There’s a new essay from Indur Goklany in response to a recent Reuters news article.
Yesterday Reuters reported on a study which claimed that heat is the deadliest form of natural hazard for the United States. However, this result is based on questionable data. The study used results for mortality from extreme heat and cold that can be traced to the National Climatic Data Center. But these data are substantially different from mortality data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) based on the Compressed Mortality File for the United States. The latter uses death certificate records, which provide the cause of each recorded death (based on medical opinion). It is reasonable to believe that regarding the cause of death, particularly for extreme cold and heat, medical opinion as captured in death certificate records is more reliable than determinations made by the meteorologists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NCDC (even if they have Ph.Ds.).
The essay draws on data from the CDC database of mortality in the USA. See this table:
Combining data from the CDC database for extreme cold and extreme heat, and various arms of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for floods, lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes, Goklany has shown that extreme cold, rather than heat, is the deadliest form of extreme weather event. In fact, from 1979-2002, extreme cold was responsible for 53 percent of deaths due to all these categories of extreme weather, while extreme heat contributes slightly more than half that (28%). For more, see The Deadliest U.S. Natural Hazard: Extreme Cold.
Of course we all know that the human race has historically done better during warm periods. While we’ve seen a sloght warming in the last century, we’ve also seen a worldwide improvement in the human condition.
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“Turns out open water at the poles causes the Earth to lose heat quicker than ice stored up on land at the poles.”
That would be true. The overall ocean itself would become a more efficient heat engine transferring heat from equator to pole where it would be radiated and the cold water returned at depth. But I think evaporation plays a larger role in heat exchange than radiation does.
For example, how much does an ocean’s temperature vary between say 6pm and 6am? Not much. But if you increase the wind by a couple of miles per hour, you can cool the surface instantly.
What I would expect to find at the South Pole if Antarctica wasn’t there would be relatively warm water creating huge banks of fog and cloud which would tend to insulate the surface from efficient radiation. The water would likely appear to be “steaming”. I would expect to find a very thick cloud deck over that relatively warm water.
OT but germaine I think.
I am skeptical of what the IPCC 4th Assessment et al state – that CO2 is the main driver of AGW. My issue is the thought that many scientists are looking for a way out of supporting this “theory,” while maintaining their funding streams. Couple with the link up above that showed another CNN weather guesser stating that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” over stepped it’s bounds by stating that Katrina was strengthened by AGW – and then recanted the following day.
One word – cowards. In the moral, ethical and principle sense – all cowards. That is something to remember as their house of cards collapses. There is strength in truth, numbers as well. The longer they stay on board this ludicrous hypothesis, the more damage they inflict not just on themselves, but on science in general.
This politicization of science is a deal with the devil – and there will be hell to pay the longer that this tragic and foolish charade is played.
GeoS (06:22:21) :
It’s pretty obvious. People retire, go to Florida and then die. Must be the heat can’t be anything else…. G
After years of playing golf, tennis, etc.
I played golf 3 weeks ago, in Florida, with a man who was disappointed to shoot only 84, his age is 83! He has shot his age or better several times this year.
Better to die (or not) in the heat than not play golf in the north!
crosspatch said:
Pamela Gray (06:45:52) :
huge increases in Dept of Transportation cost
Hmm… road salt… tap tap tappity tap… http://www.saltinstitute.org/3.html shows Compass Minerals CMP as a road salt producer, and with a new uptrend… Maybe it’s not ALL bad… Thanks for the idea!
Mike Kelley (08:28:09) :
If the envirocrits have their way and electricity becomes a luxury for people without trust funds, lots of people will die facing heat waves without air conditioning. The death toll in France a few years was so high because air conditioning was not available to many old people there.
Of course you have peer-reviewed research to support this. Reference please.
Indigo (14:04:01) :
That’s quite a story: Shaking my head in disbelief…
Ed Larson (08:45:05) :
I see New Orleans and Vegas got to shovel a couple inches of global warming.
Also Southern California… Malibu got dusted. (Google “malibu snow” http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,469164,00.html comes up on top), I5 and I15 both closed near Los Angeles.
