by P. Homewood, Jul 3, 2022 in NotatLotofPeopleKnowThat
By the 1970’s, the Earth had experienced three decades of declining temperatures, which Hubert Lambdescribed as “longest-continued downward trend since temperature records began”.
Many will be aware that the coldest winter on record in the US was that of 1978/79, more than 1F colder than any other year.
An ICSF & Clintel Zoom presentation held on 27th October, 2021
Roger Pielke, Jr. describes himself as an “undisciplined professor” of science, policy and politics. He holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science, all from the University of Colorado. In 2006, Roger received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany, for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Formerly a Scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and was also awarded the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America. He is also author, co‐author or co‐editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell you About Global Warming and The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change. His most recent book is The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.
Abstract: In his lecture, Roger will give valuable insights on the recently‐released IPCC WG1 AR6 Report; describing it as a “code red for humanity” was not only wrong, it was irresponsible. Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood, an incredible change in such a short time since the AR5 Report, which has not been highlighted by the media. Roger will also show that the IPCC has systematically and very helpfully gone through a large list of extreme‐weather phenomena in the detailed AR6 Report. Their results are quite surprising: floods, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent. Nor are tornadoes, hail, lightning or strong winds more frequent. However heatwaves are more frequent, as is extreme precipitation, and there are two other types of drought, namely agricultural and ecological drought, which have increased. It is very appealing, even seductive, for activists and the media to latch on to extreme events (as inaccurately summarized in the SPM), but at some point we have to say that objective science and its communication matters on this issue. This is a lecture and discussion of wide interest and is highly relevant in the lead‐up to COP26.
Good news: a warmer, likely tamer climate, is in the future recent science shows. A new study projects no future increase in tropical storm energy.
Lots of government-funded climate scientists like claiming tropical cyclones are getting worse and that in the future we need to expect one supercharged storm after another – due to man heating the climate with carbon dioxide emissions.
But as we noted yesterday here, Zoe Phin found that hurricanes have not gone along with this dubious doomsday science over the past 25 years. Now a new study confirms things will continue that way.
In the segment, DkS cites a new study appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters, where a team of scientists led by Philip Kreussler used three different global climate models to investigate tropical cyclone integrated kinetic energy which is closely associated with their damage potential.
by P. Homewood, Dec 3, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Inevitably the busy hurricane season this year is getting blamed on global warming:
But first of all, let’s get one thing clear – there was not a record number of hurricanes this year in the Atlantic. There were 13 hurricanes, compared to 15 in 2005:
It is true that there were more named storms, which includes tropical storms as well as hurricanes, this season than in any other year, but this is quite meaningless. Over the years, reporting practices have drastically changed, so that more storms are spotted and named now.
Northern hemisphere summer – the season when forest fires in Siberia are on the loop. And usually every single new article about the Siberian forest fires somehow links them to climate change. Therefore it is good time to see how the forest fires has changed during the years. Is there really an increasing trend of Siberia forest fires as the news suggests and what is continuously predicted based on climate models?
With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), Siberia accounts for 77% of Russia’s land area. Majority of the Siberia is sparsely inhabited wilderness with little or no roads. Therefore, what sets on fire, usually burns until rain or other natural factor ends the fire. Southern Siberia also has extensive logging.
Getting reliable fire area data based on available literature seems to be problematic. According to the literature (1) USSR-era fire area data is unreliable and was consistently and severely underreporting fires on sparsely populated areas due to incomplete reporting structure that left most of the country unmonitored (6). The situation was improved only after western satellite data was taken in use by post-USSR Russia. But considering the size of Siberia and the fact that it is very sparsely populated, it is not wonder that no reliable data can be generated without the help of satellites. But even on satellite era some smaller fires goes undetected due to cloud cover or sensor detection limits (6).
After extensive literature study, I found no actual study providing satellite-based dataset for Siberian forest fires for post-USSR era either, which is strange considering how much coverage the Siberian forest fires have got lately. There seem to be an effort going on to create such a dataset for USSR-era years, however, by digitizing old satellite images taken since 1979, but let’s discuss that later a bit more.
by B. Peiser, June 4, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A new review of the scientific literature on extreme weather events published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) confirms what IPCC assessment reports have concluded: There is little evidence of any significant changes in most indices.
The paper, by physicist Dr. Ralph Alexander, looks at trends in hot and cold weather extremes, floods and droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires and finds only a minor increase in cold weather extremes.
Ross McKitrick and John Christy have published a new paper in the Journal of Hydrology.
Abstract : We estimate trends in US regional precipitation on multiple time spans and scales relevant to the detection of changes in climatic regimes. A large literature has shown that trend estimation in hydrological series may be affected by long-term persistence (LTP) and selection of sample length. We show that 2000-year proxy-based reconstructions of the Palmer Modified Drought Index for the US Southeast (SE) and Pacific Coast (PC) regions exhibit LTP and reveal post- 1900 changes to be within the range of longer-term natural fluctuations. We also use a new data base of daily precipitation records for 20 locations (10 PC and 10 SE) extending back in many cases to the 1870s. Over the 1901–2017 interval upward trends in some measures of average and extreme precipitation appear, but they are not consistently significant and in the full records back to 1872 they largely disappear. They also disappear or reverse in the post-1978 portion of the data set, which is inconsistent with them being responses to enhanced greenhouse gas forcing. We conclude that natural variability is likely the dominant driver of historical changes in precipitation and hence drought dynamics in the US SE and PC.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse