You CAN have your cake and eat it too -- if you are a Warmist

The first article below is fairly logical.  Warmer oceans would indeed produce more rain.  But the second article predicts drought from warming.  Which should we take heed of?  Easy answer:  Neither. 

Unless countries urgently boost their flood defences, millions more people will be at risk from river flooding in the next 20 years as global warming increases the likelihood of severe rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday

In Asia, the numbers at risk will more than double to 156 million, up from 70 million, with India, China and Indonesia among the worst-affected countries, according to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Pakistan, already prone to flooding, "will observe almost a doubling in high-end flood risk," with 11 million people at risk of floods unless protective measures are taken by 2040.

The numbers at risk in South America also will double, to 12 million, and Africa will see a rise to 34 million facing flooding threats, up from 25 million, the researchers said.

However, the actual number of people at risk is likely to be higher than the scientists' predictions, as the estimates do not take into account population growth or more people moving to areas at risk of flooding, scientists said.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers calculate how much more flood protection will be needed to keep the risks of high-end floods constant in the next 25 years.

Unless actions are taken - such as enhancing dykes, boosting building standards, relocating settlements and managing rivers - the number of people affected by devastating floods could skyrocket, warns the report, based on models that are 10 times more precise than commonly used climate computer simulations.

The United States and parts of Europe also will need to make major investments in flood protection - such as improving river dykes, river management and building standards, or relocating people - to prevent a rise in the numbers of people facing flooding.

"More than half of the United States must at least double their protection level within the next two decades if they want to avoid a dramatic increase in river flood risks," Sven Willner, from the Germany-based Potsdam Institute, said in a statement.

"In South America the number of people affected by flooding risks will likely increase from six to 12 million, in Africa from 25 to 34 million," the study said.

In Germany the number of people affected is projected to rise seven-fold, from 100,000 to 700,000.

In North America, it could rise from 100,000 to one million.

Global warming increases the risk of flooding because the amount of rain that can fall during an extreme downpour "increases exponentially" as temperatures rise, Anders Levermann, also of the Potsdam Institute, said in an interview.

When more heat-trapping pollutants surround the Earth, more moisture is held in the air, leading to more rainfall.

Cutting these emissions is crucial to reducing flood risks for future generations.

Global temperatures have already risen by more than 1 deg C above pre-industrial levels, and are expected to continue rising.

Countries committed in 2015 to try to hold global temperature rise to "well below" 2 deg C, but the world is currently on track for more than 3 deg C of warming, a level expected cause much more extreme and unpredictable weather, and to cause worsening crop failures and more migration.

"The findings should be a warning to decision-makers," added Levermann. "Doing nothing will be dangerous."

Although river floods may seem less dramatic than hurricanes and cyclones, they can inflict serious damage.

Last year, Peru experienced its worst flooding in decades, causing up to US$9 billion (S$12 billion) in damage. South Asia in 2017 suffered its worst monsoon flooding in a decade, which killed more than 1,400 people, left hundreds of villages submerged and drove tens of thousands of people to relief camps.

Disaster management officials in the region said although flooding is normal during the monsoon months, they received a whole year's rain in just a few days.

But the question of how best to protect people from river floods is a complex one.

"It's not that straightforward to think if only we built dykes and levees along the rivers ... then the world will be a safe place," said Richard Klein, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Building flood protection "will also have an effect on food production and it will increase the risk of particularly high magnitude events", he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Bangladesh for example, regular and often predictable floods dump a fertile layer of river sediment on fields, one reason the country is self sufficient in rice, Klein said.

"People tend to pick up their stuff, move to higher ground and come back when the water's gone, and (they) benefit from the fertile soil that they have," he said.

Building infrastructure to contain floodwaters can also give people a false sense of security, so they are more likely to build in areas still at risk of flooding after a severe downpour. "That's not to say one shouldn't protect people, but ... simply protecting ... has consequences," he said.

SOURCE

Earth will become a DESERT by 2050 if global warming isn't stopped, claims latest study

The globe is set to start drying out dramatically if global warming isn't stopped.

That's the message from a new environmental study published by the journal Nature Climate Change .

Over 25% of Earth will start experiencing the effects of "aridificaiton" by the year 2050 if humans don't meet the changes proposed by the Paris climate agreement .

The study claims that if the Earth's average temperature goes up by two degrees Celsius over the next 32 years, the planet will start to become a desert.

“Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20-30 percent of the world’s land surface by the time the global mean temperature change reaches 2ºC," said Manoj Joshi, the lead researcher of the study.

"But two-thirds of the affected regions could avoid significant aridification if warming is limited to 1.5ºC (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit)."

The study goes on to point out that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will keep global warming under the 2 degree threshold and reduce the likelihood of aridification.