Coastal areas near San Francisco have a nice ring of snow sticking on the hills around them. Looks like about 2000 ft to me. A very early yard duty teacher thought she saw scattered small light flakes melting on contact with the ground a couple of days ago. We’re at about 80 feet elevation…
One more like this and we’re gonna have a white Christmas on the beaches of California…
David Jones, just google:
“french heat wave deaths”
You’ll find plenty of corroborating evidence, including wikipedia.
Joseph, I think it would be a lot easier and more controllable to look at dusting glaciers with soot or putting super light weight mirrors in space rather than trying to do explosive mining of the ocean floor for a flammable gas…
But in the end we are really too small to have much impact on the weather, we are just along for the ride. Maybe we could mitigate a bit, but stop it?…
Mike D. (13:39:16) :
IMHO, the root cause of our Ice Ages (including the rapidly approaching next glaciation) is the tectonic positioning of Antarctica over the South Pole.
I was trying to avoid the ‘stopping an Ice Age’ thread, but since it seems to have caught on…
I don’t remember who it was, but a geologist has stated that the ice ages came when N and S America joined shutting down the current between them. He further stated that ice ages could be prevented by digging the Panama Canal a log deeper and wider… Don’t know how Panama would feel about nuclear dredging…
(If you really care enough to want a citation and details, enjoy your Google time, I have dinner to make…)
crosspatch (14:33:48) :
There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing that is not explained simply by orbital mechanics.
Don’t know if it’s right or not, but the most interesting explanation I’ve heard is that the water level in the oceans drop to the destabilization pressure of the methane clathrates. This gives a huge, very sharp, methane pulse that starts warming. As the ice retreats, all the old plant stuff trapped under the glaciers from eons past is exposed and rots adding more methane. Repeat until warm when plants grow and sequester CO2 and redeposit in the ocean and get trapped under the (newly) advancing ice.
Mongo (15:41:35) :
I am skeptical of what the IPCC 4th Assessment et al state – that CO2 is the main driver of AGW.
I think that the A is the key here. By definition it excludes natural warming pressures. Of all the things we do, CO2 is probably the largest, but still completely irrelevant to the Natural warming NGW… now colding NGC…
From another thread, my post:
http://www.ghgonline.org/otherstropozone.htm
Tropospheric ozone can act both as a direct greenhouse gas […] As a direct greenhouse gas, it is thought to have caused around one third of all the direct greenhouse gas induced warming seen since the industrial revolution.
[…].
The largest net source of tropospheric ozone is influx from the stratosphere.
http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/e/ozone/Curr_allmap_g.htm
Shows ozone is about -10% to -30% deviation in the north pole and up to (down to?) -40% deviation in the south pole on 2008/12/13.
Given that O3 is a GHG and a significant % of GHGs … maybe the GHG folks are somewhat right. GHGs do matter, just not the way they think. The sun goes quiet, O3 plummets, the poles get really really cold and the rest of the planet starts to cool off fast?
Just call it the Smith Solar O3 Pump Theory if anything ever comes of it 😉
Well, maybe what I would expect to find at the pole without Antarctica there in winter would be something like the polar region of Saturn. There would likely be a season-long hurricane. All that rising air being warmed by the ocean would probably result in a storm that the circumpolar jet would keep stationary until it breaks down in spring. There might even be a polar ocean vortex, too, where sinking water would create a situation not unlike pulling the bathtub drain. You would have an atmospheric convection system that would be persistent for several months coupled with an ocean vortex that would suck cooling surface water to the bottom where it would spread out and return to the equator. Provided there was no major continental land mass South of the Antarctic Circle.
Most of us have no idea what cold is. Ojmjakon, Russia is currently -75F and has averaged -65F this week.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/station/24688/2008/12/20/WeeklyHistory.html
Note that Ojmjakon is right at ground zero of Hansen’s global warming Asian hot spot. The IPCC should hold their next meeting there, to gain first hand experience in the horrors of global warming.
