"THE HOTTEST YEAR"

An email from Vincent Gray (vinmary.gray@paradise.net.nz) to Benny Peiser

The Hadley Climate Centre of the University of East Anglia has claimed that the year 2005 was the hottest year in the Northern Hemisphere since records began. They then claim that this can be attributed to increased human emissions of greenhouse gases. If this were so, you would expect that the temperature rise would be more or less uniform over the whole Hemisphere. The Hadley Centre website has published a world map at

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/tgrid/2005/

showing the temperature rise for 2005, related to 1961-90, for each small box of the earth's surface. It shows that the temperature rise was very far from uniform. Most of the warming took place in North America and Northern Europe; in the winter months, and at night. Siberia, North Africa and the Middle East cooled, The Southern Ocean cooled and the other oceans hovered artound zero.. There were no measurements around the North Pole.

There is also a map for the winter months (December/January/February 2004) which shows that most of the warming in North America and North Europe took place then.

This pattern is incompatible with an influence from greenhouse gases. It is best explained by higher living standards around the weather stations in North America and Northern Europe whose temperature readings are used to calculate the average.

The "Hottest Year" maybe, but it could not be due to greenhouse gases.





MORE CRITICISM OF THE MEDIA REPORT THAT 2005 IS A RECORD HOT YEAR

The media reports today that 2005 is among the hottest years on record. This claim is based on the global average surface temperature record, which as discussed several times on this weblog is fraught with serious data quality issues. Our recent paper has even shown that a warm bias exists in the data. The media supports this claim of the hottest year (or nearly so) by stating: "Four separate temperature analyses released Thursday varied by a few hundredths of a degree but agreed it was either the hottest or second-hottest year since the start of record-keeping in the late 1880s."

This is a misleading statement. The "four separate temperature analyses" are mostly from all or a subset of the same raw data! While the statement is clarified later in the article: "The groups use the same temperature data but differ in how they analyze them, particularly in remote areas such as the Arctic, where there are few thermometers", this important caveat is missing in the earlier statement in the article (moreover, as we will show in a soon to be submitted paper, other areas also have a sparcity of data; for 20N to 20S, for example, 70% of the grid areas over land have 1 or less observation sites).

The raw surface temperature data from which the four analyses are derived are, therefore, essentially the same. That the four analyses produce similar trends should come as no surprise!

A question to the different groups which has been posed to several of them, but they have not answered, is what is the degree of overlap in the data sets? While some of the analyses use subsets of the raw data, the raw data is almost identical. To frame this question another way, what raw surface temperature data is used in each analysis that is not used in the other analyses? The best estimate we have seen is that 90-95% of the raw data is the same.

Not to highlight this important issue is an example of cherrypicking; this time by the analyses groups that are releasing the surface temperature data.

Source




BLAME GLOBAL WARMING? 'TORNADOES MILDER IN 2005 - CALMEST YEAR IN TWO DECADES'

Hurricanes are caused by global warming but tornadoes are not?

Texas tornadoes barely topped 100 in 2005, making this the calmest count in almost 20 years for the spiraling storms. As of mid-December, there were 102 tornadoes statewide, two injuries and no deaths, according to reports submitted by the state's National Weather Service offices. That's the lowest number of tornadoes since 1988, when 89 twisters dropped down. In a year when weather tragedies - mostly from hurricanes Katrina and Rita - grabbed the public's attention, tornado totals were down nationwide as well.

Nationally, weather officials estimate 1,014 tornadoes in 2005, slightly lower than average, said Daniel McCarthy, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. There were have been 38 tornado-related deaths, which is slightly more than last year but lower than the 10-year average.

Not only were there fewer twisters this year, but they were mostly weak and did little damage, say federal weather officials. "The only substantial damage report we had was a TV antenna bent over and some tree limbs," said warning coordination meteorologist Gary Woodall with the National Weather Service office in Fort Worth. He referred to tornadoes that touched down in April near south Fort Worth and Mansfield. In North Texas, which averages about 26 tornadoes annually, only 10 were recorded this year. They were all F0 - the lowest level on the Fujita Tornado Scale - with wind speeds between 40 and 72 miles per hour.

