Thanks To Global Warming We May Run Out Of Cities To Host Future Winter Olympic Games

This is just modelling rubbish. There are many large cities in the North of the world where winter temperatures fall way below zero.  A 2 degree rise in global temperature would hardly touch them.  They would still be way below zero

If you’ve been enjoying the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, we have bad news for you. Climate change could be jeopardizing the future of this popular quadrennial sporting event.

Competitions such as ski jumping, bobsleigh racing, and snowboarding require a lot of snow and ice, which means host countries should really have average daily temperatures of below freezing.

Sadly, thanks to global warming, locations that have traditionally been perfect for the Games may not be up to scratch by the mid-century. This is the conclusion of researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who published their initial findings in 2015 in the journal Current Issues in Tourism. The study has recently been updated to include Pyeongchang (2018) and Beijing (2022).

The team, led by geography professor Daniel Scott, analyzed climate data from the former host locations and used models to predict the effect climate change will have on February temperatures in throughout the next century. First, they considered a low-emission model, where average global temps increase by 2.6°F by 2100. Then, they considered a high-emission model, where average global temps rise by 8.5°F.

Shockingly, nine former sites would be considered “unreliable” or "high risk" hosts by 2080 under the low-emission model. This rises to 13 under the high-emission scenario. By 2050, between eight (low-emission) and nine (high-emission) locations would already be judged “unreliable” or "high risk".

So, what can be done about it?

Well, one solution is to use artificial snow. This is done by pumping highly-pressurized water through tiny nozzles, which freezes in cold air and transforms into "snow". There is one little problem, however.

“You’re relying on cold air to do the refrigeration for you,” Scott told the New York Times. This won’t happen if the air is above sub-zero.

Alternatively, you could bank snow from an earlier winter or cover bales of straw with a combination of artificial snow and natural snow excavated from somewhere colder. This is what they did in Sochi (2014) and Vancouver (2010) respectively, when temperatures were above freezing.

However, both times athletes complained of poor conditions.

There is the option to bring competitions inside, though this might work a little better for figure skating than it does for alpine skiing.

More likely, we'll see the list of possible locations shrink and the same sites will take it in turns to hold the Winter Olympic Games.

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FEMA is preparing for the future. “Climate change” isn’t part of it

The United States is still reeling from last year’s megadisasters. Puerto Rico lingers in the longest blackout in US history after Hurricane Maria tore through the island, and the scorched earth left behind from record-breaking fires in California is now causing floods and mudslides.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was on the front lines of many of these calamities, had to go back to Congress last September to ask for billions more dollars to handle the gargantuan relief efforts.

With some of the dust settled, it’s clear that the events in 2017 fit the pattern of extreme weather we expect as average global temperatures go up, with strong climate change signals emerging in fires and rainfall.

FEMA has, and will continue to, respond to climate change-influenced disasters. But the agency’s new strategic plan for 2018-2022, released Thursday, doesn’t mention climate change or global warming at all. That’s despite the fact that the 38-page document projects more frequent and more expensive disasters. This is a glaring omission from an agency that deals with anticipating and responding to weather extremes driven in part by a changing climate.

The damages from the hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, and tornadoes in 2017 cost at least $306 billion.

“Disaster costs are expected to continue to increase due to rising natural hazard risk, decaying critical infrastructure, and economic pressures that limit investments in risk resilience,” according to the document.

FEMA did signal that it wants to invest more in “pre-disaster mitigation,” which may or may not include climate change. But it wasn’t so coy in its previous 2014-2018 strategic plan, which noted that the agency “will also ensure that future risks, including those influenced by climate change, are effectively integrated into the Agency’s risk assessment resources and processes.”

Dropping climate change from FEMA’s strategic plan is just the latest part of the Trump administration’s long pattern of erasing climate change as a public policy issue across the federal government. Agencies including the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior have removed climate change language from many of their websites. Other agencies have limited access to policy and technical documents dealing with climate change. And some government research grant applications faced extra scrutiny and rejection for mentioning the “double C-word.”

It’s not just rhetoric. President Trump wants the United States to back out of the Paris climate agreement, and the EPA is working to undo the main policy for restricting greenhouse gases, the Clean Power Plan. The White House’s latest budget proposal seeks a 72 percent cut to clean energy research and reduces FEMA’s budget by almost $600 million from $16.1 billion.