Science Daily reported that cosmic rays do not explain Global Warming, the ice is melting faster than models predicted and so on. Sounds like the world is coming to an end, but not! Places like Vegas and New Orleans haven’t see much snow got dumped on. I guess it was the first time in 30 years the Vegas strip got 3.6 inches of snow. Last year was one of the snowiest winters in my area.
Not only that, but cold. This month the average temp is down like around 9 degrees in my area and we just blasted with a major snow storm. More snow expected Saturday night, and another major snowstorm looming for next week. So much for global warming this year, huh… It like the late 1970s all over again!
Even if we went through 5 straight years of cooling, we would still get reports on how much the earth is warming…lol
Old Coach, it is my (admittedly weak) understanding that the Permian Ice Age occurred when the super-continent Pangea drifted over the South Pole.
E.M., it is my (admittedly weak) understanding that the planet had been cooling fairly steadily since the Eocene of 50 mya. The Late Rupelian event (30.5 mya) probably coincided with beginning of full continental glaciation on Antarctica. There was a slight warming trend in the mid-Miocene, from 17.5 to 15 mya, possibly due to flood basalt eruptions. Antarctica was at one time connected to Africa and South America. The final detachment from the latter occurred about 5 mya?, setting up the circumpolar current. That tipped the system into full-on ice ages beginning roughly 2 mya, although the Panamanian closure was probably a driver too.
crosspatch, you bring up a key point. The Milankovich solar irradiation nadir was ~60 kya, but the Wisconsin glaciation did not break up until ~5,000 years before the Milankovich optimum. That plus the rapidity of the changes imply some sort of threshold, positive feedback warming effect was reached, or conversely, that the positive cooling feedback of the glaciation was suddenly interrupted. Destabilization of methane clathrates is an interesting theory. Is there any evidence? Pluvial rains on a previously dessicated ice sheet is also an interesting theory. What drove that? Is there evidence?
IMHO, the glaciation/interglacial harmonics are THE climate change question. Global warming after 9,000 years of neo-glaciation is only marginally interesting, especially considering that it is ephemeral at best. If we could disrupt the inexorable neo-glaciation with cow farts, SUV’s, etc. then great. But will all that really work? We absolutely need better understanding of our 100,000 climate cycle if we are to stave off the 20th repetition of Snowball Planet.
Cold is finally starting to settle in here around 55 degrees North Latitude in Canada. I continue to be puzzled by the slowdown in the Arctic ice formation. I am thinking that another possibility for the slowdown in ice formation is that the cold that initially formed the early ice is cooling the water faster, which is causing the cold water to sink at faster rates. This sinking cold water is forcing warmer water to flow Northward from Equatorial regions at faster rates. If this is the mechanism that is bringing warmer water Northward, then we should see cooler than usual anomalies growing in the oceans near the Equator. If true, the equatorial regions should continue cooling at a faster rate. Land temperatures in the North located away from water seem to be getting very cold while Europe is now getting warmed by the water, and Alaska seems to be getting warmer on the Pacific side. Is there any data available on ocean current speeds recorded at weekly time intervals?
I just finished organizing my UAH data spreadsheets. All the data is on sheet one, and each column of data is graphed on a succeeding sheet of its own. At the top of each graph sheet I have graphs that are linked to the month of my choosing for the region, the ocean, and land. At the bottom I just finished adding graphs that display the entire time period from 12/1978 to the present for the region, the oceans, and land. It is very interesting to observe the ocean and land graphs at the same time for the 30 year period of data, and then comparing the tropics to mid latitudes and to the polar regions. It was worth the effort to construct these graphs.
The sun certainly does appear to be the main driver for the Earth’s climate, with water extremely important. I don’t think CO2 plays any significant role in determining Earth’s climate, and hardly worth talking about. If CO2 were 3000 parts per million in the atmosphere, I still doubt it would be an important climate forcing agent.
Happy Holidays everyone.
“Pluvial rains on a previously dessicated ice sheet is also an interesting theory. What drove that? Is there evidence?”
