But the paper ignores land use and land cover change
From NOAA Headquarters and the “its the evil gases wot dun it and nothing else” department, comes more modeling madness via another poorly written press release by Monica Allen monica.allen@noaa.gov that doesn’t mention the name and/or DOI of the paper, making me hunt for it, but worries about useless details like telling me the image below is “embargoed until 1 p.m. ET, July 13, 2014 “. – as it that matters when the press release today included it anyway. To add insult to the injury, this paper funded by the taxpayers of the United States is paywalled.
New NOAA climate model zeroes in on regional climate trends
NOAA scientists have developed a new high-resolution climate model that shows southwestern Australia’s long-term decline in fall and winter rainfall is caused by increases in manmade greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion, according to research published today in Nature Geoscience.
“This new high-resolution climate model is able to simulate regional-scale precipitation with considerably improved accuracy compared to previous generation models,” said Tom Delworth, a research scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., who helped develop the new model and is co-author of the paper. “This model is a major step forward in our effort to improve the prediction of regional climate change, particularly involving water resources.”
NOAA researchers conducted several climate simulations using this global climate model to study long-term changes in rainfall in various regions across the globe. One of the most striking signals of change emerged over Australia, where a long-term decline in fall and winter rainfall has been observed over parts of southern Australia. Simulating natural and manmade climate drivers, scientists showed that the decline in rainfall is primarily a response to manmade increases in greenhouse gases as well as a thinning of the ozone caused by manmade aerosol emissions. Several natural causes were tested with the model, including volcano eruptions and changes in the sun’s radiation. But none of these natural climate drivers reproduced the long-term observed drying, indicating this trend is due to human activity.
Southern Australia’s decline in rainfall began around 1970 and has increased over the last four decades. The model projects a continued decline in winter rainfall throughout the rest of the 21st century, with significant implications for regional water resources. The drying is most severe over southwest Australia where the model forecasts a 40 percent decline in average rainfall by the late 21st century.
“Predicting potential future changes in water resources, including drought, are an immense societal challenge,” said Delworth. “This new climate model will help us more accurately and quickly provide resource planners with environmental intelligence at the regional level. The study of Australian drought helps to validate this new model, and thus builds confidence in this model for ongoing studies of North American drought.”
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Here is the paper I chased down:
Regional rainfall decline in Australia attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and ozone levels
Thomas L. Delworth & Fanrong Zeng Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2201
Precipitation in austral autumn and winter has declined over parts of southern and especially southwestern Australia in the past few decades1, 2, 3, 4. According to observations and climate models, at least part of this decline is associated with changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, including a poleward movement of the westerly winds and increasing atmospheric surface pressure over parts of southern Australia. Here we use a high-resolution global climate model to analyse the causes of this rainfall decline. In our simulations, many aspects of the observed regional rainfall decline over southern and southwest Australia are reproduced in response to anthropogenic changes in levels of greenhouse gases and ozone in the atmosphere, whereas anthropogenic aerosols do not contribute to the simulated precipitation decline. Simulations of future climate with this model suggest amplified winter drying over most parts of southern Australia in the coming decades in response to a high-end scenario of changes in radiative forcing. The drying is most pronounced over southwest Australia, with total reductions in austral autumn and winter precipitation of approximately 40% by the late twenty-first century.
Paywalled here at the expense of the public: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2201.html
This paywalling of publicly funded science, combined with the recent developments surrounding the failure of peer review, which seems to be little more than pal review in some cases, is why we need a sea-change in science review and publication.
Now while I can’t properly criticize what I can’t read, it seems to me that land use and land cover change might play a big role, if not bigger than GHG’s. But land use and land cover change isn’t mentioned in the abstract and press release, and so it seems to me that the paper is myopic in scope.
