Climate News from Around The Globe

from The Weather Channel - Weather Blog

Last September I wrote my first blog entitled "The Climate Dice Are Loaded", which was a piece intended to link the heat of the summer of ...

from NWS headlines - Top News feature by nws.social.media@noaa.gov

An upper-level low over the Ohio Valley is expected to bring a steady flow of tropical moisture up the Eastern Seaboard through the weekend. This enhanced moisture content, combined with a slow-moving frontal boundary, should lead to widespread rainfall across the eastern U.S. Flooding and flash flooding possible from parts of North Carolina into lower New England, including major metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Many regions hit hard by recent heavy precipitation events this month may see additional moderate to heavy rainfall. Flood and Flash Flood Watches and Flood Warnings are in effect from North Carolina northeastward into Massachusetts.

from NWS headlines - Top News feature by nws.social.media@noaa.gov

Ophelia has degenerated to the point where it lacks sufficient organized, deep convection to be classified as a tropical cyclone and has become a remnant low pressure area a couple hundred miles east of the northern Leeward Islands. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Philippe, which formed during the weekend over the far eastern Atlantic, is located about 600 miles west of the southernmost Cape Verde Islands. Philippe is moving toward the west-northwest at about 13 mph with maximum sustained winds near 60 mph. A turn toward the northwest with a decrease in forward speed is expected during the next couple of days. Philippe poses no threat to land at this time.

from NOAA News Releases

A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new stu

from NOAA News Releases

The globe had its eighth warmest August since record keeping began in 1880, while June through August was the seventh warmest such period on record. The Arctic sea ice extent was the second smallest for August on record at 28 percent below average.

from NOAA News Releases

Coral reef managers in the Northern Mariana Islands will now receive early warning of dangerous environmental conditions that can weaken and kill high value coral reefs, thanks to a new coral observing station added today in Lao Lao Bay, Saipan.

from ICECAP.us

During last night’s Republican presidential debate, Jon Huntsman doubled down on Al Gorism, claiming skeptics of "global climate disruption" (that’s the White House’s term) are making "comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said." Just as moderator John Harris of Politico asked Rick Perry to name some of the scientists he agrees with, Harris should have asked Huntsman just what the "98 out of 100 climate scientists" believe.

In the "survey" to which Huntsman alluded, scientists were invited to participate in a two-question online survey. Despite what Huntsman said, not even 100 climate scientists chose to participate. The two questions were simple: 1. Have global temperatures risen during the past 200 years? and 2. Are humans a significant contributing factor to this?

Forgetting for the moment that only shameless activists or the most statistically and scientifically ignorant of persons would claim that a survey sample of only 77 scientists volunteering to participate in a survey is indicative of what the entire climate science community believes, the questions and answers themselves tell us nothing.

To illustrate, I will answer the survey:

Q1. "When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?"
James Taylor Answer: Risen

Q2. "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?"
James Taylor Answer: Yes

Regarding the first question, in the early 1800s the world was in the grips of the Little Ice Age, which brought about the planet’s coldest temperatures since the last ice age epoch ended roughly 10,000 years ago. The answer to Question 1 is not only "risen," but more appropriately (and sarcastically) "Duh!" (And it’s a good thing the answer is "risen." Only the most zealous and delusional of global warming activists would argue the Little Ice Age brought about beneficial climate conditions.)

Regarding the second question, is human activity a significant contributing factor? Notice how the question did not say "sole factor," "majority factor," or even "primary contributing factor." Rather, the term is merely "significant contributing factor." More precisely, if human activity is not a "significant" contributing factor then it must be an "insignificant" contributing factor. What is the threshold between "significant" and "insignificant"? Five percent? Ten Percent? The threshold of "insignificance" is certainly no higher than that.

So, are humans responsible for at least 10 percent or so of recent global warming? In other words, are humans responsible for roughly - and merely - 0.06 degrees Celsius of warming during the past century? Most global warming "skeptics" certainly believe that!

The real question is, "So what?"

From the assertion that humans may have caused roughly 0.06 degrees of warming during the past century, it does not necessarily follow, as Huntsman and his fellow alarmists would have us believe, that humans are creating a global warming crisis. Nor does it necessarily follow that we must wreck our economy to fight it. I suspect that even the most sensitive of plant and animal species will not notice a 0.06 degree increase in temperature, especially when such a miniscule temperature increase is spread out over the course of a century.

So then, just what do "98 out of 100 climate scientists" believe? Nothing of significance, unless you like to misrepresent meaningless surveys to score cheap political points.

from ICECAP.us

A paper published last week in the journal Meteorological Applications undermines a key assumption of the theory of man-made global warming, finding that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs a supposed ‘greenhouse’ warming effect. Alarmists claim clouds have an overall ‘positive-feedback’ warming effect upon climate due to ‘back-radiation’ of the ‘greenhouse’ gas water vapor. This new paper based on satellite measurements finds instead that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics. The cooling effect is found to be -21 Watts per meter squared, more than 17 times the supposed warming effect from a doubling of CO2 concentrations [1.2 W/m2]. Another key assumption of the AGW theory topples in the face of real-world data showing the net feedback from clouds is strongly negative.

Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effect at the surface and in the atmosphere

Richard P. Allan

Abstract: Satellite measurements and numerical forecast model reanalysis data are used to compute an updated estimate of the cloud radiative effect on the global multi-annual mean radiative energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The cloud radiative cooling effect through reflection of short wave radiation dominates over the long wave heating effect, resulting in a net cooling of the climate system of -21 Wm-2. The short wave radiative effect of cloud is primarily manifest as a reduction in the solar radiation absorbed at the surface of -53 Wm-2. Clouds impact long wave radiation by heating the moist tropical atmosphere (up to around 40 Wm-2 for global annual means) while enhancing the radiative cooling of the atmosphere over other regions, in particular higher latitudes and sub-tropical marine stratocumulus regimes. While clouds act to cool the climate system during the daytime, the cloud greenhouse effect heats the climate system at night. The influence of cloud radiative effect on determining cloud feedbacks and changes in the water cycle are discussed.

By P Gosselin on 26. September 2011
I think I’ve found the root of Joe Romm’s problem. He needs to go back to school and learn more math and natural sciences! At least that’s what a recent Yale University study shows.

Somehow this paper got by me. Maybe this is old news, and so forgive me if this is already known. It’s nothing you’d hear about from the “enlightened” media, after all.

Recall how climate alarmists always try to portray skeptics as ignorant, close-minded flat-earthers who lack sufficient education to understand even the basics of the science, and if it wasn’t for them, the world could start taking the necessary steps to rescue itself.

Unfortunately for the warmists, the opposite is true. The warmists are the ones who are less educated scientifically. This is what a recent Yale University study^* shows.

Professor Dan M. Kahan and his team surveyed 1540 US adults and determined that people with more education in natural sciences and mathematics tend to be more skeptical of AGW climate science. Of course this means that people will less education are more apt to be duped by it.

Surprised? See the study’s abstract below^*.

Time for you warmists to go back to school (though I seriously doubt many of you are capable of learning much of anything, on account of extreme cultural cognition disability).

To learn more, here’s a video on Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication which looks at risk perception w.r.t. the issues of climate change, and here’s a video on Cultural Cognition Hypothesis.

* The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change
Abstract:
The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: •Limited popular knowledge of science, •the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and •the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: The individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this, “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.