SNP: liars & economically insane.
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In 2014 the Scottish people voted decisively to stay with the UK. And since then the consensus has remained the same with a majority against leaving the UK and particularly against having another extremely divisive and hate filled referendum. At … Continue reading →
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March 13, 2017 at 10:12PM
How the recent El Niño saved climate models
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
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Credit: livescience.com
Once the El Niño crutch is kicked away, what have climate models got left in terms of warming apart from ‘the pause’? Not a lot, according to this analysis.
H/T GWPF
El Ninos can be used to make computer climate models look better than they are, for a short time at least, says Dr. David Whitehouse.
The message one is trying to get across when communicating science can depend much on what one doesn’t say. Leaving something vital out can make all the difference and when it’s done it can make scientists look like politicians, although not sophisticated ones.
As an example of what I mean consider the El Niño phenomenon – a short-term oceanographic weather event. The El Niño can be used to make computer climate models look better than they are, for a short time at least.
It is obvious that computer models are running hotter than the observations over the past 30 years, but add the recent 2015-6 El Niño and things look much better. Let me show you an example of this.
Recently a group of academics kindly produced a graph intended to “help” journalists. They labeled it, “selflessly helping the Mail Online to improve their science coverage.” It shows how the HadCRUT4 global surface temperature data is “still rising” which is laid over climate models showing how accurately the models simulate the data.
It is a classic example of misinformation by omission, or in other words how to enlist the short-term 2015-6 El Niño weather event to rescue long-term computer models. It is a prime example of bad science communication.
Also shown is how this trick can be applied to satellite data. Let’s see what it looks like when the unmarked El Niño on the graph starts to come down, as it has done.
Continued here
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March 13, 2017 at 09:39PM
‘The Blob’ Is Back: Unusually Warm Waters Along Pacific Coast Has Returned
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com
This illustration of temperature in the northeast Pacific shows the status of the “Blob,” a warm-water phenomenon, as of September 2016.Image courtesy NOAA
Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather.
Earlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior.
The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem. But it is to blame for seriously disrupting the ocean food chain and for creating conditions that fed unprecedented algal blooms in the coastal Pacific.
With the Blob back in play again, what does it mean for the winter ahead? To find out, Water Deeply spoke with Nicholas Bond, a research meteorologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington’s state climatologist. In June 2014, Bond named this persistent weather phenomenon, and later wrote the first scientific paper characterizing it.
Water Deeply: What exactly is the Blob?
Nicholas Bond: It’s a large mass of water in the northeast Pacific Ocean that’s considerably warmer than usual. It doesn’t have any real sharply defined boundaries, but it’s an area that, at times, has stretched from Baja California up to the Bering Sea. At other times, it’s kinda shrunk back down. It’s been at least 1,000 miles (1,600km) across and, recently, quite deep.
Typically, it’s been something like 2.7–3.6F (1.5–2C) warmer than normal. But there have been places where it’s been as much as 9F (5C) warmer. It’s waxed and waned, but it’s been that way since early 2014. The warmer-than-normal water extends down to something like 300m (1,000ft) below the surface. So that’s a huge volume of considerably warmer-than-normal water.
Water Deeply: Is it still out there?
Bond: Yeah. There was sort of a reinvigoration this past summer. The temperatures were moderating early in 2016, and then, at least in a large area south of Alaska and off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, it really warmed up again this past summer.
Emaciated juvenile sea lions undergoing rehabilitation at the Marine Mammal Center in California. Their plight is thought to have been triggered by the unusually warm water conditions that persist in the coastal Pacific Ocean, upsetting the usual food web upon which sea lions and other wildlife depend. (NOAA Fisheries)
Water Deeply: What causes it?
Bond: A lot of it, almost all of it, is due to just the unusual weather patterns that have been occurring over the northeast Pacific during the past few years. They haven’t been the same patterns, but what really got it started was when a ridge of higher-than-normal sea-level pressure set up during the winter of 2013–14 over the northeast Pacific.
That was a very persistent and strong ridge of higher-than-normal pressure that kind of blocked the usual parade of storms across the Pacific. That meant less heat was drawn out of the ocean into the atmosphere than usual. It meant there was less cold water (from the deeper ocean) mixing near the surface part of the ocean. And also the unusual winds meant the upper-level currents in the ocean were a little bit different from usual.
Water Deeply: Is it unprecedented?
Bond: Yeah, certainly. In terms of the magnitude of anomalies in a lot of locations, we haven’t seen anything quite like this. I did a fairly careful study using the data that’s available, going back decades. There have been other periods with considerably warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the region. But they were never of the kind of geographic extent and magnitude we’ve seen with this recent event. […]
Water Deeply: How long will the Blob be with us?
Bond: That’s kind of the $64,000 question. We thought this whole event was winding down earlier this year, and then we’ve seen it rear its ugly head again in some locations.
Water Deeply: How will this affect our weather this coming winter?
Bond: The more prominent temperature anomalies are a little north of California. It’s all going to depend on the weather patterns. There are kind of borderline La Niña conditions now, which doesn’t tend to imply too much one way or another for Northern California. In the past, it probably has meant somewhat less precipitation than normal for Southern California. But we see a lot of exceptions there.
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
March 13, 2017 at 09:34PM
Surprise, Surprise: Winter Snow Storm Stella Blamed On Global Warming
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com
A resident shovels snow away from the entrance to his home in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan, after the second-biggest winter storm in New York history, January 24, 2016. REUTERS/Rickey Rogers
Stella is expected to bring up to 2 feet of snow to New York City and Boston through Tuesday. Washington, D.C., and Baltimore are expected to get between 8 and 10 inches of snow, no doubt sending the region into “Mad Max”-style anarchy.
By any measure, Stella looks like a big storm, but the only certainty about the storm is it, like pretty much every other extreme weather event, will be linked to global warming.
Climatologist and environmental writer Eric Holthaus couldn’t help himself. He had to link the storm to man-made global warming in a Daily Beast article. Holthaus wrote that “[t]wo studies published last year argue that climate change may be making the ingredients for big East Coast snowstorms more likely.”
He’s convinced “the evidence is starting to mount: Including this storm, eight of the 10 biggest snowstorms in New York City have occurred since 1996.”
Holthaus didn’t stop with one article on the subject. He wrote a second post for the blog Grist, arguing: “We’re not just getting freak weather anymore. We’re getting freak seasons.”
Holthaus, again, trumpeted the same two studies “that provided evidence that basic weather patterns over the East Coast are getting more extreme, too, as Arctic sea ice melts and modifies the behavior of the jet stream.”
“At times, the weather pattern can get stuck in a manner that provides extra cold air from the north and extra moisture from off the ocean — which is what is happening more often now,” Holthaus wrote.
There’s been a big effort in recent years to link pretty much every extreme weather event to global warming. Scientists focus on how much more likely a big weather event was made by global warming by comparing historical data and various climate models.
But not every scientists accepts this. Climatologist Roy Spencer warned against linking Stella to global warming.
“The Nor’easter and cold temperatures will be blamed on the same climate change that caused the unusual warmth over the eastern U.S. over the past couple months,” Spencer wrote on his blog.
“Global warming theory is in fact so malleable that it predicts anything. More cold, less cold. More snow, less snow,” he wrote. “What a powerful theory.”
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
March 13, 2017 at 09:34PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 