Is India’s Heat Wave Climate Change?

by Emily Atkin



Emily says so below.  I am sure Emily is a dear little soul but she would fail basic logic.  As I wrote a couple of days ago about India:   "Just one problem:  Even Warmist scientists admit that there has been no terrestrial warming for 18 years.  So how can something that doesn't exist cause anything?"

But I am a lover of the facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts so let me mention something more.  The graphs below say it all. India has just come out of an unusually COLD and wet winter.  It looks like we are just seeing some sort of bounceback.  Emily did not look very deeply did she?





Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo emails:

TEMPERATURES IN INDIA WERE WELL BELOW NORMAL THIS WINTER AND MOST OF SPRING AND IT WAS UNUSUALLY WET. NORMALLY THE HEAT PEAKS IN THE SPRING WHICH HELPS DRAW IN MONSOON MOISTURE WHEN THE JET STREAM LIFTS NORTH OF THE HIMALAYAS STARTING BY EARLY JUNE. THE COOLER APRIL AND EARLY MAY COMBINED WITH EL NINO AND A DEVELOPING POSITIVE INDIAN OCEAN DIPOLE TO FAVOR A DELAYED AND LIKELY ERRATIC MONSOON YEAR. IS THAT NEW - HELL NO - SIR GILBERT WALKER WENT TO INDIA IN 1904 TO TRY AND FIND OUT WHY THE MONSOON FAILED IN SOME YEARS (LIKE 1899) AND HE FOUND THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION (PRESSURE FLIP FLOP DARWIN TO TAHITI) THAT MUCH LATER (1960S) WAS CONNECTED WITH THE OCEAN TEMPERATURES IN EL NINO SOUTHERN OSCILLATION. AND 113.7F IS NOT AT ALL UNPRECEDENTED. WHEN YOU DELAY THE MONSOON AND HAVE THE HEAT COME LATE CLOSER TO THE MAXIMUM SOLAR (WHEN THE SUN IS OVERHEAD OVER INDIA), IT GETS HOTTER THAN NORMAL IN JUNE. WE ARE TRYING TO GET MORTALITY DATA FOR INDIA BECAUSE AS THE LANCET ARTICLE SHOWED 20X MORE PEOPLE DIE IN WINTER COLD THAN SUMMER HEAT. WE WOULD BET THAT 20-30,000 PEOPLE DIED THIS WINTER IN INDIA FROM THE COLD

Isn't it nice to have some informed comment -- even if it is in meteorological capitals?

But wait! There's more! (As the salesman said).  The number of 40C days in New Delhi peaked during the first two years of their GHCN temperature record - 1944 and 1945.  See below:



And even more:  I am reading an academic journal article about extreme weather in India.  And I read: "On 10th May, the maximum temperature at Gannavaram (Vijayawada) reached 49.0C" (p.178).  That was in 2002, when global warming had stopped.  But the maximum temperature reported by the dear soul below was 117.3 Farhenheit, which is 45.3 Celsius.  So it was actually hotter in 2002 than in 2015!

Aren't facts pesky things?


A searing and continuing heat wave in India has so far killed more than 2,300 people, making it the 5th deadliest in recorded world history.

If the death toll reaches more than 2,541, it will become the 4th deadliest heat wave in the world, and the deadliest in India’s history. As temperatures soared up to 113.7 degrees Fahrenheit and needed monsoon rains failed to materialize, the country’s minister of earth sciences did not mince words about what he says is causing the disaster.

“Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon,” Harsh Vardhan said, according to Reuters. “It’s not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change.”

According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, India is getting hotter as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. With these increases in heat, the report — produced by 1,250 international experts and approved by every major government in the world — said with high confidence that the risk of heat-related mortality would rise due to climate change and population increases, along with greater risk of drought-related water and food shortages.

While he said it was too soon to directly attribute India’s current heat wave to climate change, University of Georgia atmospheric sciences program director Marshall Shepherd agreed that climate change is having an influence on many extreme heat events across the world.

“Attribution of events to climate change is still emerging as a science, but recent and numerous studies continue to speak to heat waves having strong links to warming climate,” Shepherd said in an email to ThinkProgress. He cited a 2013 report from the American Meteorological Society (of which is is the former President), which showed that in some cases, extreme heat events “have become as much as 10 times more likely due to the current cumulative effects of human-induced climate change.”

Blah, blah ...

SOURCE






But if we are talking about weather events having climate implications, how about this?

Any bets on ANY Warmist site covering this?

Record Report
Issued by NWS Boston, MA


RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA
523 PM EST TUE JUN 2 2015

...RECORD COLD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET IN BOSTON TODAY...

THE HIGH OF 49 DEGREES TODAY AT LOGAN AIRPORT IN BOSTON SET A RECORD
FOR THE COLDEST HIGH TEMPERATURE ON JUNE 2...BREAKING THE PREVIOUS
RECORD OF 50 DEGREES SET IN 1946.

IT IS ALSO ONLY THE THIRD TIME IN BOSTON THAT THE HIGH TEMPERATURE
ON ANY DAY IN JUNE WAS BELOW 50 DEGREES. THE OTHER TIMES THIS
OCCURRED WERE ON JUNE 5 1945...WHEN THE HIGH TEMPERATURE WAS ALSO 49
DEGREES AND YESTERDAY WHEN THE HIGH TEMPERATURE WAS 49 DEGREES.

THE AVERAGE HIGH TEMPERATURE FOR TODAY IS 72 DEGREES.

RECORDS IN BOSTON DATE BACK TO 1872.

SOURCE. (Capitals and formatting as in the original.  The National Weather Service is obviously relaxed about standards of English expression.  Or is it because they are still using FORTRAN programs that output only capitals?)





Scientific hoaxes and retractions

Pielke the younger writes reasonably below.  His final paragraph below is something I have always advocated -- and practicing it does wipe out global warming.  The statistics on it show only the feeblest effects so the claim should be regarded as "Not Proven" (To use an old Scottish verdict)

Recent controversies surrounding the public portrayal of science suggest that we are too reliant on its fragile findings

The past few weeks have seen some remarkable episodes in science.

Through a hoax, evocative of the Sokal Affair of the mid-1990s, John Bohannon showed how trivially easy it is to start a popular meme based on science. Bohannon ginned up a fake study showing that eating chocolate leads to weight loss, got it published and then was able to promote it onto the pages of several newspapers and television news outlets.

Far more significant than the hoax was the unraveling of a major study published in Science by Michael LaCour and Donald Green. LaCour and Green found that a single conversation with activists on the subject of same-sex marriage was “capable of producing a cascade of opinion change.”

The study was celebrated by major media across the United States, just talking to people who were until that point opposed to same-sex marriage was apparently enough to change their minds, leading to political change. The New York Times was quick to generalize the paper: “The findings could have implications for activists and issues across the political spectrum, experts said.”

Unfortunately, LaCour and Green was too good to be true. Last week Science retracted the paper, based on irregularities and false claims. The retraction led to a series of corrections among US media giants, including The New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio, which had trumpeted the paper’s conclusions when it was released.

The Bohannon hoax and LaCour/Green retraction have a lot in common. Scientific research was manufactured, which resulted in claims that appealed to some popular views, and the media broadly and uncritically promoted the results, advocating popular actions in response.

These two episodes highlight a more general problem: a lot of nonsense is published in the name of science. Writing in The Lancet last month, editor Richard Horton argued that as much as half of all scientific papers may simply be “untrue.” He writes: “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world.” The media, journal editors and universities also share blame, he wrote.

Our considerable talents at doing science means that pretty much everything that can be predicted to occur has been predicted to occur by someone. Similarly, just about any combination of factors can be used to explain observed outcomes, even if those explanations turn out to be among the 50% of scientific findings that Horton argues are false. Consequently, using real world outcomes to select the science that we prefer is a recipe for being fooled by randomness.

As researchers, we should recognize that meaningful relationships ought to be detectable with simple methods and robust to alternative methodological approaches. If the effect you are looking for requires a complex model, data transformed away from intuitive units or sophisticated statistics to detect, then the effect that you think you have found is probably not practically significant, even if you are convinced that it truly exists. Consider that the effects of vaccines or the consequences of smoking are easily seen with understandable data and simple statistics, under a variety of experimental designs.

More HERE





Why do people believe stupid things?

Jose Duarte continues to mine a productive seam on the shameful behaviour of, on the one hand John Cook and his team, and on the other Stephan Lewandowsky. His post a couple of days ago was on the subject of the true value of the climate consensus and he puts the proportion of climate scientists who think that most warming is caused by carbon dioxide at 80%. I had previously thought that the true figure was around the 75% mark, so we are in the same ballpark.

But as Judith Curry points out in an update to Jose's post, this is all slightly beside the point. Many or even most of the the people who call themselves climate scientists are not actually working on anything relevant to the question at hand - they are specialists in impacts and responses and the like. They only believe that most warming is caused by carbon dioxide because their colleagues specialising in the atmospheric sciences tell them so.

The proportion of atmospheric scientists who adhere to the consensus appears to be a little over half according to the same update. But even then, we have to wonder if someone who is working on, say, atmospheric chemistry is getting his opinions on the extent of human influence from the tiny number of people who are working on detection and attribution - a couple of dozen was Mike Hulme's estimate if I recall correctly.

And even then we have to ask how this tightly knit group arrives at the conclusion it does about the proportion of warming that is manmade. Of course the answer is with climate simulations, leavened with parameterisations, assumptions and fudges, and larded with unknowns, both known ones and unknown ones.

The idea that most of the warming at the end of the last century was human caused is not in itself stupid. The stupidity referred to in the title of this post is that a consensus formed by people who know little of a subject, based on the opinions of a tiny group of people who claim to have discerned the truth from a simulation of an impossibly complex system, has any meaning or relevance to the public policy debate.

