WHERE ARE THE DROUGHTS?

One of the pillars of the greenhouse apocalypse is that global warming will lead to a higher frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent of droughts in the future. This prediction is fairly easy to understand in terms of basic physical principles. Higher temperatures will lead to higher rates of potential evapotranspiration (PE), so even if rainfall stays the same or even increases slightly, the increase in PE will make droughts worse, make them last longer, make them more frequent, and make them expand their spatial extent. To make the matter even scarier, many climate models predict a decrease in precipitation in continental interiors, so with less rainfall, higher temperatures, and higher PE rates, drought frequency, intensity, spatial extent, and duration may substantially increase in places like the American heartland.

Literally dozens of articles have appeared in the scientific literature showing results that lead to the prediction of increased drought conditions in the central United States. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) states in the Summary for Policymakers that "Increased summer continental drying and associated risk of drought" is "Likely, over most mid-latitude continental interiors" during the 21st century. In terms of seeing such a pattern in the observed climate record in the 20th century, the IPCC concludes it is "Likely, in a few areas."

An important article appeared in the literature recently with some surprising results given the predictions of the climate models. Konstantinos Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier of the University of Washington have published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters entitled "Trends in 20th century drought over the continental United States," and the results are peculiar -in light of climate model projections- to say the least. In the abstract, they write "Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a small portion of the country over the last century."

Andreadis and Lettenmaier used a Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model to simulate soil moisture and runoff over the continental United States; they ran the model at a spatial resolution of one-half degree and at a daily time step. The VIC solves energy and water balance equations over each grid cell, accounting for variability in soil (three layers of soil are considered), vegetation, precipitation, and topography. The model considers actual variations in precipitation, air temperature, and wind speed over the period 1925 to 2003 to calculate soil moisture and runoff. The team tested the VIC repeatedly and provided convincing evidence that the model very accurately simulates soil moisture and runoff.

Andreadis and Lettenmaier calculated trends in soil moisture and found that 1450 cells (43.6% of the domain) exhibit a statistically significant (p=0.05) upward trend, while far fewer (95 cells, or 2.9% of the domain) showed a statistically significant downward trend. They wrote "the wetting trends cover the majority of the country" and as seen in their figure below (Figure 1), the central United States is populated by "blue" grid cells indicating a significant increase in soil moisture. Furthermore, they found that "Annual trends in runoff are very similar to those found for soil moisture" and that "These results agree with previous studies that have suggested a general increase in streamflow over the conterminous U.S."

Andreadis and Lettenmaier next turned their attention to trends in drought duration, and they found that 47 cells (1.4% of the domain) had a significant upward trend indicating increased duration, while more than twice that many (102 or 3.1% of the domain) showed a significant decrease in duration. As seen in the map below (Figure 2), there is no widespread evidence of any increase in drought duration in the central United States. They computed trends in drought severity and found 121 cells (3.6% of the domain) with a significant upward trend but 198 cells (6.0% of the domain) had a significant downward trend. Next up was drought frequency, and Andreadis and Lettenmaier concluded "There is a predominant reduction in drought frequency for the eastern U.S. and Midwest". Finally, they looked at spatial extent of drought and found "Soil moisture (and runoff) drought spatial extent showed a downward trend which however was insignificant for all thresholds."

So in a world in which numerical models of climate are predicting increased drought frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent for the central United States given the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases, Andreadis and Lettenmaier examine trends in drought over the period 1925 to 2003 and found that "droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, less severe, and cover a smaller portion of the country."

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Decorated scientist defects from the church of Global Warming

Capping Year of Vindication for Skeptics

One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific "consensus" on climate alarmism.

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France's Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L'Express titled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" detailing his newfound skepticism about manmade global warming. See here. Allegre wrote that the "cause of climate change remains unknown" and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall rate has been stable over the past 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.

