Australia: Cyclone Debbie snookers coral reef panic merchants

There had been daily predictions of doom for the GBR from the usual suspects.  It turns out that the cyclone was actually GOOD  for the reef. But false prophecies are a dime a dozen from the Green/Left so that is just a minor thing.  Far more interesting is what current tourist divers on the reef are saying.  It turns out that the Greenies declare a stretch of reef as bleached even if the bleaching is confined to a few small patches.  When have you ever heard mention of patchwork bleaching from Greenies? And what is left once you stop obsessing about those patches is still magnificent: "A million times better than the Mediterranean."


CYCLONE Debbie has been a breath of fresh air for coral bleaching on the hardest-hit parts of the Great Barrier Reef.

As the category-four storm wreaked havoc on Australia’s east coast, it also brought blessed relief to a mass coral die-off on prime tourist dive sites in the Coral Sea.

Surveys of the Ribbon reefs off Lizard Island this week show a dramatic drop of up to 3C in coral-killing sea surface temperatures off the state’s ­remote far-north.

“Cyclone Debbie looks like the turning point to allow the Reef to bounce back from this mass coral bleaching event,’’ marine biologist Jess Walker said. “With water temperatures down to about 28C, there will be less stress on the coral, less chance of bleaching, and less chance of coral mortality.’’

Free-diver Audrey Buchholzer, of France, on a three-day dive expedition aboard the Spirit of Freedom in the Coral Sea, said she was stunned by the “flashy” colours and ­kaleidoscope of marine life on the outer reef.

“I had to see it with my own eyes,’’ the 24-year-old said. “I’d heard negative reports the Reef was dead. That’s not true. There are patches of dead and bleached coral, but so much of it is alive and thriving. “It is an underwater wonderland,” she said.

Fellow diver Jennifer Petrie 31, of London, was disappointed to see the Great Barrier Reef is not like it was depicted in Finding Nemo.

“There was lots of dead bits, but still a lot of beauty,’’ she said. “It’s a million times better than the Mediterranean.”

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Warmist can't even get vague generalities right

The head of the AMS has written a letter to Congress in which he pretends that what scientists should in general be doing is actually being done.  But it is not

The stars have aligned for a long-awaited debate about US climate, which was sparked by the March 29 hearing by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology: “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method”. Previous posts described earlier volleys.  Today we see a letter by the Executive Director of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), Dr. Keith L. Seitter,  to the House Committee (PDF copy). A response follows by an eminent climate scientist.

Dear Chairman Smith:

The AMS was pleased to read in your opening remarks for the 29 March 2017 hearing …that you “believe the climate is changing and that humans play a role.” This captures, correctly, that people are causing climate to change. Your question on the extent of human influence is one that has been actively addressed by the scientific community on a continuing basis as we extend our knowledge of the climate system.

The scientific community has learned a great deal about Earth’s climate system over the past several decades, applying the scientific method rigorously to data analysis and to understanding the physical processes that affect global temperature and other aspects of climate change. Hypotheses have been developed and tested through scientific experiments. The results are then systematically challenged and synthesized through open debate in scientific conferences and the peer-reviewed literature. Critically, independent scientists are rewarded for uncovering flaws or shortcomings in the work of their colleagues, so the scientific process is inherently self-correcting over time. Results that withstand scrutiny, validation, and replication by independent researchers are the basis of our physical understanding of how the climate changes.

We can now say with very high levels of confidence, based on literally thousands of independent research efforts and multiple independent lines of evidence, that most of the warming our planet has experienced over the past 50 years is due to human activity. Indeed, to suggest that humans are not responsible for most of the warming we have experienced over the past 50 years indicates a disregard for the scientific process and the vast amount of testable evidence that has been amassed on this subject.

