By Paul Homewood
Somebody has apparently leaked the latest draft federal climate change report to the NYT:
WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.
The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.
“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.
The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.
The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.
As with previous National Climate Assessments, it is full of half truths, exaggerations, omissions and outright lies.
Given the list of authors, including Wuebbles and Hayhoe, none of this should come as any surprise.
This is the leaked draft:
It starts by saying that the world has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, goes on to project much steeper rises in the next century, and claims that weather is becoming more extreme as a result.
Let’s start by examining some of the claims:
1) The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980
Why might they choose 1980 as the starting point? Quite simply because that marked the end of the coldest period since 1920.
But it gets worse. The actual temperatures measured show that the US climate is no warmer now than prior to 1960.
It is only by adjusting the measured temperatures that NOAA can come up with their “hotter than ever” claims.
2) Global warming has continued during recent years.
In fact, according to the much more comprehensive satellite data, there has been little change in temperatures since 1998.
3) Current temperatures are much higher than in at least 1700 years.
On the contrary, there is widespread evidence that global temperatures were higher in the MWP, and higher still in previous warm periods.
Greenland ice cores are just one piece of evidence, but there is plenty more from around the world.
4) Record droughts
In reality, the opposite is true. Droughts in recent years have been far less intense or widespread than in earlier decades. While the Report acknowledges the Dust Bowl years, it utterly fails to mention the drought years of the 1950s, arguably as bad.
5) Heavy precipitation
Heavier rainfall is simply the other side of the coin of intense droughts. But NOAA themselves show that rainfall trends have changed little since the 1970s.
The Report implies that heavier rainfall will lead to more floods. But the USGS put that nonsense to bed in 2012, when their report found:
The coterminous US is divided into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are independent of GMCO2. In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2.
6) Hurricanes and tornadoes
For some reason, they forget to mention that it is now a record breaking 12 years since the last major hurricane hit the US.
Globally, hurricane activity has not increased during the satellite era.
As for tornadoes, there has been a drastic fall in the number of violent tornadoes since proper records began to be kept in the 1970s.
7) Extreme heat
This is an extremely misleading statement, highlighted as it is in the Executive Summary.
The real truth is buried away on page 270:
In other words, the coldest days have become milder, while the hottest ones have grown less hot.
Put another way, the US climate has become much less extreme than it used to be.
[There is a back story here. Table 6.2, referred to above, originally appeared in the Third Draft Executive Summary, linked by the NYT. However, this has now been replaced by the Fifth Draft, which now no longer shows the Table – too embarrassing?)
The Report tries to tie the decreases in high temperatures to the dust bowl years. But as the State Climate Extremes Committee shows, all time record state highs also occurred frequently in years outside of the 1930s.
By contrast, there have only been two records since 1996.
8) Sea level rise
In actual fact, sea levels have been rising since the mid 19thC, long before any influence from mankind.
And as the IPCC admitted in 2013, sea levels were rising just as fast between 1920 and 1950.
It is very likely that the mean rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 [1.5 to 1.9] mm/yr between 1901 and 2010 and 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm/yr between 1993 and 2010. Tide gauge and satellite altimeter data are consistent regarding the higher rate during the latter period. It is likely that similarly high rates occurred between 1920 and 1950
There is no evidence at all that sea level rise is accelerating. There was a huge expansion in glaciers worldwide during the LIA, culminating in the 19thC.
They began retreating as early as the late 18thC, and at faster rates than in recent years, but evidence suggests that they are still more extensive than in the Middle Ages.
Most of the sea level rise since then is the result of that perfectly natural process.
9) Arctic warming
As we have already seen, temperatures across the Arctic were higher during the MWP and previous warm periods.
And you don’t have to go back a thousand years to find similar temperatures in the Arctic. They were just as high in the 1930s
10) Arctic sea ice
Despite the decline in ice extent between 1979 and 2007, it has remained stable since.
As we know, the 1960s and 70s were exceptionally cold decades in the Arctic, by 20thC standards. 1979 itself was one of the coldest years of the whole century.
This needs to be taken into account when sea ice trends since the 1980s are reported.
Conclusion
Although the world has warmed up since the 19thC, evidence strongly shows that it is no warmer than other recent warm periods.
Far from temperatures becoming more extreme, the opposite appears to be the case.
Meanwhile weather is also not getting more extreme. Indeed, in the US evidence clearly shows that the weather has been more benign in recent decades.
The NYT reports that the draft report is written by scientists from 13 federal agencies, and this shows just how entrenched the climate mafia now are.
Their only purpose is to ramp up hysteria over climate change, in order to maintain their power, influence, and of course income.
There has been a lot of talk about red and blue teams. Perhaps the first job of the red team should be to publish their own climate change report.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 9, 2017 at 12:18PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 