Climate & Climate Change

With all the concern about global warming resulting in more deaths due to climate-related disasters, I thought I would see if I could find some statistics on the subject.

Since 1988 the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) has been maintaining an Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the WHO (World Health Organisation) and the Belgian Government, see http://www.em-dat.net/who.htm .

Following is a graph from this site showing total number of deaths due to disasters from 1900 to 2004,
View image (75kbs).

Many would have anticipated that the graph would trend in the opposite direction.

There is a graph on page 5 of a booklet titled ‘Climate change and sustainable development’ based on this and other information that shows death rate per year and death rate (per thousand) from 1920 to 2003 due specifically to climate-related disasters. The trend is also one of reducing global deaths and death rates, see
http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/cc_sd_final.pdf (750 kbs).

It is predicted in the booklet that “All indicators suggest that similar reductions in deaths from natural disasters will continue as societies become more technologically and economically sophisticated.”

I was sent a copy of Ian Lowe’s soon to be launched book ‘A big fix’ subtitled ‘Radical solutions for Australia’s environmental crisis’ (Black Inc 2005).

I started reading the book yesterday at the beach. It is full of popular mythology dressed up as scientific fact without footnotes or references … and Lowe starts the first sentence, of the first paragraph, of the first chapter, “I am a scientist”.

He then goes on to employ the rules of propaganda every effectively, particularly rules 1,3 and 4, see https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000579.html .

On page 13 he writes, “There is a great scientific tradition of scepticism, generally a good thing because it keeps us honest and forces us to justify our conclusions.” But then goes on to suggest climate skeptics “… try to win their arguments, sometimes by actually lying, but more often by making statements that are facually correct but misleading.”

He shows himself to be expert at the same including with the statement also at the bottom of page 13, “it is now indisputable that the global climate is changing.”
As though it was ever in dispute that the history of the earth has been, and always will be, one of climate change.

While suggesting skepticism has its place, Lowe provides no example of a contrarian view worthy of consideration and evaluation. Rather he suggests that climate change global warming skeptics who number perhaps 5 (in the whole wide world!) are given a voice because the commercial media loves controversy.

And if you were wondering how many scientists “support the accepted view” – according to Lowe it is about 10,000 (pg 13).

Blog site ‘real climate’ has an interesting review of the relationship between hurricanes (frequency and intensity) and global warming with particular reference to Katrina.

By way of introduction:

The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes … the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).

I particularly noted the paragraph:

It has been asserted (for example, by the NOAA National Hurricane Center) that the recent upturn in hurricane activity is due to a natural cycle, e.g. the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (“AMO”). The new results by Emanuel (Fig. 2) argue against this hypothesis being the sole explanation: the recent increase in SST (at least for September as shown in the Figure) is well outside the range of any past oscillations. Emanuel therefore concludes in his paper that “the large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented, and probably reflects the effect of global warming.” However, caution is always warranted with very new scientific results until they have been thoroughly discussed by the community and either supported or challenged by further analyses. Previous analysis of the AMO and natural oscillation modes in the Atlantic (Delworth and Mann, 2000; Kerr, 2000) suggest that the amplitude of natural SST variations averaged over the tropics is about 0.1-0.2 C, so a swing from the coldest to warmest phase could explain up to ~0.4 C warming.

I wonder what Chris Landsea, the hurricane expert who resigned from the IPCC because of politics and ‘climate change campaigning’, thinks about recent hurricanes Katrina and Denis … and also about Emanuel?

Link to the post at real climate:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181 .

Link to Chris Landsea’s letter of resignation from the IPCC:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html

Last Saturday in Sydney, Alexandra de Blas, one-time ABC Radio National Earthbeat Presenter, told everyone at that conference which I attended at the NSW State Library that Siberia’s permafrost was melting.

According to de Blas this was yet another sign of catastrophic global warming – the end is nigh etcetera.

de Blas had probably been reading New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500):

THE world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world’s least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years”.

The fellow who sat beside me on the Virgin Blue flight to Sydney also told me that “Siberia was melting”. He was terribly worried.

But according to the official Russian news agency (http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605.html):

The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonable variations) has been remaining stable despite the increased average annual air temperature caused by climate change. If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.

“Unscrupulous scientists are exaggerating and peddling fears about permafrost thawing and swamp methane becoming aggressive,” said Professor Nikolai Alexeyevsky, Doctor of Geography and head of the land hydrology department at Moscow State University. “Siberia has vast natural resources, oil and gas above all. The article aims to set public opinion against Western Siberia and discourage investment in its industry, oil and gas. They are saying, “Swamp methane poses a global threat, so don’t touch Siberia.” They are deliberately trying to cause panic.

Alexeyevsky says that permafrost has a natural cycle of change, and that it advanced and retreated in the pre-industrial era as well.

Interestingly Russia has a whole academy dedicated to the study of the permafrost (http://www.sitc.ru/ync/ync_eng/ice.htm ).

Who should I believe?

de Blas went on to tell the crowd at the NSW State Library that global warming would destroy the Great Barrier Reef. Now that is plain wrong, see https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000762.html .

New Orleans in the southern US has been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. According to tonights ABC television news, 80% of the city is under water.

I was in Louisiana in February 1999 and remember enjoying a meal of crawfish in Baton Rouge (just north of New Orleans) and hearing about Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and how New Orleans is sinking anyway – how one day it will dissapear into the Gulf of Mexico.