A fundamental aspect of science is prediction. The ability to predict the precise time and location of the swath of totality for a solar eclipse — many years in advance — based on our understanding of celestial physics is just one example of a success story for science. Another, from the AMS community of scientists, is our increasing ability to forecast the weather, and especially highly impactful severe weather, days in advance. This capability is a combination of increased understanding of the physical processes that influence weather; increased observational capabilities that provide the present state of the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, etc.; and increased computational power to take advantage of that physical understanding and observational data.

It is inconceivable that a human disaster like the Galveston hurricane of 1900 would occur today thanks to the observational and predictive power of the weather enterprise. Having predictive capabilities has been critical in reducing the loss of life and property, as well as reducing economic disruption from severe weather events.

As a reflection of the distribution of weather, climate is influenced by the same physical processes and our increasing understanding of those processes provides an increasing capability to project future changes in climate. While the characteristics of weather that matter to us most have inherent limits of predictability on the order of weeks, our understanding of the climate system shows us that projections of climate change over many years are possible. As noted in the AMS Statement on Climate Change:

“Climate projections for decades into the future are made using complex numerical models of the climate system that account for changes in the flow of energy into and out of the Earth system on time scales much longer than the predictability limit (of about two weeks) for individual weather systems. The difference between weather and climate is critically important in considering predictability. Climate is potentially predictable for much longer time scales than weather for several reasons.

“One reason is that climate can be meaningfully characterized by seasonal-to-decadal averages and other statistical measures, and the averaged weather is more predictable than individual weather events. A helpful analogy in this regard is that population averages of human mortality are predictable while life spans of individuals are not. A second reason is that climate involves physical systems and processes with long time scales, including the oceans and snow and ice, while weather largely involves atmospheric phenomena (e.g., thunderstorms, intense snow storms) with short time scales. A third reason is that climate can be affected by slowly changing factors such as human-induced changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, which alter the natural greenhouse effect.”

Climate models simulate the important aspects of climate and climate change based on fundamental physical laws of motion, thermodynamics, and radiative transfer. These models report on how climate would change in response to several specific “scenarios” for future greenhouse gas emission possibilities.

Future climate change projections have uncertainties that occur for several reasons — because of differences among models, because long-term predictions of natural variations (e.g., volcanic eruptions and El Niño events) are not possible, and because it is not known exactly how greenhouse gas emissions will evolve in future decades. Future emissions will depend on global social and economic development, and on the extent and impact of activities designed to reduce greenhouse gas and black carbon emissions.

While the uncertainties inherent in climate projections mean the climate will never be as predictable as a solar eclipse, the basis of those projections on known physical processes allows the scientific process to be applied rigorously, which leads to increasing confidence in the envelope of possible future climate scenarios those projections provide.

The AMS community recognizes the critical importance of developing climate change policy based on the best possible information. We stand ready to assist you and the House Science Committee to ensure that the best available scientific knowledge and understanding on climate and climate change are used in policy issues facing the nation.

———————- End Letter. ———————-

A comment about the Director’s logic:

The core of it presents something resembling a syllogism.

Astronomers can accurately predict solar eclipses far in advance.
Meteorologists can accurately predict weather days in advance.
“{P}rojections of climate change over many years are possible.”
“{T}he basis of those projections on known physical processes allows the scientific process to be applied rigorously”.
“{W}hich leads to increasing confidence in the envelope of possible future climate scenarios those projections provide.”

But Dr. Seitter draws no conclusion for Chairman Smith from this chain of statements. Does this “increasing confidence” mean low but getting better — or high confidence, providing a sufficient basis for making vital public policy? They have different implications for Congress when making policy.

A climate scientist responds to the Director:

Professor Roger Pielke Sr. (bio below) sent the House committee a response to Dr. Seitter’s letter, looking at key excerpts.

(1)  “Hypotheses have been developed and tested through scientific experiments.”

