Climate & Climate Change

I can barely keep up with the current raft of peer reviewed papers that drive yet more nails into the coffin of climate alarmism. Following on from the fading huricane scare that I recently blogged about here, a new paper published in Nature on 17th January, further destroys the myth that ocean currents will slow due to global warming:

The scientific community has long believed that as global warming continues and large amounts of freshwater ice melt into the ocean, the ocean’s circulation will slow. This would have a catastrophic impact on the environment as vividly, if somewhat overdramatically, portrayed in the film “The Day After Tomorrow.” But a paper published last week in Nature magazine, the result of several studies of past and possible future weather, says that in fact the very opposite is true and ocean circulation will become stronger as the icecaps melt.
Eric Schwartz, Arizona Daily Star, 30 January 2008

The evidence is piling up, that those models predicting a weakened ocean circulation in the coming decades are wrong.
Joellen Russell, University of Arizona, Russell, 30 January 2008

Current climate-system models say that the ocean’s overturning circulation will weaken over the next century, but these predictions might not rest on a solid foundation… From the observations, it is clear that large circulation changes took place, and it seems unlikely that circulation changes of this magnitude could have happened without substantial changes in the wind forcing. It seems that the information from the past is telling us to expect a stronger oceanic circulation in the warmer climate to come.
J. R. Toggweiler & Joellen Russell, Nature 17 January 2008

The full paper is here:

Nature 451, 286-288 (17 January 2008)

Ocean circulation in a warming climate

J. R. Toggweiler 1) & Joellen Russell 2)

1) J. R. Toggweiler is at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Princeton, New Jersey 08542, USA.

2) Joellen Russell is in the Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.

Correspondence should be addressed to J.R.T. (Email: robbie.toggweiler@noaa.gov).

Climate models predict that the ocean’s circulation will weaken in response to global warming, but the warming at the end of the last ice age suggests a different outcome.

Enjoy!

Hat tip to Benny Peiser’s CCNet.

Yes, if you can’t tax the Sun, the current highly politicised state of climate science suggests that there isn’t much point spending money on understanding the Sun either.

I refer to this article on the BBC website: ‘Space weather science rues cuts’

Excerpt: The field of science dedicated to understanding “space weather” – which can pose hazards to satellites and aircraft – may be wiped out in the UK. That is the verdict of experts responding to UK physics and astronomy cuts made as administrators seek to plug an £80m hole in their finances.

Tracking the Sun’s changing activity is vital for managing radiation doses and for protecting aircraft electronics. It is also of economic importance, since it costs airlines to deviate from flight paths.

Blog contributor Arnost observes:

One of the risks that the world faces, as more and more funds are diverted to AGW and related projects, is that “real” science will get under-funded.

This is a case in point – understanding Solar Terrestrial Physics is critical. If adequate warning of solar activity is not provided, Solar Flares / Coronal Mass Emissions etc. may fry satellite electronics (if they aren’t shut down), and in worst cases may cause aircraft (esp. in trans-polar routes) to suffer major electronic failure putting lives at
risk.

It is of course ironic that the first cuts are made to the Solar Terrestrial Physics field – as this is the major threat to the CO2 driven AGW thesis in that a viable counter-theory may be found as a by-product of monitoring / predicting solar behaviour.

The head of the UN IPCC is sounding like a salesman who is worried about the quality of his product:

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century. “One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents,” he told Reuters, adding “are there natural factors compensating?” for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities.

So, Pachauri has noticed that the natural ‘El Nino’ driven record year for instrumentally measured ‘global average temperature’ remains as 1998. We are now in 2008, Rather than admit to the possibility that ever increasing CO2 emissions don’t seem to be pushing up global temperatures, he is looking for another excuse.

Read more on Pielke Jr’s excellent Prometheus blog.

“Just suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external forcings, such as those caused by changes in solar output. Just suppose all this is true for the sake of argument.

“Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds, in fact, who was involved with the IPCC and so shared in that great validator, the Nobel Peace Prize.

“You have spent a career devoted to showing that mankind, through various forms of naughtiness, has significantly influenced the climate, and has caused temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth…”

I am quoting Statistician William M. Briggs** who explores this issue by considering four different alternatives for today’s climatologists:

1. Abandon the model and seek a new career

2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong

3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model

4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and so posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and only if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

Read more here: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/01/28/is-climatology-a-pseudoscience/

———————-
** Is climatology a pseudoscience?
January 28th, 2008

Physicist F. James Cripwell, a former scientist with the UK’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and now a member of the notorious list of 400 skeptical scientists, is of the opinion that we need an independent study to compare and contrast the four ways of measuring world temperature anomalies. Following is a copy of recent communications between the physicist and Marc Morano in which he explains why:

Dear Marc,

I write with respect to your latest communication about Alexander Cockburn. He seems to have made an important and fundamental error. He writes “While the world’s climate is on a warming trend…”. I do not believe the world’s climate is on a warming trend, though I cannot as yet prove this.

It is quite true that since somewhere around 1970, the world has warmed up. What is not clear is that, as of now, the world is still warming up. And, of course, “now” is moving. As time goes on, I believe the indications that the world has ceaased warming, and has started to cool, will become more and more obvious.

As I have noted before, there are four major agencies which measure average global temperature anomalies, and report them of a monthly basis. These are NASA/GISS, NCDC/NOAA, HAD/CRU and RSS/MSU.

The first, NASA/GISS data, shows that at present, average global temperatures are increasing. The other three show the opposite, that they are decreasing. I am suspicious that Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt are closely connected with the NASA/GISS data, but they are very competent scientists with impressive credentials.

If you ask for a linear least squares regression analysis, you find a linear trend of increasing temperatures. However, if you ask for a non-linear analysis, NASA/GISS shows an increasing trend, but the other three show that temperatures has passed through a maximum, and are now decreasing. What is missing is an independent study to compare and contrast the four ways of measuring world temperature anomalies, coming up with an opinion as to which is “best”, whatever this means.

Until we have such a stduy, we are unlikely to make any progress in this area. Or we must wait until the data showing that world temperatures are decreasing becomes too overwhelming to be ignored.

Sincerely,
Jim Cripwell

This dominant 4.5metre male Estuarine Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) resides a kilometre or so downstream from my own abode on Cooper Creek; a proximity that we never forget!

It has long been known that crocodile gender is determined by temperature. If the temperature of egg incubation is cool, around 30 degrees C, the hatchlings are all female. Warmer temperatures, around 34 degrees C, hatch all males. There is also strong population bias towards females; often as high as 10 to 1.

For about thirty years, this skewed ratio was thought to provide an evolutionary advantage, whereby sex ratio optimises survivorship considerations.

In a recent News in Science article by Dani Cooper, entitled ‘Sex-change lizards settle a hot topic’, Professor Rick Shine of Sydney University and his former student Dr Daniel Warner, now of Iowa State University, report that they have proven this 30-year-old theory.

Studying the relatively short-lived Jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), which produces off-spring within one year of hatching and lives no longer than four years, the researchers found that hormonal manipulation of gender determination had no effect on the health and survival of the hatchlings, but the natural males were five to 10 times better in terms of mating and producing offspring, while the natural females produced four to five times more offspring.

It was therefore shown that the incubation temperature that produces that sex in nature optimised reproductive success of each sex.