Climate & Climate Change

“I haven’t heard any claims beating this in this supposed summer of all summers”, was the message in an email from a reader of this blog and this link that includes:

“There are a small number of towns in Australia whose names have such a potency and such a power of association that they automatically conjure up images. The name ‘Marble Bar’ is synonymous with mining, isolation and, most importantly, heat.

It is known as ‘the hottest town in Australia’ a fact which is still recorded by the Guinness Book of Records. For 161 consecutive days to 20 April 1924 the temperature in the town never dropped below 100F (37.8C). This record still stands after nearly seventy years.

And they wouldn’t have had airconditioning back in 1924.

As the newcomer to hell said to the devil “Don’t try scaring me with hellfire – I’m from Marble Bar”.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann might be listening to the once-banned Solar Shop advertisements in which Tim Flannery says climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity.

According to ABC Online, just today he has pledged a whopping 60 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions if his government is re-elected on March 18.

He will even introduce new laws to make sure the target is achieved by 2050.

The policy was apparently announced at a wind farm this morning and includes $250,000 to set up a climate change research centre at the University of Adelaide and the installation of mini wind turbines on government buildings in the city.

So 2050 is how many elections away? How old will Mike Rann be in 2050?

(Sorry Joe, but one for Ender.)

Everyone with a computer can help scientists better understand the universe, or just climate change, according to Phil Done. In the following guest post Phil suggests we all join the The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) community:

“Bored with that aquarium screen saver – worried about the computer being idle and generating greenhouse emissions between blog comments – or do you just want to do something that Ian Mott cannot do on the back of an envelope – BOINC and save the world!

What could make the climate change enthusiast’s heart beat faster – help solve the problem faster and make a personal contribution. That little hotspot on Greenland might be yours!

With Climateprediction.net and the BBC Climate Change Experiment you can do just that. You can contribute a small piece of the modelling puzzle.

How does it work?

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a distributed computing infrastructure intended to be useful to fields beyond the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This software platform is open in that it is free and open source software released under the GNU Lesser Public License. Currently BOINC is being developed by a team based at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, the project director of SETI@home – a project which uses this software.

It’s supercomputing on the grassroots level – millions of PCs on desktops at home helping to solve some of the world’s most computer – intensive scientific problems. And it’s an all-volunteer force of PC users, who, with very little effort, can contribute much-needed PC muscle to the scientific and academic communities. There are hundreds of millions of Internet-connected PCs, and they’re getting more powerful all the time, so volunteer computing can provide computing power and storage capacity way beyond what can be achieved with supercomputers, clusters, or grids. The volunteer computing approach works best for applications that don’t need to move a lot of data between processors, but this limitation will diminish as the Internet gets faster.

Of course if you’d prefer molecular biology and speed up GMO research, fighting human diseases, finding aliens in a celestial haystack, or sorting out gravitational waves there’s something for you too.

Of course contrarians have warned not to run BOINC software if:
* You are in an urban heat island,
* You’d rather find out what happens to the climate personally, or
* You are not familiar with the MER/PPP parameter settings.

Denialists have also suggested we don’t need a SETS project – Search for Earthbound Terrestrial Stupidity – it’s already been solved. And perhaps you’re blogging so hard that your screen saver never appears anyway.

Is BOINCing a western ideology? Are we losing out in the global BOINC? Do only greenies and left wingers BOINC or is BOINCing bipartisan? Are right wingers born to BOINC?

Also, you need broadband, and laptops are not recommended due to heat buildup. See the relevant FAQs.”

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Thanks Phil.

“How can anyone living through today’s bizarre and mutable weather not be concerned about global warming?” wrote David Kirkpatrick in a recent issue of CNN Money.

Kirkpatrick then goes on to tell us that he heard the best speech from former US Vice President Al Gore about unprecedented change in the earth’s climate seriously aggravated by human activity.

I was interested to know how much of the “unprecedented change” Al Gore attributed to “human aggravation”, but instead he just listed the “evidence” that “climate is changing”.

The following points are Kirkpatrick summary of Al Gore’s evidence:

“1. Global CO2 levels are way outside what have been historical norms over several hundred thousand years.

2. All ten of the hottest years on record, globally, have occurred in the last 15 years.

3. Last summer, all-time heat records were set in both the U.S. West and East.

4. Global ocean temperatures are far outside of historical norms.

5. Even after last year’s devastating Hurricane Katrina, the subsequent Hurricane Wilma was briefly the most severe hurricane ever recorded.