This is incorrect. They are not doing “experiments” but are performing model-model comparisons (e.g. with and without added CO2) which is a fundamentally flawed approach as the a priori assumption is made that the natural runs are skillful. They have not, however, shown that skill. When hindcast multi-decadal model predictions are made (in which when the models are not constrained by real world observations) they do poorly as documented in numerous studies in the literature). See the ones listed in my powerpoint: “A New Paradigm for Assessing the Role of Humanity in the Climate System and in Climate Change” (2017).

(2) “Critically, independent scientists are rewarded for uncovering flaws or shortcomings in the work of their colleagues, so the scientific process is inherently self-correcting over time.”

Hardly, as exemplified by how Michael Mann behaved at the Hearing. If scientists object to the framing that Seitter presents in the letter, they are vilified or ignored. They are subsequently excluded from committees, etc that develop AMS statements and other assessments. Judy Curry and John Christy have clearly articulated this groupthink.

(3) “We can now say with very high levels of confidence, based on literally thousands of independent research efforts and multiple independent lines of evidence, that most of the warming our planet has experienced over the past 50 years is due to human activity. Indeed, to suggest that humans are not responsible for most of the warming we have experienced over the past 50 years indicates a disregard for the scientific process and the vast amount of testable evidence that has been amassed on this subject.”

This conclusion is based on the flawed assumption that the models without including added CO2 (and aerosols) can accurately predict the natural climate system. They cannot. Thus the claim of attribution is not scientifically rigorous.

(4)  “Another, from the AMS community of scientists, is our increasing ability to forecast the weather, and especially highly impactful severe weather, days in advance.”

I agree, major advancements have been made. But they do not translate over into longer range forecasts, even seasonal as exemplified by the failure to predict the extreme rains in California this past winter.

(5) “As a reflection of the distribution of weather, climate is influenced by the same physical processes and our increasing understanding of those processes provides an increasing capability to project future changes in climate.”

This is wrong. Climate involves many more processes (biogeochemical, cryospheric etc) which are not important on multi-day time periods. Weather models also have initial real world observations which constrain the model predictions until that knowledge is lost as the forecast evolves. Multi-decadal climate predictions have no such constraint.

(6)  He gives this excerpt from the AMS Statement text (which was made by a small subset of AMS members and not voted on by the members): “Climate is potentially predictable for much longer time scales than weather for several reasons. One reason is that climate can be meaningfully characterized by seasonal-to-decadal averages and other statistical measures, and the averaged weather is more predictable than individual weather events.”

This is also in error. The statement assumes a difference in weather and climate that does not exist. It is just the averaging time for the forecasts that matter. With weather, it is daily average temperature, for example, while for climate it could be decadal average temperature. Analyses of longer term climate data show large variations and step changes even in decadal averaged climate data.

(7) The Statement also says “A second reason is that climate involves physical systems and processes with long time scales.”

He does not even seem to realize that the climate system also includes biological and chemical parts of the climate system, as was reported on in “Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties” by the National Research Council, 2005.

(8) “Climate models simulate the important aspects of climate and climate change based on fundamental physical laws of motion, thermodynamics, and radiative transfer.”

This is easy to show as wrong. The models have a fundamental part (e.g. pressure gradient force, advection,gravity) but clouds, precipitation, radiative flux divergence, turbulence, vegetation and so forth) are all parameterized using tuned constants and coefficients). I discuss this for one type of weather model is my book Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling (2013). The climate models are, therefore, not fundamental tools and it is erroneous to make such a claim. These models are the basis for claims on the dominance of added CO2 in changing regional and global climate.

(9)  “These models report on how climate would change in response to several specific “scenarios” for future greenhouse gas emission possibilities.”

The assumption that climate models accurately predict changes in climate due to increases in just one human climate forcing is absurd. The real world climate system has more variations on multi-decadal time periods than those models produce and there are a variety of other human climate forcings that Seitter neglects. Even the AMS itself has a Statement to show this: “Inadvertent Weather Modification” (Nov 2010). I was on this Committee. But Seitter ignored it.

Thus, I urge Congressman Smith to look at Keith Seitter’s letter very critically.

