A scientific team led by Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology today published findings in Science magazine. The team claimed to have found evidence in the historical record of both more tropical cyclones, such as Hurricane Katrina, but also a higher percentage of more intense ones.

This follows on the heels of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kerry Emanual proclaiming in the Aug. 4 on-line edition of Nature magazine that he had found evidence that global warming in the last 30 years was producing more intense cyclones.

The conclusion many draw from papers such as these is that anthropogenic global warming from the burning of fossil fuels by humans is causing more lethal storms. A closer look, though, reveals not human actions but rather natural cycles are the primary cause.

(Read more at Tech Central Station)

Whenever we read a story about some plant or animal showing up where they usually weren’t or disappearing from where they usual are, global warming always shows up in the list of the usual suspects.

And, of course, global warming is up to no good. Usually, “bad” species are showing up where they are unwanted, while “good” ones are being endangered.
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When it comes to the weather, it’s time to stop global whining.

Surely it is an international pastime to complain about the weather, but making global implications out of a local hot spell is a bit much. Consider the editorial in the July 26, 2005 New York Times, headlined “A Few Degrees.” The idea is that the recent heatwave that started in the American Southwest and that has been slowly spreading eastward across the rest of the country is an example of how anthropogenic global warming, although it may only raise temperatures “a few degrees,” subtly makes life miserable for everyone.
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For years, Sir David King, science advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has stated that “climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism.” In fact, King has been so effective with this hysteria that Blair has repeatedly said that global warming and terrorism are the two most important issues confronting mankind.

In doing, so, he has espoused the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which does nothing measurable about planetary temperature, but would cost the U.S. 1-2% of its GDP per year.

Last week, the London Telegraph reported that Blair’s environment ministers are proposing an individual personal allotment of energy, because of global warming, which would make Cuba, North Korea, and England the only nations on earth that ration fuel. Each personal allotment would take the form of an “energy card” against which a withdrawal would be made everytime someone purchases energy, such as buying gasoline or an airplane ticket. When you use your allotment, the price increases (hopefully) inducing you to use less.

One would hope that recent events in London might add some needed perspective.
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Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has been assigned the position of Lead Author of the “observations” chapter of the upcoming (due out in 2007) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As such, he is responsible for heading the effort to gather together and summarize the current state of scientific understanding concerning observed climate variability and change. However, based upon some recent statements that have been attributed to him, it is not clear that he can be trusted to fulfill that role.
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As the G8 summit to be held in Gleneagles, Scotland nears, the Bush Administration finds itself coming under increasing pressure to alter its course on climate change. A couple of weeks ago, British Prime Minister and acting G8 head Tony Blair came to Washington to persuade President Bush to see global warming as a looming threat necessitating dramatic measures to abate it — measures that could be hammered out at the upcoming G-8 summit. All indications are that Blair was unsuccessful. Now, several leading U.S. newspapers have tried their hand at the issue by applying a different tactic — running stories which give the appearance of “exposing” an Administration conspiracy to suppress the true nature of the global warming problem.

(Read more at Tech Central Station)

On June 7, 2005, a joint statement on climate change was issued by the national science academies of the G8 countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the United States) along with China, India and Brazil. The statement emphasized two primary points, 1) that climate change (as caused by human-induced alterations of the composition of the atmosphere) is real, and 2) something needs to be done about it.

As has been the case in the climate change debate for years, the second point simply does not follow from the first.
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Climate scientists have long suspected that warming the oceans around a very cold continent is likely to dramatically increase snowfall. Consider Antarctica. It’s plenty chilly, dozens of degrees below freezing, and it’s surrounded by water. The warmer the water, the greater the evaporation from its surface, and, obviously, the more moisture it contributes to the local atmosphere.

So, when this moisture gets swirled up by a common cyclone, do you think it’s going to fall as rain in Antarctica?

A recent study, no shocker to real climatologists (but perhaps to climate doomsayers), demonstrates this simple physics. It appears in the latest SciencExpress, and it shows that the vast majority of the Antarctic landmass is rapidly gaining ice and snow cover.
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Recently there have been several papers published that have attempted to use the evolution of the earth’s temperature after big volcanic eruptions as a determinate of the earth’s climate sensitivity—that is, how much the average temperature changes with a change in climate forcing (i.e. a change of energy input). Having a good understanding of the climate sensitivity is key to having a good understanding of future climate change.

Oftentimes, the sensitivity is reported as the temperature change resulting from an energy change that is equivalent to the one assumed for a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (from pre-industrial values). In its 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) settled on a value of 3.7 watts per meter squared (W/m2) (see out last article for more information on energy units) for the energy change associated with a doubling of CO2. That’s the easy part. Figuring out how much the earth’s average temperature will change as a result has proven to be much more difficult.
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In light of the general hysteria over global warming, it’s nice, once in a while, to be able to couch our current and ongoing climate changes into some larger perspective. We keep hearing about historically warm years, warm decades, or warm centuries, uncharacteristically long or severe droughts, etc. for which mankind’s striving for a high quality of life is to blame, via the internal combustion engine and its by-product, carbon dioxide. But in reality, in most cases, we have a tragically short record of good observations to really determine how much of a record we’re even close to setting.

For example, let’s take one fairly recent climate discovery called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. In the late 1990s, some west coast fisheries researchers noted cyclical behavior in the annual salmon harvest and tied it to a Pacific Ocean climate anomaly. It turns out that when the Pacific Ocean off of Southern California and the Baja Peninsula is warmer than normal at the water surface, temperatures are typically lower than normal in the north central Pacific well south of the Aleutians. This state, called the positive phase of the PDO, is also linked to dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies and above average rainfall in the Desert Southwest (see Figure1). In the opposite situation, negative PDO, you simply flip the sea-surface temperatures and precipitation patterns.

(Read more at Tech Central Station)