From the James Hansen is just wrong department comes some inconvenient data, data that Dr. Hansen or anyone in the media could have easily looked up for themselves before writing irresponsible stories like this one:
Former Virginia State Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels, in a guest opinion on WUWT said:
Hansen claims that global warming is associated with increased drought in the US. This is a testable hypothesis which he chose not to test, and, because PNAS isn’t truly peer-reviewed for Members like him, no one tested it for him.
I have [examined] drought data [that] are from NCDC, and the temperature record is Hansen’s own. His hypothesis is a complete and abject failure.
I’ve looked at the data too, and I agree, Hansen’s hypothesis is a dud, and in no way supported by NOAA’s own data to be “scientific fact”. But, because it has been spread by an irresponsible and incurious media, its is a dangerous “dud”.
Let’s go to the data…
In my research regarding why I didn’t think the July 2012 USA Temperature of 77.6F was a record (compared to July 1936 of 77.4F), I spent some time trying to understand how they computed the value, since NCDC offers no way to replicate it and so far has not responded to my query about how it is done.
In conjunction with a switchover to happen next year from simple division averages (TCDD) to gridded averages (GrDD, which they say will be more accurate) NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) offers a visualization tool to plot all sorts of data for the continental USA (CONUS). From NCDC’s U.S. Climate Divisions page:
A visualization toolkit was created to help users examine snapshots of both datasets for the comparison period (i.e., through December 2009). The tool allows the user to select criteria which are of interest and investigate the comparisons themselves. Parameters included in the toolkit are temperature, precipitation, and a variety of drought indices. Changes in monthly, seasonal and annual variability can be examined through the use of the interactive time series plots. In addition, slope (trend) values by decade and 30-year period may also be added to the output plots. This allows the user to take a closer look at the behavior of the data at a variety of smaller time scales throughout the record.
Unfortunately, they don’t have 2010-2012 data online, and I could go to the NCDC FTP site and get the remaining data and plot all of it, but since many people on the alarmist bandwagon don’t trust data plots from skeptics, I thought the fact that these are unmodified 100+ year plots from NCDC directly outweighed the 3 years of data they didn’t provide.
Here’s some screen caps output direct from that visualization toolkit. You can visit it and exactly replicate any of these for yourself.
First, CONUS temperature:
No surprise there. In my opinion, GHCN and all of its airport weather stations tends to make the present warmer than the past, with 1998 being warmer than 1934. But that’s another old story. My real interest in this essay is in precipitation trends and drought trends which don’t go through as many issues with equipment, siting, adjustments, as temperature does.
Here’s national precipitation:
Some people say the precip is down in the summer months due to “increasing drought”, that’s unsupported by the data:
Like with CONUS temperature, there’s an upward trend annual precipitation, and essentially no trend in summer months. This is curious, because if as Dr. Hansen is quoted as saying regarding U.S. Droughts…
“This is not some scientific theory,” Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”
…you’d expect a downward trend in U.S. precipitation. Interestingly, as shown in the plot above, the driest period for precipitation in the USA is 1951-1956, followed by a big upswing.
But precipitation totals alone is not a measure of drought, soil moisture and other factors figure in too. Let’s look at some drought data. Using NCDC’s visualization toolkit, I’ve plotted the major drought indices based on the Palmer Drought Index. Here’s a description of these indices from NCDC’s page on the current Palmer Index:
The Palmer Z Index measures short-term drought on a monthly scale.
The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) (known operationally as the Palmer Drought Index (PDI)) attempts to measure the duration and intensity of the long-term drought-inducing circulation patterns. Long-term drought is cumulative, so the intensity of drought during the current month is dependent on the current weather patterns plus the cumulative patterns of previous months. Since weather patterns can change almost literally overnight from a long-term drought pattern to a long-term wet pattern, the PDSI (PDI) can respond fairly rapidly.
The hydrological impacts of drought (e.g., reservoir levels, groundwater levels, etc.) take longer to develop and it takes longer to recover from them. The Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI), another long-term drought index, was developed to quantify these hydrological effects. The PHDI responds more slowly to changing conditions than the PDSI (PDI).
Here’s the plots, note that for the Palmer Index, negative values correlate to drier conditions, and positive values show wetter conditions. First PDSI:
And since some people will argue that summer months are the most affected:
The flatness of the Palmer Drought Severity Index, compared to the upward trends of temperature and precipitation, strongly suggest no correlation between CONUS temperature and CONUS drought severity. But let’s not stop there, let’s examine the other PDI data types.
Here’s the Modified Palmer Drought Severity Index, the operational version of the PDSI, which was defined in Heddinghaus and Sabol (1991).