About the author

Roger Pielke Sr. is currently a Senior Research Scientist in Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, and now serves there as a Senior Research Associate.

SOURCE




Enough Protection Already

“Trump may have just signed a death warrant for our planet!” warns CNN host Van Jones.

“Disaster for Clean Water, Air,” says the Environmental Working Group.

Give me a break.

Regulation zealots and much of the media are furious because President Donald Trump canceled Barack Obama’s attempt to limit carbon dioxide emissions. But Trump did the right thing.

CO2 is what we exhale. It’s not a pollutant. It is, however, a greenhouse gas, and such gases increase global warming. It’s possible that this will lead to a spiral of climate change that will destroy much of Earth!

But probably not. The science is definitely not settled.

Either way, Obama’s expensive regulation wouldn’t make a discernible difference. By 2030 — if it met its goal — it might cut global carbon emissions by 1 percent.

The Earth will not notice.

However, people who pay for heat and electricity would notice. The Obama rule demanded power plants emit less CO2. Everyone would pay more — for no useful reason.

I say “would” because the Supreme Court put a “stay” on the regulation, saying there may be no authority for it.

So Trump proposes a sensible cut: He’ll dump an Obama proposal that was already dumped by courts. He’d also reduce Environmental Protection Agency spending by 31 percent.

Good!

Some of what regulators do now resembles the work of sadists who like crushing people. In Idaho, Jack and Jill Barron tried to build a house on their own property. Jack got permission from his county. So they started building.

They got as far as the foundation when the EPA suddenly declared that the Barrons’ property was a “wetland.”

Some of their land was wet. But that was only because state government had not maintained its own land, adjacent to the Barrons’ property, and water backed up from the state’s land to the Barrons’.

The EPA suddenly said, “You are building on a wetland!” and filed criminal charges against them. Felonies. When government does that, most of us cringe and give up. It costs too much to fight the state. Government regulators seem to have unlimited time and nearly unlimited money.

But Jack was mad enough to fight. He spent $200,000 on his own lawyers.  Three years later, a jury cleared Jack of all charges. But even that didn’t stop the EPA.

Jill Barron told me, “We won, but after we were home for a month maybe, the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA sent us another letter saying, ‘how nice for you that you won in the criminal court, but we still feel it’s a wetlands.’ And the decision made by the jury did not matter to them. ‘And if you don’t get off the property, we’re going to fine you (in) civil (court).'”

The EPA threatened a fine of $37,500 a day. The Barrons sold their home and moved into a trailer.  “We’ll be bankrupt, obviously.” Jill told me, “You have no idea what you’re up against. You don’t know the power that is the EPA.”

So I’m glad that Trump wants to limit the EPA. Scott Pruitt, the agency’s new director, understands that bureaucrats often abuse their power. When he was Oklahoma attorney general, he sued the EPA 13 times for regulatory overreach. I hope he cuts the bureaucrats back to proper size.

The agency was necessary in 1970, when it was created. At the time, cities dumped whatever we flushed into nearby waterways — with no treatment.

Smokestacks filled the air with actual pollutants: soot, sulfur dioxide, etc. In New York City, we didn’t dare leave windows open because filth would blow in.

The EPA required sewage treatment, scrubbers in smokestacks and catalytic converters in car exhaust systems. The regulations worked. America’s air and water is cleaner than it’s been for decades. I can even swim in the Hudson River, right next to millions of people — who are still flushing.

Now, in a rational world, the EPA would say, “Stick a fork in it, it’s done! EPA now stands for ‘ Enough Protection Already.'” But bureaucracies never say they’re done. “Done” means bureaucrats are out of work. Can’t have that.

So politicians keep adding unnecessary new rules and keep harassing people like the Barrons.

