Climate Change Weekly #142
Contrary to claims often repeated by environmental radicals, global warming is not responsible for extreme weather events, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Explaining Extremes of 2013 from a Climate Perspective, NOAA’s new report, examined claims global warming was behind various droughts, floods, unusually cold weather and blizzards, cyclones, etc. – and found no identifiable connection between them and rising greenhouse gas emissions.
In California, for example, a prolonged drought has been blamed by climate alarmists on global warming. The liberal Center for American Progress and media outlets including the Washington Post and Associated Press have published stories claiming global warming caused or worsened the California drought. NOAA’s scientists beg to differ, writing, “[F]or the California drought, which was investigated by three teams from the United States, human factors were found not to have influenced the lack of rainfall.”
It would seem President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who regularly cite the California drought as evidence of man’s fiery influence on climate, need to follow the research more closely, since their own scientists disagree with their take on the matter.
Environmentalists follow their own talking points and not the science again when they claim global warming is responsible for extreme cold, surprising blizzards, or heavy snowfall. NOAA could find no evidence linking such events to global warming. NOAA reported, “Analysis of UK cold spring showed the probability of occurrence may have fallen 30-fold due to global warming.” In other words, global warming decreased the likelihood of extreme winter storm events.
This was true when looking at the tragic Colorado floods of September 2013, as well. The NOAA report found global warming may be making such tragic events less likely.
If anything is truly alarming in the discussion of global warming, it is the widening gap between what the science finds and what the media, backed by alarmists, report.
SOURCE: Forbes.com
IN THIS ISSUE
The ocean is not storing excess heat … Antarctic sea ice breaks record again … Many people don’t care about global warming: Why? … Climate summit, sad fiasco … Climate models: Flops, failures, and fumbles … Former Socialist EU members fight climate policies
THE OCEAN IS NOT STORING EXCESS HEAT
The cold waters of the deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 1995, destroying one theory commonly proposed for why Earth hasn’t warmed over the past 18 years despite rising greenhouse gas levels. Various scientists and global warming activists have pointed to the deep ocean as a reservoir for heat, saying people should still believe climate models despite the fact they failed to predict the present 18-year lull in warming. However, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013, finding that below 1.24 miles the ocean has not warmed. JPL did find the temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans is rising, but not enough to account for the present stall in warming.
SOURCE: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
ANTARCTIC SEA ICE BREAKS RECORD AGAIN
For the third year in a row sea ice in the Antarctic has reached record highs. Antarctic ice extent was higher this year than at any time since 1979 when satellites began measuring sea ice extent. Scientists, including those with the IPCC, admit they simply don’t understand what is going on in Antarctica and sea ice extent will remain a puzzle for some time to come.
SOURCE: The Carbon Brief blog
MANY PEOPLE DON’T CARE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING: WHY?
Climate scientist Roy Spencer notes polls consistently show many people aren’t overly worried about global warming – it regularly comes in dead last in polls asking what are the most pressing problems facing the nation. Spencer cites a number of reasons people don’t seem to care about global warming. First, they often experience 50-degree temperature swings in a single day, so one or two degrees seems like nothing. In addition, most people prefer warmth to cold; retirees move south, not north, upon retirement. Moreover, people have become jaded concerning claims made by scientists that a catastrophe is about to occur, since over their lifetimes scientist have made many such contradictory claims, none of which has come to pass.
SOURCE: Dr. Roy Spencer.com
CLIMATE SUMMIT, SAD FIASCO
Last week’s United Nations climate summit in New York was a fiasco, with world leaders making dull speeches to bored audiences concerning the need to act now to counteract climate change. Nothing was said that hadn’t been said before, and no actions followed the less-than-passionate speeches. The meeting was doomed to fail from the start since leaders from China and India, two of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world, did not attend and had shown through their actions at a 2009 summit they had no intention of signing an international treaty that would restrict their use of fossil fuels.
SOURCE: The Telegraph
CLIMATE MODELS: FLOPS, FAILURES, AND FUMBLES
German scientists Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt offer an excellent review of the history of the failure of climate models. As a rule, in science, when theories or models repeatedly fail to track reality, they are falsified. The validation of models is one of the fundamental principles of science. Increasingly, scientists are acknowledging climate models fail basic validation. They are wrong on temperatures and they are wrong on the phenomena they predict. For example, climate scientist Roy Spencer compared the results of 73 climate models to the observed temperature and found each and every model predicted higher temperatures than those measured, by a significant margin.
SOURCE: No Trick Zone
FORMER SOCIALIST EU MEMBERS FIGHT CLIMATE POLICIES
The ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia met in the capital of Slovakia in early October to discuss European Union common climate policies. The EU members find climate goals being discussed by Western European members to be unrealistic and undesirable because they would force less-developed EU members to bear a greater share of the costs for energy modernization. Trading reliable traditional energy sources for costly green renewables based on scientifically questionable climate claims is a luxury poorer European countries cannot afford.
SOURCE: The Reference Frame