2010’s world gone wild: Quakes, floods, blizzards: The Associated Press has published one of the most interesting pieces of environmental science journalism in a long time, and that’s quite a feat in itself. Indeed, there are some serious factual issues as the authors intersperse anecdotes with specific scientists’ quotations while playing fast and loose with the facts.
This article deserves a thorough fact-checking and deconstruction. Hold onto your seats on this roller coaster…
This is an absolute masterpiece: quotations are in the boxes, comments are mine.
This was the year that the Earth struck back. Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 – the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.
What purpose does this statement serve? Is there a moral equivalence between suicide bombers and the heartbreaking suffering associated with Haiti’s earthquake, the resulting mysteriously-caused cholera epidemic, or the devastation associated with the Pakistani floods? Apparently there is, as the authors make that case that it is either human-caused or exacerbated.
And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.
That didn’t take long.
Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes.
There is no doubt that the impoverished around the world suffer disproportionately from natural disasters: their ability to mitigate is very limited with poorly constructed buildings and standards of living that could further unravel by nature’s tragic pulling on the threads of survival. Earthquakes occur without regard to the dwellers above the ground. Tropical cyclones occur without regard to the topography in their path. Weather and seismic activity cannot be controlled; it can only be adapted to with the best possible disaster prevention. This fact is not ground breaking or in any way controversial, yet it is seemingly brought up, acknowledged, and summarily dismissed while Borenstein and Bell get to work on blaming humanity for the ills of the Earth.
Climate scientists say Earth’s climate also is changing thanks to man-made global warming, bringing extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding.
Some climate scientists perhaps, but there is current NO peer reviewed literature that DIRECTLY connects the floods in Pakistan or the heat wave in Russia definitively to anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, there are scant scientifically diligent explanations available for the weather/climate events of 2010, but here’s one from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory Climate Attribution or CSI outfit on the Russian heat wave. Note, this is also a draft document, and not peer reviewed (yet), but with the extent of the data analysis from inside, it has a helluva lot more weight than the word of scientists who have not demonstrated or presented similar data analysis on the Russian heat waves or the floods. Instead, as Borenstein and Bell helpfully intersperse in the article, scientists are giving expert testimony on the events without tangible evidence, but perhaps intuition, feelings, or political motivations, which are superfluous anyways to the situation at hand.
Here is NOAA’s explanation by Dr. Martin Hoerling, which has received almost no media mention anywhere, and definitely not a press-release from NOAA.
Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave. It is not known whether, or to what exent, greenhouse gas emissions may affect the frequency or intensity of blocking during summer.
AP continues:
In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined.
What in tarnation does the number of casualties associated with plane crashes have to do with anything? Simply making an academic comparison here for the readers? WUWT!
Expert Quote #1
“It’s a form of suicide, isn’t it?” Professor Roger Bilham, geological sciences University of Colorado.
Anecdote #1
“I think it is the end of the world,” she said. “Our planet warns us against what would happen if we don’t care about nature.” Mask wearing Vera Savinova, a 52-year-old administrator in a dental clinic who in August took refuge from Moscow’s record heat, smog and wildfires.
Expert Quote #2
“These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Where’s that missing heat? It’s a travesty…
How Extreme?
The article lists a series of weather events which seemingly are examples of events contemporaneously associated with the “season”, aka winter or summer aka cold/snowy, hot/dry, and some comments in parentheses. Here’s the rundown of extreme events: blizzards over the eastern-US, Russia, and China ( always happened, still happening, and will happen again & again ) | record heat in Los Angeles on one day (Urban Heat Island effects?) | freezes in Florida (yup, happened in January 2010 and December 2010) | tropical floods in tropical Australia, and desert droughts in desert Australia | Amazon drought (though flooding in nearby Venezuela must have been missed).
Anecdote #2 (How costly?)
Ghulam Ali’s three-bedroom, one-story house in northwestern Pakistan collapsed during the floods. To rebuild, he had to borrow 50,000 rupees ($583) from friends and family.
An attempt at scientific knowledge:
Even the extremes were extreme. This year started with a good sized El Nino weather oscillation that causes all sorts of extremes worldwide. Then later in the year, the world got the mirror image weather system with a strong La Nina, which causes a different set of extremes. Having a year with both a strong El Nino and La Nina is unusual.
Almost, but not quite. Okay, it’s just untrue. La Nina is NOT the mirror image weather system of El Nino. El Nino is one mode of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is a 2-7 year period coupled atmosphere-ocean phenomena — it modulates the world’s weather — it is NOT weather. It is the number one mode of variability in the tropics. Someone please get these folks at the AP Wikipedia or Google or perhaps one of the experts can help them understand this. It’s like the fact checking / preparation that Larry King is known for! Here, Jerry Seinfeld talks to King who seriously thought Seinfeld’s show was canceled. Anyways, look at the graphic from that pesky government-run NOAA website again: when the red switches to blue, that’s when El Nino goes to La Nina, happens a lot — and if we had more than a hundred years of data, we’d see it goes back and forth, without any concern for the “human hand”.
Another attempt at scientific knowledge:
The excessive amount of extreme weather that dominated 2010 is a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave – setting a national record of 111 degrees – would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming.
The climate scientists he is referring to is ONE blogger at Jeff Master’s Weather Underground (no, not Bill Ayers’), Rob Carver. You’ll see from my comment #13 (RyanFSU), which is not responded to, that his interpretation of the “normalized anomaly” is woefully inadequate and should be removed as it is, uh, statistical rubbish. But, Carver is cited as “climate scientists” — the AP and the drive-by media is known for these mystery quotations of plural groups: “some people say“.
Expert Quote #3
“The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion,” said Greg Holland, director of the Earth System Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Please, someone publish a peer-reviewed transliteration of that statement, using the evidence contained in this article.
Expert Quote #4
“The science is clear that we can expect more and more of these kinds of damaging events unless and until society’s emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles are sharply reduced.” Ecoscience author, and Science Czar John Holdren.
And, almost a the end, the AP writers manage to throw in the BP oil spill, and declare the Chilean mining crew’s 69-day ordeal as the “feel good story of the year.” WUWT!
Here’s a clue AP: if you really want to understand the world’s weather and climate, don’t look to global warming. It is an absolute pittance compared to the global reorganziation of the world’s weather due to El Nino, and it will be for the foreseeable future. So, if you want the easiest, best, and most correct expert explanation for what happened in 2010 here it is:
The transition from a strong El Nino to a strong La Nina (ENSO), hardly unprecedented, dramatically changes the tropical Pacific ocean temperatures. The atmosphere and ocean, acting together in a coupled fashion, teleconnect these tropical changes to the rest of the globe — both hemispheres. Storm tracks including tropical and extratropical cyclones, large-scale weather regimes such as blocks and Rossby-wave breaking cut-off lows, and shorter-time scale oscillations such as the PNA, NAO, and AO are all NON-LINEARLY associated with ENSO.
Academically, we have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding atmospheric/climate variability — and no matter what the experts on 2010 quoted in this article purport to understand about this year’s weather, it is only hand-wavy testimony that is actually at odds with some researchers at their own government labs!
Seth Borenstein? This was the guy who stayed in Copenhagen’s cold waiting outside experiencing global warming first hand… LOL
Trash.
Sickening.
CAWG is like a zombie now. It’s dead but it can still make meaningless loud noises and stink up the place.
Said it before and I need to say it again – why give this scum the oxygen of publicity?
A very basic point, apparently not addressed, is that if you have more people on the planet, there will obviously be more people killed by each natural disaster.
If we ‘rebase’ and ‘homogenize’ the figures, like they do with temperatures, I am sure that any increase in deaths (if there is any) will be sharply reversed.
.
“killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined”
This has about as much to do with anything as the statement which (lazy) reporters use when trying to talk about a lot of water. viz. “As much water as (use any number you like) ‘Olympic Swimming Pools’ “. I have NO idea how much water is in an Olympic Swimming Pool (nor do I particularly care how much there is).
So, as is becoming normal with the lazy, ineffectual MSM, it doesn’t mean a thing.
The AP should have included this story from the BBC Caracas feed:
Venezuelan squatters bank on the future in office tower
Isabel Morales is still haunted by the latest tragedy to happen here.
“A little girl fell 18 storeys to her death,” she recalls, shuddering slightly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11942501
There must be some way of linking it to CO2 !
There really does not seem to be any random event that these fraud catastrophists will not blame on civilization in general.
Then they capitalize on the ignorance of their readers with leading questions
and ridiculous hypotheses about AGW causing everything from snowstorms to monsoons to earthquakes to volcanic activity. Can meteors, Comets, portents in the heavens and human sacrifice
be far behind ?
While I think you’re right…the article is a piece of end of the year journalistic trash, I think the quote by Kevin Trenberth that you used from the piece should be used in full context. The article says:
“Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.
“These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.”
To be fair, Dr. Trenberth seems to be commenting on the 18 countries that broke their records for the hottest day ever and the not the rest of the natural disasters mentioned in the arcticle, but because the article is better suited for the front page of the National Equirer, it is hard to say what Dr. Trenberth was really commenting on or what he might have actually said.
Regardless. the article is a piece of trash and it’s sad to see the AP fall so low.
Unfortunately, Drudge made this article his top headline.
And eats brains, as is evident from the AP article.
Ralph says:
December 19, 2010 at 11:40 am
A very basic point, apparently not addressed, is that if you have more people on the planet, there will obviously be more people killed by each natural disaster.
This need not be the case. But, unfortunately it is more true than not. Some of the climate science (sic) funding could do wonders if re-directed toward such problems.
