Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Extreme Weather Events are Killing Fewer People

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DESPITE concerns about global warming and a large increase in the number of reported storms and droughts, the world’s death rate from extreme weather events was lower from 2000 to 2010 than it has been in any decade since 1900, according to a new Reason Foundation study.  Following is the media release:

THE Reason Foundation report chronicles the number of worldwide deaths caused by extreme weather events between 1900 and 2010 and finds global deaths caused by extreme weather events peaked in the decade running from 1920 to 1929, when there were 241 deaths a year per million people in the world. From 1930 to 1939 there were 208 deaths a year per million people. But from 2000 to 2010 there were just 5.4 deaths a year per million people in the world. That’s a 98 percent decline in the weather-related death rate since the 1920s. Extreme weather events were responsible for just .07% of the world’s deaths between 2000 and 2010.

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Insightful Ramblings on “The Greenhouse Effect” from Vincent Gray

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I can’t agree with Vincent Gray that the only true climate science is meteorology, but I can agree that meteorology as a climate science is in its infancy.   There is much we don’t understand about convection, evaporation and precipitation.   And interesting, as Gray explains in the following essay, they are all limited in a Greenhouse…

“THE only true climate science is meteorology. It has been built up for some 200 years from a network of local and international observations of every property which can be measured and can influence both local and more general climate behaviour.

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More Propaganda from Al Gore?

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“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change sceptics and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses…

More about the campaign here:
climaterealityproject.org

The Other Climate Theory

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IN an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, Lord William Thomson Kelvin said, “There is nothing new to discover in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurements.”

Then along came Albert Einstein.

More recently and closer to home, economist John Quiggin, has claimed, “There is no longer any serious debate among climate scientists about either the reality of global warming or about the fact that it is substantially caused by human activity.”

Then along came Jasper Kirkby.

The research effort lead by Kirkby at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, indicates that galactic cosmic rays can very significantly enhance cloud formation – by up to a factor of ten.

According to global warming theory, cloud formation is in essence a response to temperature change, with temperature change over the last 100 years apparently driven by human activity.

The research effort at CERN could prove global warming theory, and in particular the dependent General Circulation Models, somewhat deficient.  Indeed it is increasingly possible that the small amount of global warming over the last 100 years has all been due to extra-terrestrial galactic activity… or something else entirely.

Read more at ‘The Other Climate Theory:  Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.’ By Anne Jolis at The Wall Street Journal Online

Http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904537404576554750502443800.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

And the recent findings by Jasper Kirkby are published as a letter to Nature on August 25, 2011, ‘Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.’

New insight into cloud formation

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If cloud formation  is impacted by cosmic ray flux, as suggested by new research from CERN, then this further complicates our understanding of drivers of global temperature:

GENEVA, 25 August 2011. In a paper published in the journal Nature today, the CLOUD1 experiment at CERN2 has reported its first results. The CLOUD experiment has been designed to study the effect of cosmic rays on the formation of atmospheric aerosols – tiny liquid or solid particles suspended in the atmosphere – under controlled laboratory conditions. Atmospheric aerosols are thought to be responsible for a large fraction of the seeds that form cloud droplets. Understanding the process of aerosol formation is therefore important for understanding the climate.

The CLOUD results show that trace vapours assumed until now to account for aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can explain only a tiny fraction of the observed atmospheric aerosol production. The results also show that ionisation from cosmic rays significantly enhances aerosol formation. Precise measurements such as these are important in achieving a quantitative understanding of cloud formation, and will contribute to a better assessment of the effects of clouds in climate models.

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