Animation reveals the global sea level 'fingerprints' that show how climate change is affecting Earth

The report below repeatedly links sea level variations to global warming but offers no proof of that.  It's all just assertion.  Natural factors can and do affect sea levels -- such as isostatic uplift, El Nino etc.

And we do well to note Morner's demonstration that most of the sea level changes are the product of "adjustments".

And even after the adjustments (upwards) we are still talking about a stunningly trivial 7 hundredths of one inch in sea level rise per year.  That is obviously a statistical artifact.  The available measurements are not nearly that precise.  There are those pesky things called waves which make all sea level measurements very rough


NASA researchers have reported the first detection of sea level 'fingerprints' that show changes in sea level variability around the world.

They result from changes in water storage on Earth's continents and in the mass of ice sheets. .

The ocean observations, called sea level 'fingerprints,' allow researchers to determine how much the sea level will rise at any point on the global ocean due to glacier melt.

As ice sheets and glaciers undergo climate-related melting, they change the Earth's gravity field, leading to sea level changes that are not uniform around the planet.

For example, when a glacier melts and loses ice mass, its gravitational attraction is reduced.

As such, ocean waters nearby move away, causing sea level to rise faster far away from the glacier.

This resulting pattern in sea level change is known as a sea level fingerprint - and certain areas, particularly in Earth's middle and low latitudes, are hit even harder, and Greenland and Antarctica contribute differently to the process.

For example, sea level rise in California and Florida caused by the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet is up to 52 per cent greater than its average effect on the rest of the world.

To calculate these sea level fingerprints associated with melting ice sheets, glaciers and changes in land water storage, the team used gravity data data collected by the twin satellites of the US/German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) between April 2002 and October 2014.

During that 12-year period, the loss of mass from land ice and from changes in land water storage increased global average sea level by approximately 0.07 inches (1.8 millimeters) per year.

43 per cent of the increased water mass came from Greenland, 16 per cent from Antarctica and 30 per cent from mountain glaciers.

The researchers verified their calculations using reading of ocean-bottom pressure from stations in the tropics.

'Scientists have a solid understanding of the physics of sea level fingerprints, but we’ve never had a direct detection of the phenomenon until now,' said co-author of the study Dr Isabella Velicogna, UCI professor of Earth system science and JPL research scientist.

'It was very exciting to observe the sea level fingerprints in the tropics, far from the glaciers and ice sheets,' said lead author Chia-Wei Hsu, a graduate student researcher at UCI.

The findings are published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The research project was supported by UCI and NASA’s Earth Science Division.

SOURCE




The 2017 hurricanes

The Left seem determined to paint the current hurricane season as evidence of global warming, despite there being no evidence for that.  So a small memoir from one of my older readers might help restore perspective:


"I currently live just south of Atlanta GA. I grew up in Crosby Texas...now in the news because of a chemical plant fire, the results of hurricane damage. My farm home was about 3 miles from that chemical plant.

We are now in the forecast path of hurricane Irma.  I worked on an off shore drilling rig in 1961 when hurricane Carla hit the Texas coast just south of where I lived. We prepped everything and left the rig to fend for itself. It washed off of location and sank. I never went back........ Texas A&M became my new home.

Hurricane Carla ranks as the most intense U.S. tropical cyclone landfall on the Hurricane Severity Index. The third named storm and first Category 5 hurricane of the 1961 Atlantic hurricane season, Carla developed from an area of squally weather in the southwestern Caribbean Sea on September 3

Starting as a tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea on Sept. 3, 1961, Carla steadily gained momentum until it was labeled a major hurricane four days later. After a few days, it became a Category 5, only to be downgraded to a Category 4 by Sept. 11, when it made landfall on Matagorda Island, a 38-mile (61-kilometer) barrier island on the Texas Gulf coast, according to the National Weather Service.

It weakened to a tropical storm after its eye hit Port O'Connor and Port Lavaca in Texas. The hurricane also impacted parts of Louisiana, Oklahoma and Illinois.

In Texas, the highest winds were about 115 mph but sustained winds in some parts hit 170 mph.

The hurricane spawned 18 tornadoes, including 10 in Louisiana and eight in Texas. Between Carla and the subsequent tornadoes, the NWS said 46 people were killed and more than 450 were injured.
Total damage was estimated at $2.36 billion with Texas suffering more than $400 million in damage. In Texas, 1,915 homes were destroyed.