An annual U.N. audit of progress towards that goal showed emissions are likely to be 53.0-55.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2030, far above the 42 billion tonne threshold for averting the 2 degree rise.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said climate-fuelled hurricanes, floods and drought would rapidly worsen unless ministers committed to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

"Paris was just the starting point," she said.

The Nature Climate Change study predicts the regions that will be most affected by an average temperature increase are those located in Central America, Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa and Southern Australia.

SOURCE




Despite What You've Heard, Global Warming Isn't Making Weather More Extreme

We keep reading about how the extreme weather of 2017 is the "new normal" thanks to global warming — even if the weather in question is frigid air. But the data don't show any trend in extreme weather events in the U.S. for decades. Science, anyone?

The latest to make this "new normal" claim is Munich RE, which issued its annual report on the damage costs from hurricanes, floods, wildfires and the like on Thursday.

According to the report, insurers paid out a record $135 billion because of these disasters, and total losses amounted to $330 billion, the second worst since 2011. It was also, the report says, the costliest hurricane season on record. And if you look at the chart in the report, it does appear that the cost of natural disasters has been on the uptrend since 1980.

Naturally, climate change advocates point to this as further proof that the increase in CO2 levels is already causing calamities around the world. "As human-induced climate change continues to progress, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and dangerous," is how the Environmental Defense Fund put it.

Munich RE's own Corporate Climate Center head claims that "2017 was not an outlier" and that "we must have on our radar the trend of new magnitudes."

But what evidence is there that extreme weather "is becoming more frequent and dangerous." In the U.S., there isn't any.

If you don't believe that, then look at the series of charts below, which are taken from government sites, that depict trends in hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires — all of which should be, according to environmentalists, on the uptrend.

What do you see in these charts. There is no trend in any of them.

Look at the data on drought conditions, from the EPA. There is no meaningful increase from 1900 to 2016. In fact, the past decade has been relatively mild on the drought front, with several years below average.

The same is true when it comes to tornadoes. The number of tornadoes in 2014 was below the number in 1954, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association data show. Indeed, the trend line seems to indicate that tornado activity has been lower since the mid-1980s than it was in three decades before that.

What about hurricanes? Yes, this year was a bad one in terms of the number and damage caused by hurricanes. But these storms came after years of lower than normal hurricane activity, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. NOAA data show the annual Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE)  in each region going back to 1970.

As NOAA explains "The ACE index is used to calculate the intensity of the hurricane season and is a function of the wind speed and duration of each tropical cyclone." Can anyone see a discernible upward trend in this index in the past 46 years? As with tornadoes, the index seems to have declined since the 1980s.

Wildfires? Sorry, but as with the other natural disasters, there's nothing here to validate the environmentalists scare stories, either. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there were 67,743 wildfires in 2016. That's down from more than 85,000 in 1986. By December 22 of last year, there had been about 66,000 fires, NIFC data show.

The snowfall trend hasn't changed in decades, either, according to EPA data, although you'd think there'd be less snow as the planet warms. Of course, whenever there's a blizzard or a blast of arctic air — as with the "bomb cyclone" in the northeast — environmentalists start mewling about how that, too, is a sign of global warming. So if there's no trend one way or another, what does that mean?

Even global temperatures aren't rising as fast as the global warming computer models say they should be, as we pointed out in this space recently.

Yet despite these data, story after story continues to peddle the claim that the weather is getting more extreme, using whatever recent string of bad weather as the hook.

OK, but what about the Munich RE numbers showing the continued increase in costs? That can easily be explained by the fact that the past several decades have seen increases in development and population in areas that are prone to severe weather.

If a hurricane battered Florida 100 years ago, the monetary damages would be far, far less than today — even if you adjust for inflation — for the simple reason that Florida's population and its economy have exploded over the intervening years.

It's also not inconceivable that Munich RE could have a vested interest in playing up the potential for climate-caused natural disasters, as a way to justify rate increases. That would present a conflict of interest that journalists — normally on guard for things — are noticeably disinterested in exploring.

In any case, the question remains: If climate change is supposed to unleash waves of horrifying natural disasters as climate experts claim, why aren't we seeing any evidence of it here?

SOURCE




Despite global warming, some reefs are flourishing, and you can see it in 3D

Maybe it’s not the end of the world for corals after all.

That’s one of the surprising findings of a new project called the 100 Island Challenge, led by two scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Jennifer Smith, Stuart Sandin and their team from Scripps are studying the changes taking place on 100 coral reef systems around the world. What they have found offers a surprising, and hopeful, glimpse of the current state of coral reefs.

