Climate & Climate Change

I received the following email from a Fletcher Christian. In some of the email exchange associated with getting his approval to post this comment he signed off “Gotta go put Bligh in the long boat.”

Anway, he clearly believes that readers of this web-log are not getting the whole story when it comes to global warming/climate change.

And he writes:

“I note only that mainly anto-global warming dissent gets reported on your blog and any pro-evidence is discarded. Seems pretty selective.

It’s also fascinating to see how “certain” all the anti’s are in this debate; and how the any “uncertainty or caveats” from proponents is jumped on as AHA ! – WEAKNESS.

I’m sure you’re not concerned about what happening out there is terms of temperature changes, freak weather, species movements and Arctic melt.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational alternative explanation – it’s just that nobody has come up with one yet. Nor cited any mechanisms except the climate has changed in the past so….

umm …errr… that must be it – yea that’s it….

But we all know what IT COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE true don’t we. We’re all sooooo sure.

Anyway on a few comments to various classics that do the rounds on your blog. And most anti sites.

10,000 years between ice ages. Sorry – wrong – 50,000 to 100,000 years for next one – see NOAA’s site for some intelligent papers on the subject.

10,000 years is a persistent urban myth from mis-reporting popular press of the 1970s – the science journals haven’t said ice age.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html See the references quoted within.

Hockey stick – note you guys have given up on this since the independent confirmation – see as usual proponents turn to http://www.realclimate.org for the news.

and we find – http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/ammann.shtml hmmm independent verification – whoops…

anyway that will start you all up again. But remember even if the hockey stick was wrong – who cares. But it ain’t…

On Landsea doing a dummy spit. Well boo hoo. Pity he didn’t hang in and help the process.

But it is interesting that we have had those record breaking 300 km/hr plus storms in the Pacific and off WA in recent years.

And gee that South Atlantic storm (hurricane) certainly looked weird.

And did you note our recent tropical cyclone Ingrid’s speed and track – 300 km/hr again and very unusual track across the top.

And have you wondered where all the coast crossing Qld cyclones have gone.

And strangely despite some commentators saying our annual rainfall has increased (well maybe our average overall may have – what a useless statistic)

But everywhere people live and we have agriculture – SW WA, eastern Australia, SE SA, eastern Tasmania, central Queensland seems to have dried up over decades.

Where has all the rainfall gone ?

Any mechanisms come to mind – perhaps annular mode changes in Antartica.

Journal of Climate: Vol. 14, No. 10, pp. 2238�2249

Science, Vol 296, Issue 5569, 895-899 , 3 May 2002

Nah – couldn’t be – it will just be one of those coincidences.

and nothing on those physics stories that confirm the greenhouse flux is pretty well what you’d expect

http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Uphysik_Litertur/scholl.ppt
– whoa there – let’s not get technical now.

And nothing on the latest Scripps ocean studies
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4275729.stm

And if anyone says – all the models are wrong without some reasoned comment we’ll all be very cross.

And is anyone says cities have warmed and the heat island effect etc we’ll be evener crosser…. yes they don’t use city data. Jeez.

And no mention of the Christy satellite data story getting reviewed with some different findings.
http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=36988

No mention of Wall St journal getting it totally wrong.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?s=wall+st

or Crichton’s State of Fear book telling a few porkies
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74

or Bellamy going berserk and getting his maths wrong
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-science/

And also no mention of Oliver North type in the Whitehouse editing the climate change documents from IPCC to water things down ….

Here’s the rebuttal story – yep I believe it – sure ….. http://www.waterconserve.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=30672

Anyway off to check my oil shale shares, through another whale steak on the barby, and have a fag (smoking doesn’t cause cancer – I simply don’t believe it so it must be wrong).

What’s whale taste like – stronger than dolphin but not as tough as koala. 🙂

Fletcher”

end of message.

There looks like a fair bit of reading at the end of some of those links. Thanks Fletcher for taking the time to compile all this information.

Scientists believe they have discovered proof that global warming has altered Tasmania’s marine environment. So begins one of today’s stories at ABC Online, that continues …

A group of biologists from the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute has found a shallow reef extensively covered by coral at the Kent Group Marine Protected Area near Flinders Island off the north-east of Tasmania.

Coral reefs only survive in warmer waters and are usually found in tropical areas such as Queensland.

The senior biologist who discovered the reef, Neville Barrett, believes it is evidence that rising water temperatures are having an impact on the marine environment.

John McLean has responded with a letter to the Editor of ABC Online. The letter begins with a comment about “sloppy journalism at its worst” and then makes the following 7 points:

1. Data from the UK’s Climate Research Unit shows that Southern Hemisphere
temperatures are less than 0.4 degrees C above their 1961-90
average. WARMING IS LARGELY A NORTHERN HEMISPHERE PHENOMENON (despite
carbon dioxide being relatively even in both hemispheres – but that’s
another story).

2. Data from the Bureau of Meteorology shows that both Tasmania and
Victoria were warmer than the 1961-90 average in 1999 (by about 0.5
degrees) but annual average temperatures have steadily declined since
then. In 2004 Tasmania’s average temperature was 0.25 degrees below that
long term average and Victoria’s just 0.07 degrees above their average.

3. Data from the US NOAA shows that sea surface temperatures in Bass
Strait have been close to normal save for a short period about January 2003
when warmer waters (caused by El Nino conditions in the Pacific a few
months earlier) made their way down the east coast of Australia.