My Dad and I crawled into the attic around midnight and nailed in more roof braces as the roof was starting to lift off. The house survived with no damage but the next morning we were in the middle of a county size lake about 20 inches deep.  Our pecan trees were badly damaged but no damage to our farm buildings or any of the animals.

Others were not so fortunate. There were stories of people being cut off by the storm surge when they thought that it would be exciting to watch the surf. They got the excitement of riding out the storm on a shed roof that they managed to reach as it floated away.

Now we see Climate People using these 2017 storms as proof of Climate Change.  They refuse to compare past years when equally violent storms landed on our shores. Most of the famous ship wrecks, especially the famous treasure ships, went down in hurricanes."




Prince Charles ‘Wrong’ On Climate Link To Syria War

Scientists have accused the Prince of Wales of exaggerating the link between climate change and the civil war in Syria.

A new study found no evidence for the widely publicised theory that climate change was a factor in causing the war, in which more than 300,000 people have died and 11 million have been forced to leave their homes.

The researchers said making “overblown claims” based on poor evidence fuelled scepticism about the need for action on climate change, undermining the cause the prince was advancing.

The prince made the claim in November 2015 before the Paris climate change summit at which 194 countries agreed a global deal to cut emissions. Speaking of the threat from climate change, he said: “There’s very good evidence that one of the major reasons for this terror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”

A study by King’s College London and the University of Sussex has debunked the prince’s claim, which was also made by Barack Obama when he was US president.

The researchers found that although northeastern Syria did experience a severe drought from 2007 to 2010, before the civil war started, the drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on global climate.

The scale of migration away from northeastern Syria was “on nothing like the scale which has been claimed”, the study says. Only 40,000 to 60,000 families moved, not the 1.5 million people often quoted by proponents of the climate change link.

The study said that migration was “probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by drought.”

The study, published in the journal Political Geography, concludes: “Given the urgency of the climate change challenge and the contestation around it, plus the media’s preference for striking, overblown stories . . . it is incumbent on analysts not to exaggerate climate-conflict linkages, or to champion false but headline-friendly statistics.”

Jan Selby, lead author and director of the Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, said:”It is extraordinary this claim has become so widely accepted when the evidence for it is so thin.

Climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence this is what was going on in this case. It is vital experts and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about climate change. Overblown claims only risk fuelling climate scepticism.”

The journal article:

Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited

Abstract

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its
civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria’s descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria’s pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.

SOURCE




James Lovelock On ‘Wicked’ Renewables And Why He Changed His Mind On Climate Change

Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the planet is not going to end any time soon; and, by the way, the answer is nuclear…

This isn’t me speaking, but the views of an environmentalist so learned, distinguished and influential you could call him the Godfather of Green. His name is James Lovelock, the maverick independent scientist perhaps best known for positing the theory that our planet is an interconnected, self-regulating organism called Gaia.

Not ‘Sir’ James Lovelock, I was mildly surprised to discover when I met him at his Dorset home, perched idyllically just behind Chesil Beach. ‘But I am a CH,’ he says, meaning Companion of Honour. ‘There are only 65 of them,’ chips in Lovelock’s American wife Sandy. ‘Yes, but I have to share the honour with Shirley Williams, which dilutes it somewhat — you know, comprehensive education,’ says Lovelock. ‘You’re not supposed to say that!’chides Sandy, clearly amused.

The Lovelocks are delightful company. Our lively conversation ranges from Brexit (they’re both very pro) to the joys of having a hornets’ nest in your house (they kill all the wasps in your garden so you can enjoy picnics undisturbed); they’ve witnessed an awful lot of history (‘I was stationed briefly at a B-17 base in the Midlands. The death toll was hideous, almost as bad as Passchendaele. One day I remember 21 planes  — each with a crew of ten — took off and only three came back. It was devastating’); and they fizz with irreverent good humour. We’d never met before, but they felt like
old friends.

Really old friends. Lovelock is 98, though you’d never guess it to look at him. His movements are light, agile and brisk; his marbles more than still there. One secret is his three-mile daily walk with Sandy; another is that though he used to smoke, he has never been a big eater or drinker. Mainly, though, he puts it down to a lifetime spent doing whatever has taken his fancy: ‘Live life as an independent! Never have a boss.’

