Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming's impact

More "heretics" keep emerging as knowledge and understanding increases

One of the most influential scientists behind the theory that global warming has intensified recent hurricane activity says he will reconsider his stand. The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this week unveiled a novel technique for predicting hurricane activity. The new work suggests that, even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries.

The research, appearing in the March issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is all the more remarkable coming from Emanuel, a highly visible leader in his field and long an ardent proponent of a link between global warming and much stronger hurricanes. His changing views could influence other scientists. "The results surprised me," Emanuel said of his work, adding that global warming may still play a role in raising the intensity of hurricanes but what that role is remains far from certain.

Emanuel's work uses a new method of computer modeling that did a reasonable job of simulating past hurricane fluctuations. He, therefore, believes the models may have predictive value for future activity.

During and after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, which were replete with mega storms and U.S. landfalls, scientists dived into the question of whether rising ocean temperatures, attributed primarily to global warming, were causing stronger storms. Among the first to publish was Emanuel, who, just three weeks before Hurricane Katrina's landfall, published a paper in Nature that concluded a key measurement of the power dissipated by a storm during its lifetime had risen dramatically since the mid-1970s. In the future, he argued, incredibly active hurricane years such as 2005 would become the norm rather than flukes. This view, amplified by environmentalists and others concerned about global warming, helped establish in the public's mind that "super" hurricanes were one of climate change's most critical threats. A satellite image of a hurricane emanating from a smokestack featured prominently in promotions for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

"Kerry (Emanuel) had the good fortune, or maybe the bad fortune, to publish when the world's attention was focused on hurricanes in 2005," said Roger Pielke Jr., who studies science and policy at the University of Colorado. "Kerry's work was seized upon in the debate." After the 2005 hurricane season, a series of other papers were published that appeared to show, among other things, that the most intense hurricanes were becoming more frequent.

What has not been as broadly disseminated, say Pielke and some hurricane scientists, is that other research papers have emerged that suggest global warming has yet to leave an imprint on hurricane activity. One of them, published late last year in Nature, found that warming seas may not increase hurricane intensity. That paper's co-author, Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Emanuel's new work highlights the great uncertainty that remains in the field of hurricane science. "While his results don't rule out the possibility that global warming has contributed to the recent increase in activity in the Atlantic, they suggest that other factors - possibly in addition to global warming - are likely to have been substantial contributors to the observed increase in activity," Vecchi said.....

More here

Update:

Emanuel told the NY Times: "The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet."





Brrrr... Frosty Snake Oil Salesman Admits to Ca$hing In on Global Warming Hysteria

Post below recycled from Gateway Pundit.

Record snowfall continues to blanket the planet.
Global temperatures continue to drop.
Record cold and snow is causing armed clashes.
But, thankfully there were no reports of climate change cannibalism in the news.


Derby County goalkeeper Roy Carroll looks to the sky as snow falls heavily onto the pitch during the English Premier League soccer match at Goodison Park, Liverpool, England Sunday April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/PA, Martin Rickett)

This extremely cold year hasn't stopped the world's most famous snake oil salesman from ca$hing in on the global warming hysteria.
Newsbusters reported this latest admission by Al Gore:

"There are a lot of great investments you can make. If you are investing in tar sands, or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these so I'll have a disclaimer there. But geo-thermal concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency, and conservation."

Newsbusters also has video.

Now, who was it that said that Al Gore should be sued?