The spring storm season spun out in North Texas primarily because cold, high-pressure fronts pushing through the Great Plains and into the Gulf of Mexico cut off the return of low-level warm, moist air into the area, Mr. Woodall said. Upper-level storm systems and strong winds passed through the region, but without that "rich, muggy, juicy air" from the gulf, they just kept on moving, he said.

Mr. Jones, a storm spotter for almost three decades, said his pager went off only about four times this year, whereas he's usually called up 10 to 12 times. The 69-year-old Sachse ham radio operator said the thunderstorms that passed through caused some minor damage but didn't have the right mix to produce tornadoes. "We did see some rotation at one time, but it soon dissipated," he said. He wasn't disappointed, though. "You hate to see tornadoes move through your community because nothing good comes from a tornado," he said. "I visited Wichita Falls the day after the tornado hit there in 1979, and I have never seen such destruction in my life."

The tornado that made headlines this year was an early-morning storm that hit Evansville, Ind., in November. It killed 24 people. Although that storm was severe, it was in the middle of the scale, an F3 on the Fujita Scale. According to preliminary data, not a single more devastating tornado, F4 or F5, touched down in 2005, Mr. McCarthy said. "We may have gone through a whole year" without any violent tornadoes," without any of the top-level tornadoes, he said. "That is extraordinary."

There were signs along the way that 2005 would be a quiet year, especially when there were only 155 tornadoes in May. The last two years have been closer to 500, Mr. McCarthy said.....

More here






CLIMATE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THE THEORIES

The easiest way to make a climate expert flinch is to say: "So, all these really bad hurricanes must be caused by global climate warming, right?" Some will answer yes. Some no. And still others will say, well, maybe. Confusing? Absolutely. But that's the current state of climate science for you.

A cluster of studies over the past two years links the increasing number of violent hurricanes in our tropical oceans to warming water. (In fact, the possibility was first suggested, though not thoroughly studied, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.) One such study emerged from Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in mid-September, just after Hurricane Katrina hit. Like other hurricane forecasters, this team started with ocean temperatures. Hurricanes form only over warm water 28 C is about the minimum because they draw their energy from the water below, recycling it through convection into wind power. The warmer the water becomes, the more energy is available to the hurricane. And with Katrina, the surface water in the central Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea was about 31 C.

The Georgia Tech scientists went back through storm records, and concluded that bigger storms are already happening. But they do not conclude what some other scientists have predicted a greater number of tropical storms and hurricanes. Instead, they concluded, we're seeing the same number of storms, but a larger proportion of them are growing into monsters Categories 3, 4 and 5 on the hurricane scale. Katrina was a 5 over the Gulf of Mexico, weakening to a 4 just before landfall. In the 1970s, there was an average of 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes a year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 a year globally.

This all seems to line up neatly with the theory that warmer water will breed bigger storms. But climate experts don't consider it conclusive. Even Peter Webster of Georgia Tech, a lead author of the study, has some unanswered questions. "Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea-surface temperature and hurricane intensity," he says. "However, it's not a simple relationship. In fact, it's difficult to explain why the total number of hurricanes and their longevity has decreased during the last decade, when sea surface temperatures have risen the most."

Meanwhile there's a competing theory about this difficult link between global warming and storms. Some say it's purely a natural cycle. The current series of bad hurricane seasons is part of a long-term cycle predicted years ago, according to the U.S. National Weather Service. It says the Atlantic is in its 11th year of bad storm activity, a trend expected to continue "for the the next decade or perhaps longer." Eight of the past 10 years have been above-average in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, in a long stretch through all the 1970s and 1980s and the early 1990s, there were only three above-average seasons. Reasons for this cycle remain unclear.