Earthquakes? What’s next Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD).
Don’t forget how anthropogenic continental drift caused all those deaths with the tsunami several years ago. Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel (from a particularly good fortune cookie).
I just googled ” plane crash global warming”.
Incredible.
473,000 articles, mostly like this one
http://announcexpress.com/mp/?p=2048
I wonder what stopped them from going there in the AP article ?
““As much water as (use any number you like) ‘Olympic Swimming Pools’ “”
outdated.
You must convert the water to snow and the swimming pools to metrodomes, to derive an accurate amount of water for a given watery disaster.
So Seth Borenstein, a well-known, much-ridiculed AGW fanatic with a long history of writing erroneous drama queen articles, quotes Kevin Trenberth, another AGW fanatic exposed in the Climategate e-mails. Haven’t both of them been discredited? Why does AP continue to let him–actually THEM–use its network to promote their extremely political, extremely religious, fictitious, self-serving hysteria? Talk about a complicit Press . . . .
If it says AP near the byline, you can pretty much assume it isn’t true.
“This was the year that the Earth struck back. Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 – the deadliest year in more than a generation. Less people were killed than in a single month of the Holodomor (Stalin’s enforced Ukrainian famine).”
See, that’s much better!
“In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, less people than were killed in a single day at the peak of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.
This is easy stuff!
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb
“This was the year that the Earth struck back. Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 – the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.”
What a load of complete rubbish!
I’m sure that 2004 must have been significantly higher than 2010 because of the Indian Ocean earthquake and subsequent tsunami that claimed 230,000 lives alone.
“freezes in Florida (yup, happened in January 2010 and December 2010)”
I was a student at the Univ. of South Florida in Tampa in 1976/77 and there was a minor snowstorm in Tampa accompanied by freezing orange crops all around South Florida. To this day, I vividly recall looking out of my dorm window and seeing snow covering the grass (admittedly it was less than one inch).
I guess “climate change” started in the 1970’s???
This is on a par with the Mullah who claimed that Tsunamis and Earthquakes were cause by women behaving with a lack of modesty. Mumbo Jumbo rules the world!
From the article: “Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.
“”These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.”
Kevin Trenberth knows for a fact that his statement is scientifically insupportable. No one knows what specific weather events would happen under any climate circumstances. So, no one knows what specific weather events would not happen under any climate circumstances, either.
But his wording has some apparently inadvertent plausible deniability: ‘All I meant was that under different climate trends, the weather events would be different.’
Of course, if the 21st century could be rolled back to January 1, 2001, there’s no guarantee whatever that subsequent weather events would be distributed in the same way again. That is, under the same climate trends, the specific weather events would be different.
Somehow Kevin Trenberth worded his comment in a way that was useful to reporters intent to cry out about human culpability. But he’s highly trained in climate science, so the ambiguous wording must have been accidental.
[ryan: Trenberth is one of the most prolific publishers in the climate arena, and is one of the top-hard science climate variability academics out there. He knows exactly what he is saying.]
I’m glad you noticed that, Ryan. When I head that death like this hasn’t been seen in a generation (250,000 deaths from disasters), I couldn’t help think back to 2004 because of the tsunami and the estimated 200,000 deaths from the giant wave alone. Bear in mind both of these were earthquake related, something that global warming has absolutely no connection to (other than, people live on the coast because it’s a great place to make a living).
So I’m think we should approve the choking of all economies, thrust the world into economic poverty, and increase the amount of people who are suffering from weather-related disasters.
The reason liberal Democrats tend to be pro Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming [CAGW] and conservatives don’t buy it has as much to do with politics as science.
The “solutions” to the “problem” are everything the liberal Democrats want anyway.
1) World government. [CO2 doesn’t respect borders]
2) Redistributing of wealth [poor folks deserve reparations]
3) Massive government intervention into the marketplace. [CO2 taxes which can be spent for anything.]
What’s not to love ?
The conservatives and Republicans don’t believe in CAGW for the same reasons the Democrats do believe in it.
The science backing CAGW is so shaky and full of uncertainty that it is the easiest place to attack.
Who is going to change their view of redistribution of wealth ?
I tend to be a conservative but I know far more about climate than the average alarmist. They seem to me to be almost totally ill informed.
Some articles are so bad, you can’t wait to wade in and refute them, point by point. Such articles, however, are on a plane far above this latest AP enigma. It is not just bad on factual levels, but on every criteria that written works are judged, it is an affront to the intelligence. So bad, in fact, that any attempt at a reply will only dignify it. Some things are best left unsaid.
These idiot journos are lucky they don’t work in Australia, as Jo Nova would deconstruct their nonsense and hold their rubbish up to ridicule very quickly indeed.
Borenstein has form for this kind of nonsense – it’s not surprising he’s at it again.
See Seth Borenstein: catalogue of alarmism
“Expert Quote #4
[…]Population Bomb author, and Science Czar John Holdren. ”
Ehrlich wrote that particular fantasy book. Holdren co-wrote the hard-core population control manual “Ecoscience” with Ehrlich though.
None of the weather events cited are unique. Most are aggravated by mankind and not the climate. In fact cold weather produces far more deadlier results. The Moscow fires were bad. But Moscow has no forestry fire control. Not even fire fighters. That trade, which goes back to the Czars , was virtually eliminated by Putin and gang. As for Pakistan, 1,000 years ago the Punjab was a heavily forested area complete with lions and tigers and everything in between. The waters were cool and ran clear.
The forests have been chopped down and not replanted. Combine the loss of watershed and continual erosion with the fatalism of Islam , the burgeoning population , mud hovels, lack of governmental concern, the theft and destruction by religious vandals and organized crime of what little efforts are made to ameliorate things, and you have a disaster. One that will repeat itself in parts every year for the foreseeable future.
I’ve written to the AP before and told them they should fire Borenstein for being a liar and a propagandist. IIRC this is the same punk in the climategate emails coordinating with the Mann team behind-the-scenes to “get the message out” properly – it is obvious from the other climategate guys quoted in the article (Holdren, Trenberth) that he is still up to his old tricks.
As for his silly death comparison figures – it would be easy to beat him at that game. For example, I could say that omega-3 deficiency causes 96,000 deaths annually in the US – that would blow any “heat wave” death figures out of the water.
His implication that man is causing earthquakes due to “retaliation” from the Earth is ridiculous but not unprecedented.
Ryan,
I think Pat Frank was being sarcastic in his last comment.
[yup, just furthering the logic…]
The scientific method is to test your hypothesis by predicting results. If the results are not what was predicted then the hypothesis is wrong.
Climate Science predicts, gets results that are not predicted, but does not question the hypothesis.
Climate Science does not use the scientific method.
I get the feeling
ProfessorMaue is a little ticked with this article! Can’t say I blame him. To see such garbage being promoted as fact by people who clearly know better must be infuriating. Perhaps Ryan might pen an appropriate rebuttal for Drudge to post above the (cr)AP story that is up in the marquee spot? I sent a link to this article to Drudge, but I doubt it will make the grade as is.[ryanm: i don’t expect matt to link my opinion pieces, but my hard science pages, sure — not a professor, yet]
“…More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.
And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say…”
True. Because ALL of the terrorist attacks in the past 40 years HAVE BEEN CAUSED BY MAN.
So where’s the call against Terrorist Induced Global Murder (TIGM)?
Controlling CO2 wont have an effect on that.
“CAWG is like a zombie now. It’s dead but it can still make meaningless loud noises and stink up the place.”
Eventually you will realize it isn’t dead. That was just a load of junk you fooled yourselves into believing. In 2020 CO2 and global warming will still be an issue.
The question is will you still be around saying “CAGW is like a zombie now”
Emerging science suggests that increasing CO2 /AGW leads to an increase in nips and tucks and skimpier bikinis. What’s not to like? 🙂
“That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people,”
===============================================
In Russia and Pakistan….
But they didn’t die because some glorified weathermen predicted a cool dry summer.
The English news reported that there were over 30,000 “extra” deaths last year because of the cold winter. Just in England.
A winter that the glorified weathermen had predicted to be mild and snow free.
A winter when heating bills doubled because of “green” energy.
People are being forced to choose between heating their homes and eating.
Governments are not prepared with enough salt, grit, and even fuel, because they are taking the advice of another government agency that’s it’s not going to be a bad winter.
They are having to leave people stranded……….
People are dying because of some glorified weathermen, not in the future, but right now…………
“. In 2020 CO2 and global warming will still be an issue. ”
The difference being that the frozen NH masses will be pining for the phony phenomenon rather than searching for fictional mitigation.
So ummmm… call back in 2012 and let us know how that Solar maximum is coming along, and don’t forget to wear some warm socks.
The Trenberth statement is nothing short of downright disgusting. One day, I will perhaps have the chance to see him eat his words! – In a way, I suppose that could be an ironic benefit of being such a prolific producer of rubbish! Expect to be obese very soon, Mr Trenberth! LOL!
Aaah I see now, the earth mother goddess is very angry and filled with rage at her childrens lack of respect for her?
What should we do then I wonder? Maybe burn some witches or sacrifice a few first borns? Maybe we should worship and believe and sin no more against the mother earth and that will make her less likely to kill us by way of disasters, think of it, no more earthquakes and floods and droughts!
Anti reason is taking over the minds of the authors, its a collective cognitive regression back to the days when the little old lady(midwife/herbalist) would have a secret life of souring the cows milk and making the mayors son fall in love with the lowly millers daughter. Burn the witch! It must be the witch what else could it be?
Back to the days when the tribe thought they could bring the rains and make the fields fertile by murdering a few children, hey thatll work.
