By Nishika Patel, The Standard
As Hong Kong shivers through its second-longest cold spell since 1885, scientists point to global warming to explain the abnormal cold weather phenomenon worldwide. Unusually cold weather is gripping a number of countries, including China and Canada. “We are seeing extremely unusual weather across the world,” said polar researcher Rebecca Lee Lok-sze. “This is due to human activities and our style of living. Carbon dioxide emissions are heavy, which is changing the weather rapidly. We could see colder winters and hotter summers in the future in Hong Kong.”
Greenpeace echoed the view, saying mainland scientists had also concluded that the extreme cold weather in China was triggered by climate change. “This does not only cause an increase in global warming but also causes extreme weather patterns,” said campaigner Edward Chan. Hong Kong has also experienced more than 456 hours of cold weather this winter - more than double the 205-hour record in January 2004. Read more here.
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up with That
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Land-Ocean Global temperature index data was released yesterday for the month of January, 2008. Like we’ve reported before for other datasets, including the RSS and UAH satellite temperature anomalies, GISS also had a sharp drop in January. The GISS change in temperature was -.75C, which is larger than the satellite data from UAH change of -.588C and the RSS RSS change of -.629C.
The change in temperature of -.75C from January 2007 to January 2008 appears to be the largest single year to year January drop for the entire GISS data set. This is yet one more indication of the intensity of planet-wide cooler temperatures seen in January 2008, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, which has seen record amounts of snow coverage extent as well as new record low surface temperatures in many places. Read full blog here.
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By By John Goetz, on Climate Audit
Back in September when I was busy trying to figure out how Hansen combined station data, I was bothered by the fact that he used annual averages as the basis for combining scribal records (via the “bias method") rather than monthly averages, which are readily available in the records that he uses. In my thinking, the use of monthly averages would provide twelve times the number of data points to use for combining records.
Recently, I began wondering just how much estimation is going on. On February 7 I downloaded the raw GHCN data (v2.mean.Z) from the NOAA FTP site to see if I could get a handle on how much estimation Hansen does by examining the frequency of missing monthly data. Hansen does not use every single record from this dataset, but he does use almost all of them. Thus, an analysis of the GHCN data should provide a close approximation of how much estimation Hansen does.
The yellow section represents the percentage of station records with fewer than twelve months of valid data, but enough data for Hansen’s algorithm to calculate an estimated average. The red section represents the percentage of station records missing enough data to preclude even an estimation of the annual average temperature.
To compound the problem, the last thirty years have seen a significant station record die-off. Most are familiar with the graphic on the GISS website showing the number of stations used in Hansen’s analysis. I always found it interesting that this graphic ends with the year 2000, and seems to have a rather precipitous drop in stations during that year. Thus, I decided to count the number of GHCN records on an annual basis, and the results tracked rather well with the GISS graphic. Note that my count is of records, whereas Hansen counts stations. Prior to 1992 multiple records might consolidate to a single station, which explains why my absolute numbers are higher than Hansen’s. This chart shows the number of records on an annual basis since 1880:
The above graphic shows that, while GISS says 2007 was the hottest year on record and GHCN indicates it had the second highest level of temperature estimation, GHCN also indicates that the number of data points for 2007 were the fewest since before 1900.
To summarize what I am seeing from the GHCN data: (1) the number of stations / records has been dropping dramatically in recent years and (2) with that drop the quality of the record-keeping has also dropped dramatically because we are seeing a corresponding rise in estimated annual temperatures and/or insufficient data to calculate an annual temperature. Using this data, GISS is showing that the temperature anomaly in recent years is the highest recorded in the historical record. Read full assessment here.
Investor’s Business Daily
Not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV - the sun. Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles. To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming. Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity. Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle. This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere. Read more here.
Written by Jerry Carlson
In March 2007 the UK’s Channel 4 broadcast a biting documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. It debunked most of the major arguments of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning video, An Inconvenient Truth. The Chinese word for crisis is a combination of the two ideograms Wei, which means “danger” and Ji, which means “opportunity.” In the past several months, a new “crisis” has heated up the controversy over man-made global warming.
A few major-media writers and TV personalities are actually reporting statements by credible scientists who are challenging the assumption that carbon dioxide is the primary force causing global warming. There’s a real possibility that big-name journalists will break ranks and pursue their next Pulitzer Prize by exposing the lack of scientific consensus on CO2 as a planet-heating pollutant. That would create a crisis of confidence among the activists, researchers and global-governance apparatchiks who want a global carbon tax to build their political and financial power base.