SOURCE




EPA Getting Its Just Deserts  

A recent headline in the LA Times reads, “At Trump’s EPA, going to work can be an act of defiance.” The article focuses on complaints from Environmental Protection Agency employees who find themselves in a state of despair “with morale plummeting … since President Trump took office.” Evidently, numerous employees at the agency have been calling former EPA California regional office director Jared Blumenfeld looking to find work elsewhere. Blumenfeld says, “The number one call I get everyday is, ‘Jared, can you help us find work somewhere else?’” There were also reports surfacing days after Trump’s inauguration of EPA employees “coming to work in tears.”

Experiencing a change in management can be challenging, but juxtaposed to distress experienced by many Americans who have been abused by the EPA’s unchecked power it quite simply doesn’t even compare.

Trump’s agenda is to cut the bloated bureaucracy down to size and challenge what has become an increasingly leftist bent within the agency. That could downsize the agency’s workforce by some 3,000. No one likes to lose their job, but how many thousands of Americans have lost their jobs due to the EPA’s heavy-handed unilateral action in the creation of oppressive business killing regulations under the dubious guise of fighting climate change? Or what about the litany of individuals who have lost their property rights due to the EPA’s action in declaring their private property to be protected lands? That’s followed by steep fines should property owners dare to engage in responsible use and development of their own land. The EPA complains of Trump being opposed to “science,” but in reality it is the EPA that has increasingly favored politically leftist pseudo-scientific policy over and against sound-scientific practice and policy. The agency has routinely hidden its research findings while continuing to press for increasingly burdensome “environmentally friendly” regulations.

The EPA has been the schoolyard bully for far too long and with Trump effectively hitting the agency in its proverbial nose, its career bureaucrats now seek sympathy as they sit and cry about how unfair life is.

SOURCE





Ireland going wishy washy on climate change

The State climate change watchdog says the Government’s draft plan for reducing carbon emissions lacks substance, detail and analysis about how the objectives are to be achieved.

John FitzGerald, chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council, says there must be “substantial changes” in the final version of the National Mitigation Plan due for publication in June.

However, Prof Fitzgerald he warns that delays that mean the draft version was only published 12 days ago will limit the council’s ability to offer useful advice for the final document.

The long overdue plan — the first climate action plan in 10 years — is meant to map the way for Ireland to drastically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and cut the associated carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, as required by the EU.

Prof FitzGerald signalled the council’s concerns about it in a letter to Minister for Communications, Climate, and the Environment Denis Naughten on March 7, a week before the draft version was published.

He wrote in anticipation that the document would fall short of what was required to make clear the steps that must be taken by industry, transport, farming and the domestic sectors.

He said at the weekend that nothing in the draft subsequently published did anything to allay the council’s concerns.

In the letter, Prof FitzGerald had written that the council wanted the plan to “address the achievement of the 2050 national transition objective in a substantive manner”.

“The Council would expect to see further and more detailed analysis of policies,” he wrote, adding that this would require “analysis of costs and benefits of historic, current and planned policies; analysis of barriers to implementation; and analysis of projections for how far away Ireland is from meeting agreed emissions targets as a result of current and new actions under the National Mitigation Plan.”

Since seeing the draft, he was not reassured. “They did not deal with the issues which we raised in terms of them showing a path to 2050 so the points, I’m afraid, have not been addressed,” he said.

Prof FitzGerald added that the council had previously made the same points in their first annual report published last November.   “Then we reiterated it in the letter [of March 7] more clearly and I’m afraid there’s still a long way to go,” said Prof FitzGerald.

The letter also referred to the delays in publishing the plan.  "These delays limit the time available for the council to consider the draft National Mitigation Plan and, therefore, to provide meaningful advice to you as Minister with responsibility for the Plan, and to other Ministers who are responsible for key sectoral mitigation plans,” he said.

The draft plan is out for public consultation until the end of next month and there is a statutory obligation to finalise it by mid-June.

“Our concern in terms of timing is that for us to provide good comments on the National Mitigation Plan we need quite some time to do research because our comments will be based on evidence rather than back of the envelope calculations,” said Prof FitzGerald.

SOURCE

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