Previously:
Brrrr... Antarctica Records Record High Ice Cap Growth
Brrrr... South America Has Coldest Winter in a 90 Years
Brrrr... Iraqis See First Snow in 100 Years As Sign of Peace
Brrrr... Worst Snowstorms in a Decade in China Cause Rioting
Brrrr... Jerusalem Grinds to a Halt As Rare Snowstorm Blasts City
Brrrr... Worst Snowstorms in 50 Years Continue to Cripple China
Brrrr... China Suffers Coldest Winter in 100 Years
Brrrr... Pakistan Suffers Lowest Temps in 70 Years-- 260 Dead
Brrrr... Record Cold Hits Central Asia-- 654 Dead in Afghanistan
Brrrr... Severe Weather Kills Dozens in Kashmir
Brrrr... Tajikistan Crisis!! Coldest Winter in 25 Years!
Brrrr... Record Cold Wave Blasts Mumbai, India
Brrrr... Snow and Ice in San Diego?
Brrrr... Wisconsin Snowfall Record Shattered
Brrrr... The Disappearing Arctic Ice Is Back And It's Thick
Brrrr... Turkey's snowiest winter continues.
Brrrr... Record Cold & Snow Blankets Acropolis in Greece (Video)
Brrrr... Longest Ever Cold Spell Kills Cattle & Rice in Vietnam
Brrrr... Most Snow Cover Over North America Since 1966
Brrrr... Australia Suffers Through Coldest Summer in 50 Years
Brrrr... Record Snowfall Slams Ohio River Valley
Brrrr... New Data Gives Global Warming the Cold Shoulder
Brrrr... Global Cooling Causes Armed Clashes in Canada





Climate change forecasts 'invalid' - NZ researcher

Karori researcher Kesten Green has told MPs there was no need to pass the Government's Climate Change (Emissions Trade and Renewable Preference) Bill - because global warming forecasts are unscientific. Dr Green, the author of a peer-reviewed paper auditing the forecasting methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), opposed the bill because he claimed it was based on "invalid climate forecasts".

He told Parliament's finance select committee that authors of the IPCC fourth assessment report provided sufficient information to observe predic tions violated 72 of 89 accepted principles of forecasting. There was insufficient information to judge how closely a further 51 principles had been followed. "Some individual principles that were violated are so important that violation of any one of them alone invalidates the IPCC's forecasts," he said.

These IPCC forecasts drew on six years of research by 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries, and said global warming was "unequivocal" with human activity more than 90 percent likely to blame for an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, to 379 parts per million (ppm), up from 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution. They warned that by 2050, there is very likely to be loss of high-value land, faster road deterioration, degraded beaches, and reduced farm and forestry production in southern and southeastern Australia and parts of eastern New Zealand. The warmer temperatures and decreasing water resources would increase the burden of some diseases, and global sea levels would rise 59cm this century.

Professor Scott Armstrong, of Pennsylvania University - who wrote the global warming forecast audit with Dr Green - put in a written submission to the committee, claiming they had been unable to find a single "scientific" forecast of global warming.

Source




Cull trees to "save the planet" from global warming!

Not long ago, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid famously suggested that global warming may be causing an increased number of forest fires.In fact, it may be the other way around. "In the green scheme of things, trees are a good thing and deforestation is bad," Investors Business Daily pointed out on March 31. "We must plant as many trees as we can to suck up all that CO2, the pollutant that sustains all plant and therefore all animal life on earth. Old-growth forests must be protected from those nasty loggers."

Trouble is, according to Thomas Bonnicksen, professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M University, forests left in 'pristine' condition have too many trees and too many dead ones, both of which provide fuel for the devastating forest fires that ravaged California last year," IBD reported.

Mr. Bonnicksen has authored a study available at the Web site of the California Forest Foundation (calforestfoundation.org). It shows that four recent large California wildfires produced 38 million tons of greenhouse gases through fire and subsequent decay of dead trees -- 10 million from the fires themselves and 28 million from the decay. That's equivalent to the emissions from 7 million cars for a year.

Mr. Bonnicksen reports by the time the un-logged forests burned they were clogged with 350 trees per acre, whereas 50 an acre is considered normal. Some California forests, he says, have more than 1,000 trees per acre, with young trees growing under big trees, serving as "ladder fuel" to make fires more devastating.He advocates "thinning" the forests so they're less like time bombs waiting to explode.

"Harvested trees can be turned into long-lasting wood products that store carbon," he notes, adding that it's important to remove trees destroyed by fires and insects "so that they don't decay and send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.""So it just might be forest fires that are causing global warming," Investors Business Daily concluded, "not the other way around, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently claimed."

Mr. Bonnicksen concludes that, "Reducing the number and severity of wildfires may be the single most important short-term action we can take to lower greenhouse gas emissions and really fight global warming."Assuming there's anything man can do, that is, to alter a climate cycle that's been repeating every 15,000 years, since long before we had power plants, automobiles or even charcoal grills.

