Gore links Iowa floods and tornadoes to climate change, but makes a basic error on global temperature to evaporation linkage, plus he misses the real reason behind imagined tornado increases.
[Excerpt: In a recent article in the Des Moines Register, Al ] Gore attributed the historic floods that devastated Iowa in June to man-made emissions causing more water to evaporate from oceans, increasing average humidity worldwide. “In 66 of your 99 counties, the flood damage was truly historic.” Gore told the crowd of 1,000 Democratic donors. “No one has ever seen a flood like this.” Gore also blamed climate change for increased tornadoes, including the one that leveled much of Parkersburg earlier this year. “Yes, we’ve always had tornadoes in Iowa and in Tennessee,” he said. “But they’re coming more frequently and they’re stronger.”
UAH satellite derived global temperature data. Click for a larger image
Current value for August 2008 is -0.010°C
According to our current scientific understanding of the water cycle and water vapor on Earth, the average residence time of water molecules in the troposphere (where evaporation and most weather occurs) is about 10 days.
Since the global temperature trend has been a negative slope since 2007, and is currently near the zero anomaly line, and with the short residence time of water vapor in the water cycle, Gore’s claimed “warming” could not be responsible for increased water vapor. If anything, water vapor in the water cycle would be less now.
Gore clearly doesn’t understand basic meteorology, much less climate.
Then there is Gore’s claim of “Yes, we’ve always had tornadoes in Iowa and in Tennessee,” he said. “But they’re coming more frequently and they’re stronger.” Well, the graph below says otherwise.
Graph from NWS/NOAA. Smaller (F1) tornadoes seem to be on the increase, but not larger ones (F2-F5). This is likely due to increased reporting from Doppler Radar, storm chasers, and news gathering. Small tornadoes that once went unnoticed are now often reported, and make the news.
Gore is flat wrong.
References:
1) Climatologist dismisses extreme weather predictions due to man-made warming as ‘complete nonsense’ – By Hydro-climatologist Stewart Franks, an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Newcastle in Australia. (LINK)
2) Another scientist dismisses fearmongers: Midwest Floods and ‘Completely Unjustified’ Climate Change Fear Mongering – June 22, 2008 – By Mike Smith is a certified consulting meteorologist and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society He is CEO of WeatherData Services, Inc., an AccuWeather Company, based in Wichita.) (LINK)
3) U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report shows Hurricanes declining, NO increases in drought, tornadoes, thunderstorms, heat-waves – June 20, 2008 – (LINK)
4) Going Down: Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events (LINK)
5) Analysis in peer-reviewed journal finds COLD PERIODS – not warm periods – see INCREASE in floods, droughts, storms, famine – April 24, 2008 – (LINK)
6) Increasing tornadoes or better information gathering? – February 8th, 2008 – (LINK)
JamesG [snip] . The financial collapse has nothing to do with the “free market” failure. It is because of intervention in it by governments that has caused it. The latest because of government’s allowing people to borrow money for houses they couldn’t pay back, Fannie and Freddie are evidence of that.
The GW nonsense IS about socialism and the Greens and the influence and control they want to gain by draining us of taxes.
That is what socialism is about.
It is bloody evil.
Good job, Anthony. You just have to keep after this continuously for the benefit of us metereological illiterates, because “Chicken Little” Gore is going to take advantage of any major weather event to spread his alarmist propaganda. This man is unconscionable in his disregard for the truth.
Al Gore doesn’t care whether he tells the truth or not. His goal is to scare the hell out of everyone so that they will do whatever he says to correct the preceived global warming that he truelly believes in. To him the end justifies the means. If you keep repeating a lie long enough people will start believing it.
How does one actually calculate what a “five hundred year flood” is anyway?
Think of it this way: Flooding is generally local. There are fifty states. Assuming a state-by stat evaluation, there’s a 10% chance of a five hundred year flood every year.
You have to deduct to include multi-state events, but you get the general idea. #B^1
I will resist refuting some of the silly economic notions I have just read. (Just take it that I am a liberal voting GOP largely for economic reasons and leave it at that. Free the Enterprise 350 million.)
Al Gore is a mouse studying to be a rat. So far he has only achieved obese mouse.
Well, I will take a shot at your rhetorical question. Dick Nixon, who is the last person to be cheated out of the presidency that we know about, didn’t take it very well, and it released a dark side in him that did him no great service in the end.
However he did not challenge the formal results for the good of the country. And we can’t really be 100% sure.
The one time I can figure that the election was outright stolen was Tilden-Hayes. Hays was 18 EV behind with 19 EV “in dispute”. So GOP congress decided that all 19 be made into a single block (what a crock!) and awarded the block to Hayes (in return for Jim Crow).