Lovelock came up with his Gaia hypothesis more than half a century ago, in the course of a conversation with fellow scientists including Carl Sagan at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he was employed to work out ways of testing whether there was life on Mars.

This got him thinking about the mystery of life on our own planet: our peculiar atmosphere, largely comprising nitrogen and oxygen (unlike Mars and Venus, where it’s mostly CO2), and the extraordinary way that for the past 3.5 billion years, Earth has remained within a narrow temperature band capable of supporting life, even though the sun has grown 30 per cent hotter and ought to have fried us by now. Could it be, he wondered, that the entire planet is an incredibly complex, self-regulating system designed for supporting life?

The name Gaia came later, provided by his friend, the novelist William Golding, after the ancient Greek name for Earth. This didn’t help its reputation with scientists, many of whom dismissed it as a neo-pagan religion. But from the early 1970s  onwards it struck a chord with the green movement, which used it to support its belief that the planet’s delicate balance was on the verge of being destroyed forever by an unwelcome interloper: man.

In 2006, Lovelock burnished his green credentials with The Revenge of Gaia, in which he argued that, thanks to global warming, man was all but doomed. By the end of the 21st century ‘billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,’ he told an interviewer. Climate change was so serious a threat, he told the Guardian in 2010, that democracy might have to be ‘put on hold’.

Within two years he’d had a remarkable change of heart. ‘All right, I made a mistake,’ he told the cable channel MSNBC. He still believed —and continues to believe — that manmade carbon dioxide is a problem that needs addressing. But we’ve plenty of time to do something about it before any dangerous effects are felt, and in any case, the cures being advanced by green zealots are often worse than the disease itself.

One of his main bugbears is biomass, such as the woodchips from old oak forests in the US, which are shipped across the Atlantic to be burned for electricity at the Drax power station: ‘This is one of the most monstrous examples of green absurdity that I know of. It’s wicked!’

Nor is he a fan of wind energy, which he considers environmentally damaging, inefficient, expensive and a scam. ‘There’s so much money in renewable energy. I’m sure there’s a giant corruption going on.’

He’s modestly pro shale gas — only as a transition fuel to wean the world off coal — but his real enthusiasm is for nuclear, ‘so cheap, so safe’, whose dangers, he believes, have been grotesquely oversold by greens for reasons which have more to do with quasi-religious ideology than with science.

‘The way to look at radiation is that it’s about what they call the linear no-threshold. Namely, what the greens say is that there’s no amount of radiation that won’t give you cancer, no matter how small it is. Well, this is as stupid as saying, “Never go out of your home because if you do you’ve a chance of being killed by something or other.”’

SOURCE




Coldest night in 45 years for parts of Australia

Global cooling! If Greenies can see hurricanes as evidence of warming, it's actually a lesser stretch to see cold weather in Australia as evidence of global cooling

IF you thought winter was over, you might want to think again because spring isn’t quite ready to officially take over just yet.

Temperatures across NSW plummeted yesterday with residents in the inland town of Goulburn shivering through the coldest September night in 45 years, with a chilly -5C recorded.

The good news is the cold snap isn’t hanging around for too much longer.

Sky News weather meteorologist Tristan Meyer told news.com.au the cold snap was the result of a high pressure system.

“This high pressure system will also lead to predominantly sunny skies and a warm day over the southeast,” he said.

The cool overnight temperatures was a significant drop for Goulburn with the average minimum for this time of year being 4.6C.

There’s also good news for Tasmanians though who were bombarded with snow last week.

It looks like the icy conditions have eased off and are being replaced with more springlike temperatures.

However there are still some strong wind warnings in place for the South West Coast and Central West Coast of Tasmania for the beginning of the week.

Temperatures dropped to -6C in parts of the state during the cold snap but the freezing weather eventually subsided with Hobart reaching a maximum on 15C today.

While southeastern Australia is shivering, it’s a different case entirely for the northern part of Australia.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a fire weather warning for Darwin and Adelaide River as that high pressure system slowly moves eastwards causing hot and dry winds to sweep across parts of the Northern Territory.

SOURCE

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