"Following the month of August experienced by the northern half of France, the prophets of doom of global warming will have a lot on their plate in order to make our fellow countrymen swallow their certitudes," Allegre wrote. He also accused proponents of manmade catastrophic global warming of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!"

Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" in which the scientists warned that global warming's "potential risks are very great." See here

Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States.

Allegre's conversion to a climate skeptic comes at a time when global warming alarmists have insisted that there is a "consensus" about manmade global warming. Proponents of global warming have ratcheted up the level of rhetoric on climate skeptics recently. An environmental magazine in September called for Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics and CBS News "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley compared skeptics to "Holocaust deniers." See: here & here. In addition, former Vice President Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as "global warming deniers."

This increase in rhetorical flourish comes at a time when new climate science research continues to unravel the global warming alarmists' computer model predictions of future climatic doom and vindicate skeptics. Earlier this year, a group of prominent scientists came forward to question the so-called "consensus" that the Earth faces a "climate emergency." On April 6, 2006, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister asserting that the science is deteriorating from underneath global warming alarmists.

"Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary," the 60 scientists wrote. See here

"It was only 30 years ago that many of today's global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas," the 60 scientists concluded.

In addition, an October 16, 2006 Washington Post article titled "Climate Change is Nothing New" echoed the sentiments of the 60 scientists as it detailed a new study of the earth's climate history. The Washington Post article by reporter Christopher Lee noted that Indiana University geologist Simon Brassell found climate change occurred during the age of dinosaurs and quoted Brassell questioning the accuracy of computer climate model predictions. "If there are big, inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining the Earth's climatic future even harder than it is," Brassell said. See here.

In August, Khabibullo Abdusamatov, a scientist who heads the space research sector for the Russian Academy of Sciences, predicted long-term global cooling may be on the horizon due to a projected decrease in the sun's output. See: here

There have also been recent findings in peer-reviewed literature over the last few years showing that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growing and a new 2006 study in Geophysical Research Letters found that the sun was responsible for up to 50% of 20th-century warming. See here.

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter has noted that there is indeed a problem with global warming - it stopped in 1998. "According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005. ".this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," noted paleoclimate researcher and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia in an April 2006 article titled "There is a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998." See here

In addition, new NASA satellite tropospheric temperature data reveals that the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years contrary to "global warming theory" and modeling. This new Southern Hemisphere data raises the specter that the use of the word "global" in "global warming" may not be accurate. A more apt moniker for the past 25 years may be "Northern Hemisphere" warming. See here

According to data released on July 14, 2006 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the January through June Alaska statewide average temperature was "0.55F (0.30C) cooler than the 1971-2000 average." See here

Another bombshell to hit the global warming alarmists and their speculative climate modeling came in a September article in the Geophysical Research Letters which found that over 20% of the heat gained in the oceans since the mid-1950s was lost in just two years. The former climatologist for the state of Colorado, Roger Pielke, Sr., noted that the sudden cooling of the oceans "certainly indicates that the multi-decadal global climate models have serious issues with their ability to accurately simulate the response of the climate system to human- and natural-climate forcings." See here.

Despite predictions that 2006 would bring numerous tropical storms, 2006's surprisingly light hurricane season and the record early start of this year's winter in many parts of the U.S. have further put a damper on the constant doomsaying of the global warming alarmists and their media allies.

Other new studies have debunked many of the dubious claims made by the global warming alarmists. For example, the claim that droughts would be more frequent, severe and wide ranging during global warming, has now being exposed as fallacious. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters authored by Konstantinos Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier finds droughts in the U.S. becoming "shorter, less frequent and cover a small portion of the country over the last century." See here

Furthermore, recent research has shown that fears that global warming could lead to the next ice age, as promoted in the 2004 Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow" are also unsupportable. A 2005 media hyped study "claimed to have found a 30 percent slowdown in the thermohaline circulation, the results are published in the very prestigious Nature magazine, and the story was carried breathlessly by the media in outlets around the world.Less than a year later, two different research teams present convincing evidence [ in Geophysical Research Letters ] that no slowdown is occurring whatsoever," according to Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michaels, editor of the website World Climate Report. See here

The "Hockey Stick" temperature graph's claim that the 1990's was the hottest decade of the last 1000 years was found to be unsupportable by the National Academy of Sciences and many independent experts in 2006. See here

A 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass. See here. Also, according to the International Arctic Research Institute, despite all of the media hype, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930's than today.