This paper (which isn’t paywalled) was discussed at Jo Nova’s forum last year:
The effect of land clearing on rainfall and fresh water resources in Western
Australia: A multi-functional sustainability analysis
Mark A. Andrich & Jörg Imberger DOI: 10.1080/13504509.2013.850752
Abstract (excerpt)
It is widely recognized that southwest Western Australia has experienced approximately a
30% decline in rainfall, in areas inland from the coastal margin, over the last forty years or
more. It is generally thought that this decline was due to changes induced by global warming, but recently evidence has emerged suggesting that a substantial part of the decline may be attributed to changes in land use. These changes involved extensive logging close to the coast and the clearing of native vegetation for wheat planting on the higher ground. We present a methodology that compares coastal and inland rainfall to show that 50 – 80% of the observed decline in rainfall is the result of land clearing.
Read it here: Andrich_and_Imberger_(2012a)
Let’s all ignore the fact that the GAT has been stalled for years while CO2 keeps on its steady rise and make a higher resolution CO2-driven regional model, shall we?
Of course we shall! How the @ur momisugly#%$! else are we going to get funding?
Harrumph!
“improved accuracy compared to previous generation models”
Now that’s a mighty low bar to meet.
So, the models which were designed to have CO2 be the main driver of climate show that CO2 is the main driver of climate? That’s what I call science!
[golf clap]
GIGO. Well it’s a model, so I suppose that’s all right then.
IT’S BULLDUST! We are currently in a VERY wet winter. The Dams are all full. We are still paying for the useless desalination plants that the previous Labor/Greens alliance insisted that we needed because CAGW was going to make Australia very dry. This sort of model-sourced crap makes me very angry, because we (the taxpayer) seem to always foot the bill the generally results from these model-driven guesses.
Did this model predict a “pause”? Of course not – it is a new one; did not exist in year 2000. It was “trained” to reflect the “pause” accurately. So it was also trained to reflect recent Australia temperatures accurately. No prediction at all.
Actually, according to Jared Diamond, Australia has a long record of variable climate. When it was initially settled by Europeans it was during a period when rainfall was relatively high. Then I think (from memory) around 1820 there was a dry period lasting a couple of decades where many otherwise successful farms failed due to drought. The rains came back, the farms got going again until the next big drought.
What appears to be the problem is that despite this long record of changing climate from wetter to drier and back again, society seems able not to learn to adapt appropriately. It’s fair to say that since there is a record of long periods of relative dry compared to relative wet, that that constitutes the climate to which societies infrastructure ought to be robust enough to withstand, regardless of whether mans influence on the climate is something to be concerned about.
And right now it is pissing down in Perth.
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR704.loop.shtml#skip
This is real time, so it may be gone inland by the time you get to see the rain.
I was working in the water supply industry in 2000 in New South Wales during the last big drought when the regional Water Board received a geological report on the rivers of southeastern
Australia that showed that the last 200 odd years had been abnormally WET. That was a more than the time Australia had been settled by the British, so colour me surprised to find now it’s greenhouse gases!!!! ( no I don’t have reference for the paper, sorry)
Bollocks.
well that’s a relief…..
CO2 doesn’t affect temperatures…
…it only affects rainfall
Now if they ever figure out where the moisture comes from…they might actually get somewhere
I agree with Jimbo – It is cold and wet here
A recent model study was released by the British Columbia government a few days ago which claimed that our infrastructure along the Fraser river needed 10 billion dollars of upgrades, mainly by raising the height of the dikes. Sorry I don’t have any links as I only saw the report on global TV news. In a province the size of Washington state, Oregon and California combined with a population of a little over 4 million, that’s a lot of money per person. The same cost of building the site-C dam that can provide electricity for 430 thousand homes.
It appears that a scare tactic of high costs are to make it look cheaper to have the world spend 50 trillion dollars, as the IEA (or some such) claims than it is to adapt to any changes as they occur.
The dikes that I will be riding home on (bicycle) after my outing to the coffee shop today have had millions of dollars of height raising after the last scare of a flood, which didn’t happen after all.
These high resolution models use 1.0000000 and 0.00000000.
The fundamental problem with this drivel of course is that while it is true that SW of Western Australian has dried, the rest of southern Australia , except for Tasmania, has not but has got a bit wetter. The continent as a whole has got wetter by about 20% over the past century or so as has the Eastern seaboard and the Murray Darling Basin.