Source






Climate change may help rainforests

Pesky facts again



Climate change may lead to lush growth rather than catastrophic tree loss in the Amazonian forests, researchers from the US and Brazil have found. A study, in the journal Science, found that reduced rainfall had led to greener forests, possibly because sunlight levels are higher when there are fewer rainclouds. But scientists cautioned that while the finding raises hopes for the survival of the forests, there are still serious threats. Climate models have suggested that the forests will suffer as the region becomes drier and will release huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Climate models have suggested in the past that the Amazon will suffer enormous die-backs as the region becomes drier and will release huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Deforestation is calculated to be one of the main contributors to the rising carbon dioxide levels that are widely held by the scientific community to be causing global warming. The loss of the Amazon would cause enormous quantities of carbon dioxide stored in the vegetation to be released back into the atmosphere, intensifying the warming effect.

Researchers identified the greener regions of the Amazon after analysing satelite images and comparing them to rainfall records. The 2005 drought provided them with "a unique opportunity to compare actual forest drought response to expectation". They said: "Large-scale numerical models that simulate the interactions between changing global climate and terrestrial vegetation predict substantial carbon loss from tropical ecosystems including the drought-induced collapse of the Amazon forest and conversion to savanna. "If drought were to have the expected negative effect on canopy photosynthesis, it should have been especially observable during this period. "The observations of intact forest canopy `greenness' in the drought region, however, are dominated by a significant increase, not a decline."

Growth spurts would be "inconsistent with expectation", they reported in the journal Science, and concluded the reduced rainfall was more than compensated for by extra sunlight. "These observations suggest that intact Amazon forests may be more resilient than many ecosystem models assume, at least in response to short-term climatic anomolies," they added.

Further studies will be needed to assess the long-term impacts of changing weather patterns on the Amazon and other forest regions from factors including strong el Nino events and long-term climate change. Deforestation from logging, legal and illegal, and fires were cited as other threats to the condition of the Amazon forests, especially as the areas pinponted as being in the steepest decline were those that were "heavily impacted by human activites". The paper 'Amazon Forests Green-Up During 2005 Drought' was written by Scott R. Saleska, Kamel Didan, Alfredo R. Huete and Humberto R. da Rocha.

Source






EDITORIAL BIAS AND THE CRISIS OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

Despite the majority consensus among climate scientists, science organisations and governments, there is a sizeable minority of researchers, economists and political observers who are concerned about the apocalyptic nature of climate hype and the potential risk it poses for political and economic stability. Sceptical researchers have and will continue to publish critical papers that question important parts of even some fundamentals of the current climate consensus. Will the science media provide a platform for these critiques? Will they discuss the weight of their evidence and the validity of their arguments? Or will the science media continue to ignore challenges to the status quo?

The absurdity of the science media's handling of climate science is well illuminated in this week's issue of New Scientist. In an editorial, the editors try to square the principle of falsification (which they claim is vital for science to progress) with their belief that any such attempt would undermine political attempts to mitigate climate disaster: "Some scientists are challenging our ideas on climate change, which is vital if we are to progress. But to overturn present thinking will need very strong evidence because, as the IPCC states, confidence in the idea that anthropogenic warming is changing our world has never been higher." (New Scientist, 14 April 2007)

Yet, at the same time, the editor's zealous defence of the apocalyptic climate consensus and their fierce resistance to provide critical researchers a forum for rebuttals or falsification attempts undermines their own integrity

Let me conclude: The integrity of the science media will depend on whether they will encourage critique and fault-finding analysis by consensus sceptics - or whether they will continue their course towards unbalanced campaign journalism. Given the well-documented reluctance of mainstream science media to accept submissions by critical scientists and the aversion to report on critical papers published elsewhere, I remain unconvinced that science journalism will moderate its blinkered attitudes in the near future.

The diverse groups of critical analysts and researchers will need to develop alternative infrastructures and media outlets if they wish to provide open-minded science writers and policy makers with judicious evaluations of disaster predictions and a genuinely impartial assessment of evidence. Given the evident biases mainstream science media and environmental journalism, there is a growing demand for more balanced and even-handed coverage of climate science and debates. Scientists and science writers who are concerned about the integrity and openness of the scientific process should turn the current crisis of science communication into an opportunity by setting up more critical, even-handed and reliable science media.

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