Despite Time Magazine and the rest of the media's unfounded hype, polar bears are not facing a crisis, according to biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut. "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present," Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here

As all of this new data debunking climate alarmism mounts, the mainstream media chooses to ignore it and instead focus on the dire predictions of the number-one global warming media darling, NASA's James Hansen. The increasingly alarmist Hansen is featured frequently in the media to bolster sky-is-falling climate scare reports. His recent claim that the Earth is nearing its hottest point in one million years has been challenged by many scientists. See here. Hansen's increasingly frightening climate predictions follow his 2003 concession that the use of "extreme scenarios" was an appropriate tactic to drive the public's attention to the urgency of global warming. See here Hansen also received a $250,000 grant form Teresa Heinz's Foundation and then subsequently endorsed her husband John Kerry for President and worked closely with Al Gore to promote his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." See here & here

The global warming alarmists may have significantly overplayed their hand in the climate debate. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this August found that most Americans do not attribute the cause of any recent severe weather events to global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe that climate change is due to natural variability has increased over 50% in the last five years.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, commented last week on the media's unfounded global warming hype and some of the recent scientific research that is shattering the so-called "consensus" that human greenhouse gas emissions have doomed the planet. "The American people are fed up with media for promoting the idea that former Vice President Al Gore represents the scientific `consensus' that SUV's and the modern American way of life have somehow created a `climate emergency' that only United Nations bureaucrats and wealthy Hollywood liberals can solve. It is the publicity and grant seeking global warming alarmists and their advocates in the media who have finally realized that the only "emergency" confronting them is their rapidly crumbling credibility, audience and bottom line. The global warming alarmists know their science is speculative at best and their desperation grows each day as it becomes more and more obvious that many of the nations that ratified the woeful Kyoto Protocol are failing to comply," Senator Inhofe said last week. See here. "The mainstream media needs to follow the money: The further you get from scientists who conduct these alarmist global warming studies, and the further you get from the financial grants and the institutions that they serve the more the climate alarmism fades and the skepticism grows," Senator Inhofe explained.

In a speech on the Senate floor on September 25, 2006, Senator Inhofe pointed out the abject failure of past predictions of ecological disaster made by environmental alarmists. "The history of the modern environmental movement is chock-full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future. The more the eco-doomsayers' predictions fail, the more the eco-doomsayers predict," Senator Inhofe said on September 25th. See here.

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THE STOCKHOLM CLIMATE CONFERENCE

Al Gore's recent visits to Australia and Scandinavia to publicise the launch of his movie, An Uncertain Truth, jollied up - but regrettably did not materially illuminate - public discussion of the global warming issue. Mr Gore arrived in Scandinavia, by chance, at the same time that a technical meeting on climate change was in progress in Sweden. The science discussed at the meeting did nothing to reinforce the apocalyptic climate message contained in Mr Gore's film, but rather mostly directly contradicted it.

Given that fact, and given that the timing was just a few days before a general election, the lack of coverage of the climate meeting in the Swedish media - which virtually ignored it - was astounding. And especially so because public statements at the time by the president of the European Union Council, Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, stressed that preventing global warming remained of the highest priority for the member states of the union. Mr Vanhanen and his advisors, not to mention Swedish politicians of all stripes, obviously remain innocent of knowledge of the real facts regarding human-caused climate change, such as were presented to the Stockholm conference.