Here’s the same data by months:
For summer months, the century scale trend is slightly down. But there is still no large century scale trend in drought.
How about the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index?
Still essentially flat. Note that while there are slight upward trends in the divisional data plots (suggesting less drought), NCDC says this is erroneous, and will introduce the new gridded method in 2013. The GHCN values are flat.
How about the short-term Palmer Z Index? Maybe Hansen’s drought correlation is hiding there?
Still pretty much flat, though there’s a spike in the monthly plot for 2009 that beats 1915. As we know, a couple of months of dry conditions does not a long-term trend make.
How about the summer months for the short-term Z-index?
Short term summer months Z index is slightly down in the last 114 years. But not largely so, certainly nothing like the inverse correlation with CONUS temperature we’d expect to see if Hansen’s hypothesis was true.
Pat Michaels, in his previous WUWT opinion piece, noted that Hansen is making a claim that global temperatures are driving U.S drought, and did a scatterplot to gauge correlation between Hansen’s own GISS temperature data (GISTEMP) and the U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index with annual data through 2011:
There’s no correlation: zero, zip, nada. If there were, you’d see the dots align along a diagonal line, there’s not even a hint of that. Of course proponents might say that but, but, but, 2012 was a terrible drought. Yes, it was, it is, but a few months of a not yet complete year of data does not a long term trend make. And, we’ve seen worse in the past.
In a Tweet today, NYT reporter Andrew Revkin agrees, drawing attention to this Sunday essay Hundred Year Forecast – Drought (which he didn’t write), saying:
This 21 century reconstruction of rainfall for New Mexico, done by Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, University of Tennessee, in the paper “A 2,129-Year Reconstruction of Precipitation for Northwestern New Mexico, USA,” 1996; David M. Anderson, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center. Full details here.
This paper suggests that what New Mexico experiences today, isn’t really any different from what it has been experiencing in the past, when CO2 levels were far lower. In fact, for the most recent period, New Mexico has had greater rainfall:
PNAS should withdraw the paper, and NASA should fire Dr. Hansen for promoting an opinion unsupported by data as “scientific fact”.
Hansen also states in his paper, in the second paragraph under the heading “Broader Implications” the following:
“A warmer world is expected to have more extreme rainfall occurrences because the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere holds increases rapidly with temperature,…”
So next year if we have floods instead of drought, Hansen can still quote his paper, and the MSM headlines will be “Scientist says Global Warming Causes Floods.”
Maybe some political economy will be useful. James Hansen is wrong and lacks empirical evidence. What if Hansen knows you know he lacks empirical evidence, but that is not his aim?
Informational cascades may well be his aim. Prior to climate-gate much of the global cooling, warming, change or what have you was based upon the ability to disseminate incorrect information through informational cascades.
Climate-gate was one of those informational cascade stoppers for all but those that began the cascade and/or those that live by mysticism.
Rather than going back and producing empirical evidence, what if the aim is to merely restart the informational cascade? Hansen is doing his part, along with other doing their part, to begin the cascade once gain. Why bother producing empirical evidence when the cascade was working so well before climate-gate.
As Thomas Sowell has stated on many occasions, [paraphrasing]: fallacies never die, they are merely recycled.
Climate science is unusual in that the work of ‘professionals’ can often be amateur, and the work of ‘amateurs’ can often be professional!
old engineer says:
August 12, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Hansen also states in his paper, in the second paragraph under the heading “Broader Implications” the following:
“A warmer world is expected to have more extreme rainfall occurrences because the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere holds increases rapidly with temperature,…”
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So next year if we have floods instead of drought, Hansen can still quote his paper, and the MSM headlines will be “Scientist says Global Warming Causes Floods.”
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Yes Sir, you catch on right quick. Until climate science, catch 22 was not part and parcel of the “scientific method”
Regarding 1950s-1980s, the CBC article says:
“But Derek Arndt, director of climate monitoring for the U.S. government’s National Climatic Data Center, said that range is a fair one and often used because it is the “golden era” for good statistics.”
What does that even mean — golden era for good statistics? What era are we in now?
Looking at graphs of proxy data for droughts from 500, 2000, and up to 10,000 year intervals it is very clear that this drought is a pipsqueak in comparison with past historical droughts. From about 1 A.D. to about 1200 A.D. things were way way drier. In about 1550 ish A.D. as well. Also, the 1950s way worse drought shows up nicely. (Though much smaller than the droughts of the first millennium).