4. The report INCORRECTLY stated “Coral reefs only survive in warmer
waters and are usually found in tropical areas such as Queensland.” The
report would have been closer to the mark had it said that “SHALLOW WATER
coral reefs have only been found…” because deeper water coral reefs have
been found in many places. In the 1990s, Norwegian scientists discovered a
14-kilometer-long, 30-meter-high coral reef on the Sula Ridge–an ocean
ridge off the western coast of Norway-at a depth of 250 meters. Also in the
1990s, a French-led team discovered coral gardens thriving at 600 meters
below the surface on seafloor mounds off the coast of Ireland. Since then,
researchers throughout the world have documented a 35-kilometer reef off
Norway, coral growths atop mounds off Scotland’s coast, an area of growth
covering 100 square kilometers off Nova Scotia, and colonies along Alaska’s
Aleutian Islands.

5. Your report failed to mention the types of coral found in these reefs
and whether these were typical of shallow or deep water reefs. Given that
reefs exist at both depths, i sthere any good reason why reefs could not
exist at intermediate depths? I don’t know and your reporter clearly
didn’t bother to ask any of Australia’s most knowledgeable experts at James
Cook University in Townsville.

6. Your report failed to mention the estimated age of this coral
reef. Coral grows slowly and if this reef is more than 50 years old you
can forget about recent in Australia’s temperature having anything to do
with this formation.

7. Your report failed to mention if the region had been properly surveyed
in the past. For all we know there may be extensive coral reefs across
Bass Strait as remnants of the last Ice Age when sea levels were much lower.

Thanks John for taking the time to put the extremely naive reporting in some context. My guess is the journalist just copied from a press release – from honest scientists at a reputable research institute?

John’s website is at
http://mclean.ch/climate/global_warming.htm.

(The 7 points as detailed above were edited, mostly shortened and sharpened, at about 2.10pm on 17th July – following request from John.)

I wonder how David Hicks felt when Hurricane Dennis passed through Guantanamo Bay on Saturday apparently downing a guard tower.

According to some reports the hurricane left 10 dead in Cuba and 22 in Haiti.

According to the BBC, Hurricane Dennis is the Atlantic’s first hurricane this year (formed last Tuesday) and the strongest to form in the Atlantic this early in the season since records began in 1851.

A state of emergency has now been declared in Florida.

Will this hurricane be ‘attributed’ to global warming or will there be at least some reflection on the words and actions of Chris Landsea?

Early this year there was much excitement amongst ‘climate skeptics’ when hurricane expert Chris Landsea withdrew from the IPCC process.

In an open letter Landsea wrote,

Dear colleagues,

After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.

With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author – Dr. Kevin Trenberth – to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.

Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.

I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record. …

An impressive letter.

So how many hurricanes have there been over the last 100 years? What appears to be the official site for hurricanes hitting the US at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml indicates there was a peak in hurricane activity in the 1940s. But why does this site only record one cyclone for the period since 2000. I thought there were four hurricanes just last year?

There is some interesting information about hurricanes at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3653020.stm .

And a blogger has been following Hurricane Dennis at
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html .

I received the following email yesterday from David Douglass, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, New York:

Dear Dr Marohasy

The following quote from your web page has come to my attention:

“A good example of skeptics cherry picking is ‘Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation’ by David Douglass, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004, Volume 31, Page L13208).

Here the authors claim to compare modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes.
A nice idea in theory.
But in practice, the data set which they compare the modeling results against has been cherry picked in three ways.

[1] There are a number of different attempts to determine atmospheric temperature trends. They pick the only one that shows a cooling influence.

[2] The authors of this attempt to determine atmospheric temperature trends have since refined their algorithms, the new dataset shows warming. Their new data is ignored.

[3] They end their analysis in 1996. Had they included the extra data, the dataset would have shown warming.“(end of quote)

You have not read this paper very carefully (attached).

I will comment on your 3 points.

[1] Which atmospheric trend sets showing warming have we ignored? I believe that I have read all of the relevant papers and am not aware of a single measurement supporting positive trends in the troposphere. Please send reference to such papers.

[2] Who are the authors? Not us. You may mean other attempts to analyze the satellite data. If so, then Christy has shown that those attempts are flawed and that the UAH results stand. The UAH satellites only gives us one point. What about the other two independent data sets showing disagreement with the models?

[3] We explained why we only showed the results to 1996. However, we did do the whole range and found very little difference (read the paper).

I do not mind being called a skeptical scientist, but it is not too accurate because the word skeptic as used in the climate debate implies being against.

I prefer just “scientist”. In physics the word scientist, without adjective, has an invariant meaning. It means one who searches for scientific truth by comparing observations against hypothesis — if there is disagreement, the hypothesis is wrong.

However, in this field of climate research there evidently is more than one kind of scientist and adjectives seem to be necessary. If forced, then I choose “agnostic” for myself because I do not know which hypothesis is correct. That is why I am working in the field of climate research right now.

Sincerely
David Douglass
Department of Physics and Astronomy

I have emailed David explaining that the comment was posted by Ken Miles, not myself as he had assumed. And I wrote that I would post his response – which is what you have just read. The comment from Ken followed my post of 18th April titled “Warwick Hughes” and can be read here
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000559.html.

Ken ended with the comment, “Climate change skeptics may say that they are just after the truth, but in the vast majority of cases (I can only think of two prominent exceptions) it simply isn’t true.”

I ask, “Which pot is calling which kettle black?”.