The winter of 2009-2010 has produced its fair share of winter storms in the Northern Hemisphere – recall that President Obama arrived back in Washington from his appearance at the Copenhagen climate conference only to find the White House grounds buried under near-record amounts of snow. Europe and Asia have seen their share of large winter storms as well during the 2009-2010 winter. Hardly a large storm goes by without someone, somewhere suggesting that whatever we are seeing, it is related to “climate change”. If one looked no further than the Technical Summary of the IPCC, they would discover that the IPCC is rather quiet on this subject with no claims whatsoever that winter storms will increase in frequency, magnitude, duration, or intensity due to the ongoing changes in atmospheric composition.

Two new articles are out that further confirm that global warming has not and will not be causing mid-latitude winter storms to become some new destructive result of the greenhouse effect.

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A few weeks ago, over at the blog MasterResource.org, WCR’s Chip Knappenberger took a look at just how confident one should be regarding the amount of warming that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have caused since the mid-20th century.

The IPCC claims that it is “very likely” that “most” of the warming since then has been the result of human GHG emissions. In IPCC parlance, “very likely” means with a greater than 90% likelihood. The EPA parrots the IPCC’s claim in the Technical Support Document for their Endangerment Finding (TSD, p. 2):

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.

But, in his MasterResource.org article, Knappenberger shows that this statement is not supported by recent findings in the scientific literature—findings that have appeared in the literature subsequent to the publication of the IPCC’s statement. He concluded that the IPCC’s statement—especially the likelihood designation—should be re-evaluated in light of what we know now.

In some sense, however, Knappenberger’s analysis did not go far enough. While he used middle-of-the-road estimates for the warming influence of some non-GHG factors, in some cases he was being too conservative—like when it comes to the non-climatic influences on local thermometers—and, further, he failed to include a potential impact from solar changes.

So here, we take Knappenberger’s analysis a bit further, and show that it is easy to demonstrate, using the contents of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, that anthropogenic GHG emissions could be responsible for less than one-third of the warming in the extant global temperature records.

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Ben Santer has an article over at RealClimate defending himself against some claims made recently by Fred Pearce in a series of articles Pearce did for the U.K.’s Guardian in recent weeks.

In particular, Santer discusses a 1996 paper that he (and colleagues) published in Nature magazine in which they reported to have identified a human fingerprint on global temperature change. Well, actually, in his RealClimate article Santer primarily discusses his Response to a Comment that WCR’s Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger published in Nature that pointed out that had Santer et al. used the full observational period of record available at the time they published their original paper (instead of a truncated one), that Santer et al.’s statements “about the strength of the evidence for human alteration of the lower tropospheric climate must be tempered.”

In Santer’s RealClimate piece, he claims that in his Response to our Comment, that he “demonstrated that this criticism was simply wrong.” And that “[u]se of a longer record of atmospheric temperature change strengthened rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint.”

At RealClimate, Santer provided this link to his Response to our Comments. Here, for completeness’s sake, we provide a link to our Comment.

We invite you to read them both and see for yourself.

Personally, we are incredulous that Santer maintains, even to this day, that had they used the full period of available record—which he admits would have shown a decline in the correlation between models and observations—that this somehow “strengthened rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint.”

We can only wonder what he would have concluded had the full dataset of observations maintained or strengthened his original correlation! Somehow we doubt that had the updated data strengthened the correlation between models and observations, that Santer would have come out and declared this as evidence the human fingerprint was fading.

(There is lots more regarding this issue (and others discussed by Santer in his RealClimate article) that resides in our back pages. To investigate for yourself, use our ‘back issues’ search function and enter “Santer”)

We are sure you have heard that global warming is causing more frequent and intense droughts throughout the world. Right? The claim is easy to make – higher temperatures increase evaporation rates, soil moisture is depleted, and drought conditions result. Indeed the Technical Summary of the most recent IPCC assessment includes “More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas, particularly in the tropics and subtropics since the 1970s. While there are many different measures of drought, many studies use precipitation changes together with temperature. Increased drying due to higher temperatures and decreased land precipitation have contributed to these changes”. Further, they write “Although precipitation has increased in many areas of the globe, the area under drought has also increased. Drought duration and intensity has also increased. While regional droughts have occurred in the past, the widespread spatial extent of current droughts is broadly consistent with expected changes in the hydrologic cycle under warming. Water vapour increases with increasing global temperature, due to increased evaporation where surface moisture is available, and this tends to increase precipitation. However, increased continental temperatures are expected to lead to greater evaporation and drying, which is particularly important in dry regions where surface moisture is limited.” The bottom line in the table below from the IPCC’s Technical Summary leaves little doubt that the IPCC thinks that droughts have become more frequent, they have been caused in some part by humans, and they will become more frequent in the decades to come.

A major article on global-scale drought has appeared recently in the Journal of Climate by drought experts from Princeton University and the University of Washington; the work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We saw an interesting sentence in their abstract as Sheffield et al. wrote “Globally, the mid-1950s showed the highest drought activity and the mid-1970s to mid-1980s the lowest activity.” That does not seem consistent with the story coming from the IPCC.

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Several errors have been recently uncovered in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These include problems with Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events. More seem to turn up daily. Most of these errors stem from the IPCC’s reliance on non-peer reviewed sources.

