Two recent events underscore how predictable is the distortion of global warming by those who gain from exaggeration. The events were the Montreal “Conference of the Parties” which had signed the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Both took place in early December.
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Below are some observations found in a couple of recent journal articles that have received little attention—hmm, we wonder why?

The first observation was made by a team of paleoclimatologists led by Jan Esper in a viewpoint paper entitled “Climate: past ranges and future changes,” published in Quaternary Science Reviews. Esper and colleagues examined the amplitude of the temperature variations that have been reported for earth’s temperature during the past millennium. These include studies from the by-now familiar names of Mann, Moberg, Jones, Esper and Briffa.
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In the December 1st issue of Nature magazine, Harry Bryden and colleagues at Britain’s National Oceanography Centre report that the Atlantic meridional circulation (also known as the thermohaline circulation (THC))—the density driven current that carries warm surface water northward and returns colder deep water southward—has slowed by 30 percent between 1957 and 2004.

The significance of this finding is difficult to assess in light of other recent observations.

Climate model simulations estimate that a complete shutdown of the THC would result in a cooling of Europe of 4ºC or more. So, shouldn’t a 30% slowdown have some noticeable impacts, i.e. a pretty sharp cooling trend?

Just two days before the Bryden results were published, a report from the European Environment Agency detailed all of the ills that Europe has been facing recently because of how warm it has been, and prominently proclaimed that Europe’s four hottest years on record were 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004!
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The best way to garner headlines in the global warming game is to generate scary scenarios about how many people will die in its wake. While many people view global warming as some esoteric concern of environmentalists, it does at least raise one’s eyebrows when you hear a phrase like “global warming deaths.”

It’s little surprise then that a “Review” article that just appeared in Nature magazine has caught so much attention. The review by Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin and three colleagues essentially is a selective culling of the scientific literature—some recent, some not—on climate change and possible health impacts across the planet. And it should also be little surprise to the readers of this column that prospects are bad.

In an effort to provide balance, we’ll briefly review key portions of the paper and provide a much-needed perspective that was unfortunately missing.
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Forget “Fair and Balanced” on global warming. Fox News has gone native, airing a “documentary” more one-sided than anything I have seen in the entire sad history of climate change journalism.

How on earth did this happen? Apparently Fox’s Roger Ailes has been captured by—hope you are sitting down—Robert F Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, and eco-activist Laurie David.

The story goes like this. Kennedy dragged Ailes to a global warming lecture by Al Gore. Ailes was impressed, and then contacted David, who helped line up Weston Productions, which can now claim to produce environmental propaganda for both Greenpeace and Fox News.

Laurie David is the head of www.stopglobalwarming.org. She’s a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She’s the wife of comic Larry David. She has no formal academic training whatsoever in hard climate science. She’s never published a paper on climate science in the refereed scientific literature. Despite this, Ailes is on record saying that she is one of the nation’s “leading authorities” on global warming, and speaking of her “impressive passion and dedication” to the subject.

In science, passion is poison, it serves no one when it blinds one to inconvenient facts.
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One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the ocean is about to rise and swallow our coasts. These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995. The frequency of really strong storms striking the U.S now resembles what it was in the 1940s and 50s, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember.

Those arguing that global warming is an overblown issue have been claiming for years that “consensus” forecasts of sea-level are equally overwrought. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global average rise of from 3.5 to 34 inches by 2100, with a central estimate of 19 inches. Depending upon how you slice or dice the data, the last century saw maybe six inches.

Critics have long argued that these changes require a substantial net melting of some combination of the world’s two largest masses of land-based ice, Antarctica and Greenland. In addition, they note that observed global warming is right near the low end of the U.N.’s projections, which means that realized sea level rise should be similarly modest.

(Read more at Tech Central Station)

A series of prominent papers has been recently published claiming a link between global warming and increasing power of Atlantic hurricanes. These papers became very prominent largely because of the large number of strong hurricanes that have hit the United States in recent years. But, is global warming really the cause?

The public is certainly divided on this one. On his blog, Roger Pielke, Jr. reports on a recent Gallup/CNN poll that queried Americans on their beliefs about the relationship between global warming and hurricanes. The question was posed “Thinking about the increase in the number and strength of hurricanes in recent years, do you think global warming has been a major cause, a minor cause, or not a cause of the increase in hurricanes?” 36 percent of the respondents answered “major cause,” 29 percent answered “minor cause,” and 30 percent thought that global warming played no role whatsoever in the upswing in recent hurricane activity (the remaining 5% must not have made up their minds yet).
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According to David Rind from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), 2005 is going to set the all-time record for global warmth. He told Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post (October 13, 2005) only a major volcanic eruption could intervene. Eilperin also interviewed Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor, who told her that Goddard’s findings were “mighty preliminary.”

That’s because there’s more than one history of global temperature. Three receive the most citations. NASA’s record begins in 1880, as does another history from the U.S. Department of Commerce, developed at the Department’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). But the most widely referenced history (and the one primarily used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) is compiled by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia. It goes back to 1856.

The vast majority of the underlying temperature observations that go into each of these compilations is the same, but each organization has developed its own techniques for how the raw observations are geographically combined and adjusted for confounding factors such as urbanization, missing values, etc. As a result, annual values in each temperature history differ slightly.

So let’s take a look at where the average temperature is each stands through September 2005, and what the prospects are for setting a record for the year as a whole, given that there are still three months of data to be added.

(Read more at Tech Central Station)

Global sea level rise figures prominently in most climate doom and gloom stories. And, not surprisingly, good news is either ignored or mis-reported.

First, a little history. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated, in its Third Assessment Report (2001), that between 1990 and 2100, the global average sea level will rise somewhere between 3.5 and 34.6 inches, with a central value of 18.9 inches. Of course, the values falling near the low end of the range are usually left out of global warming scare stories, while the values near the high end are prominently featured (e.g. see here and here).
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As shown on the front page of the September 29 New York Times, NASA has pronounced that the September, 2005 coverage of Arctic sea ice is the lowest since their satellite record began in 1979.

We offer a more measured reaction: ho-hum. Summer (that’s when ice melts) Arctic temperatures in the late 1970s were at their lowest levels since the mid-1920’s. Since then, they have risen to slightly exceed the previous 100-year high point of the late 1930s.

Read that again. From roughly 1925 through 1940, a 15 year period, Arctic summer temperatures rose just about as much as they have from 1979 through 2005, a 25 year period. If sea-ice wasn’t near or at its end-of-summer lows this year, something would be wrong with a very basic physical theory: warm temperatures melt ice.
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