quickly made corrections.
Still, the pro-warmers who dominate the Goddard Institute almost certainly recognized the impacts these changes would have on the global-warming debate, because they made no formal announcement of their recalculations.
In many cases, the changes are statistically minor, but their potential impact on the rhetoric surrounding global warming is huge.
The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third.
Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression.
The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.
In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.
Major New Theory Proposed to Explain Global Warming
A team of mathematicians have come forth with a startling new theory that solves both these problems. Led by Dr. Anastasios Tsonis, their model says the known cycles of the Earth's oceans -- the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino (Southern Oscillation) and the North Pacific Oscillation -- all tend to try to synchronize with each other.
The theory is based on a branch of mathematics known as Sychronized Chaos. The math predicts the degree of coupling to increase over time, causing the solution to "bifurcate," or split. Then, the synchronization vanishes. The result is a climate shift.
Eventually the cycles begin to sync up again, causing a repeating pattern of warming and cooling, along with sudden changes in the frequency and strength of El Nino events.
Better yet, their theory has predictive power. The model predicts past shifts in the year 1913 (explaining the strong warming of the 20s and 30s), 1942 (resolving the post-WW2 cooling trend) and 1978 (covering our current warming). The model predicts another shift to occur around the year 2033. Most shocking of all is their prediction for the year 2100 to be slightly cooler than present day, despite the assumption of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Eye-popping indeed.
Is carbon-dioxide really so ineffective at warming? A new study by Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute seems to think so. Its conclusion is that, while CO2 does have some effect, that "it can never play the decisive role attributed to it" in global warming, and that its effects have been grossly overstated.
Cloudy forecast for global warming
How clouds react to a warming world remains one of the great unknowns in climate change research. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report earlier this year noted that cloud behavior is the biggest source of physical uncertainty in climate projection.
Another salvo in this debate was fired this week by John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Their study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that instead of creating more clouds, their research found a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds (above). Christy and Spencer have both been outspoken in their skepticism about human influence on global climate change.
"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high- altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," Spencer says in a press release. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."
In addition to Spencer and Christy, the paper was also authored by Alabama-Huntsville's W. Danny Braswell and Justin Hnilo of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
"While low clouds have a predominantly cooling effect due to their shading of sunlight, most cirrus clouds have a net warming effect on the Earth," Spencer says. With high-altitude ice clouds their infrared heat trapping exceeds their solar shading effect.
"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer adds. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming."
Putting Global Warming on Ice
Ask Anthony Watts. He's the veteran meteorologist from Chico, Calif., who was featured in the June 17 edition of this column because of his project to quality-check the 1,221 official weather stations used to take the country's average surface temperature.
Watts and his volunteers have now surveyed about 227 weather stations. A recent discovery: Many are sited at water sewage treatment plants, which Watts described as "giant heat bubbles."
A responsible scientist, Watts won't draw any conclusions from his research yet. But one top climate scientist -- NASA's James Hansen, the patron saint of the apocalyptic global warming movement -- apparently doesn't think Watts' dogged pursuit of scientific certainty matters much.
Noting that Watts has found many sites whose readings are clearly compromised, I asked Hansen if that concerned him "about the long-term reliability of the temperature readings."
"No," Hansen's e-mail said.
Global Warming Update (XXXIV)
A recent Washington Post article which was reprinted in the Seattle Times argues that recent weather events are consistent with predictions of global warming science!
temperate zones, such as Europe and the United States, are likely to become more prone to flooding and areas closer to the equator will experience more drought.
On the other hand, the recent unusually heavy floods in Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas are not consistent with the prediction of "an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in
Southwestern North America". Nor are unusually heavy floods in India, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sudan consistent with these predictions of "a significant drying of areas in the northern subtropics, including the US southwest and the Mediterranean".
The convenient thing about global warming science is that there are so many predictions and so many observations that it's easy to cherry-pick observations that appear to fit the predictions.
Global Warming Uncertainties
Not only do global warmers claim that temperatures are going up, but that there are supposed to be more storms like hurricanes. I noticed that NOAA has lowered the predicted number of storms for 2007 twice already.
Global Warming 8000 Years Ago
A fascinating find on the floor of the English Channel is causing consternation among some Global Warming enthusiasts. Glacial melting about 8,000 years ago (timing range of the Jewish Flood story) didn't destroy human artifacts but rather kept them in a recoverable condition under the English Channel for later discovery.
And one more time:
NASA Revises Climate Data; 1934 Ousts 1998 as Hottest US Year
Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- NASA has revised climate data to show 1934 as the hottest year on record in the U.S., ousting 1998 and challenging the argument that national temperatures are reaching new highs amid global warming.
According to the figures released last week, four of America's 10 warmest years are now in the 1930s, during the Dust Bowl era. Just three years from the past decade remain among the top 10, with 2001 having fallen out entirely.
A flaw in the data, brought to light by a Canadian researcher, led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to cut mean ``temperature anomalies,'' or deviations from the 30- year average, by 0.15 degree Celsius (0.27 degree Fahrenheit) from 2000 to 2006.
The above reports are what biased advocates like Newsweek would consider the "Denial Machine".
Newsweek Burns Truth In Global Warming Story
The extremists committed to the man-made global warming theory - that humans are causing the world to get hotter and that we have to drastically raise taxes and/or ration energy in response - are on the run. How else does one explain the sensational Newsweek cover story with the provocative headline, "Global Warming is a Hoax,*" over a photo of a boiling sun?
Newsweek, a Washington Post property, claims to be telling us "The Truth About Denial," and to make sure everyone gets the point, it uses some form of the word "denial" 20 times, including "denial machine" 14 times.
The article, which is the worst kind of advocacy journalism, is a shoddy attempt to suggest that those skeptical of the theory are like holocaust deniers.
Scientists: Newsweek Erred in Global Warming Coverage
A recent Newsweek magazine cover story on global warming contained significant errors and used outdated scientific material in its representation of global climate data collected by satellites, according to the scientists who maintain that dataset at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, who created and maintain the global temperature dataset, are available to answer questions about how instruments aboard NOAA satellites collect temperature data, and about the accuracy of that data. The most recent monthly update of global temperatures shows a warming trend of about 0.25° Fahrenheit per decade (about 0.14 C) since satellites started collecting the data in late 1978.
"One of the more egregious errors in the Newsweek article is the misrepresentation of the satellite data relative to a January 2000 report from the National Academy of Sciences," said Christy, who is director of UA-Huntsville's Earth System Science Center and who participated in writing the 2000 NAS report. "That report did not 'skewer' the satellite data, as the Newsweek article contends. Instead, it found that the apparent disagreement between surface temperature records and the satellite record was not so significant as to invalidate either dataset.
Newsweek v. Newsweek on global warming denial
Among the criticisms leveled by Samuelson against his own magazine:
Newsweek used discredited allegations about an ExxonMobil grant to a think tank to pay academics to write articles critical of global warming. The alleged cabal of deniers does not seem to be so effective as to warrant a scary cover story. Meanwhile, he points out how the mainstream media have promoted catastrophic, manmade global warming as fact rather than theory. The article was full of "self-righteous indignation," which he said "can undermine good journalism.
Samuelson concludes: "But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don't have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale – as Newsweek did – in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society."