Are you afraid and frightened enough yet? let the old superstitions reign once more, back to the days of old, who needs rational thought and reason anyway? What has science and advanced civilised values ever done for us anyway? Thunder and lightning is not the product of electricity, its the gods of the earth that are angry at our lack of faith and of course the lack of murdered kiddies and not forgetting the unburned witches, so what are ye waiting for, go ye forth and doeth the good work, dont stop to think and be rational because that is just the devil leading you astray.
Onion says:
December 19, 2010 at 12:47 pm
“Eventually you will realize it isn’t dead. That was just a load of junk you fooled yourselves into believing. In 2020 CO2 and global warming will still be an issue.
The question is will you still be around saying “CAGW is like a zombie now”
You mean it will snow even more?
Apparently the hurricanes didn’t cooperate, too cold, so got to drum up something to go along with the Obama science department rewrite of the climate records. Lying is unbecoming, regardless who is doing it.
How in the world do they equate crappy / no building codes in Haiti (along with subsequent poor public health and water systems) causing death at the hands of an earthquake with anything having to do with weather?
I think someone was desperate for a story and had to make something up fast for a deadline…
For effective dog bite prevention, you must know your dog.
Most of the time, dog bites aren’t sudden, unexpected occurrences; they follow a series of escalating events that an alert dog owner can spot. If you notice your dog becoming more uneasy in certain situations, watch your dog to gauge your dog’s comfort level. Dog bite prevention requires you to gauge your dog’s fight-or-flight reactions; some dogs bite only when cornered, while more aggressive dogs may want to bite any time they see a challenge.
Just read “State of Fear” for the second time.
This and other similar articles are captured in the narrative with frightening accuracy. I wonder how many times the word catastrophy has been used in the MSM this year.
“This was the year that the Earth struck back”.
Ooooohhhhhhh Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don’t these people want to see a de-population of the earth in order to save it??? It would seem to me that if what they say in this article is actually true then it would be a win-win for them. F’n hypocrites!
Seth Borenstein
That name, to me, considering the crap he regularly churns out, indicates there’s no real point in reading any further.
Wonder if he considers Walter Duranty a role model. . .
The press did the same in the 1970s, using the same words and expressions. Do we have to bring these old stories back out to remind them? It’s a story for the yellow media.
Did anyone else notice Trenberth used the term ‘global warming’ and not ‘anthropogenic global warming’?
There is a world of difference between the two terms. Me thinks Trenberth is cleverly stoking the fire all the while giving himself an out if called on it in the future.
If tar n feathering was still in vogue, he’d be near the head of the que in my book.
Kevin Trenberth spoke honestly [“It’s a travesty…”] when he wrote in his email about not finding evidence of global warming – an email that he assumed would never be seen by the public.
But since he craves publicity, and because he knows if he said the same thing to the Ass. Press it wouldn’t be printed, Trenberth has reversed his story 180°, and embellished it to make it sound even more alarming.
Deliberate mendacity like Trenberth’s used to result in being shunned by one’s colleagues. I may be somewhat jaded, but I’m still shocked when I see a scientist like Kevin Trenberth say things that he must certainly know are not factual.
And he doesn’t have the excuse that he’s an idiot like Borenstein and Bell, who are no doubt on the Soros payroll like Joe Romm. Trenberth lied because the late Steven Schneider advised climate scientists that lying to promote their agenda is A-OK.
“Seth Can’t Tell the Truth” could be the title to a Berenstain Bears story.
It appears the gibberish has been removed from Drudge. It’s certainly no longer the headline and I didn’t even notice it buried in the other articles.
[ryanm: amazing how that happened 😉 ]
On a more positive note.
On Chanel 4 news UK tonight:
TV presenter asked Meteorologist what was the cause of present Britain’s persistent low temperature spell.
He answered it was due to low Sunspot activity.
Then followed an entirely rational discussion about the past history of such events.
Neither CO2 nor Global Warming were brought up.
There is light at the end of the tunnel.
Wow, the irresponsibility of the reporting is amazing.
This is not journalism.
It is muckraking.
R. Gates says: “Regardless. the article is a piece of trash and it’s sad to see the AP fall so low.”
Fall? It’s not a recent change. They have been battling UPI for the cellar for decades. UPI has the advantage of being owned by the Unification Church, but the AP keeps trying.
Anton says: “If it says AP near the byline, you can pretty much assume it isn’t true.”
“The Earth strikes back in cahoots with bad human decision-making,” said a weary Debarati Guha Sapir, director for the World Health Organization’s Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. “It’s almost as if the policies, the government policies and development policies, are helping the Earth strike back instead of protecting from it. We’ve created conditions where the slightest thing the Earth does is really going to have a disproportionate impact.”
This is serious, if you see a butterfly, cut its wings off fast.
Dr. Richard North suggests re-insurance industry is behind it & I think he’s right.
DaveE.
This whole AGW issue seems much like a variation of the millennial end-of-the -world movements that plagues humanity. In wonder what the next one might be about.
I note that the Russian heatwave was caused by a stable high during the summer months which prevented cooler changes coming through.
The same thing happened in Australia during the spring of 2009. A of high pressure stabilised over central Australia causing temps to build and resulting in an extremely warm spring/early summer.
However, this spring the highs were centred south of the mainland causing a cool, wet spring (wettest spring on record for Australia).
Pressure systems, winds and cloud are not part of the climate modelling so no wonder they get it wrong.
Speaking of fantasy disasters, check this story and a quote from it…
“Nobody really knows how the Arctic is going to behave as the ice retreats, but we do anticipate that significant changes will occur,” said Dr Seymour Laxon, a Cryosat science team member from University College London, UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12025283
Apparently, even though the entire UK is buried in snow and probably Laxon’s head too, these pro AGW scientists still think it’s warming.
Hard freezes in Fla. aren’t as uncommon as the media would have you believe , probably on the order of once every five years or so . I would like to add that – as an aside – I’m thoroughly sick of the words extreme , sustainable , and unprecedented . Off to make eggnog now …
Really? Ever? C’mon Borenstein, the planet is older than you are.
Utter and total desperation . . . the planet is warming so they have to come up with ever bigger lies and distortions to try and keep their propaganda efforts alive.
Goebbels would certainly understand and approve their methods.
Kinda sad actually that promising scientists like Trenberth have sunk to such depths of distortion, lies and exaggerations. He could have had a real career instead of the shark jumping crap he now spouts off. A sad, sad legacy indeed.
“2010′s natural disasters as talking points in this narrative is a new low”
Ya think that’s lower than sexing up 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita as global warming artifacts?
That’s a tough call for me. Those hit pretty close to where I live. Austin is a hurricane refuge city and lots of people here have friends and family on the Louisiana and Texas coasts who lost their homes for months, years, or forever to say nothing of all the lives lost in Katrina. Gore was especially shameless about blaming it on AGW.
[true, a lot of mileage was made out of the ’05 hurricane season, re-insurance and insurance made out like bandits based upon the flawed expert testimony by folks such as ____, ____, ____, etc.]
a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave – setting a national record of 111 degrees – would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming.
Uh-huh.
From the Novgorod Chronicle:
1298: There was a wholesale death of animals. In the same year there was a drought, and the woods and peat bogs burnt.
1364: Halfway through summer there was a complete smoke haze, the heat was dreadful, the forests, bogs and earth were burning, rivers dried up. The same thing happened the following year . . .
1431: following a blotting out of the sky, and pillars of fire, there was a drought – “the earth and the bogs smouldered, there was no clear sky for 6 weeks, nobody saw the sun, fishes, animals and birds died of the smoke.
1735: Empress Anna wrote to General Ushakov: “Andrei Ivanovich, here in St Petersburg it is so smoky that one cannot open the windows, and all because, just like last year, the forests are burning. We are surprised that no-one has thought about how to stem the fires, which are burning for the second year in a row”.
1831: Summer was unbearably hot, and as a consequence of numerous fires in the forests, there was a constant haze of smoke in the air, through which the sun appeared a red hot ball; the smell of burning was so strong, that it was difficult to breathe.
The years of 1839-1841 were known as the “hungry years”. In the spring of 1840, the spring sowings of corn disappeared in many places. From midway through April until the end of August not a drop of rain fell. From the beginning of summer the fields were covered with a dirty grey film of dust. All the plants wilted, dying from the heat and lack of water. It was extraordinarily hot and close, even though the sun, being covered in haze, shone very weakly through the haze of smoke. Here and there in various regions of Russia the forests and peat bogs were burning (the firest had begun already in 1839). there was a reddish haze, partially covering the sun, and there were dark, menacing clouds on the horizon. There was a choking stench of smoke which penetrated everywhere, even into houses where the windows remained closed.
1868: the weather was murderous. It rained once during the summer. There was a drought. The sun, like a red hot cinder, glowed through the clouds of smoke from the peat bogs. Near Peterhoff the forests and peat workings burnt, and troops dug trenches and flooded the subterranean fire. It was 40 centigrade in the open, and 28 in the shade.
1868: a prolonged drought in the northern regions was accompanied by devastating fires in various regions. Apart from the cities and villages affected by this catastrophe, the forests, peat workings and dried-up marshes were burning. In St Petersburg region smoke filled the city and its outlying districts for several weeks.
1875: While in western europe there is continual rain and they complain about the cold summer, here in Russia there is a terrible drought. In southern Russia all the cereal and fruit crops have died, and around St Petersburg the forest fires are such that in the city itself, especially in the evening, there is a thick haze of smoke and a smell of burning. Yesterday, the burning woods and peat bogs threatened the ammunitiion stores of the artillery range and even Okhtensk gunpowder factory.