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/drought-is-not-a-global-warming-sign/
Charts and graphs from NCDC / NOAA publications that makes it all just the sweeter…
Hansen is now just making up political spin that is demonstrably wrong by the data from his own buddies / agencies. Sad to see someone go that far around the bend…
According to the drought map mid North Carolina is sitting in moderate drought.
Well you could not prove it by the amount of rain we have been getting the last month (25 rainy days out of the last 45 days) or by the Jordan Lake Reservoir that is stuff to the gills. The water level is high up on the trunks of the trees lining the lake shore as of 3:00 pm when I drove past and has been all summer. Actually this summer has been rather soggy.
Whenever something is not ‘normal’ first thing I look at are the ocean currents. According to
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
California current appears to be ‘cooler’ than normal (less evaporation), and by the current’s loop appearance that was the case for some time. Many reasons why that could happen, I would suspect the Kuroshio-Oyashio and Alaskan currents system. By next summer it should be OK since that side looks to be warmer than usual. If this drought is ‘unusual’ it may be that the current systems have been temporarily disturbed by tectonic movements of Honshu in March of 2011.
Just speculating.
Seen it all before.
Australia has just come out of a 10yr drought – which is normal – but during which it was never gonna rain again, according to the warmistas. Right now we’re waterlogged!
If only these clowns would look out the window
Further to my post above:
In wikipedia list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan of M8+ earthquakes are at
01 September 1, 1923 M8.3
March 2, 1933 M8.4 Major drought 1934
December 20, 1946 M8.1
March 4, 1952 M8.1 Major drought 1953-4
May 16, 1968 M8.2
September 25, 2003 M8.3
March 11, 2011 M9.0 Major drought 2012
Month of March (spring equinox time) Japan’s major earthquake could have a high probability of causing major drought in the USA (3 of 7 all in March). Two September quakes (autumn equinox) were followed by minor droughts, but minor droughts are regular occurrence, so no correlation is established.
Speculative ?
Toto says: August 12, 2012 at 12:15 pm
I clicked on the screenshot of that article and was shocked to see the photo of Hansen.
They are all ‘climate clones’ (or is it climate clowns) .
Photo gallery:
James Hansen
Michael Mann
Gavin Schmidt
Richard Black
Whenever I hear Hansen discribed as a NASA scientist I always think of this guy though he was ‘formerly of NASA.
Many thanks, this is an excellent piece.
But it’s also extremely depressing. It shows, once again, how unbelievably easy it is to show what nonsense much of this stuff is. And yet what difference does it make? My guess is that 99% of the people who read that article quoted at the top would simply assume that it’s true. How many would actually go to the trouble of looking up the data?
.
Still, there is hope. Opinion polls show fairly consistently that people in general are becoming more sceptical. I am actually quite sure that science, which has always been self-correcting, will regain its integrity, and that people like Gore, Mann and Hansen will occupy their rightful places in history.
.
This will happen. The depressing thing is that it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.
Chris
Philip Bradley
You said ” ..would point to US drought as the cause of a positive AMO” . I suggest you are saying that it is the tail that may wag the dog .? Read the resarch papers by Gregory J. Mcabe and et al on the influence of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans on the multidecadal drought frequency in the United States .
I laugh at the “weather weirding” theme they are working on. If you know even a little about climate history, you know that it can get REALLY weird, and have NOTHING to do with mankind or Co2. If you put on the warmist glasses, you cannot see that we view the climate from a relatively stable time in our climate history.
Philip Bradley
You may also want to read a more recent 2011 research paper by Sumant Nigam et al in the Geophysical Research Letters called KEY ROLE OF THE ATALANTIC MULTIDECADAL OSCILLATION IN THE 20 TH CENTURY DROUGT AND WET PERIODS OVER THE GREAT PLAINS.
I visit AIRS occasionally to stay caught up on spin quality (but not scientific inquiry quality). Sure enough, AIRS reports that when sea surface temperature rises, so does water vapor. Can you imagine the amount of funding used to confirm this cough-cough poorly understood connection so that we could all learn something? This makes complete sense of course and is something we all knew back in 5th grade. So what happens over land when moisture is not available to evaporate? Do we have humidity creating water vapor to hold in the heat??? Any water vapor out there over the corn fields??? Bueller?? Bueller?? Ferris Bueller??
On the other hand, AIRS’ vertical water vapor observations led to the odd occasion when they had to tell modelers, they got it wrong. Modelers use an absolute WAG, keeping water vapor layering dry, then wet, in order to get their required outgoing long-wave radiation results they way they want them. AIRS had to state on the website that this is wrong and does not match observations.
Spend some time reading. They even have observations that contradict one another. Say it isn’t so. Mother Nature would NEVER contradict herself.
