Climate Science Watch has a devastating and detailed debunking of Richard Lindzen’s April 16 op-ed in Newsweek, “Why So Gloomy?”
Let me expand on one point. Lindzen writes, “There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way.” That is just plain wrong.
As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense — precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.”
And since 1995, the climate has gotten much more extreme. For instance, a 2004 analysis by the Center found an increase during the 20th century of “precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East.” They found a 14 percent increase in “heavy rain events” of greater than 2 inches in one day, and a 20 percent increase in “very heavy rain events”-best described as deluges-greater than 4 inches in one day.These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models.
The deluge that socked the mid-Atlantic and Northeast the last week of June 2006 fits this global-warming-type drought. Washington, DC, for instance, was drenched with over seven inches of rain in one 24-hour period. And this deluge happened at the same time that 45 percent of the continental United States as a whole was experiencing moderate to extreme drought.
For more on the global warming/extreme weather connection, read Chapter Two of Hell and High Water.
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Duh. Dozens of tornadoes in places like New Mexico this last Winter? You’d have to be a blind idiot not to see this happening.
The photo shown as a storm surge shown for Typoon Gonu is actually a touched up version of the Katrina Surge This is not truthful mreporting and stengthens the voice of Crichtonites ….My attemt to paste the pictures failed but I can send to anyone who wants to see
The following picture was taken from the third story balcony of Saint Stanislaus College located next door to Our Lady of the Gulf church in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi on the morning of August 29th, 2005. This is believed to be the initial tidal wave from Hurricane Katrina. The tidal wave was approximately 35 to 40 feet high. When it slammed into the beach front communities of Bay Saint Louis and Waveland Mississippi to completely destroy 99% of every structure along the beach for 9 miles and over ? of a mile inland The destruction only started there. The flooding that continued inland destroyed the contents of all but 35 homes in these two communities of approximately 14,000 people.
cid:00a801c77bda$58e491d0$6901a8c0@D6BGD391
A Storm-Surge of Extreme Hurricanes
Storm World author Chris Mooney has a good post, “Gonu, Monica, Wilma, Ioke … Hurricane Intensity Records Just Keep Breaking.”
Katrina storm surge[photo #1}
Mooney explains that Cyclone Gonu [photo #2] is the “strongest storm ever recorded in the Arabian Sea (140 knot winds, making Gonu the first recorded Category 5 storm in this region),” and the “First/strongest recorded hurricane to hit Oman/Gulf of Oman/Iran.” He then notes that Gonu “closely follows”:
Your accusation is false. The photo I think you are talking about — why on Earth did you post this complaint here and not on the relevant post???? — has a picture of a storm surge for a post on a surge of hurricanes. Nowhere does it claim that photo is of Typhoon Gonu — indeed I left the label on it.
The Crichtonites are only interested in science fiction — nothing anyone does will change their views since they aren’t fact based. Are you a Crichtonite???
i do not like this website. it has useless information. it did not help me at all.
im hungry
The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.
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Related Topics: Global Warming
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Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”
Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”
Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”
“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”
In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming “community” — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by “dramatic changes” in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.
“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.
The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”
But if the sun shuts down, we’ve got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that’s hanging in the balance.