1885: (in a letter from Peter Tchaikovsky, composer): I’m writing to you at three oclock in the afternoon in such darkness, you would think it was nine oclock at night. For several days, the horizon has been enveloped in a smoke haze, arising, they say, from fires in the forest and peat bogs. Visibility is diminishing by the day, and I’m starting to fear that we might even die of suffocation.
1917 (diary of Aleksandr Blok, poet): There is a smell of burning, as it seems, all around the city peat bogs, undergrowth and trees are burning. And no-one can extinguish it. That will be done only by rain and the winter. Yellowish-brown clouds of smoke envelope the villages, wide swaithes of undergrowth are burning, and God sends no rain, and what wheat there is in the fields is burning.
speaking of media disinfo:
the following “study” appeared on most dem-leaning blogs, plus on CBS radio, toronto star, globe & mail, and more plus NYT blog and seemed to have one purpose:
17 Dec: NYT Blog: Brian Stelter: Study: Some Viewers Were Misinformed by TV News
The study was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project that is managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland…
were 30 points more likely to believe that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring…
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/study-some-viewers-were-misinformed-by-tv-news/
10 Dec: Misinformation and the 2010 Election
WORLDPUBLICOPINION.ORG IS A PROJECT MANAGED BY THE PROGRAM ON INTERNATIONAL POLICY ATTITUDES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that: …
most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)…
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf
only 616 people were interviewed.
PIPA: Sponsors
Rockefeller Foundation
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Tides Foundation …
Ben and Jerry’s Foundation
University of Maryland Foundation ETCETC
org/sponsors.htm
worldpublicopinion.org:
Staff: Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). He directs the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll of the US public, plays a central role in the BBC World Service Poll of global opinion and the polls of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and is the principal investigator of a major study of social support of anti-American terrorist groups in Islamic countries. He regularly appears in the US and international media, providing analysis of public opinion, and gives briefings to the US Congress, the State Department, NATO, the United Nations and the European Commission. His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Public Opinion Quarterly, Harpers, The Washington Post and other publications. His most recent book, co-authored with I.M. Destler, is Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (Brookings). He is a faculty member of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Association of Public Opinion Research.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/about.php?nid=&id=
the framing of all the questions was biased, the reading of which response was correct was politicised, yet the MSM reports it uncritically.
AP ardently phony? Borstein is a sign to skip to the next article, hopefully written by someone with thinking skills and integrety. I am beginning to think the authors of “Not Evil Just Wrong” are incorrect, stupidity of the magnitude of CAWG is as evil as man can get. Hysterical actions for an imaginary problem. Imposition of stupid rules in the name of a belief. Use of propaganda to manipulate children. All the historical precursors of mindless mob violence. Dehumanise your opponents too far and they will return your love in spades. And so on, all normal cycles of human nature except if I believe this (that they are evil) about the proponents of AWG I will be forced to apply their logic to them. That precautionary principle has never worked before but if I am to be subjected to it then it is only fair I should apply it to all who cause me to fear for my freedom and future. Which is not a path to a civil and peaceful society. I think therefore the proper tools to use are laughter and mild derision and humor, after all we cannot always help being stupid. And to top off the dumb thoughts, I do not know if the planet is warming or cooling ,the chosen time frames are very small. the state of the land based stations is worse than I ever dreamed, the actual value of UHI may be orders of magnitude larger than we were told, The data still has not turned up for confession at the CRU and yet claims of science are made for the results. Climatology is similar to scientology in my book as I now wonder if any science is to be found in the CO2 causes warming claims. I suspect the next decade will be a bad time to be an authority as nothing will be accepted on trust because our goverments, at least up here, have blown the AWG alarm endlessly.However 2010 has been a wonderful year and in 2011 I expect govts to cave and use the truth, “We Do Not Know”.
John R. Walker asks:
“Said it before and I need to say it again – why give this scum the oxygen of publicity?”
Answer: Simply to provide documentation for future historians of science as they dig through archives of old blogs, trying to figure out why some ‘scientists’ left science for the AGW religion, and how sensible humans overcame their hegemony with the mainstream press.
A basic instinct in animals and humans is the flight or fight response. The most dangerous animal is a cornered animal because the animal cannot take flight and thus has no choice but to fight.
It is no coincidence this eco-propaganda came out when it did. Cancun just ended in a disaster. It is a well know fact that if you want something to be disclosed discretely you do so on Friday. Thus, this eco-propaganda would not have been published Friday because it would receive far too little exposure. Sunday is a good day to release something you want well know, because it will talked about first thing on Monday. That is why this article is eco-propaganda.
But why so vitriol? The AGW believers and others who stand to gain are cornered. Cancun didn’t work, Copenhagen didn’t work, well populated areas are freezing, and the political climate in the US is changing against the true believer/war profiteers. Global warming belief is cornered by all these. The only option left is a desperation fight. It is also a sign that the end is nigh for those who have tied their fates to the belief. The smart one will, of course, find another crisis to profit off of, but most are about to go down in ignominious defeat.
A desperation attack on Sunday was well-planned by those who know how to manipulate people.
As there are 195 countries in the world, if 18 broke temperature records it means that 177 did not, which means that by my advanced statistical reasoning the world must be cooling.
On the other hand I could be wrong.
Not sure if things are getting worse (colder instead of warmer) or that it’s always been like this & the media is only reporting it more with new vast Internet for all of us to now view.
Just wrote to AP to complain about the article. Not sure it will have any effect or not, but if it stops just one paragraph of inaccuracy getting out it will be worth it.
What makes me really mad in all of this is that this article, once in the AP ‘network’ will get republished left right and center by simple ‘cut and paste’ journalism/editing; the amount of actual publishers who critic what comes down the wire is thin and far between. The number of checks and balances once stuff like this gets into the system is minimal and I know it is having worked on news feed processing systems sourcing_many_ providers – also the amount of effort you need to spend deduping the articles due to the republishing cross networks is quite horrendous.
“The Associated Press has published one of the most biased pieces of environmental science journalism in a long time, and that’s quite a feat in itself. (…) Undoubtedly, there is a considerable amount of scientific ignorance on the part of the authors, but using the human suffering associated with 2010′s natural disasters as talking points in this narrative is a new low for the Associated Press.”
Biased narrative?!?!
Well , putting Al Gore blowing fire on the Earth and calling AP ” is a new low” is not biased?
Reporting all colds events in the world during one of the hottest years on record, while ignoring the far more common (in this year and this decade) hot extremes is not biased?
Making the link between excess heat in the atmoshere and extreme weather is a pretty obvious thing. This year will pass as a very wild year, even if you don’t like it.
““These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Where’s that missing heat? It’s a travesty…”
This is an absolutely biased and misleading quote. The “travesty” of Kevin Trenberth is about missing heat in the Oceans, that WAS MEASURED JUST IN THE UPPER 700 METERS OF THE OCEANS where there was no appreciable warming since 2003.
2003 is a relatively recent year, and there are problems with measurements. Look at how the data has been corrected one and again:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-2010-update-to-nodc-ocean-heat.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-and-changes-to-nodc-ocean-heat.html
Looking at the upper 2000 meters of the ocean, instead, shows an unmistakable warming:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tracking-the-energy-from-global-warming.html
The von Schuckmann’s paper shows a trend of 0.77 W/m2 of warming in ocean, a study published after the paper that Trenberth was referring in the email, so he still didn’t know about it.
Von Shuckmann still very likely UNDERestimate the warming, as the thermo-steric sea level rise estimated in the paper is 1 mm/yr, when the total thermo-steric SLR is 3.2 mm/yr(measured from altimetry)-1.9mm/yr(ocean mass from GRACE)= 1.3 mm/yr., that is, o.3 mm/yr more than in the Von Shickmann paper.
Clearly there is a lot of heat accumulating in the planet, and 2010 is so far the warmest year in the NASA GISS and NCDC datasets and second warmest in UAH and RSS satetellite datasets, despite the 2009-2010 El Niño was much weaker than the 1997-1998 Super El Niño, and was quickly followed by a moderate-to-strong La Niña, and we are coming out in the deepest solar minimum in a century.
Claiming that there is no global warming is burying the head in the sand, and in the warmest year on record (or second warmest if you prefer UAH and RSS) a series of climate extremes is absolutely no surprise. AP is reporting that extremes.
[ryanm: so, if the globe were 0.5C cooler, then none of this would have happened? come on… i’m making the argument that Natural Variability >>>> AGW by a lot … I’m not writing for Associated Press and sending my work across newswires across the world to media that pay for the service. Go get your own blog if you don’t like the content here, no one is going to engage you on blog policing or censoring.]
It should be possible to tally up the number of people each year (as a percentage of population) who died from extreme weather events – heat, cold, snow, floods, droughts, tornados, hurricanes, typhoons, and anything else I might have missed. Tally it up in dollars damage compared to global GDP while you’re at it as a another measure and don’t forget to include crop losses (if any after accounting for gains).
If “global climate disruption” is real then both datasets described above should reflect a growing problem taking a toll in blood and treasure.
Someone should be able to get a nice juicy grant to study on this for a spell and then write it up for publication in a trade rag.
Wow Christmas comes early on WUWT, a present of opportunity.
My acid tongue is on vacation ’till Jan though, I’ll e-mail my derision then.
Has Seth ever written a non biased story????
[if he had, AP would have fired him]
It is amazing that every single proposed remedy for global warming happens to exactly parallel the left-wing agenda. However, I think Seth Boringtheme may have slipped up on this one.