At Colorado State University, William Gray has reigned as the U.S. guru of hurricane forecasting for more than two decades. He retired this fall. Before he left, he wrote that he expects hurricanes to follow the multi-decade cycles in global weather, such as periods when El Nino effects in the Pacific are common and periods when they become rare. "This is a valid methodology provided the atmosphere continues to behave in the future as it has in the past. We have no reason for thinking that it will not," he wrote. And he concluded that the 2004 hurricane season (four major storms hit Florida) was indeed horrible for the Sunshine State, but not so bad worldwide. The number of tropical storms globally, he notes, was just about normal.

And do the average numbers really matter? The 1992 season was considered "below average" until Hurricane Andrew hit Florida and caused $30 billion in damage. In fact, the longer people study climate, the more they shake their heads at how events in one part of the globe have effects that seem impossibly remote on regions halfway around the world. Last year, for example, NASA announced it had solved the riddle of what made the "Dust Bowl" conditions on the Prairies in the 1930s.

The Goddard Space Flight Center used a computer model and modern satellite data, and found that cool water in the tropical Pacific and unusually warm water in the tropical Atlantic changed the atmosphere, which in turn caused the dust bowl. The changes in sea-surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low-level winds, NASA found. This reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall across the Prairies. Normally a low-level jet stream flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns north, pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Prairies, NASA says. In the 1930s, this jet stream weakened and failed to travel north. The Prairies dried up, and so did the farming economy.

But why did the Atlantic and Pacific act this way in the first place? And why did they then return to normal? No one knows. Canadian climatologist David Phillips says it shows the need to understand "teleconnections" massive connections of weather across great distances, such as El Nino and La Nina (contrasting currents in temperature in the Pacific), and a similar shift in currents in the Atlantic, called the North Atlantic Oscillation.

But how does man-made global warming affect hurricanes? Even after studying 35 years of records, Georgia Tech's Webster still can't tell. "We need a longer data record of hurricane statistics, and we need to understand more about the role hurricanes play in regulating the heat balance and circulation in the atmosphere and oceans," Webster says.

It is easier to blame global warming for other natural disasters: Melting of glaciers appears to be accelerating, causing mudslides and flash floods in the Himalayas, and the collapse probably of ice sheets in Antarctica. The two-week August heat wave of 2003 was the worst weather-related killer in modern European history. An estimated 14,800 French people, mostly seniors, died. But 2004 and 2005 brought no heat wave.

Arctic sea ice does seem to be melting more in summer. If it melts completely in 50 years, as many forecast, this deprives polar bears and Inuit of traditional hunting grounds, and lays open Canada's northern waters to foreign fishing fleets. The World Wildlife Fund says 2005 had the smallest arctic ice sheet on record, and the warmest Caribbean waters.

A quieter debate is taking place about global warming's effect on another part of our climate: The Gulf Stream. One theory, widely shared, says that a warmer climate will unbalance this current abruptly by upsetting the supply of dense, extra-salty air that makes it flow. No more Gulf Stream, the theory says, and Western Europe will cool by five to 10 degrees C, making Britain like Labrador. Eastern North America would cool, though not as much. It could even happen in a few decades. "Once considered incredible, the notion that climate can change rapidly is becoming respectable," a summary of Gulf Stream research from NASA says. "Global warming could plunge North America and Western Europe into a deep freeze, possibly within only a few decades," it says.

But here again, scientists are sharply divided. For every theory, every prediction, there's a counter-theory. In this case, it comes from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leader in climate research. Its team says the Gulf Stream isn't that important after all. The warmth that flows north doesn't come from the ocean, it announced two years ago, but from a unique set of swirls in long-range wind patterns caused by the Rocky Mountains. Northern Europe should be safe from freezing no matter what happens to the Gulf Stream, they argue.

That's climate science in a nutshell. The ideas are all there, swirling like the eye of a hurricane. Some day we'll all find out who was right.

Source

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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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