SOURCE





Climate Policy Models Are ‘Useless’

Models used to craft climate models are “close to useless” when it comes to crafting policies to combat global warming, according to a recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Economist Robert Pindyck writes that integrated assessment models (IAMs) used to craft global warming policy “have flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis” and trick government officials “into thinking that the forecasts the models generate have some kind of scientific legitimacy.”

Why are IAMs poor tools for figuring out the impacts of environmental policies? In the case of global warming, Pindyck argues scientists know very little about “climate sensitivity” and the “relationship between an increase in temperature and GDP.”

“IAMs can be misleading — and are inappropriate — as guides for policy, and yet they have been used by the government to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate tax and abatement policies,” Pindyck writes.

The federal government’s “social cost of carbon” estimate is a key component of evaluating the costs of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities. The basic idea goes that CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, causes a certain amount of warming and drives certain events that impact the economy.

Scientists and environmental activists tend to argue that global warming will drive more “extreme weather” like hurricanes, cyclones, floods, snowstorms, droughts and tornadoes. There are also predictions that disease could become more widespread from global warming, and warnings that food and water supplies could be endangered.

So far, the evidence does not support claims that weather is getting more extreme or many of the other catastrophic claims made by some scientists and activists. But the government has gone ahead and increased the SCC based on models that Pindyck argues are misleading.

Even the Working Group that developed the SCC acknowledged that “[t]here is currently a limited amount of research linking climate impacts to economic damages, which makes this exercise even more difficult.”

In 2013, the Obama administration increased the SCC from $21 per ton to $37 per ton — a move that inflates the benefits of pending federal regulations on CO2 emissions from power plants and other administration actions to cut emissions.

“Claiming that IAMs can be used to evaluate policies and determine the SCC is misleading to say the least, and gives economics a bad name,” Pindyck writes. “If economics is indeed a science, scientific honesty is paramount.”

Other economists have also criticized the Obama administration’s SCC estimate. Economist Robert Murphy with the Institute for Energy Research has argued the SCC is “a very malleable concept that can be inflated or deflated by turning certain wheels.”

“In any event, the public should realize just how ‘unsettled’ the economic side of the carbon debate is,” Murphy said. “The estimates keep bouncing around all over the place, and the estimates are driven by very controversial parameter choices, not objective assessments given by physicists and climatologists.”

So what does Pindyck give as a solution to IAMs?

“I have argued that the best we can do at this point is come up with plausible answers to these questions, perhaps relying at least in part on consensus numbers supplied by climate scientists and environmental economists,” Pindyck wrote.

“It might not inspire the kind of awe and sense of scientific legitimacy conveyed by a large-scale IAM, but that is exactly the point,” he added. “It would draw back the curtain and clarify our beliefs about climate change and its impact.”

SOURCE





Australia May Need to take in many Pacific islanders as their islands sink under the waves?

More nonsense from far-Leftist "New Matilda".  They quote all sorts of "authorities" who say that many low-lying islands will be flooded as global warming melts polar ice. Their reliance on authorities is amusing.  Leftism has always been authoritarian.  Once freed from democratic restraint, we see just how authoritarian.  What were Soviet Russia, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Kampuchea if not authoritarian?.  And the Kim dynasty in North Korea is still providing us with a graphic example of Leftist authoritarianism.

To any reasonable person, however, it is the facts that are the ultimate authority and the facts are pesky for the alarmists.  For a start, global warming stopped 18 years ago.  Even Warmist scientists like Jim Hansen recognize that.  They call the last 18 years a "pause" -- which acknowledges the halt but adds a prophecy that warming will resume.  But prophecies are so far from facts that they are almost always wrong.  So no warming means no flooded islands and no humanitarian crisis.

And even if warming does resume, it probably will not be a problem.  While there are thousands of articles online shouting the theory of submerging islands, the reality is a little different.

Lots of low lying islands and shorelines have in fact been GROWING.  Gradual rises in sea-levels have been going on for a couple of hundred years as a correction to the little ice age but accretion of island-building material has more than cancelled that out in many places.  And its not only Pacific islands that have been GAINING land mass.  It has even been happening in Bangladesh, contradicting many prophecies.  See here and here and here and here and here and here

Countries like Australia and New Zealand may have to provide special humanitarian visas and put in place international evacuation plans as less developed nations in the region are hit by “disasters on steroids” occurring as a result of man-made climate change, the United Nations has been told.

In a submission to the UN’s World Humanitarian Summit, the UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law has warned the impacts of anthropogenic warming are already being felt in the region, and that governments must prepare for large population displacements as the intensity of natural disasters increases.

“The people most affected are generally the most vulnerable already – the poor, living in environmentally precarious parts of the country, without the social networks or resources to get out of harm’s way early,” a written submission by the Centre’s director Jane McAdam said.

“Humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of disasters is essential, but it is ultimately a band-aid solution and is not enough.

“The cost of inaction will be higher than the cost of implementing measures to reduce displacement now, both in financial and human terms.”

Simon Bradshaw, Climate Change Advocacy Coordinator at Oxfam Australia, said it was not clear what ongoing support Australia was providing to Pacific nations to help them deal with the threat of climate change.

SOURCE

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