Consider the first item on his list of ways the Earth struck back…Earthquakes. Follow the logic here; plate tectonics tells us earthquakes are caused by the Earth’s plates slipping and sliding past each other. What causes things to be slippery? Lubricants. What is the best lubricant? Oil!
As a conservative environmentalist, I won’t rest until every last drop of that evil substance has been sucked out of the Earth. Since we have to do something with it (we don’t want pools of the stuff fouling beach vistas and bird feathers after all), we’ll have to burn it to save the planet.
Reminder December 19th was the last day of Copenhagen climate confab last year, and of course the anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s Impeachment in 1998, a stain upon the office and the nation.
All rise…hail to the media ignorant extraordinaire. Very single minded…just like a dogs in heat. Consider the degree in journalism criteria, or any other not so hard science education coupled with the blinding dollars for selling hysteria for a meal. Can’t think straight for their life.
Just more trash with which to start a comfortable fire in the old wood stove; CO2, tar, creosote, and ash, but to stay warm. 🙂
Why stop at comparing heat and a storm to airline travel, which is an extremely safe mode of travel, but one that a lot of people are unjustly afraid of, why not compare it to drop side cribs, which killed only 32 babies in nine years and yet have been banned in the U.S. because of the danger they pose?
Come on AP you could have written “more people were killed by this storm and heat than were killed in 9 years by drop side cribs, a product so dangerous that the consumer product safety administration has ban them, while cigarettes remain on the market.
See how cool that is? it implies that the heat and storm killed more than cigarettes, without really lying.
Piers Corbin at Weather Action has been accurately predicting weather months into the future with 85% accuracy using his Solar Lunar Action Technique. Among other weather anomalies, WA accurately predicted the start and end of the recent Moscow heat wave. It was due to changes in the jet stream caused by solar activity. It was not due to global warming, climate change, or a paucity of virgins being thrown into the volcano.
Add the AP to the list of those that will be held accountable for their perpetrating this global warming scam. Their day of reckoning is approaching.
from mars gets his misinformation from the misnamed blog “skeptical” science. No wonder he’s misinformed.
The following are charts ARGO copied directly off of the official ARGO deep sea buoy site:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5 [this last chart from ICECAP]
[And Ryan, keep in mind that folks “from mars” are really our friends. ]
Ladieeeeeeeeeeees and Gentlemen!
Might I present to you an article from the MSM in the UK, (the Daily Wail is one of the widest-read tabloids), wherein our rather chilly weather is discussed and there is NOT ONE MENTION of CAGW!
In fact there is … wait for it …. an actual mention of High Pressure Blocking of the jet stream.
There is even attribution of the present weather to an Arctic Oscillation!
Ladies and Gentlemen, please read the article referenced below for an astounding example of something resembling honest reporting!
Yes, it’s amazing!
Yes, it verges on the unbelievable!
But, Ladies and Gentlemen, HERE IT IS!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339937/UK-snow-weather-update-Temperatures-set-hit-low-26C.html
I wonder who the AP is aiming this Doomsday Alert, at…
It can’t be ‘students’ as, they’ve not been taught to read at a 6th grade level.
Perhaps their indoctrinated ‘behavior-mod teachers’ are supposed to find this and then bring the junk into the classroom…?
Regardless, this ‘Chicken Little Propaganda Piece’ should be expected by such ‘arms of the bureaucracy’ such as the A.P. Their “owners” are the ones making $BANK$ over this travesty, to begin with. I wonder how they sleep at night?
C.L. Thorpe
Only a complete fool would believe that the first 700 meters from surface of the oceans are cooling or stable and the next 2000 meters are somehow warming. This is the type of idiocy that boggles the mind.
The AP article by Seth Borenstein clearly shows the huge frustration extremists like him are experiencing because their mission to influence political policy to address their climate fear agenda is simply failing. Cancun produced no commitments for any legally binding reductions in global CO2 reductions nor any commitments to put actual cash in the bank to supposedly compensate developing nations for global warming impacts.
Further the U.S. Congress is much more likely in the next two years to undertake hearings providing many many scientific critics of the climate fear agenda an opportunity to present their views, analysis and data versus prior efforts by this body to deny such critics an opportunity to be heard.
The outcomes from these events will significantly add to building the public record addressing the overwhelming flaws, dishonesty, deceit and misrepresentation that are the hallmarks of the purely politically driven climate fear science.
The AP article represents how desperate the climate fear agenda supporters have become and how extensive their failures have been in trying influence political policy here in the U.S. and world at large.
R. Gates says:
December 19, 2010 at 11:50 am
R. Gates quotes Kevin Trenberth…
“These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.”
… and then has this to say. “To be fair, Dr. Trenberth seems to be commenting on the 18 countries that broke their records for the hottest day ever and the not the rest of the natural disasters mentioned in the arcticle, […]”
I might point out that those records are the hottest since records have been kept. We don’t know that they are the hottest temperatures ever. There’s historical and geological records that would indicate hotter days in times past… before all that CO2 was liberated by humans.
It seems to me to be either a death wish or an act of desperation on AP’s part. For them to even consider allowing the likes of Seth Borenstein, with his form anywhere near them, illustrates their parlous condition – a clear signal of the impending death throws to come for AP.
Douglas
Just did a quick google of death rates and supposedly out of all possibilities for causes, weather related deaths account for 1.8% going back to the 1900s. Not sure what that really means, but everyone will die eventually, and it looks more likely that the cause will be something else.
Mr. From Mars:
“Reporting all colds events in the world during one of the hottest years on record, while ignoring the far more common (in this year and this decade) hot extremes is not biased?”
You don’t even know when you are doing it , do you ?
Ryan Maue is absolutely right in exposing this piece of garbage journalism filled with flawed science . If we leave this unchallenged , it will be repeated by others and soon become the 1000 lies of the future that people will believe to be the truth unfortunately. There appears to be a renewed effort to blame every form of natural event or disaster if even if slightly extreme on global warming and due to manmade greenhouse gases because they have basically lost the public battle about the greenhouse gases as the prime cause of global warming . It is the only game in town for them as less and less people now trust what the AGW camp says these days. You just have to step outside the door in any part of Northern Hemisphere and see for yourself whether we are having global warming weather or the kind of winters we used to have periodically in the past and many records were broken those years as well. The problem is that many regions have forgotten the kind weather their elders remember well and are quite unprepared nationally and individually to deal with it . This has been made worse by some scientists telling the people that snow will soon be a thing of the past. This same message was echoed in countries other than just UK. Here we have had four 4 bad winters in UK already and the Transportation Secretary is still in doubt about what he should do. There seems to be plenty of money to fight global warming abroad but no money to help the people at home to survive and to cope with global cooling and cold winters . How odd?.
Smokey says:
“from mars gets his misinformation from the misnamed blog “skeptical” science. No wonder he’s misinformed.
The following are charts ARGO copied directly off of the official ARGO deep sea buoy site:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5 [this last chart from ICECAP]”
Youy continue to misinform and accuse others of doing so. That is called “proyection”, that is, you have a misbehaviour and to cover your conscience of doing so, you “proyect” your conduct to people that doesn’t think like you.
Skepticalscience DOES NOT invent data, but just report data and results from peer-reviewed articles. I referred to the Von Shuckmann et al.article:
“Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008”
A nice review is here:
poseidon.inogs.it/sire/conferenze/ppt…06…/Argo_von_Schuckmann.ppt
It clearly shows a warming trend of 0.77 W/m2 in the upper 2000 meters of the global ocean.
In the “click 5” you poorly make a reference to:
Loehle, Craig. 2009. “Cooling of the global ocean since 2003”
and
Josh K. Willis1*, Don P. Chambers, and R. Steven Nerem “Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal to Interannual Time Scales”
Well, Loehle staes in the paper :”The study is based on ocean heat content anomaly (OHCA) data compiled by Willis et al. (2008b). This monthly dataset (Fig. 1) uses only data from the Argo array of profiling floats. Heat content is evaluated down to 900 m depth.”
Three observations:
1)Loehle uses the Willis study, so the two souces are not independent: one relies on the other.
2)Willis and Loehle use data from the UPPER 900 METERS. Clearly the von Shuckmann paper, down to 2000 meters, is better.
3)Even in the upper 900 meters, there is no agreement on “Global cooling”. There is the paper:
Eric W. Leuliette: “Closing the sea level rise budget with altimetry, Argo, and GRACE”
link: ftp://ftp.ifm.uni-hamburg.de/outgoing/scharffe/BACKUP/paper/2009_GRL_Leuliette.pdf
Where is shown a WARMING TREND, deduced from a thermo-steric sea level rise of 0.8 ± 0.8 mm/yr. The difference is attributed to poor sampling used in the Willis et al data and a possible higher climatology baseline compared to the WOCE gridded hydrographic climatology (WGHC) of ARGO.
More, the Leuliette, Willis and Loehle data stop at 2008, a La Niña year, so the sea level trend is biased downward. Updated SLR trends show a SLR trend of 3.2 mm/yr
Substracting the ocean mass component obtained by GRACE, as shown in the paper:
A. Cazenave et al. : “Sea level budget over 2003–2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo” (Ocean mass SLR: 1.9 +/−0.1 mm/yr)
3.2 mm/yr – 1.9 mm/yr = 1.3 mm/yr
A thermo-steric SLR even bigger than the one of the von Shuckmann paper (1 mm/yr). The ocean is still warming, at more than 0.77 W/m^2.