The evidence is that the ice is gone. Had it kept snowing, it would still be there. At some point the precipitation changed to rain instead of snow. That would have melted the previous winter’s snow. The water would have ponded between the ice and the terminal moraines and as the crust was depressed by the weight, huge lakes would have existed. In fact, lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron were all one lake until only about 2000 years or so ago as post-glacial rebound continues there and land rose up to separate the lakes.
When a combination of rising water and crustal rebound brought the water levels up to a point where they breached any barrier to an outlet, we would have seen major flooding … as was also seen out West when Lake Bonneville overflowed to the North. Once it started raining on those glaciers in summer, it would have been all over.
And maybe that is all the trigger than is needed. Maybe a long term change in weather pattern that brings cold, snowy winters with cool dry summers is all that is needed. If you get boatloads of snow in winter and no precipitation in the summer, the snow might last longer. But still the missing piece is how it can go so cold so fast. Now I do realize the the cooling seems to be more gradual than the warming,
Drop sea levels 100 meters and see how many Greek islands become connected. And such building of lakes and eventual breaching of containment features makes it little wonder that there are stories passed through the ages such as Atlantis and the Great Flood. Such stories were not limited to just people of that region, either:
We have had writing for what, 5000 years or so? Imagine sea levels 100 meters lower than today for 100,000 years. Imagine the coastal settlement that would have taken place. Now imagine “Meltwater Pulse 1A” that happened about 14,000 years ago. In the space of only 500 years or so, sea levels rose some 25 meters. So in 500 years the sea level came up about 25% of what had taken 100,000 years to go out. 25 meters of sea level rise is a lot particularly where most of the coast is on continental shelf that is fairly flat. Entire tribal areas could have been inundated in a single generation. Tribes could have been pushed inland into the territory of other tribes. So imagine where sea level was in 1500 and imagine it being 25 meters higher now. London would be another “Atlantis” legend and would now stand miles offshore.
And that wasn’t the end of it either. The water kept rising though that period was the fastest rise. Between 7500 and 8000 years ago there was another rise of about 13 meters. In the last 100 years it has risen less than a foot.
It *had* to be raining on that ice. Because if it had kept snowing, it would still be there.
@Mike D.
I won’t purport to have the knowledge to judge whether what you covered in your 18:21:22 post makes any sense, but I certainly like your style.
“Admittedly Weak” followed by flood basalt eruptions, speculation on plate tectonic effects, mention of methane calthrates and the effect of Pluvial rains on desiccated ice sheets…
And to top it off, your last paragraph should qualify for some sort of WUWT hall of fame 🙂
Kudos,
OA
radun (11:43:13) :
“…
For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.
…”
My rough guess … when the glaciers are marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, maybe the AGW crowd, the IPCC, and their slavish pols will scratch their heads and wonder where they went wrong.
S’pose?
Off topic:
Have you seen the big list?
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/sign_the_big_list/P1240/#commentsmore
The Swiss Alps are losing their glaciers at an accelerating rate:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7770472.stm
Useful info on Swiss Glaciers:
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/glacierlist?year=2007&submit=Go%21&order=&field=
Is sublimation/deforestation an issue in Switzerland?
“The Swiss Alps are losing their glaciers at an accelerating rate”
Yes, and they are exposing 5000 year old wood in the process. Meaning that 5000 years ago, the area that is now glacier was forest. And other glaciers are exposing other artifacts as they recede such as leather clothing, arrows, even ancient Roman coins.
And I sincerely doubt the rate is “accelerating”. Also the study only goes to 2007. 2007 would be when I would expect to see the glacial retreat start to reverse. My guess is that 2008 would have shown a stop in this “retreat” and 2009 will show (as Alaska and Scandinavia have shown in 2008) a glacial advance.
Here is one interesting link. And here is an interesting article but you have to subscribe to get it. Here is the abstract:
In other words, we have cycles of advance and recession of the glaciers but overall it is getting colder.
@ur momisugly crosspatch (22:48:58):
Thanks very much – your response condensed into one handy package all the crucial AGW-Panic-Prevention data I need to argue convincingly with my friends that it is almost certainly not our fault.