The damage Nixon did to the US was NOTHING compared with what over 80 years of legalized apartheid did.
I wasn’t going to infest Mr Watts’ lovely blog with anything about the financial meltdown, but people seem to be determined to debate it, so here goes.
If you are in the business of making a profit by lending money you are well advised to lend only to those who can repay you.
Lending for house purchase involves two elements of security – a charge over the property and the personal covenant of the borrower. A borrower who cannot afford to repay does not cause a problem if the property provides sufficient security. Equally, a property worth nothing is not a problem provided the owner pays his mortgage loan.
Good practice requires two limits to the amount advanced: (i) the repayments should be an affordable proportion of the borrower’s likely income (therefore the amount advanced should be limited to the capital sum which such an income can afford to repay) and (ii) the property used as security should be worth substantially more than the amount advanced (because there are costs associated with repossession and sale and a forced sale often results in a lower than average price being achieved).
If you lend without due regard to these two factors you run the risk of making a loss on the transaction.
Two factors caused vast amounts of bad lending in the USA: (i) the Community Regeneration Act which requires banks to lend to all sectors of society (not all President Clinton’s fault, it was introduced by President Carter and expanded by President Clinton) and (ii) lending purely on the basis of property valuations in a rising property market. The first factor paid insufficient regard to the value of the borrower’s covenant to repay and the second paid insufficient regard to the true value of the property offered as security.
The first factor was caused wholly by government intervention in the market. The second was caused wholly by market forces, forces which had been skewed by the effect of the first factor in that artificially bringing buyers into a market they cannot afford creates apparent demand which forces up prices.
The next stage of the problem was the selling-on of loans and the use of them as security for other debt. A bank with a lending book of $100million bringing a maximum return of $8million a year appears healthy, so they package up thousands of mortgage loans and commercial loans and sell the right to receive the future income. If you have advanced $100million and have the right on paper to a return of 12.5% someone will be tempted to pay you your capital investment ($100million) and 10 years of interest against an average loan life of 20 years. So you sell for $180million, repay the $100million of capital you had to expend and go out for a very nice dinner indeed.
The problem comes when the toxic bad loans start to default. Not only does the purchaser of the loans receive a reduced income but he repossesses properties and finds he can’t sell them for their book value. The investment of $180million can lose substantial value almost overnight. Once the loan book has been sold, re-sold, broken into bits, packaged with other bank’s books, sold again and used as security for commercial lending no one can value any package of loans with confidence.
Greedy speculators invested in loan books containing vast tracts of toxic waste and will never get their money back. They are to blame for not valuing what they were buying with sufficient care. That is not a fault of the market, it is the market in operation. If you are stupid enough to buy a 20 year old Ford Escort for the price of a new Mercedes you have only yourself to blame for not sending a mechanic to examine the car.
And all the time the US government had regulators in place to oversee how these markets were operating and issue warnings and guidance if bad practices were developing. The regulators were in place precisely because a raw market can allow spivs and speculators to distort true values.
Was there a failure of the market? Yes, of course there was. Was the market alone to blame? Absolutely not, it was distorted by the CRA. That is not a criticism of the policy behind the CRA, and here I have to be blunt. The CRA was enacted not because American banks did not lend to those on the margin of being able to afford their own home but because American banks did not lend to those on the margin who were of dark pigmentation (not all banks, but enough to make it a genuine matter of governmental concern). It was designed by President Carter as a necessary civil rights measure, albeit one which would distort the market.
To prevent the distortion being amplified through securitisation of marginal loans, regulators had the power to intervene. But they did not intervene. They sat back, as did both the White House and Congress, while house-price inflation and a general credit bubble gave the impression of ever increasing wealth. Eventually it had to unfold because a bubble is just a bubble and every bubble bursts eventually. This one has burst and left banks and investment houses holding untold billions of poor security.
The market is partly to blame because all markets have the capacity to be used by the unscrupulous to the detriment of the impecunious. Any suggestion that the problem is the fault of the market being too free is a self-defeating proposition. The market was not free, it was overseen by regulators with massive powers. If only they had seen fit to do their job the bubble would have been identified and countered many years ago.
There.
Nothing to do with weather stations, global warming, climate change or cricket. But jolly good stuff anyway.
Oh … and now there is no money. This is one reason for that:
http://thefatbigot.blogspot.com/2008/10/where-has-all-money-gone.html
That seems to be fairly stated.
Ad to it the fact that banks had default insurance — but then all the defaults caused the default insurance companies to go bust and the banks were left holding the bag.