6. Last year Japan hit an all-time record for typhoons –10. The previous record was 7.

7. The largest downpour ever seen occurred last summer in India.

8. Thirty-five years ago there were an average of 225 days when Alaska’s tundra was frozen enough for trucks to drive. Today there are only 75.”

The first point doesn’t actually tell us climate is changing. Points 2,3,5,6,7 and 8 read like a mumble jumble of ‘cherry picked’ anecdote – but I can see there are some interesting statistics here. Number 4 doesn’t match. And I didn’t know that global ocean temperatures were far outside of historical norms?

Not that I deny climate change – there has always been climate change and there will always be climate change. But how much is due to us?

A movie by Paramount Classics based on this sort of ‘evidence’ and Al Gore’s personal journey of discovery titled ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ is due out in May. And there will be a book out by the same name, also by Al Gore. And, according to David Kirkpatrick, Gore is working with major environment groups in the US on a new consortium with the aim of running a “campaign of public persuasion” about global warming and its consequences.

I think the message is already out there – that it is getting warmer.

But no one really believes the world is about to end. Rather several of my friends, and lots of other people, have decided (as far as I can tell based at least in part on all the news reports about global warming) that they need to install an air conditioner, because it is going to get hotter.

The new air conditioners will be coal-powered, in so much as most of the electricity for Brisbane in south eastern Queensland, Australia, comes from coal-fired power stations.

Meterologists from around the world gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, this week.

At the World Meterological Conference a report was tabled summarizing information on the impact of global warming on cyclones including hurricanes and typhoons.*

Titled Statement on Tropic Cyclones and Climate Change, two of the nine authors are from the Australian Bureau of Meterology.

Julian Heming from the United Kingdom Met office gave the following summary in a media release:

“The main conclusion we came to was that none of these high-impact tropical cyclones could be specifically attributed to global warming. Whilst there is no conclusive evidence that climate change is affecting the frequency of tropical cyclones worldwide, there is an ongoing debate as to whether it is affecting their intensity.

The report is unusual, in so much as these type of documents associate with climate conferences are often written in such a way that they exaggerate the likely impact of global warming. This report seems to represents a middle ground and acknowledges there is no consensus on the issue of increased intensity.** It does acknowledges a potential impact from global warming and the likely nature of this impact – more severe hurricanes.

The report also includes comment that:

1. While demographic trends [more people living in more hurricane prone coastal environmentals] are the dominant cause of increasing damage by tropical cyclones, any significant trends in storm activity would compound such trends in damage.

2. Projected rises in global sea level are a cause for concern in the context of society’s vulnerability to tropical cyclones. In particular for the major cyclone disasters in history the primary cause of death has been salt-water flooding associated with storm surge.

3. A robust result in model simulations of tropical cyclones in a warmer climate is that there will be an increase in precipitation [rainfall] associated with these systems (for example, Knutson and Tuleya, 2004). The mechanism is simply that as the water vapor content of the tropical atmosphere increases, the moisture convergence for a given amount of dynamical convergence is enhanced. This should increase rainfall rates in systems (viz tropical cyclones) where moisture convergence is an important component of the water vapor budget. To date no observational evidence has been found to support this conclusion; so no quantitative estimate can be given for the anticipated rainfall increase without further research.

I interprete this last point to mean that as it gets warmer it is likely to get wetter?

The report includes the following summary of tropical cyclone activity during 2004 and 2005 and notes that a number of high-impact tropical cyclones events occurred during this period:

1. Ten fully developed tropical cyclones made landfall in Japan in 2004, causing widespread damage.

2. Southern China experienced much below-normal tropical cyclone landfalls and subsequently suffered a severe drought.

3. Four major hurricanes caused extensive damage and disruption to Florida communities in 2004.

4. In March 2004 southern Brazil suffered severe damage from a system that had hurricane characteristics, the first recorded cyclone of its type in the region.

5. Five fully developed cyclones passed through the Cook Islands in a five week period in February-March 2005.

6. The 2005 North Atlantic Hurricane Season broke several records including number of tropical cyclones, number of major hurricanes making landfall and number of category five hurricanes. In particular, the landfall of Hurricane Katrina at New Orleans and Mississippi caused unprecedented damage and more than 1300 deaths.

……………………………………………

*A hurricane is a cyclone in the Atlantic Basin and North Pacific east of the dateline. A typhoon is a cyclone in the Northwest Pacific west of the date line.