In SW of WA the poor land clearing and land management practices have had a significant impact and that part of the country is also very much influenced by the long period changes in behaviour of the mechanisms in both the Indian and Southern Oceans.
The conclusion of this paper and the models ( 🙂 !! ) is risible and out there with the sky is falling and Tim Flannery’s predictions that all the east coast dams would dry up ( they are pretty full atr the moment).
Having just returned to Tasmania from 10 days in Perth while colder it is a lot dryer here than last week in Perth as Chris from Queensland attests above.
I would give it 4.5 Flannery’s for speculative nonsense, 2 Mann’s for modellers madness ( it has all been done before) and 5 NOAA’s for administrative dystopia.
from NOAA in 2003 – claim – Polar Vortex to blame for Aussie drought
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s948858.htm
” So one thing looks certain – we’d better get used to living with less water.
That prediction failed too. Yawn.
And we just had a thread about the spread of misinformation through academic journals… perfect.
“The model projects a continued decline in winter rainfall throughout the rest of the 21st century… The drying is most severe over southwest Australia where the model forecasts a 40 percent decline in average rainfall by the late 21st century.”
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At least they make a projection that is falsifiable, although this study will likely be forgotten by then.
Does anyone know how ozone depletion contributes to a decline in winter rainfall?
Great to see the ozone layer making a comeback,
Go NOAA!!
For sure, the USA leads the world in “Departments of Silly Walks”.
Crank up those treasury printing presses – more greenbacks required.
Hey, there’s a thought, my favourite printer here does most of the USA’s bibles, i am sure they can be trusted to knock out a few billion notes a month, for sure they have the latest Ryobi kit – happy to act as a responsible print broker..
Hammer. Nail.
Perth Australia rainfall over the past year (in the south west of Australia, the main area this model was simulating). Slightly above average.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/precipitation/sn94610_1yr.gif
Inland Southwest Australia at Kalgoorlie. Well above average.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/precipitation/sn94637_1yr.gif
The issue is, what good is this climate model and these climate scientists (Delworth would be considered one of the leading scientists) when they essentially ignore the actual climate observations.
They are drifting farther and farther from reality. At some point, they should all have major breakdowns it seems.
Here’s a graph of rainfall very near to my house which is almost at the southernmost point of mainland australia since about 1900.
Bit hard to see much of a trend there!
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=090061&p_nccObsCode=139&p_month=13
I suppose I’ll have to and pull out the monthly data to replicate their analysis, but March-August is a funny choice, it rains through to December.
Darn wet in Perth this morning. Been a very wet winter so far despite the supposed ‘long-term’ trend. It’s been a relatively cold winter as well … close to freezing several mornings so far, but Gore was in Australia recently…
Less than a year ago, another model-based study by Prof. Sarah Kang from UNIST linked ozone depletion to extreme precipitation. This is a summary of what they found:
“In this research they discovered that the ozone depletion in the Antarctic area is associated with extreme rain in the austral summer and it would be used to forecast heavy rain and the natural disasters in the future.” (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130829093405.htm)
My, what a difference a year makes! So does ozone depletion cause more or less rainfall? Or does it do both by causing “extreme rain in the austral summer” and a “long-term decline in fall and winter rainfall”? What could be the mechanism behind that?
Well folks, let’s take this study and see if we can’t just accept this study and spin it a slightly different way. Let’s suppose for a moment (just a moment) that they got it right:
NOAA researchers conducted several climate simulations using this global climate model to study long-term changes in rainfall in various regions across the globe. One of the most striking signals of change emerged over Australia, where a long-term decline in fall and winter rainfall has been observed over parts of southern Australia.
So, given that they developed this model and applied it to various regions all over the world, and only southern Australia came up as a problem, we could re-write the headline as follows:
New Study by NOAA: World Wide Precipitation Expected to be Unchanged Due to Global Warming with Southern Australia as Possible Exception