I have found this photo of the Mississippi River at New Orleans taken in 1999. And to put the region in some perspective, the Mississippi drains a catchment of over 1 million square miles, collecting water from 32 US states, before reaching New Orleans and the sea – according to a powerpoint I did in 1999 that I have just found. Check out this old slide: Mississippi drainage basin .

According to my book Roadside Geology of Louisiana:

“Louisiana hosts nearly 40% of the wetlands of the United States, and they are disappearing at a rapid rate. About 35 square miles of wetland in Louisiana slip away each year, an important loss of habitat to innumerable species of birds, animals, fish and plants. Public attention has focused on wetland loss in Louisiana in recent years, and blame flies in many directions. In truth the phenomenon is largely due to natural geological proceses, though human intervention certainly plays a significant role.”

The book by Darwin Spearing (published by Moutain Press Publishing Co, Missoula, Montana, 1995) goes on to explain how 7,000 years of delta construction is being lost to subsidence during the past few thousand years:

“… before humans ever dredged a channel, build a control levee, or cut through a marsh to reach an offshore oil platform. … whether deltas and their wetlands survive or sink benealth the sea hinges on the fine balance between sediment and subsistence. Deltas tend to sink as their soft and watery mud compacts beneath the weight of more mud laid on it. If no new sediment is added to the top of the pile, the top of the delta will sink beneath the waves. If the supply of sediment delivered to the delta exceeds the sinking rate, the delta will continue to grow and wetlands will expand.

…Nevertheless, tinkering human hands have certainly accelerated wetland loss during the last century. Their principle contribution has been construction of continuous levees along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Venice. The levees do contain floods, but they also deprive the marshes of the sediment they need to stay above sea level. Furthermore, the levees force the river to dump all its sediment at the extreme end of the delta, where waves and currents cannot rework it into sandy coastlines as they did before the levees were build. Much of the sediment slides down the continental slope and onto the Mississippi fan on the deep ocean floor.

… The second major human contributor to wetland destruction (and the sinking of New Orleans) through sediment loss is outside Louisiana. Scores of dams were build during the past century upriver in the Mississippi drainage and in its tributories. They were designed to control floods, generate electricity, store fresh water, and provide recreation. They also trap so much sediment that what reaches Louisiana is only about half that of a century ago.”

So this explains why New Orleans is below sealevel.

And for those who want to argue climate change, I received the following from Benny Peiser:

After reading the round-up of German newspaper editorials in Spiegel Online, one can’t be blamed for thinking that global warming is leading to an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes hitting the US mainland (strangely, Halliburton was not mentioned as the culprit in this present storm). Going back to 1851, what does the actual data from NOAA (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml) say:

Fig 1: The average number of all hurricanes per decade (in red) is 17.7
http://eurota.blogspot.com/2005/08/eu-environmentalism-score-another-one.html

Fig 2: The average number of major hurricanes per decade (in red) is 6.0
http://eurota.blogspot.com/2005/08/eu-environmentalism-score-another-one.html

Of course, 2001-2004 is not a complete decade. If you think the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes is due to global warming, be glad I did not add trend lines. There are plenty of real environmental problems to consider, save the global warming hype.

Knowing the above facts, consider the statement by Germany’s Environmental Minister, Jurgen Trittin, a Green Party member (natch):

“There is only one possible route of action,” he writes. “Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide. Until now, the US has kept its eyes shut to this emergency. (Americans) make up a mere 4 percent of the population, but are responsible for close to a quarter of emissions.” He adds that the average American is responsible for double as much carbon dioxide as the average European.

“The Bush government rejects international climate protection goals by insisting that imposing them would negatively impact the American economy. The American president is closing his eyes to the economic and human costs his land and the world economy are suffering under natural catastrophes like Katrina and because of neglected environmental policies.”

Phillip Done, a reader of this web-log, reviews a recent article in New Scientist:

“The 27 August 2005 New Scientist (NS) has an article Global Warming: The flaw in the thaw.

It examines recent developments in worldwide glacial retreat. 79 out of 88 glaciers surveyed were retreating. The phenomenon of glacial meltdown is heralded by climate change protagonists as the “canary in the mine” for climate change.

What else do you need to know. But the article has something for everyone and maybe the climate change guys surf to the front at the end. The paper is instructive in that it discusses the complexities of climate change science and difficulties with untangling natural trends and CO2 induced warming.

Basically the glaciers started meltdown started before the global warming flux should have kicked in.

In another twist, the recent rewrite of the radiosonde data means that Kilimanjaro needs another look. Global warming theorists now have a better mechanism.

El Nino muddies the signal for glaciers in the tropical Andes making
interpretation confusing.

However many glaciers which slowed their rate of melting in the mid-1900s have now accelerated away with a vengeance. But there are always off regional exceptions such as seven glaciers in California’s Mount Shasta.

Does it matter anyway – is all this of just academic interest. Well the worry appears to be that peripheral ice sheet melting around Antarctica and Greenland is now proceeding rapidly with surface water getting in the bottom of the glaciers further speeding up their movement. The breakup of the Larsen ice shelf will allow more rapid glacial movement – up to eight times has been recorded. Sea level rises are predicted.

I commend the NS article to you – it has something for both sides of the debate.”