Nice wrapup of the banking/loan issue. Free markets praying on stupid people who can be convinced that they can get more than what they can afford, while regulators sit on their hands, can affect smart people who have always paid their bills but are trying to float a loan till their product gets sold and they can pay off operating expenses. But even then, really smart people should salt away profits so that operating expenses can be covered the next year till produce gets to market. That means that share holders need to learn to live with smaller dividends so that these companies can keep more of their profits for coming expenses. Basically, everyone needs to act smarter and learn to live with less by saving more. I would put it in a mattress or other equally secure place if you are going to use it within the next 6 months.
Regardless of my raw attempt to summarize the issue, the above summary by FatBigot seems like a good one to me.
Bobby Lane wrote:
“[…]And just in case you hadn’t noticed, insulting people does little to help them in listening and understanding your point of view. Since I haven’t seen you on here before, unless you are using an alias, I assume you are new here; therefore, you really haven’t earned the right, if it can be earned at all, to speak to the ‘regulars’ around here like that. It’s called respect, look it up in the time you haven’t devoted to acting like an idiot.”
Aww, ya got me. I had no intention of showing any respect, because I really don’t have any for the “regulars” here. I just happened to be browsing blogs and checked this out to see what it was about and saw an opportunity to stir the hive. Unfortunately for me, there is little sport in it. Maybe, if it weren’t so easy, I might pursue the “right” to comment here.
Instead, I’ll devote my energy and money where it could really make a difference, writing to Congress about the issue and supporting legislators and executives who have the vision to tackle this very real problem head-on.
So I’ll leave you to revel in your sense of superiority and with a wonderful article and video by David Elliot Cohen that showcases the photography of Gary Braasch. Enjoy, and au revoir.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/28/what.matters.meltdown/index.html#cnnSTCText
REPLY: Pay him no mind, he’s just a sometimes writer to the local alternative weekly. He always acts this way. – Anthony
Fat Bigot, great explanation of the housing crises except Carter and Clinton shouldn’t have intervened because of a failure of black people to get loans.
I suspect a large number were not allowed to borrow money simply because they couldn’t afford to service one, and that should have been that.
Politics and the free market just don’t go well together.
“If Alexander Cockburn is correct that Gore has been a long-time lobbyist for nuclear power then that’s an area to focus your vitriol but if he genuinely believes what he is saying then it’s purely because the scientists are lying to him.”
I would certainly like to think that someone that came so close to being president was not that gullable. I used to like Al Gore, but since he lost that election he has not been the same person.. now he has joined the darkside:)
Kim
Just to be clear I don’t blame Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, for the market failure. I blame new-wave economists brought up on the Washington consensus and free-market dogma because, just like the socialist economists before them they think the system will works fine without human checks and balances. When in fact it always fails inevitably by human greed and dogma and the need to believe what you want to believe. However, you’ll find after very little searching, that it was liberals like Krugman, Stiglitz etc who warned the world. Conservatives on the other hand seemed to believe in the tooth fairy eg “deficits don’t matter”, “the only problem is a wordwide savings glut”, “the debt is a sign of confidence in America”, “compare the gdp to debt ratios”, etc, etc. All blah blah blah!
pKatt
Yes politicians ARE gullible and stupid as well as being liars. Sometimes they have wars for no apparent reason except perhaps to increase their popularity. Worse, the even more stupid and gullible voting population, in patriotic fervor, fall for the ruse every time.
And you guys who say that the free-market works are correct because everything does eventually fall back to it’s true value. However that correction takes too long and cuts too deep when it comes. When it comes then every economist – like fatbigot above – turn out to be marvelously wise after the event like economists always are just after they’ve been mightily wrong.
JamesG, the fault for the collapse lie fairly and squarely on your federal government for allowing people who couldn’t afford to borrow money do just that AND on those borrowing it.
The Wall Street types just went along on the taxpayer subsidized ride.
“It really means there is a 1 in 500 chance to have a flood of that magnitude for that year.”
Yeah, under the conditions that are prevelant during the measurement period. I just don’t believe that the conditions last for 500 years. I think that a statement like “the increase in prevalence of 500 year floods” is a circular argument, for the reasons I gave above.
Darren (01:13:49) The Boston Fed report in 1992, which purported to show that blacks were disproportionately being denied mortgages and upon which the subsequent, tragically mistaken, policy was erected, had fatally flawed analysis of the data. When the errors were corrected it showed that there wasn’t any racial discrimination in the mortgage market at all. And on this the horribly flawed policy was based. Kenneth Fritsch, at climateaudit makes an analogy with poor climate policy flowing from terribly flawed analysis of data.
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The moral of the story then KIm?
Do your research properly…