KATRINA AND GLOBAL WARMING

Climate scientist Roger Pielke looks at what really happened

The catastrophic destruction that has occurred in the central Gulf coast of the United States due to Hurricane Katrina is occupying our thoughts. This calamity will consume enormous time and cost to recover from and to provide as much protection as possible from the inevitable next hurricane of this magnitude in this region and elsewhere. This is a sad time.

However, little time has passed before the disaster is being blamed by some of the media on global warming (see, for example, articles in The Belfast Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times. This narrow perspective completely misses the real reason for this disaster. As we, and others, have discussed (see Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2000: Discussion Forum: A broader perspective on climate change is needed and Pielke Jr. et al. 2005: Hurricanes and global warming), the significant risks are due to crossing thresholds in our vulnerability to environmental threats of all types. In this case, construction of towns on the immediate coastline and of a city below sea level (New Orleans) makes these regions particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. In the book,

Pielke, R.A., Jr. and R.A. Pielke, Sr., 1997: Hurricanes: Their nature and impacts on society. John Wiley and Sons, England, 279 pp.

the exposure of the coastal population to hurricanes in the eastern United States is clear (see Figure 2.8 (d) on page 52), with New Orleans clearly at risk. What this figure also shows is that other urban areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts have also become increasingly vulnerable as population grows, and, therefore, infrastructure development accelerates.

Even with respect to global warming, its reasons for occurring over the past several decades, while predominately due to humans (see our Climate Science post of August 29th), is not predominately due to the increase in the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, nor is global warming the more significant way humans are altering the climate system (see our Climate Science post of July 28th "What is the Importance to Climate of Heterogeneous Spatial Trends in Tropospheric Temperatures?"). The media have almost universally ignored an accurate description of the spectrum of human forcings on climate as presented in the National Research Council 2005 report.

Thus the advocates of blaming global warming erroneously assume that carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of this disaster, but miss the other human caused global warming forcings that we summarized in our August 29th blog. They miss that other climate change effects, both due to natural and human- caused influences, such as atmospheric and ocean circulation changes due to spatially heterogeneous climate forcings such as landscape changes and aerosol emissions, have a greater effect than the relatively small magnitude of global warming that has actually been documented (see Pielke and Christy 2005)

The media fail to recognize that climate is complex and involves numerous natural and human climate forcings and feedbacks. To focus on the radiative warming forcing of carbon dioxide shows a complete misunderstanding of the climate system. We recommend they read the 2005 National Research Council report . They also need to understand that we cannot rely on even the complete description of climate change to understand our vulnerability to hurricanes and other weather events. We need to focus on an integrated assessment of the vulnerability of specific societal and environmental resources, (such as an urban center) to the entire spectrum of risks (see Table E.7 in Pielke, R.A. Sr., and L. Bravo de Guenni, 2004, for a summary of the vulnerability perspective as contrasted with using climate models to define risk).

Thus the answer to the question posed in this blog, is that we cannot attribute this disaster to global warming, or even climate change. It is a human-caused disaster resulting from decisions made as to where to locate our population and commerce, without enough protection to avoid inevitable catastrophic consequences.

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KATRINA: GLOBAL WARMING, MY FOOT!

A more forthright comment from N.Z. technical author Nick Sault [tikouka@ihug.co.nz] in an email to Benny Peiser:

As much as my heart goes out to the people of those southern states, let's be sensible here and admit that when you have millions living at or below sea level, one day the sea is going to come get you. This is no more due to global warming than was the Indian Ocean tsunami. In this case, you could almost do the sums and calculate the chances of disaster based on there being 3000 miles of hurricane landfall in south-east USA and applying the rate of landfall of category 4+ hurricanes. Heck, New Orleans is built on a delta, and those levees will no doubt not stop the thousand-year Mississippi flood, let alone the landfall of a major hurricane. On a smaller scale, my local city of Christchurch New Zealand has levees to protect it from its local big river, the Waimakariri. But it is a known fact that those levees would be no protection against a flood on the scale of one that occurred in the 19th century, when New Zealand was a young colony. So, my city is living on borrowed time. Will we be surprised when the San Andreas finally does it to a major Californian city? Will some idiot blame global warming? Sorry, but the biggest fault here is not recognising the fact that we live on a dynamic planet, and if you live on the ocean, under a volcano, on a fault line, or on the flood plain of a giant river, nature is going to get you at some time. It is wrong to argue that it hasn't happened before, for recorded history is too short, and we have to remember that the global newsreel is a modern artifact.




The German Kyoto Protocol Hoax

An excerpt from a much more detailed article by Prof Brignell

In anticipation of the former Environmentalist Vice-President's ascendancy to the throne of ultimate global power, the United States Department of Energy had commissioned a Doomsday Book of CO2 emissions for global, regional, and national CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement manufacture and gas flaring, annually from 1751 to 1998, which is available . While there are difference in some of the values reported here and at other DOE and EPA web sites, the data, which are in an easily manipulated spreadsheet format, can yield useful insights to the continuing debate over the Kyoto Protocol and global warming.

The Kyoto Protocol calls for industrialized nations to reduce their CO2 emissions to levels that are 5.2% lower than those recorded for 1990. The selection of 1990 as the base line and the strong support of this objective, on the part of Germany and other Eastern European countries, is no accident, as the DOE CO2 emissions database clearly shows. When the CO2 emissions data for all of Germany and its two cold-war East and West entities, which existed from 1945 to 1990, are plotted and compared with a Western European country such as the United Kingdom, it is glaringly obvious that Germany can meet and, indeed, exceed all of its Kyoto obligations by doing absolutely nothing. When the two Germanys were merged in 1991, the newly reunited country inherited Soviet era manufacturing facilities that generated levels of pollution extraordinary by Western standards. By simply closing or upgrading these legacies of the Cold War to Western norms, Germany was Kyoto compliant by 1992....

The United Kingdom on the other hand can expect no such advantage: Most egregious is the fact that in 1998, the Per Capita CO2 Emission for the United Kingdom was 2.51 metric tons of carbon, while that of Germany was 2.75. The people of the United Kingdom generate 9.6% less CO2 per person than the Germans, but, to meet their Kyoto goals, they must reduce their CO2 emissions still further. Germany, on the other hand, had already met their targets before Kyoto was even finalized. In addition to the ephemeral prize of climate stability in our times, all that the Great Leader can offer the British people is blood, sweat, tears and cold houses. Meanwhile in Germany, the members of the Green Party, who only recently morphed to that color from Red, can bask in the warm glow of an environmental righteousness predicated on 45 years of the most brutal subjugation of other nations' economies.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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