NOAA Scientist To Media: Don’t Link Hurricanes To Global Warming

The news media should be cautious about linking hurricane activity to global warming, according to National Hurricane Center Science and Operations Officer Chris Landsea.

In an interview with NBC News reporters, Landsea said he is concerned when hurricanes are used “as a poster child” for global warming.

“There are periods where it’s busy and quiet and busy and quiet, but no trend,” said Landsea, “There’s no statistical change over a 130-year period. Since 1970, the number of hurricanes globally is flat. I haven’t seen anything that suggests that the hurricane intensity is going to change dramatically.

“It looks like a pretty tiny change to how strong hurricanes will be. It’s not zero, but it’s in the noise level. It’s very small.”

Responding to assertions that hurricanes are stronger now or retain their strength longer than was the case several decades ago, Landsea questioned whether that perception is due to modern technology.

Today’s technology is able to immediately detect the full strength of a hurricane even when it is far out at sea.

Global tropical cyclone data, presented by meteorologist Ryan Maue at http://wx.graphics/tropical/, show fluctuations from year to year but little if any long-term trend.

2017 was an active hurricane season in the North Atlantic, prompting the media to link hurricane activity to global warming.

However, the 12 years before 2017 marked the longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane (category 3 or higher) striking the United States.

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Wind Disappears in Britain Leaving Turbines at a Standstill

Britain’s gone seven days with almost no wind generation and forecasts show the calm conditions persisting until the middle of the month.

The wind drought has pushed up day-ahead power prices to the highest levels for the time of year for at least a decade.

U.K. turbines can produce about as much power as 12 nuclear reactors when conditions are right. During the “Beast from the East” storm that hit Britain in March, they generated record levels of power and at times provided the biggest share of the nation’s electricity.

Low wind power isn’t a threat to supplies in June when demand is low, but on a dull, dark day in winter, this could be a different story.

The government has to make sure that there is enough back up generation for times when the wind isn’t blowing. Greg Clark, secretary of state for business energy and industrial strategy announced Monday that the U.K. will take the next step toward agreeing to help Hitachi Ltd. finance a new nuclear reactor.

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Ehrlich’s Guide To Being An Intrusive Arsehole

SPOTLIGHT: The venomous, judgmental tone of public discourse can’t be blamed on Twitter. It was already in full swing 50 years ago.

BIG PICTURE: Convinced that overpopulation threatened civilization, scientist Paul Ehrlich urged readers of his monster 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, to harangue their friends and acquaintances.

The question of how many children to bring into the world wasn’t a supremely private matter. Ehrlich insisted it was everybody’s business.

His book says someone who already has eight kids should have it pointed out to them that they “surely would not behave that way today.”

Childless individuals, he said, should be praised for their “selfless devotion to mankind” even, he said, in instances in which “you suspect [they are] sterile.”

People with two children should be told that “two is plenty,” and advised that any additional offspring would make it clear they were “doing it for personal satisfaction, not out of love of children.”

Conservatives should be reminded that “overpopulation breeds conditions in which communism and ‘big government’ thrive.”

Liberals should be told that “as long as population continues to grow” the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. (Global poverty has actually fallen sharply in recent decades, despite ongoing population increases.)

Those encountering a university professor must convince the professor that he should immediately use his influence in every way possible within and outside of the university…The population crisis must be an integral part of his teaching – it is pertinent to everysubject…

In this context, Ehrlich the censor is once again on full display. Someone in the physical sciences, he says, should “write to the Scientific American and similar journals to ask the editors to stop accepting advertisements that imply that a technology for mining or farming the sea can save humanity.”

Such a scientist should also “write strong letters to his narrow-minded colleagues who are proposing idiotic panaceas to solve the food problem.”

A man who dismissed others as narrow-minded had the chutzpah to insist it was his way or the highway. Multiple analyses weren’t permitted.

Other people had no legitimate contributions to make. Magazine readers shouldn’t even be exposed to ads that implied a different perspective.

TOP TAKEAWAY:  Supercilious arrogance. Scorn, contempt, and disrespect for other people. This has been the Paul Ehrlich playbook for half a century.

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Cooling Ocean Air Temps

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

The May update to HadSST3 will appear later this month, but in the meantime we can look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6 which are already posted for May. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean temps since January 2015.

The anomalies have reached the same levels as 2015.  Taking a longer view, we can look at the record since 1995, that year being an ENSO neutral year and thus a reasonable starting point for considering the past two decades.  On that basis we can see the plateau in ocean temps is persisting. Since last October all oceans have cooled, with upward bumps in Feb. 2018, now erased.

As of May 2018, global ocean temps are slightly lower than April and below the average since 1995.  NH remains higher, but not enough to offset much lower temps in SH and Tropics (between 20N and 20S latitudes).  Global ocean air temps are now the lowest since April 2015, and SH the lowest since May 2013.

The details of UAH ocean temps are provided below.  The monthly data make for a noisy picture, but seasonal fluxes between January and July are important.


Big fall from 2016 ElNino peak evident

The greater volatility of the Tropics is evident, leading the oceans through three major El Nino events during this period.  Note also the flat period between 7/1999 and 7/2009.  The 2010 El Nino was erased by La Nina in 2011 and 2012.  Then the record shows a fairly steady rise peaking in 2016, with strong support from warmer NH anomalies, before returning to the 22-year average.

Summary

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps.  They started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST3, but are now showing the same pattern.  It seems obvious that despite the three El Ninos, their warming has not persisted, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995.  Of course, the future has not yet been written.

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NEW Rebel Book Makes ‘The Case Against David Suzuki’

The smiling avuncular deceiver

Tomorrow the University of Alberta will give David Suzukian honorary degree. That’s a disgrace. David Suzuki despises Alberta — he boycotts it, insults it, encourages lawbreaking against it.

Imagine inviting in such a man, to bestow upon him the university’s highest honour. And not just at any time.

Right when the debate over the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is at its apex; when the lack of a pipeline is causing a bottleneck that costs tens of millions of dollars a day, not just to workers, but to government coffers too.

For the unemployed men and women in the oil patch, the U of A has no time. But for their tormentor, David Suzuki, they’ve got an honorary degree.

There was a backlash — protests, petitions, donors cancelling their money. But the U of A dug in.

The thing about Suzuki is, opposition to him is dissident. It’s underground. Because who would dare contradict him? No-one at the CBC, the largest media company in Canada, for forty years.

They’ve been Suzuki’s PR machine, pumping him out not only over the airwaves, but also into classrooms and the popular culture. He’s ubiquitous. But he’s never been properly vetted.

At his events, at his speeches, for which he charges $30,000 a pop, he rarely takes questions, and if he does, they’re almost always pre-screened.

David Suzuki lives a double life:

Someone who condemns capitalism — but has literally five homes. Someone who condemns fossil fuels — but travels globally, non-stop, and even has a business deal with an oil company. Someone who claims to be progressive, but treats young women as sexual objects.

Now our own Sheila Gunn Reid has published the authoritative guide to Suzuki — it’s called The Case Against David Suzuki: The Unauthorized Biography.

It’s a quick read — less than 100 pages. But meticulously footnoted. So you can check all the facts for yourself.

And we’re giving it away, absolutely FREE, as an ebook at SuzukiBook.com

The idea being: have as many people as possible get the truth about Suzuki. Do the kind of research that the U of A didn’t do — and then refused to do, when they were called on it.

SOURCE 

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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

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