As the Houston flood disaster is unfolding, there is considerable debate about whether Hurricane Harvey was influenced by “global warming”. While such an issue matters little to the people of Houston, it does matter for our future infrastructure planning and energy policy.
Let’s review the two basic reasons why the Houston area is experiencing what now looks like a new record amount of total rainfall, at least for a 2-3 day period over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.
Various sources, scientists publishing their opinion in the media, claim that Tropical Storm Harvey, recently landed in Texas, is one more signal of the influence of global warming on such catastrophic events. These claims are based on model calculations. Let’s examine the facts.
In the press release for a newly published and controversial peer-reviewed scientific paper, Australian scientist Dr. Jennifer Marohasy unveiled one of climate science’s better-kept secrets.
She and her colleagues are well aware that the post-1940s Northern Hemisphere (NH) proxy evidence from tree-rings, bore holes, pollen, etc., consistently fails to affirm sharply rising temperatures from the late 20th century onwards.
Way back in February, Global Weather Oscillations (GWO) veteran meteorologist David Dilley predicted that the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season would be “the most dangerous and costliest in 12 years for the United States.” (…)
by Paul Homewood, September 2, 207 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Indeed, it could be that the last 20-years of temperature recordings by the Bureau will be found not fit for purpose, and will eventually need to be discarded. This would make for a rather large hole in the calculation of global warming – given the size of Australia.
Changes in the sources of nitrogen and the composition of the phytoplankton community are more likely to account for the differences seen in the isotope data, Huckstadt said. “It looks more like a shift at the base of the food web, probably related to the transition from the Little Ice Age to current conditions, causing changes in the phytoplankton community,” he said.
See also: “Here we present new data from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, that indicates surface temperatures were ~ 2 °C colder during the LIA, with colder sea surface temperatures in the Southern Ocean and/or increased sea-ice extent, stronger katabatic winds, and decreased snow accumulation.”
Human appropriation of land for agriculture has greatly altered the terrestrial carbon balance, creating a large but uncertain car- bon debt in soils. Estimating the size and spatial distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) loss due to land use and land cover change has been difficult but is a critical step in understand- ing whether SOC sequestration can be an effective climate mitigation strategy.
Here’s another blow to the global warming alarmist scientists, who have been claiming that the Medieval Warm Period was a local, North Atlantic phenomenon, and did not really exist globally. What follows is a report on yet another paper contradicting this now worn out claim.
As the Houston flood disaster is unfolding, there is considerable debate about whether Hurricane Harvey was influenced by “global warming”. While such an issue matters little to the people of Houston, it does matter for our future infrastructure planning and energy policy.
Let’s review the two basic reasons why the Houston area is experiencing what now looks like a new record amount of total rainfall, at least for a 2-3 day period over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.
Our findings indicate that the water intrusion problems in the region are due not to “sea level rise”, but primarily to land subsidence due to groundwater depletion and, to a lesser extent, subsidence from glacial isostatic adjustment. We conclude that water intrusion will thus continue even if sea levels decline. These findings are critical because the water intrusion problems in the Chesapeake Bay—and elsewhere—cannot be successfully solved unless their causes are correctly identified and appropriate remedies are devised.
by Roger Andrews, August 23, 2017 in Energy Matters (blog)
Between 2007 and 2015 total annual US CO2 emissions decreased by 740 million tons (12%). An updated analysis shows that 35% of this decrease was caused by natural gas replacing coal in electricity generation, 30% by lower fuel consumption in the transportation sector, 28% by renewables replacing
There are models that predict that the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet wouldn’t change very much, even if the West Antarctic ice sheet was taken away,” Licht said. According to these models, even if the ice sheet’s perimeter retreats, its core remains stable.
We suggest that solar activity may play a key role in driving the climatic fluctuations in North China during the last 22 centuries, with its quasi ∼100, 50, 23, or 22-year periodicity clearly identified in our climatic reconstructions.
We quantitatively illustrate that precipitation (67.4%) may have been more important than temperature (32.5%)…
(…) Maximum sustained winds are near 110 mph (175 km/h) with higher gusts. Some strengthening is possible, and Harvey is forecast to become a major hurricane before it reaches the middle Texas coast (…)
by Ron Clutz, August 25, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The animated image shown after the jump shows ice extents for day 233 from 2007 to 2017. Particularly interesting is the variation in the CAA (Canadian Arctic Archipelago), crucial for the Northwest Passage
What is causing the death of the polar bear as a climate change icon? Fat bears are part of it, but mostly it’s the fact that polar bear numbers haven’t declined as predicted.
Sea level changes is a key issue in the global warming scenario. It has been widely claimed that sea is rising as a function of the late 20th’s warming pulse. Global tide gauge data sets may vary between +1.7 mm/yr to +0.25 mm/yr depending upon the choice of stations. At numerous individual sites, available tide gauges show variability around a stable zero level …
… In this situation, it is recommended that we return to the observational facts, which provides global sea level records varying between ±0.0 and +1.0 mm/yr; i.e. values that pose no problems in coastal protection.
The sun was completely free of spots on 11 days in July. Notable: while during last month the sun’s northern hemisphere was more active (in June all sunspots were in the northern hemisphere), last month the southern hemisphere was the most active part with 60% of the sunspots appearing there. The following diagram shows the course of solar cycle 24 thus far (…)
Our results show up to 1°C of warming. The average divergence between the proxy temperature record and our ANN projection is just 0.09 degree Celsius. This suggests that even if there had been no industrial revolution and burning of fossil fuels, there would have still been warming through the twentieth century – to at least 1980, and of almost 1°C.
AFTER deconstructing 2,000-year old proxy-temperature series back to their most basic components, and then rebuilding them using the latest big data techniques, John Abbot and I show what global temperatures might have done in the absence of an industrial revolution. The results from this novel technique, just published in GeoResJ, accord with climate sensitivity estimates from experimental spectroscopy but are at odds with output from General Circulation Models.