As an agricultural journalist, I find this a fascinating new development in the climate controversy. I’ve studied weather and climate for more than 50 years. In the early 1970s, I wrote a short book, Tomorrow’s Wild Weather, which warned what could happen if there was a long-term continuation of the cooling trends in the mid-latitudes since the 1930s. As climatologist Reid Bryson advised me at the time, a cooler climate in temperate zones would have been serious for world agriculture: Westerly winds would intensify, making U.S. weather more extreme. Africa’s Sahel desert would expand much farther southward, spreading famine across northern Africa. The data looked ominous: Average temperature in the 48 U.S. states had fallen by more than six-tenths of a degree Celsius since 1930. This cooling attracted widespread press coverage and even some political pressure-to reduce “aerosols” or fine particles of pollutants which must be making our atmosphere more opaque. But the “New Ice Age” scare faded as more refined data emerged and the longer-term, slow recovery from the Little Ice Age resumed.
I’ve continued to follow the climate controversy, especially since the 1997 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since that conference, billions of dollars in government funding have generated floods of research data, a myriad of computer models, political posturing and the Kyoto Protocol. Read more here.
By John Tierney, New York Times Tierney Lab Blog
Suppose that the pessimistic forecasts of global warming are accurate. Suppose that the planet’s temperature rises according to the high-end scenario of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that we experience the economic and social impacts (like hunger, malaria and coastal flooding) projected by the much-publicized Stern Review sponsored by the British government. Does that mean our best course of action is to quickly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases?
That’s the question addressed in a new report by Indur Goklany for the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that has taken issue with many of the dire predictions about global warming. “The surprising conclusion using the Stern Review’s own estimates,” Dr. Goklany writes, “is that future generations will be better off in the richest but warmest” of the I.P.C.C.’s scenarios. He concludes that cutting emissions will do much less good than encouraging sustainable development in poor countries and policies of “focused adaptation” to deal with disease and environmental problems like coastal flooding. For a fifth the cost of the Kyoto Protocol, he calculates, these adaptation policies could yield more immediate and also long-term benefits than would a policy that entirely halted global warming (which would cost far, far more than Kyoto).
He argues that this path isn’t merely an economic but also a moral imperative: For the foreseeable future, people will be wealthier-and their well-being higher-than is the case for present generations both in the developed and developing worlds and with or without climate change. The well-being of future inhabitants in today’s developing world would exceed that of the inhabitants of today’s developed world under all but the poorest scenario. Future generations should, moreover, have greater access to human capital and technology to address whatever problems they might face, including climate change. Hence the argument that we should shift resources from dealing with the real and urgent problems confronting present generations to solving potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier and better positioned generations is unpersuasive at best and verging on immoral at worst.
By Patrick J. Michaels in the Spectator
The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning us of “Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica.” A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thought the opposite would occur. The Post went full-bore with this one, spreading the article on to an entire interior page. The piece ends by noting that Rajenda Pachauri, head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is so concerned that he’s is personally going down to inspect the situation.
He should. Before he even gets to Antarctica, Pachauri is going to see something even more surprising than Rignot’s finding. Despite a warming Southern Ocean, the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost thirty years ago. This represents a continuation of the record set last winter (our summer).
One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it’s blatant. Midway through the Post’s page-long article comes a statement that “these new findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate.” Wouldn’t that have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now larger than ever measured? See full story here.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
By Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, The New American
A roughly linear global temperature increase of about 0.5C per 100 years seems to have occurred from about 1800, or even much earlier, to the present. This value may be compared with what the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists consider to be the manmade greenhouse effect of 0.6C per 100 years. This long-lasting linear warming trend is likely to be a natural change.
One possible cause of the linear increase may be Earth’s continuing recovery from the Little Ice Age. This trend (0.5C/100 years) should be subtracted from the temperature data during the last 100 years when estimating the manmade contribution to the present global warming trend. Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend is attributable to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. This conclusion is contrary to the 2007 IPCC Report, which states that “most” of the present warming is due to the manmade greenhouse effect.
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The public is greatly alarmed and thus concerned about climate change largely because of such misinformation and misunderstanding.
I am concerned about the inevitable backlash against science and scientists, when the public eventually learns the correct information about climate change. Even if the IPCC is not directly responsible for the present confusion, they should take the necessary responsible action to help rectify the confusion. I request that the IPCC make an appropriate statement in this regard before the next G8 meeting in May 2008. Read more here.
Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, was the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks from its establishment in 1998 until January of 2007. He has been professor of geophysics since 1964 and has published more than 550 professional journal articles. In 2002, he was named one of the “1000 Most Cited Scientists.” His full paper on the Little Ice Age is available as a PDF download.