Do the math:
0.77 W/m^2 = 1 mm/yr
x = 1.3 mm/yr
1 W/m^2: That is a huge amount of heat.
So, I do NOT believe blindly in sites like skepticalscience and climateprogress say. I CHECK the original sources.
So, please, cancel the “global cooling party”.
The oceans are warming, this is warmest year on record in GISTEMP, NCDC, and second in HADCRUT, UAH and RSS, and yes, with a lot of heat in the atmosphere, extreme weather in the forms of heatwaves and droughts (like the Russian drought and heatwave and the record Amazon Drought of 2010). The cold weather in USA and Eurasia in winter are the result of a record negative Arctic Oscillation, that ALSO bring record warm weather to Canada, Greenland , East Siberia and the Arctic Ocean.
[The five “click” links above appear to fail when tested. Robt]
Broken link to:
poseidon.inogs.it/sire/conferenze/ppt…06…/Argo_von_Schuckmann.ppt
Now that “presses” have become a thing of the past, “Associated Press” has become an increasingly irrelevant dinosaur, spewing nothing but leftist propaganda in its death-throes. They should change their name soon. “Addled Propaganda” would be appropriate.
I’m a scientific illiterate, and would’ve instantly recognized this as hogwash, with no prompting from anyone.
Still, thanks for the excellent dismantling job.
The single heat and storm system?
Don’t they mean the jet stream?? We’ve known about the jet stream for over half a century. They didn’t seem to have any trouble identifying the jet stream as the cause for the unusually cold spring and summer of 2009.
from mars says:
December 19, 2010 at 5:17 pm
You do realize that from 2003-2008 (inclusive) the sea level rise was only 1.8 mm/yr?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.txt
His editor is equally blamable. He should have said, “You’re hanging a global warming story on a natural-disaster peg. That’s OK, but earthquakes aren’t weather-related natural disasters, so you’ll have to deduct their death toll from the count.”
Editors are trained to look for these sort of flaws and have lots of experience in catching them. So his oversight looks deliberate–a sin of omission. Maybe Borenstein has so much “clout”, or such influential friends, that his editor shrinks from curbing him. I suspect that’s the case.
Maybe the AP itself fears the wrath of the CACA Cult and the mobs and blogs it can inflame, if offended. (I.e., if Borenstein started blubbering that he was being muffled.)
This site offers commentary, the AP purports to be presenting news. It’s apples and oranges.
Jimash says:
December 19, 2010 at 11:56 am
I just googled ” plane crash global warming”.
Incredible.
473,000 articles, mostly like this one
http://announcexpress.com/mp/?p=2048
I wonder what stopped them from going there in the AP article ?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They didn’t find this one either – 1.2 million hits for “global warming sexual dysfunction” An example.
http://www.reconnections.net/danielverse_April-May2010.htm
You’d think AP would have cotton onto the health link. Never mind, I’m going to contact AP immediately and send them some relevant links and quotes so their next article can more doomsdayish. Yeah!
A simple climate model forced by satellite-observed changes in the Earth’s radiative budget associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is shown to mimic the major features of global average temperature change during the 20th Century – including three-quarters of the warming trend. A mostly-natural source of global warming is also consistent with mounting observational evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than the IPCC’s climate models simulate.
See
See http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natural-response/
Quoting Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
October 20, 2008 (updated December 29, 2008)
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natural-response/
The AP story talked about 18 record highs, but how many record lows were there? I know that we broke the record lows four days week before last here in N. Florida. I seem to remember that record lows were set last Jan and earlier this month in Europe, not to mention S. American and south Africa this summer (their winter).
“The transition from a strong El Nino to a strong La Nina (ENSO), hardly unprecedented, dramatically changes the tropical Pacific ocean temperatures. The atmosphere and ocean, acting together in a coupled fashion, teleconnect these tropical changes to the rest of the globe — both hemispheres. Storm tracks including tropical and extratropical cyclones, large-scale weather regimes such as blocks and Rossby-wave breaking cut-off lows, and shorter-time scale oscillations such as the PNA, NAO, and AO are all NON-LINEARLY associated with ENSO.”
“Academically, we have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding atmospheric/climate variability — and no matter what the experts on 2010 quoted in this article purport to understand about this year’s weather, it is only hand-wavy testimony that is actually at odds with some researchers at their own government labs!”
“The Associated Press and agenda-driven journalists without much evidence of scientific knowledge (especially in terms of climate variability) do the entire planet a disservice by conflating anecdotes, expert testimony, political appointees’ nonsense, and real-world suffering by those afflicted by natural disasters into a self-serving, blame humanity, anti-progress screed.”
==============================
Quotes from Ryan Maue….and repeated here for effect.
Ryan (or should we say Dr. Maue)….we are expecting great things from you, brother!
Grrrr. I love the fire. Keep it up.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Drudge didn’t just bump down the headline for that (cr)AP story, he dumped it entirely! Seth Borenstoned; serial liar. I’ve already forgotten the name of the bint that co-wrote that piece (of crap) with him. I will do my best to forget I ever read it.
Thanks for your debunking Ryan! And thanks for the following; http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/extreme/gfs/current/nhdt.html
That is an awesome forecasting tool.
Pat Frank says:
December 19, 2010 at 12:21 pm
“Somehow Kevin Trenberth worded his comment in a way that was useful to reporters intent to cry out about human culpability. But he’s highly trained in climate science, so the ambiguous wording must have been accidental.”
===========================================
Note the extreme irony in the second sentence.
John M says:
“You do realize that from 2003-2008 (inclusive) the sea level rise was only 1.8 mm/yr?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.txt”
Did you realize that 2008 was a La Niña year?
During El Niños, precipitation over land decreases , resulting in a temporary increase in sea level. During La Niñas, global precipitation increases over land, so some water is transferred from the ocean to land, resulting in a temporary decrease in sea level.
So, given that the 2007-2008 event was a strong La Niña and was followed by a weak 2008-2009 La Niña, the trend for 2003-2008 is masked by natural variability (i.e. ENSO).
If you use the long-term trend to 2010, you find a sea level rise near 3 mm/yr
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html (SLR= 3.2 mm/yr)
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.pdf (SLR =3.0 ± 0.4 mm/yr)
Dave Andrews says:
December 19, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Ryan,
I think Pat Frank was being sarcastic in his last comment.
=============================
Whoops. Late bloomer here.
Sorry Pat Frank for jumping the gun.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
A wikileaks not controlled by left wing activists would be a real benefit for the world.
I would be really interested in the background, which appears to allow this author publish all these untrue comments again and again and above all against the interest of the American people.
from mars says:
December 19, 2010 at 8:14 pm
============================
Why don’t you take it up with the preeminent sea level physicist on the planet? Or are you afraid? You should be. I dare ya.
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf
1 MM per year?
OMG time to run for the hills!
Fool!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Along the lines of this garbage “news” reporting:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8212616/Television-news-should-no-longer-be-impartial-Sir-David-Attenborough-says.html
Statements like “..preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever…” are clearly ridiculous.
For instance, re: the Russian heat wave,”….according to Roshydromet [Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring] studies of the past climate show no record of similar high temperatures since the tenth and eleventh centuries in Ancient Russia….”.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news/extremeweathersequence_en.html
Hmm, ‘the tenth and eleventh centuries’ has a familiar ring to it.
The Earth has been warming for at least three centuries (only the last 60 years or so according to the IPCC, due to human CO2 emissions) so according to AR4, there ought to have been a gradual increase in the frequency of extreme weather events over three centuries.
Or are extreme weather events a unique product of warming (which according to ‘The Science’) is overwhelmingly due to human CO2 emission?
Why should 2010 be cursed with extreme weather events when there has been no significant warming for over 10 years?
Thee emulation of a simple sound can change the weather, never mind your gases.
Who owns Reuters and Associated Press? Is it Lord Rothschild? The same Lord Rothschild who owns the Federal Reserve Bank of America.
This brings to mind a 1999 piece from http://www.theonion.com called ‘Millions and Millions Dead’.
An oldie, but still relevant under the circumstances.
So essentially because of the excessive prolonged heat spells in places such as death valley, USA, central Australia, And pretty much the whole of the African continent and Saudi Arabia, north south america, and central america, antarctica suffers unnatural prolonged cold spells with unnatural massive amounts of snow and ice.
Makes sense, what with all that heat must go somewhere. Personally I thought that somewhere was space, but hey, why be picky?
You know, this sort of nonsense is going to continue forever. How many times have we seen new scientific studies being published that keep exposing the flawed IPCC mantra of catastrophic man-made global warming caused by rising CO2 emissions from human activity? Yet governments and the media don’t give it any attention… they don’t even give a damn!
Honestly, there is only one way to shut these people up. We have to have the IPCC’s 2007 report tested in a Court of Law to demonstrate, for example, that it is intentionally biased, it contains significant errors, it was falsely claimed by Dr Pachauri that the IPCC only relied on peer reviewed literature, no empirical evidence exists proving CO2 causes global warming, etc etc.
It is only in a court of law that the evidence should be tested, otherwise the “My dad’s better than your dad” type arguments will just go on forever and ever.
Look what happened, for example, when Gore’s political propaganda movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, was challenged in the British High Court. It was deemed exactly that, a political movie not a scientific movie, and a number of errors in that movie were exposed by the judge.
Also, look what happened when the flawed manipulated New Zealand temperature record was challenged in a New Zealand court. Heck, the NZ government abandoned ship and resorted to disclaiming the official NZ temperature record. The government said no such record existed!
So how can we get the IPCC’s crappy science tested in a court of law? How can we get this organized to make it happen… to hold the IPCC to account over key elements of its claims? It is the only way to stop this great global warming swindle dead in its tracks!
