WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING IN THE REAL WORLD?

As distinct from those dinky "models"? Surely temperatures don't vary NATURALLY! News from Britain:

The Government has summoned industrialists and generating companies to an emergency meeting next month amid fears of an energy crisis if Britain suffers a harsh winter. Long-distance forecasters are predicting that the country is facing its coldest weather for a decade, putting lives at risk and forcing businesses to lay off workers. The CBI said that there were only 11 days’ gas held in reserve. In comparison, other European countries keep an average of 55 days in reserve. The Met Office has already put the energy industry, the NHS and the Government on high alert. Now there are fears that Britain could run out of fuel. Sir Digby Jones, the Director-General of the CBI, said: “If we have a cold winter, we are going to throw the switch; businesses will shut down.”

The National Grid has identified emergency measures to ensure that power is maintained to homeowners. Under the plans, manufacturers who use large amounts of gas for industrial processes would be required to shut down factories on very cold days. Britain has not had a particularly cold winter for ten years, but some experts believe that temperatures over the coming months could plummet as low as the winters of the 1970s.

Paul Simons, The Times weatherman, said that the shift in temperature was influenced by a phenomonon known as North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO, influenced by a lowpressure system over Iceland and high pressure over the warm Azores islands in the sub-tropical Atlantic. When the Icelandic pressure rises and the Azores pressure dips, Britain catches blasts of bitterly cold air. He said: “In the 1940s the NAO turned negative and brought some of the coldest European winters of the 20th century, including the bitter freezes that helped to defeat Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Another bout of negative NAOs in the 1960s included the worst winter for more than 200 years, when homes were buried under snow and ice floes drifted in the English Channel. “The Met Office is forecasting a negative NAO this winter. Although they cannot tell how severe the weather will be, the past ten winters had such ridiculously mild weather that even an average British winter will come as a rude shock.”

Last week Ofgem and National Grid Transco gave warning that gas supplies were at their lowest for ten years. The energy market regulator said that large industrial users and gas-fired power stations would be switched off in the event of a severe winter. Gas is used to fuel around two fifths of the country’s power stations. Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said: “It’s not about switching off the domestic customers but there could be problems for industry.” The National Grid has not imposed compulsory measures to conserve power supplies since the blackouts caused by the miners’ strikes during the 1970s

Source




PUTTING POSSIBLE SEA-LEVEL RISES INTO PERSPERCTIVE

Post lifted from World Climate Report

Global sea level rise figures prominently in most climate doom and gloom stories. And, not surprisingly, good news is either ignored or mis-reported.

First, a little history. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated, in its Third Assessment Report (2001), that between 1990 and 2100, the global average sea level will rise somewhere between 3.5 and 34.6 inches, with a central value of 18.9 inches. Of course, the values falling near the low end of the range are usually left out of global warming scare stories, while the values near the high end are prominently featured (e.g. see here and here)

A couple of recent modeling studies demonstrate that those who have said that estimates near the low end of the UN’s huge range (i.e., us) are probably right. Using the high resolution version of the climate model developed at the Center for Climate System Research at the University of Tokyo run with two different IPCC emissions scenarios (resulting in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 550 and 720ppm by 2100), a research team led by Tatsuo Suzuki found that global average sea levels by 2100 were projected to rise by somewhere around 12 inches (in the 550ppm scenario) and 15 inches (in the 720ppm scenario). The warming projected to accompany the 15-in. sea level rise in the 720 ppm scenario (SRES A1B) was about 4.0ºC.



Figure 1. Components of sea level rise as projected by the Japanese climate model run under two different IPCC emissions scenarios. Add up the contributions from expansion (steric rise) and from Greenland and Antarctica, and you get between 12 and 15 inches (30 and 38 cm) by the end of this century.

Another modeling study found about the same thing. Although the details are a bit sketchy, a press release from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, touts that scientists using the latest-greatest version of the Max Planck climate model project a global average sea level rise of about 12 inches (30 cm) in association with a temperature rise of 4ºC by 2100. From what we can gather from the press release, this occurs when the climate model is input one of the IPCC high CO2 emissions scenarios. The Max Planck modelers also used more moderate emissions scenarios, but these results were not reported in the press release for reasons that should be obvious (no problem=no funding).

Since the upward trend in global averaged temperatures that has been well-established for about the past 30 years is about 0.18C per decade (and there is a new paper suggesting that solar variability has been responsible for about 10-30% of that, see here), a rise of 4ºC in the next 100 years as a result of anthropogenic alterations to the earth’s atmospheric composition is just too much.

The central tendency of the consensus of climate models is that, once warming starts as a result of human influence, it takes place at a constant (not an increasing) rate. So, 1.8°C/century, at the max, is what we can expect (i.e. ten times 0.18°). Since the sea level rise is closely tied to the temperature rise, even the modest 12-15 inch projections from the most-current climate models, are also on the high side.

Thus it appears that the demand for policy actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has lost another of piece of its foundation—the threat from a rapidly rising ocean. After all, a future sea level rise on the order of a foot or so by the end of this century hardly seems bad enough to jolt people into lifestyle-altering action, especially considering that over the last century, the sea level rose by about one-half to two-thirds that amount, and coastal development boomed.

References:
Max Planck Society press release, Climate Change More Rapid Than Ever, September 30, 2005.

Suzuki, T., et al., 2005. Projection of future sea level and its variability in a high-resolution climate model: Ocean processes and Greenland and Antarctic ice-melt contributions. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, doi:10.1029/2005GL023677.





RECENT GLACIER ADVANCES IN NORWAY AND NEW ZEALAND

From Chinn, T., S. Winkler, M.J. Salinger, and N. Haakensen, 2005. Recent Glacier Advances in Norway and New Zealand: A Comparison of their Glaciological and Meteorological Causes Geografiska Annaler, Series A, Vol. 87, No 1, pp. 141-157, March 2005

Abstract:

Norway and New Zealand both experienced recent glacial advances, commencing in the early 1980s and ceasing around 2000, which were more extensive than any other since the end of the Little Ice Age. Common to both countries, the positive glacier balances are associated with an increase in the strength of westerly atmospheric circulation which brought increased precipitation. In Norway, the changes are also associated with lower ablation season temperatures. In New Zealand, where the positive balances were distributed uniformly throughout the Southern Alps, the period of increased mass balance was coincident with a change in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and an associated increase in El Nino/Southern Oscillation events. In Norway, the positive balances occurred across a strong west-east gradient with no balance increases to the continental glaciers of Scandinavia. The Norwegian advances are linked to strongly positive North Atlantic Oscillation events which caused an overall increase of precipitation in the winter accumulation season and a general shift of maximum precipitation from autumn towards winter. These cases both show the influence of atmospheric circulation on maritime glaciers.

Source

Glacier ADVANCES! What is this? The earth is warming, don't you know? The glaciers are all RETREATING O unbeliever!

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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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