“We’ve seen evidence of health pretty much everywhere,” says Sandin. “This isn’t saying that every reef is thriving, and every reef has stayed immune to climate change. But what we’re seeing is that after a reef dies, organisms grow.” Call it the Jurassic Park effect: life finds a way.

While they acknowledge that some reef systems like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia have suffered tremendously from recent warming events, other reefs seem to be thriving.

“We were inspired by some observations that we had about seeing coral reefs in far flung places that showed signs of resilience, that showed bounty, that showed wonder,” says Sandin. “And these observations that we had were somewhat in contrast to some of the news reports of doom and gloom, of loss.”

If you don’t believe it, take a look at the video above, which the team has assembled as part of the 100 Island Challenge. In vivid 3D, corals bulge with life, exhibiting vibrant hues that stand in stark contradiction to the pale skeletons left behind after coral bleaching events that have ravaged other reefs.

The videos themselves are an astonishing and important part of the project. Although the corals look computer generated, the videos represent actual reef systems shot with off the shelf DSLR cameras. They are assembled from as many as 4000 photographs, shot by divers who swim lawnmower patterns over the reef, snapping a picture every second. The images are then run through a software process called photogrammetry, which stitches the images together into a 3-dimensional whole, allowing the viewer to glide across the reef with resolution down to one centimeter.

The team has shot over 70 reefs so far, in places like Hawaii, the Marianas, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Tonga, and French Polynesia. This year, they will visit the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Kiribati and several islands across the Caribbean.

They plan to return to each one after 2-3 years to repeat the process. The idea is to gain a fine-grained understanding of the changes that are taking place over time on the reefs, and to do so without harming the coral. It is the most detailed study of its kind on the planet, and it’s providing data the likes of which has never been collected before.

“Now we’re able to do a single dive on a reef, capture thousands of images, bring them back home, recreate that reef in the lab and then spend hundreds of hours extracting data out of that one dive, whereas normally that would have taken hundreds of hours underwater to collect the same data,” says Smith.

Although they have not yet determined how the reefs are changing over time, perhaps the most surprising results they have seen reveal how well many reef systems are doing, even in places facing human impact. Jamaica, for example, has long been held out as a case study for coral loss. But the team visited last year and came away surprised.

“You can see these little colonies of pretty much every species of Caribbean coral alive, growing slowly,” says Sandin.

The team is already taking the study into other interactive realms, with plans to create virtual reality tours of the reefs, adding sound and expanding into 4D by adding the dimension of time into the experience. They believe that the images will become a valuable baseline for understanding the changes, both good and bad, that are taking place on the planet.

“These models are essentially a living library of reefs that will essentially be an opportunity to take a time machine into the past 20 years from now,” says Sandin.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




Australia: New funding for the Great Barrier Reef

This is in response to Greenie claims that the GBR is "dying".  The reef has been there for millennia but Greenies talked up some recent changes as if they were catastrophic and final.  As is now clear even to a Greenie, the reef "fixes" itself.  It has rebounded from the small but highly exaggerated degree of damage that it suffered.

Dead coral revives when the stressor -- in this case a temporary sea level fall -- goes away.  To Greenies, of course, coral deaths are caused by Global Warming. 

The new money seems to be reasonably allocated even if the need for it was built on false pretences

THE number of crown-of-thorns starfish control vessels will be more than doubled under a new $60 million Great Barrier Reef funding suite.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will unveil the package in Townsville today as he continues the North Queensland tour that began in Cairns yesterday.

The Federal Government will spend $10.4 million for what Mr Turnbull labelled an “all-out assault on coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish” to increase the number of culling ships from three to eight.

Another $36.6 million will go towards measures to reduce run-off pollution entering the reef, giving farmers incentives to cut down soil erosion, improve nutrient management, and restoring coastal and riparian vegetation in reef catchments.

“This $60 million funding boost over 18 months will set in motion a major research and development program for coral reef restoration,” Mr Turnbull said.

“For the first time The Commonwealth will bring together key agencies to explore ways the reef can best adapt to the changing environment to protect it for decades to come.

“By supporting the development of innovative new reef technologies we are also helping to cement Australia’s international reputation as a strong innovation-driven economy.”

The Australian Institute of Marine Science and CSIRO will share in $6 million to scope and design the program to develop heat-tolerant coralswith a focus on leveraging private investment.

Mr Turnbull said $4.9 million would be spent to boost the number of field officers protecting the reef and the 64,000 jobs that rely on it.

“It is a vibrant, resilient ecosystem and one of the best-managed coral reef ecosystems in the world,” he said.

“While it is facing increasing threats we intend to remain leaders in reef management.

“The specific science focus of the R & D funding is part of the government’s broader focus on science, innovation and jobs and the central role they will play now and into the future.

“Innovation and science are key to future employment opportunities for Australians.”

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************