Held at KTH, Sweden's leading science and technology university, and hosted by its president, physicist Professor Anders Flodstr"m, the September 11-12 meeting was entitled "Climate Change - Scientific Controversies in Climate Variability". An audience of about 120 persons from 14 countries heard a much more balanced account of climate change science than is presented to viewers of Mr Gore's film.

For conference organiser, Professor Peter Stilbs, had taken care to invite speakers with a diverse range of views, including people who argue that adaptation to the dangers of natural climate change (which include especially the threat of cooling) is the key issue, as well as supporters of the view that dangerous human warming is already upon us and that no expense should be spared in its mitigation.

Those on the "global warming is dangerous" side of the argument included Professor Bert Bolin, first chairman of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In an extraordinary outburst against a speaker discussing the carbon cycle, Professor Bolin suggested that the speaker might improve his knowledge if he consulted a textbook, and threatened to withdraw from the meeting if critical discussion continued. Happily, the other participants were undeterred by this intolerant disruption, and, after listening to some further comments by Professor Bolin, the meeting continued in constructive vein.

Leading climate modellers Professors Hans von Storch and Lennart Bengtsson described the attribution studies that the IPCC uses to recognise the "fingerprint" of human-caused warming. That such models can mimic the elapsed temperature curve over the past 100 years does not constitute "evidence" for human-caused global warming, but rather indicates only that - given enough degrees of freedom - even the most complex natural time series can be model-matched. Also, many of the models omit such well-known climate forcings as solar change. At any rate, few at the meeting seemed convinced that even the latest and best climate models possessed significant predictive or unique attribution skill.

Former research director of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Professor Sten Bergstrom, described the many vicissitudes of recent natural climate change in Sweden, which have included the presence of a covering of ice more than one kilometre thick over much of the country as little as 20,000 years ago. Commenting about the difficulty of distinguishing possible human-caused changes from natural variability, his conclusion that "the main problem is adaptation to today's climate" resonated strongly with many in the audience.

Many other feet-on-the-ground science results were discussed at the meeting. For instance, the remarkable fact that global average temperature has been static since 1998 despite increasing carbon dioxide emissions. And that the short period of late 20th century warming of about 0.4 deg C that preceded this stasis took place at a rate, and to a magnitude, that lies within natural climate variability. Previous claims to the contrary, including those of the IPCC, were based largely on "hockey stick" or "spaghetti diagram" statistical depictions of climate history that are now scientifically discredited, as explained to the meeting with elan by Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre.

Several presentations contributed to a strong impression that the global carbon cycle is inadequately understood to determine whether all the significant sources, sinks and flows of greenhouse gases are known with the accuracy needed to assess human causation. For example, in 2006 alone a new source - trees - and a new sink - desert sand grains (as described at the KTH meeting for the first time by Dr Peter Stakalos) - have been identified for methane. Though neither of these mechanisms is particularly large, their discovery reinforces the important general principle that we have many things yet to learn about climate processes.

Because Scandinavian countries have a particular interest in the climate events that are affecting the nearby Arctic polar region, the Stockholm conference received a detailed briefing on the recent warming that has occurred there. This was provided by Professor Erland Kallen, director of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, who noted that the late 20th century Arctic warming does not exceed earlier natural warmings in magnitude, such as the one that peaked in the 1930s. Therefore, and despite all the public alarmism that surrounds it, the recent warming may have an entirely natural cause.

What overall conclusions, then, can be drawn from the Stockholm meeting? From the papers presented, as indeed from Mr Gore's film, it is clear that the alarmist case for dangerous global warming rests on circumstantial evidence, unsubstantiated computer models and green political activism. It is therefore premature to conclude, as member countries of the EEC and other Kyoto signatories have, that modern industrial carbon dioxide emissions pose a grave hazard to the planet. It is entirely likely instead that any mild warming that may be produced by the emissions will serve as a useful counterbalance to the future climatic coolings that are bound to develop. In which regard, scientists from the Russian Academy of Science have recently issued a warning that they foresee just such a cooling over the next two decades.