“Peer Review is a process that journals use to ensure the articles they publish represent the best scholarship currently available.”
Associated Press should consider peer review for their scientific articles. This article looks to have no research, other than pseudoscience.
Perfect irony: The places that suffered the worst damage are EXACTLY the places where “the hand of Man” hasn’t done much. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, New Orleans…. all places where governments put all their effort into enriching the rich and no effort into protecting the citizens.
In places where “the hand of Man” has built and maintained levees, built and maintained solid houses, or sanded and salted the damn streets, there is much less damage and death.
Ralph:
Can you mark yourself as “Ralph-2”
Ralph
Sounds about right. The northern hemisphere, North American continent and Europe have more man-made structures, so it’s going to cause a wobble and misalignment of the continents. The disaster should come to a peak in about 1 year (Decemeber 21, 2012).
Plate tectonics has the inconvenient effect of making nature unsustainable. The new paradigm is that Wegner was a Holocaust denier and hyoomans cause earthquakes.
Personally, I’m waiting for the screaming headlines that say “Climate has Flat-lined! No heating, No cooling! Scientists Mystified!”
Then of course will follow the stories about disasters if we have no floods, no storms no melting glaciers, no Icebergs…
Mark my words, the stories are coming!
Chew on this one:
Global Warming causes humans to grow taller.
hmmmm
INGSOC says:
“Drudge didn’t just bump down the headline for that (cr)AP story, he dumped it entirely! Seth Borenstoned; serial liar. I’ve already forgotten the name of the bint that co-wrote that piece (of crap) with him. I will do my best to forget I ever read it. ”
Yes, and Drudge brought it back today, December 20. Left column, near the bottom:
2010 WORLD GONE WILD: QUAKES, FLOODS, BLIZZARDS
linked to this
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20101219/D9K734E81.html
Drudge is a carnival barker who makes money with sensational headlines often linked to stupid stories. I think he would print any headline linked to anything, as long as his ad revenues kept going up.
[ryanm: please don’t disparage matt drudge here]
from mars says: December 19, 2010 at 5:17 pm
“1 W/m^2: That is a huge amount of heat. ”
I’m no scientist, but I calculate that 1 W/m^2 equates to a blackbody temperature of 65K (-208C).
1 W is 1 J/s – which would raise the temp of 1 kg of water by 1/4200 th of a degree Celcius in 1 second, or raise the temp of 1kg of water by 1 C in 1 hour and 10 minutes.
No, imo, it is _not_ a huge amount of heat.
Sleepalot
It IS a huge amount of heat for the climate.
Specially if you consider that most people that comment here believe that the oceans are cooling.
Nope. The oceans are warming.
from mars says:
December 19, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Von Shuckmann still very likely UNDERestimate the warming, as the thermo-steric sea level rise estimated in the paper is 1 mm/yr, when the total thermo-steric SLR is 3.2 mm/yr(measured from altimetry)-1.9mm/yr(ocean mass from GRACE)= 1.3 mm/yr., that is, o.3 mm/yr more than in the Von Shickmann paper.
I’ve read the link you gave too the skeptical science. It says:-
Whilst Greenland may be “losing ice mass at an accelerating rate” there is no evidence other than GRACE that the Antarctic is.
From the skeptical science:-
Grace is new technology and it has been noted that it is contradicting empirical evidence. The idea that you can calculate Ocean Heat Content by measuring the mass alone of the oceans is flawed. Only by measuring the temperature and pressure at the stratified layers of the oceans can you even begin to calculate the OHC.
AP = Always Propaganda
Look at the graphic from that pesky government-run NOAA website again: when the red switches to blue, that’s when El Nino goes to La Nina, happens a lot — and if we had more than a hundred years of data, we’d see it goes back and forth, without any concern for the “human hand”.
Remember the climate shift in 1975, looks like a lot more natural red, err sorry I mean AGW red than natural blue since then.
from mars says: December 20, 2010 at 8:24 am
“It IS a huge amount of heat for the climate.”
Ah, argument by use of CAPITAL LETTERS.
ryanm says: “please don’t disparage matt drudge here”
I didn’t disparage him; I stated a fact, which even he would probably not dispute. His headlines, which are chosen for maximum click-potential, sometimes outdo those of the old Weekly World News, which was a screamingly funny parody tabloid many dense people took seriously.
In the old days, if a natural disaster occurred, people might hunt out the “witch” in their midst who brought evil upon the land. “Modern man” thinks of them as being simple-minded, superstitious and ignorant of science -searching for evil to explain their suffering. Amazing how some people refuse to believe “natural disasters” actually exist and all disasters are caused by the evil and the greedy.
What in tarnation does the number of casualties associated with plane crashes have to do with anything? Simply making an academic comparison here for the readers? WUWT!
Propaganda tactic – the AP says it has relevance simply by presenting the comparison, therefore, it does, and readers should repeat it with the same authority to everyone else. Imo, it’s basically an example of purposeful “intellectual collapse”. – Jo Nova
Though this article is complete trash, it has an upside – the public see through this kind of rubbish and are put of climate change and green ideals completely – they are crapping in their own nest so to speak!
I experianced the Christchurch earthquake this year (7.1 magnitude) and I can tell you it was nothing to do with the climate – Unless its effects faults 15km below the ground!
@from mars
‘Nope. The oceans are warming.’
So essentially when El niño rages hippie say the oceans are warming, and when La niña rages hippies are saying the oceans are warming. All, of course, in the general statement: The oceans are warming!
I know of two oceans that aren’t warming, but hell maybe that is evidence that they are warming?
Is the antarctic ocean warming as well?
MartinGAtkins says:
December 20, 2010 at 8:39 am
“Grace is new technology and it has been noted that it is contradicting empirical evidence.”
Please show that “empirical evidence”. I have made the effort to bring here peer-reviewed literature, with links to it when that is possible (that is, when there is an open access source). It will be intersesting to see your sources so we can have an interesting discussion.
“The idea that you can calculate Ocean Heat Content by measuring the mass alone of the oceans is flawed.”
I did not calculated OHC by measuring the mass of the oceans alone. Do not criticise me for things I have not done. What I calculated is thermo-steric sea level rise, by the simple formula:
Thermo-steric SLR (mm/yr)= Total SLR from satellite altimetry (mm/yr) – Ocean mass SLR (mm/yr)
Thermo-steric SLR is a consecuence of ocean heating (the water warms and because of thermal expansion its volume increases) so this kind of SLR is proportional to oceanic heating.
“Only by measuring the temperature and pressure at the stratified layers of the oceans can you even begin to calculate the OHC.”
That is exactly what von Schuckmann did. See this link:
poseidon.inogs.it/sire/conferenze/ppt…06…/Argo_von_Schuckmann.ppt
But this is from just the upper 2000 meters of the Oceans. The oceans are more than 3000 meters deeps, so it is likely that more heat is accumulating below 2000 meters. Here enter the thermo-steric SLR as a proxy of Ocean Heat Content. Since thermo-steric SLR is proportional to OHC, by a simple proportion a very rough calculation of OHC increase in the global ocean is found.
Do the math:
0.77 W/m^2 = 1 mm/yr
x = 1.3 mm/yr
Result:
x= 1 W/m^2
Earthquakes.
Earthquakes.
…seriously?
Earthquakes:
“Was the 2010 Haiti Earthquake triggered by deforestation and the 2008 hurricanes?”
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1712
“At last week’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting last week in San Francisco, Shimon Wdowinsky of the University of Miami proposed a different method whereby unusual strains on the crust might trigger an earthquake. In a talk titled, Triggering of the 2010 Haiti earthquake by hurricanes and possibly deforestation , Wdowinsky studied the stresses on Earth’s crust over the epicenter of the mighty January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people
(…)
Tragically, the hurricanes of 2008 may have set up Haiti for an ever larger disaster. Wdowinsky computed that the amount of mass eroded away from the mountains over the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake was sufficient to cause crustal strains capable of causing a vertically-oriented slippage along a previously unknown fault”
Apparently, AP wasn’t so wrong after all.
Weather events can trigger eathquakes.
[ryanm: well if jeff masters has it on his blog, it’s gospel]
from mars
“If you use the long-term trend to 2010, you find a sea level rise near 3 mm/yr”
But your original argument, which you’ve not repeated, was based on Grace data from 2003 to 2008. Why in the world should anyone use a value obtained from a different time period to subtract from a value obtained from 2003 to 2008?
oops. Should be “which you’ve now repeated”.
John M :
I used the value of SLR over all the TOPEX/POSEIDON- JASON1-JASON 2 data (1992-2010).
The trend around 3.2 mm/yr was nearly constant, with some accelleration in 1997-1998 because of the Super 1997-1998 El Niño and some slowdown during the 2007-2008-2009 La Niña.
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html
Since the rate of SLR has varied little over the last 20 years, you coluld use it in any interval of time, including 2003-2008 of course.
I used the Cazenave et al.paper:
A. Cazenave et al. : “Sea level budget over 2003–2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo” (Ocean mass SLR: 1.9 +/−0.1 mm/yr)
Because it is the latest paper on that matter.
So I just used the best data avaivable at the moment. The result has some errors, but it is the best that can be done, and it is certainly better than use La Niña-biased rates of SLR between 2003 and 2008.
from mars says:
December 20, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Earthquakes:
“Was the 2010 Haiti Earthquake triggered by deforestation and the 2008 hurricanes?”
…………………….
slippage along a previously unknown fault”
Apparently, AP wasn’t so wrong after all.
Weather events can trigger eathquakes.”
___________________________
Is it hypothesis or theory? Hypothesis are cheap – and everyone has got a multitude of them.
The Physics guys can get away with wild hypothesis because:
a) No-one comprehends what they are saying; 🙂
b) It won’t matter because it is going to happen in 10^9 billion years. 🙂
But with climate science:
a) Everyone somewhat comprehends what is being said;
b) It does matter, and everyone (even the so called “denialist”) cares, and it’s right now.
My administrator at work is also hearing about it and immediately panics!!!
Not good for the science. Once she figures it out, she won’t support it anymore…..the credability thing.
Sorry I said it, please don’t kill me.
“Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.”
I’d love to see where those thermometers were sited! Doubt it would appear bucolic
In the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, 230,000 people were killed.
from Mars,
Is there a reason you’re using only the ocean mass number (1.9) from Cazenave and not the “sum of ice and waters” (2.2)? The latter is what Cazenave et al. themselves used to subtract from the altimetric sea level rise, which they purposely chose to take for the same period as their study. They themselves conclude a steric rise of 0.3 mm/yr. I know you think you are more expert than they, and you think their altimetry number is “outdated”, but you prefer to use a 1993-2010 number when they themselves explicitly say they chose the contemporaneous number so as to be more relevant to their study. They explicitely say a reason for their study is that there appeared to have been a change in sea level rise around 2003, and despite your claim that sea level rise has been consistent, it has not, and varies over significant periods of time. If you want to use an updated sea level rise, use 2003 (the beginning of Cazenave’s study) to the present, which is the most up-to-date data relevant to the Cazenave study. From 2003, the rate of sea level rise has been about 2.0 mm/year. You may not like it, but that is what it is.
If you want to compare from 1993, you will have to compare with contemporaneous measurements for ocean mass numbers, not make some faith based statement that rates have been steady. Of course, over that time period, you will miss any recent changes in rates.
And if you insist on using data since the early 90s, then at least use the up-to-date number of 3.0 and not 3.2.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg
And finally, even if we take your point that all that heat somehow slipped by the Argo buoys without being noticed, doesn’t that mean the heat is effectively sequestered out of harms way?
John M says:
December 21, 2010 at 1:49 pm
from Mars,
“Is there a reason you’re using only the ocean mass number (1.9) from Cazenave and not the “sum of ice and waters” (2.2)? The latter is what Cazenave et al. themselves used to subtract from the altimetric sea level rise, which they purposely chose to take for the same period as their study.”
Well, if you like:
3.2 mm/yr-2.2 mm/yr = 1 mm/yr
In this case the von Shuckmann thermo-steric SLR is right. If it is or not, I don’t know. I t shows that the data has incertainities. By the way, I should have included the +/- errors. I didn’t for simplicity. Including the uncertainities:
Using GRACE:
(3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr) – (1.9 ±0.1 mm/yr) = 1.3±0.5 mm/yr
Using “Sum of ice and waters”
(3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr) – (2.2 ±0.28 mm/yr) = 1.0±0.68 mm/yr
There is a significant uncertainty, but in any case the oceans are accumulating heat. If von Shuckmann understimated or overestimated the heating, I don’t know, but given that his study missed the waters below 2000 meters, I think it is more likely that she undestimated the heating.
“They themselves conclude a steric rise of 0.3 mm/yr. I know you think you are more expert than they”
I do not think so. The study is from 2008, and was a La Niña year. The data is biased by ENSO.
” and you think their altimetry number is “outdated””
Yes, is outdated, as the recent data has shown.
” but you prefer to use a 1993-2010 number when they themselves explicitly say they chose the contemporaneous number so as to be more relevant to their study. They explicitely say a reason for their study is that there appeared to have been a change in sea level rise around 2003″
Yes, they said something similar:
“Yet, satellite altimetry observations indicate that global mean sea level has continued to rise since 2003, at a slightly reduced rate however (of 2.5+/−0.4 mm/yr over 2003–2008”
The key here is that 2007-2008 was a La Niña, and it biased the trend downward.
“and despite your claim that sea level rise has been consistent, it has not, and varies over significant periods of time. If you want to use an updated sea level rise, use 2003 (the beginning of Cazenave’s study) to the present, which is the most up-to-date data relevant to the Cazenave study. From 2003, the rate of sea level rise has been about 2.0 mm/year. You may not like it, but that is what it is.”
You may not like it, but the overall trend IS consistent. Just look at the figures:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg
The SLR rate varies. El Niño accelerate the rate, La Niñas slow down it. But over 20 year, the original trend resumes a few years after. It happened after the 1997-1998 El Niño and after the 2007-2008 La Niña. It is not clear from the figures?
“If you want to compare from 1993, you will have to compare with contemporaneous measurements for ocean mass numbers, not make some faith based statement that rates have been steady. Of course, over that time period, you will miss any recent changes in rates.”
I used the Cazenave study because it is the most recent to date study about ocean mass changes. It is a bit outdated, and this of course increase errors, but is the best we have still. If you know a more recent study, I will thank you for the reference.
“And if you insist on using data since the early 90s, then at least use the up-to-date number of 3.0 and not 3.2.”
Well, your number is from the University of Colorado and I have been using the CSIRO ones.
The difference probably is for different Glacial-Isostatic Adjustment (GIA).
“And finally, even if we take your point that all that heat somehow slipped by the Argo buoys without being noticed, doesn’t that mean the heat is effectively sequestered out of harms way?”
That heat is in effect far from the surface so it not influences any more the climate, but remember that this discussion began because of the so-called Kevin Trenberth travesty.
That “travesty” is largely caused by a so-called “missing heat”. This is a result of heat accumulating far below the upper 700 meters of the ocean. This heat no longer affects the climate , but is an important part of the world heat budget.
This heat should cause a notable thermo-stric sea level rise, and it is.
I computed that thermo-steric SLR using the best data avaivable. Of course an altimetric SLR biased downward by a strong 2007-2008 La Niña is not good data. So I used the updated data.
And I gave you an SLR to the present that is 2.0 that includes a pretty hefty El Nino. You can keep repeating your preferred date range all you want, but your method contradicts that of your key reference.
from mars,
Here’s a fairly recent summary of sea level rise, including references to more recent Cazaneva papers.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Visual-depictions-of-Sea-Level-Rise.html
They laud that they are able to “close the budget” within the experimental error. If you believe Skeptical Science, the “climate related” rise is 2.85 mm/yr +/-0.35. The altimetry rise is 3.3 +/-0.4. By blindly assuming one must subtract from the altimetric rise, you are assuming that all of the missing “climate related” rise that is not included in the “best” value of 2.85 is related to steric expansion. The problem is that the 2.85 number already includes their best estimate of the steric expansion, and the budget is “closed” because the two values are within the error values. Your method essentilly counts the uncertainty in “closing the budget” as more steric expansion.
John M says:
December 21, 2010 at 5:35 pm
“And I gave you an SLR to the present that is 2.0 that includes a pretty hefty El Nino.”
Where did you find that number?
According to this graph:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html
The rate of SLR returned to the 20 year trend after the temporary slowdown during thge 2007-2008 La Niña.
” You can keep repeating your preferred date range all you want, but your method contradicts that of your key reference”
Why? I followed the Cazenave et al. method of substracting the ocean mass SLR from the altimetric SLR:
thermo-steric SLR = altimetric SLR – ocean mass SLR
I only used a trend of altimetric SLR that is not biased downwards by a strong La Niña.
[ryanm: well if jeff masters has it on his blog, it’s gospel]
No, it is not gospel. Jeff Masters was reporting on an AGU meeting conference:
“At last week’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting last week in San Francisco, Shimon Wdowinsky of the University of Miami proposed a different method whereby unusual strains on the crust might trigger an earthquake. In a talk titled, Triggering of the 2010 Haiti earthquake by hurricanes and possibly deforestation , Wdowinsky studied the stresses on Earth’s crust over the epicenter of the mighty January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people. This quake was centered in a mountainous area of southwest Haiti that has undergone severe deforestation—over 98% of the trees have been felled on the mountain in recent decades, allowing extreme erosion to occur during Haiti’s frequent heavy rainfall events”
The title of the post:
Was the 2010 Haiti Earthquake triggered by deforestation and the 2008 hurricanes?
Has a (?) sign. It is a preliminary study, and is in no way certain that the deforestation plus flooding triggered the earthquake. But is possible, so I say:
“Weather events can trigger earthquakes.”
“can” trigger earthquakes, not “do” trigger earhquakes.
And by the way I say “trigger” not “cause”
from mars,
I used the data from U Col Boulder, which is availabe as actual data and not just a graph. It looks like CSIRO smooths their data a lot more. Do you know if CSIRO has actual data available?
And you did not use Cazenave’s method. He used contemporaneous data.
The Skeptical Science link I provided seems to indicate that the slr budget can be closed over the entire record with use of ocean temperature data alone. That is also the conclusion of Cazenave for 2003-2008. Why do you feel the need to “supplement” the period from 2003-2008 with a steric number that’s more than the known temperature data provides?
And for what it’s worth (again using the Colorado data), if you break up the 18 year satellite data into thirds (each encompassing multiple El Ninos and La Ninas), the first third of the record gives 3.1, the second gives 3.6, and the third gives 1.9. Hardly numbers that indicate a consistent rise in sea level.
Hey Seth! Glad to see that you have surfaced again. I was getting worried about my favorite UN controlled environmental propagandist. Keep up the good work. You are always good for a laugh. Ta-Ta.
from mars,
How did ocean heat bypass the 700m depth without being detected?