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/climate/
Lotsa rope!
James Hansen is a liar. Yes that’s right a liar.
Please, please Dr. Hansen, sue me for this libel.
“PNAS isn’t truly peer-reviewed for Members like him”
Looks like PNAS membership = Priesthood, Not Authentic Science
old engineer says:
How about it, any takers on a discussion of the paper?
Sure.
Among the fundamental failings of Hansen’s paper:
1) Asserts that individuals can percieve statistical shifts in the global surface temperature field. No, they can’t. That is why we spend billions of daolars on thermometer networks, radiosondes, and weather satellites. And why we spend even more applying various statistical analyses (legitimate and otherwise) to the data that these systems provide. But if have something that you want people to believe that is based on sensor networks and statistics, you have a problem. Most people don’t operate on that level. If you want most people to believe it, you have to make them believe they have seen it, and that requires first making them believe that they can see it.
2) “Finds” that when it is warm, it is … uh … warm. That is the fundamental “finding” of this paper. Hansen “investigates” a period over which the average temp has gone up, and “finds” that … the mean temperature has gone up. Then he “finds” that when you graph a mean temperature that has gone up, it … uh … shifts to the right on the page. And if you plot a distribution around the mean, well it also shifts to the right. This is not a scientific result. NAS should be ashamed to publish this tripe as if it were some sort of finding. But NAS is the organization that had Peter Gleick as it’s ethics watchdog. Shame isn’t something they understand.
3) Jiggers the stats to exaggerate their faux “findings”. Wholey apart from Hansen’s penchant for fiddling with the data, are the misleading methods they admit to in the paper. They quantify variation using a base period that they admit they chose because it does not vary much. And when they compare to data outside of that period they find that those data are at the extremes of the cherry picked and restricted variation. Really? How surprising!
Criticism here of their choice of base periods has been misplaced. The problem isn’t that they didn’t include the present. The problem is they eliminated the past. Eliminating the data prior to 1950 gets rid of lots of temps that were much cooler and well as some as warm as now. Including those data would not only substantially increases the variability that the current period would be measured against, it would also invite people to ask questions like: Hmmmm … if 1980-2010 is extreme vs the mean and variability of 1950-1980, how does 1950-1980 compare against the mean and variabilty of, say 1920-1950. Or 1850-1880? Do things like that, and Hansen’s “new category of extreme events” is shown to be the lie that it is.
4) Having asserted the impossible, “found” the obvious, and exaggerated the results, all that remains is to toss in a bunch of assertions and insinuations that lead the reader to believe that everything they see, no matter what it is, is proof of ‘global warming.’ Hansen covers all the warmist bases here. Included among the numerours unsupported, non-scientific statements (shame on you, NAS) are: ‘global warming ‘ causes extreme droughts, ‘global warming’ increases the water capacity of the atmosphere causing unusually heavy rainfall and floods, ‘gobal warming’ causes warmer winters, ‘global warming’ causes heavier snow falls, etc.
Included is the bald assertion of the piece’s propaganda theme: that statistical changes in the global temperature field are readily and reliably perceptible to individuals, and will become more so. The proof for this nuttiness cited by Hansen is not some physiological or psychological research which demonstrates that humans can quantifyably sense the entirety of the climate system from their very limited personal (or even social) experience of it. No, the citation is for another of Hansen’s own political essays, in which he attempts to effect such perception! This is “science” to NAS.
Scurrilous!
And that is just a start.
Here are the only two places Hansen mentions drought in his scientific paper. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1205276109.full.pdf
Here is what is claimed in the news article
“In a blunt departure from most climate research, Hansen’s study — based on statistics, not the more typical climate modelling — blames three heat waves purely on global warming:”
and
“The increase in the chance of extreme heat, drought and heavy downpours in certain regions is so huge that scientists should stop hemming and hawing,”
So the claim:
Former Virginia State Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels, in a guest opinion on WUWT said:
Hansen claims that global warming is associated with increased drought in the US.
seems to be a strawman. In fact, the whole blog entry and much of the discussion seems to be a strawman.
All Hanson claims is:
1) increases in TEMPERATURE
2) increased VARIABILITY in rainfall (as an expected but otherwise unexamined side-effect).
Did I miss it? Can someone point me to a section in his paper (or even the news article!) where Hansen is claiming anything about a general increase in drought associated with warming? It seems to be more than a bit silly to blame Hansen for not testing a hypothesis he never stated!
I’m with the “old engineer” — the discussion should focus on Hansen’s paper and what he said, not what everyone else imagines he said or wishes he said.