The defenders of the IPCC have contended that most of these errors are minor in significance and are confined to the Working Group II Report (the one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) of the IPCC which was put together by representatives from various regional interests and that there was not as much hard science available to call upon as there was in the Working Group I report (“The Physical Science Basis”). The IPCC defenders argue that there have been no (or practically no) problems identified in the Working Group I (WGI) report on the science.

We humbly disagree.

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The Technical Summary of the most recent IPCC reports states that “Over the 1961 to 2003 period, the average rate of global mean sea level rise is estimated from tide gauge data to be 1.8 ± 0.5 mm yr–1.” “The average thermal expansion contribution to sea level rise for this period was 0.42 ± 0.12 mm yr–1, with significant decadal variations, while the contribution from glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets is estimated to have been 0.7 ± 0.5 mm yr–1. The sum of these estimated climate-related contributions for about the past four decades thus amounts to 1.1 ± 0.5 mm yr–1, which is less than the best estimate from the tide gauge observations. Therefore, the sea level budget for 1961 to 2003 has not been closed satisfactorily.”

That is indeed very interesting – the average rate of sea level is around 1.8 mm per year, and the IPCC can account for only 60% of the increase. This uncertainty is compound considering IPCC’s statements that “The global average rate of sea level rise measured by TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimetry during 1993 to 2003 is 3.1 ± 0.7 mm yr–1. This observed rate for the recent period is close to the estimated total of 2.8 ± 0.7 mm yr–1 for the climate-related contributions due to thermal expansion (1.6 ± 0.5 mm yr–1) and changes in land ice (1.2 ± 0.4 mm yr–1). Hence, the understanding of the budget has improved significantly for this recent period, with the climate contributions constituting the main factors in the sea level budget (which is closed to within known errors). Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 compared to 1961 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear”.

As you might guess, there is much to be done to improve our understanding of sea level rise.

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One of the enduring pillars of the climate change issue is that the temperature of the Earth is increasing at an unprecedented rate … we’ve heard it a million times over the past few decades. However, it is well known that the temperature of the Earth has not increased over the past decade, and the lack of recent warming is now receiving serious consideration in the leading scientific journals. Two recent articles are of particular interest to us at World Climate Report.

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Should products produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) carry the following warning label:

“The findings of the IPCC reports were developed in advance and furthered by a careful selection from whatever material could be found to support them. In some cases, supporting material was developed or fabricated where none could otherwise be located. As such, these findings may not necessarily reflect the true state of scientific understanding. Use at your own risk.”

See the story at MasterResource.org to find out!

A recent article has appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society regarding trends in tropical cyclone damages in China. The article was generated by three Chinese scientists from the China Meteorological Administration’s National Climate Center and Nanjing University’s Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster. The authors note that “This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China through the National Science and Technology Support Project and the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China.”

Let’s start with a key figure (Figure 1) in which Zhang et al. reveal an upward trend in damage from tropical cyclones (a.k.a., hurricanes, typhoons) over the 1983 to 2006. They note that “In addition to the heavy economic losses in individual years, the time series shown” “contains an upward trend over the past 24 yr, which is statistically significant at the 95% level. On average, the losses caused by landfalling tropical cyclones in China mainland increased by 1.19 billion yuans each year.” We could see this result spun several different ways. On one hand, we could write about how poor China is being ravaged by hurricanes fueled-up thanks to global warming. On the other hand, we could say, see, China is now the world leader in greenhouse gas emissions, and they are suffering the consequences. As we are about to see, there is a lot more to this story about increasing damages in China.

Figure 1. Estimated direct economic losses caused by landfalling tropical cyclones in billion yuans (thin, inflation adjusted to 2006) and the corresponding 5-yr running mean (thick) (from Zhang et al., 2009).

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Boy, it seems like it’s been a rough couple of years for New Hampshire, as far as natural wonders go.

First, back in 2003, the rocky outcropping that was known as Old Man of the Mountain—a natural wonder gracing both the state’s license plates, and state’s quarter, came crumbling down.

Now, another one of New Hampshire’s icons has fallen—that of the highest wind gust ever recorded on the surface of the earth. Back in the spring of 1934, at the observing post atop New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington—the tallest mountain in the Presidential Range and one of the most prominent peaks in the eastern U.S.—a howling 231 mph (372 km/hr) wind speed was recorded. That observation has long stood as the answer to the trivia question as to the “official” fastest wind speed ever recorded.

Now, the World Meteorological Organization has just announced that that the non-tornado surface wind speed record has been broken—actually, the WMO announced that the record was broken back in 1996, but it is just now officially recognizing the observation.

Back on April 10 1996, tropical cyclone Olivia passed near Barrow Island, Australia, where a wind gust of 253 mph (408 km/hr) was recorded. The WMO’s panel of “experts in charge of global weather and climate extremes within the WMO Commission for Climatology” has just finished a review of that observation and decided that it was indeed accurate, and thus knocking Mt. Washington’s 1934 observation from the top of the list.

But, New Hampshire can rest assured, because the general weather at Barrow Island, Australia is rather pleasant, and therefore Mt Washington’s claim to be the “Home of World’s Worst Weather” still seems be pretty safe.