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The bias towards bad news is getting worse, and affecting how we act

‘Deadly new epidemic called Disease X could kill millions, scientists warn,” read one headline at the weekend. “WHO issues global alert for potential pandemic,” read another. Apparently frustrated by the way real infectious diseases keep failing to wipe us out, it seems that the nannies at the World Health Organisation have decided to invent a fictitious one.

Disease X is going to be a virus that jumps unexpectedly from an animal species, as happens from time to time, or perhaps a man-made pathogen from a dictator’s biological warfare laboratory. To be alert for such things is sensible, especially after what has happened in Salisbury, but to imply that the risk is high is irresponsible.

No matter how clever gene editors get, the chances that they could beat evolution at its own game and come up with the right combination of infectiousness, lethality and viability to spread a disease through the human race are vanishingly small. To do so in secret would be even harder.

I fear the only effect of the WHO’s decision could be to cause unnecessary alarm and damage public confidence in the very technology that brings more effective cures and vaccines for known and unknown diseases. It also feeds our appetite for bad news rather than good. Almost by definition, bad news is sudden while good news is gradual and therefore less newsworthy. Things blow up, melt down, erupt or crash; there are few good-news equivalents. If a country, a policy or a company starts to do well it soon drops out of the news.

This distorts our view of the world. Two years ago a group of Dutch researchers asked 26,492 people in 24 countries a simple question: over the past 20 years, has the proportion of the world population that lives in extreme poverty

1) Increased by 50 per cent?

2) Increased by 25 per cent?

3) Stayed the same?

4) Decreased by 25 per cent?

5) Decreased by 50 per cent?

Only 1 per cent got the answer right, which was that it had decreased by 50 per cent. The United Nations’ Millennium Development goal of halving global poverty by 2015 was met five years early.

As the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling pointed out with a similar survey, this suggests people know less about the human world than chimpanzees do, because if you had written those five options on five bananas and thrown them to a chimp, it would have a 20 per cent chance of picking up the right banana. A random guess would do 20 times as well as a human. As the historian of science Daniel Boorstin once put it: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.”

Nobody likes telling you the good news. Poverty and hunger are the business Oxfam is in, but has it shouted the global poverty statistics from the rooftops? Hardly. It has switched its focus to inequality. When The Lancet published a study in 2010 showing global maternal mortality falling, advocates for women’s health tried to pressure it into delaying publication “fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause”, The New York Times reported. The announcement by Nasa in 2016 that plant life is covering more and more of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide emissions was handled like radioactivity by most environmental reporters.

What is more, the bias against good news in the media seems to be getting worse. In 2011 the American academic Kalev Leetaru employed a computer to do “sentiment mining” on certain news outlets over 30 years: counting the number of positive versus negative words. He found “a steady, near linear, march towards negativity”. A recent Harvard study found  that 87 per cent of the coverage of the fitness for office of both candidates in the 2016 US presidential election was negative. During the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, 80 per cent of all coverage was negative. He is of course a master of the art of playing upon people’s pessimism.

This is a human susceptibility and one that is open to exploitation. Even while saying that they would prefer good news, subjects in a subtle psychology experiment in Canada who were told to choose and read a newspaper article while waiting for the “experiment” to begin in fact “chose stories with a negative tone — corruption, setbacks, hypocrisy and so on — rather than neutral or positive stories”. Financial journalists have been found to report rising financial market indices with declining enthusiasm as rises continue, but falling ones with growing enthusiasm as the falls continue. As the Financial Times columnist John Authers said: “We are far more scared of encouraging readers to buy and ushering them into a loss, than we are of urging them to be cautious, and leading them to miss out on a gain.”

That is one reason for the pervasive negativity bias that afflicts the public discourse. Humans are loss-averse, disliking a loss far more than they like an equivalent gain. Such a cognitive bias probably kept us safe amid the dangers of the African savannah, where the downside of taking risks was big. The golden-age tendency makes us remember the good things about the past but forget the bad, with the result that the present seems worse than it is. For some reason people sound wiser if they think things are going to turn out badly. In fiction, Cassandra’s doom-mongering proved prescient; Pollyanna was punished for her optimism by being hit by a car.

Thus, any news coverage of the future is especially prone to doom-mongering. Brexit is a splendid example: because it has not yet happened, all sorts of ways in which it could go wrong can be imagined. The supreme case of unfalsifiable pessimism is climate change. It has the advantage of decades of doom until the jury returns. People who think the science suggests it will not be as bad as all that, or that humanity is likely to mitigate or adapt to it in time, get less airtime and a lot more criticism than people who go beyond the science to exaggerate the potential risks. That lukewarmers have been proved right so far cuts no ice.

Activists sometimes justify the focus on the worst-case scenario as a means of raising consciousness. But while the public may be susceptible to bad news they are not stupid, and boys who cry “wolf!” are eventually ignored. As the journalist John Horgan recently argued in Scientific American: “These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism.”

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Mystery solved: Rain means satellite and surface temps are different. Climate models didn’t predict this…

A funny thing happens when you line up satellite and surface temperatures over Australia. A lot of the time they are very close, but some years the surface records from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) are cooler by a full half a degree than the UAH satellite readings. Before anyone yells “adjustments”, this appears to be a real difference of instruments, but solving this mystery turns up a rather major flaw in climate models.

Bill Kininmonth wondered if those cooler-BOM years were also wetter years when more rain fell. So Tom Quirk got the rainfall data and discovered that rainfall in Australia has a large effect on the temperatures recorded by the sensors five feet off the ground. This is what Bill Johnston has shown at individual stations. Damp soil around the Stevenson screens takes more heat to evaporate and keeps maximums lower. In this new work Quirk has looked at the effect right across the country and the years when the satellite estimates diverge from the ground thermometers are indeed the wetter years. Furthermore, it can take up to six months to dry out the ground after a major wet period and for the cooling effect to end.

In Australia rainfall controls the temperature, which is the opposite of what the models predict, but things are different in the US.

In Australia maximum rainfall occurs in the summer but it is highly variable, whereas in the US, while the summer rain is heavier, it’s the winter precipitation where the big variations occur. This seasonal pattern makes a big difference. Both the Australian pattern and the US pattern appear in other places around the world, but the models only have the one scenario. It appears the modelers figured out the situation in New Jersey and programmed it in for the rest of the world, but whole zones of the world are behaving quite differently.

Models predict that temperature affects rainfall — but in Australia the rainfall affects the temperature. No wonder these models are skillless at predicting  temperature and on rainfall — they are even worse.

As far as I know this is new and original research. Tom Quirk has run it past a few people, including John Christy of UAH who notes that this has been seen elsewhere. Let’s keep up with the peer review…

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Australian PM 'disappointed' the Greens linked destructive wildfire to climate change

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has expressed his "disappointment" that the Greens linked the catastrophic bushfire that ripped through Tathra overnight to climate change.

"I'm disappointed that the Greens would try to politicise an event like this," the Prime Minister told reporters, speaking from the fire-ravaged town this afternoon.

“You can’t attribute any particular event, whether it’s a flood or fire or a drought or a storm – to climate change."

As Tathra residents waited to hear if they'd lost their homes, businesses, and or livelihoods, Greens leader Richard Di Natale rose in the Senate and linked the catastrophic bush fires to climate change.

"We are seeing climate change in our every day lives have an impact on the risk of bush fires in our communities," he said.

"We can't any longer be complacent about risk of bush fires once the end of summer comes around. "And yet here we are with bush fires racing through my home state and indeed my community."

But Malcolm Turnbull said such intense fires are part and parcel of life in Australia.

“We are the land of droughts and flooding rains, we're the land of bushfires,” he said. “Nature hurls her worst at Australians – always has and always will."

“We saw from the air how the fire had not just leapt over a river, but had leapt over streets of houses, apparently without any damage, and then landed on a group of houses which had been burnt out. So, you can see how unpredictable it is.

“We have an environment which has extremes. Bushfires are part of Australia, as, indeed, are droughts and floods.”

Coalition Senator, Ian Macdonald, called the speech "hypocritical and a fraud". "These events happened before. They will happen in the future," he said.

The official New South Wales bush fire season ends at the end of March.

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