** This is what the report says on the issue of cyclone intensity:

“No single high impact tropical cyclone event of 2004 and 2005 can be directly attributed to global warming, though there may be an impact on the group as a whole;

– Emanuel (2005) has produced evidence for a substantial increase in the power of tropical cyclones (denoted by the integral of the cube of the maximum winds over time) during the last 50 years. This result is supported by the findings of Webster et al (2005) that there has been a substantial global increase (nearly 100%) in the proportion of the most severe tropical cyclones (category 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale), from the period from 1970 to 1995, which has been accompanied by a similar decrease in weaker systems.

– The research community is deeply divided over whether the results of these studies are due, at least in part, to problems in the tropical cyclone data base. Precisely, the historical record of tropical cyclone tracks and intensities is a byproduct of real-time operations. Thus it’s accuracy and completeness changes continuously through the record as a result of the continuous changes and improvements in data density and quality, changes in satellite remote
sensing retrieval and dissemination, and changes in training. In particular a step-function change in methodologies for determination of satellite intensity occurred with the introduction of geosynchronous satellites in the mid to late 1970’s.

– The division in the community on the Webster et al and on the Emanuel papers is not as to whether Global Warming can cause a trend in tropical cyclone intensities. Rather it is on whether such a signal can be detected in the historical data base. Also it can be difficult to isolate the forced response of the climate system in the presence of substantial decadal and multi-decadal natural variability, such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

– Whilst the existence of a large multi-decadal oscillation in Atlantic tropical cyclones is still generally accepted, some scientists believe that a trend towards more intense cyclones is emerging. This is a hotly debated area for which we can provide no definitive conclusion. It is agreed that there is no evidence for a decreasing trend in cyclone intensities.”

Update

Following comment and advice from readers of this blog I added the word ‘tropical’ to the title of this blog post.

Jennifer, 8pm. 22nd Feb.

I reckon it is nearly impossible to keep up with the climate change literature particularly the latest climate change scare story. Working out whether a particular piece of information is invented, real, real but exaggerated, etcetera, certainly takes effort.

Brisbane’s newspaper, The Courier-Mail, has a story on page 19 of this weekend’s edition titled ‘Greenland ice sheets double melt rate’.

It begins:

“Global warming is melting Greenland’s glaciers much faster than previously believed, raising fears that sea levels will rise rapidly during the next century”

This is how it works according to a latest issue of Science magazine:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet gains mass through snowfall and loses it by surface melting and runoff to the sea, together with the production of icebergs and melting at the base of its floating ice tongues. The difference between these gains and losses is the mass balance; a negative balance contributes to global sea-level rise and vice versa. About half of the discharge from the ice sheet is through 12 fast-flowing outlet glaciers, most no more than 10 to 20 km across at their seaward margin, and each fed from a large interior basin of about 50,000 to 100,000 km2. As a result, the mass balance of the ice sheet depends quite sensitively on the behavior of these outlet glaciers.

Two changes to these glaciers have been observed recently. First, the floating tongues or ice shelves of several outlet glaciers, each several hundred meters thick and extending up to tens of kilometers beyond the grounded glaciers, have broken up in the past few years. Second, measurements of ice velocity made with satellite radar interferometric methods have demonstrated that flow rates of these glaciers have approximately doubled over the past 5 years or so.”

This article in Science (Vol. 31, pg 963-964) goes on to explain that 2002 and 2005 are records for “melt extent over the 27 years of observation” – which I assume refers to the last 27 years.

Contrast this information with an article titled “Recent cooling in coastal southern greenland and relation with the north atlantic oscillation” published in 2003 by Edward Hanna and John Cappelen (Geophysical research letters, VoL. 30, NO. 3, 1132).

This research paper which covers the period up until 2002 (the year there was record melting according to the new article in Science magazine)states:

“Analysis of new data for eight stations in coastal southern Greenland, 1958-2001, shows a significant cooling (trend-line change -1.29C for the 44 years), as do sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent part of the Labrador Sea, in contrast to global warming (+0.53C over the same period). The land and sea temperature series follow similar patterns and are strongly correlated but with no obvious lead/lag either way. This cooling is significantly inversely correlated with an increased phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) over the past few decades (r = -0.76), and will probably have significantly affected the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

This 2003 paper only refers to coastal southern Greenland, while the new Science paper refers to “several large glaciers” and the last 5 years or so.

…………

Thanks to Phil Done for alerting me to the new paper in Science and Benny Peiser for the link to 2003 paper.