But there is also an important political conclusion to be drawn from the Stockholm climate meeting. It is that carbon taxes and other measures based upon the supposition that dangerous human-caused global warming is underway are quite unable to be justified from the scientific evidence presently to hand. And this conclusion stands even should the precautionary principle be invoked, because our knowledge of natural climate change tells us that future climatic cooling remains at least as strong a hazard as was the late 20th century phase of warming.

The Swedish public might ponder why it was that such an important conference as "Scientific Controversies in Climate Variability" was allowed to pass unremarked by a local media which at the same time gave prominence to the movie An Inconvenient Truth, and that during the run up to what proved to be an historic election. In contrast, Australians and Americans have every reason to be thankful that their governments - in eschewing the Kyoto accord and encouraging the development of the Asia-Pacific Climate agreement - have put the interests of their citizens ahead of Mr Gore's speculative do-goodery towards expensive and ineffectual climate mitigation measures.

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THE NYT RECOGNIZES NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE

And climate unpredictability as well! Very subversive! See the article below:

Study Links Extinction Cycles to Changes in Earth's Orbit and Tilt

If rodents in Spain are any guide, periodic changes in Earth's orbit may account for the apparent regularity with which new species of mammals emerge and then go extinct, scientists are reporting today.

It so happens, the paleontologists say, that variations in the course Earth travels around the Sun and in the tilt of its axis are associated with episodes of global cooling. Their new research on the fossil record shows that the cyclical pattern of these phenomena corresponds to species turnover in rodents and probably other mammal groups as well.

In a report appearing today in the journal Nature, Dutch and Spanish scientists led by Jan A. van Dam of Utrecht University in the Netherlands say the "astronomical hypothesis for species turnover provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of mammal species- and genus-level evolution."

In addition, the researchers write, the hypothesis "offers a plausible explanation for the characteristic duration of more or less 2.5 million years of the mean species life span in mammals."

Dr. van Dam and his colleagues studied the fossil record of rats, mice and other rodents over the last 22 million years in central Spain. The fossils are numerous and show a largely uninterrupted record of the rise and fall of individual species. Other scientists say rodents, thanks to their large numbers, are commonly used in studies of such evolutionary transitions.

As the scientists pored over some 80,000 isolated molars, the most distinct markers of different species, the patterns of turnovers emerged. They seemed often to occur in clusters, which seemed unrelated to biology. And they occurred in cycles of about 2.5 million and 1 million years.

The longer-term cycle, the scientists determined, peaks when Earth's orbit is closer to being a perfect circle. The short cycle corresponds to shifts in the tilt of Earth's axis. The "pulses of turnover," the scientists determined, occurred mainly at times when the different cycles left Earth a colder world.

Previous studies have invoked climate change to explain mammalian species turnover, but they have been challenged or only partly supported by other research.

Paleontologists and mammal experts not involved in the research said the findings and interpretations were provocative and likely to inspire other investigations. One objective, they said, was to extend the study to small mammals beyond Spain, preferably to other continents.

"It's very intriguing," said John J. Flynn, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. "But this will be controversial. Any time you invoke periodic and external forces to explain patterns in biology and climate, it stirs up controversy."

Dr. Flynn said some recent research had led other scientists to conclude that there was no strong correlation between climate changes and species turnover.

While scientists go off looking for fossil rodents outside Spain, there is no apparent cause for concern that another species turnover is nigh.

Dr. van Dam said the 2.5-million-year cycle "has entered the critical stage corresponding to a relatively circular orbit." But any period of high turnover may be tens of thousands of years away, he said. And it may be good news for both mice and men that the climate system has changed significantly in the last three million years.

Ever since the establishment of the northern ice cap, Dr. van Dam said, the climate system has been reacting differently, as reflected in the succession of ice ages. "So it is not easy to predict what the 2.5-million-year cycle will do," he said.

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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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