When it comes to hurricanes, it’s the alarmists who are wrong — on so many levels.

“How many once-in-a-lifetime storms will it take,” demanded “The Daily Show” comic Trevor Noah, “until everyone admits man-made climate change is real?” His audience roared its approval.

When Hurricane Irma hit, so-called friends admonished me, “Look what your fossil fuels have done! Will you finally admit you are wrong?”

No. It’s the alarmists who are wrong — on so many levels.

First, two big storms don’t mean much. The global-warming activists must know that because when Donald Trump joked about a lack of warming on a snowy day, they lectured us about how “weather is not climate — one snowstorm is irrelevant to long-term climate.”

But now that bad weather has come, they changed their tune. Time magazine reported confidently, “Climate change makes the hurricane season worse.”

But Irma and Harvey came after a record 12 years without any Category 3-5 storms.

The government’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said neither its models “nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120-plus years support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers.”

As Irma approached, The Washington Post ran an even dumber headline: “Irma and Harvey Should Kill Any Doubt That Climate Change Is Real.”

Of course climate change is real! Climate changes — it always has and always will. For the past 300 years, since “the little ice age,” the globe warmed about three degrees. The warming started well before man emitted much carbon.

So the real unanswered questions are: 1. Will climate change become a crisis? (We face immediate crises now: poverty, terrorism, a $20 trillion debt, rebuilding after the hurricanes.) 2. Is there anything we can do about it? (No. Not now; the science isn’t there yet.) 3. Did man’s burning fossil fuels increase the warming? (Probably. But we don’t know how much.)

Politicians (and ex-politicians like Al Gore) are eager to exploit our fears by calling for more spending and regulation in the name of fighting deadly but preventable climate change — as if feeble efforts like the Paris climate accord would have made the tiniest difference. They wouldn’t.

A video I made about this seems to have struck a chord. It got more than a million views last weekend.

Some people reacted with anger online: “the scientific community suggest that humans are contributing to the warming of the planet. Isn’t (it) at least a little reckless to put a finger in each ear and say ‘Nuh uh! LALALALALALALALALA!’ ”

A calmer commenter wrote, “Don’t forget the hurricanes of the past. 1926 Miami, 1935 Keys, 1947 West Palm Beach, Donna 1961. People act like hurricanes like these have never happened.”

Right. And he left out Galveston’s hurricane in 1900, which killed as many as 12,000 people.

One commenter added, “It’s called El Nino and La Nina. We will be entering El Nino again (and) so seeing storms actually form. It shifts back and forth every 7-10 years or so. Do schools not teach these things?”

Climate fluctuates, and humans don’t have too much to say about it. Maybe someday humans will be gone. The storms will continue. But at least there’ll be less hot air.

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September 16, 2017 at 03:39AM

The residual dynamics left after adjusting global surface temperature anomalies (1950-2014) for short-term variability from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and volcanic eruptions have a staircase pattern. Linear trends for three quasi-stable periods 1950-1987, 1988-1997 and 1998-2014 are near zero with nearly all warming occurring during two step-like shifts in the years 1987/1988 and 1997/1998.

Figure 2. Staircase consisting of regimes and shifts in various climate parameters: (a) adjusted for ENSO and volcanoes: yearly global surface temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4), 1950-2014 years; (b) adjusted for ENSO monthly SST anomalies (ICOADS), 1950-2016 years and aerosol optical depth (reflecting the influence of major volcanic eruptions); (c) The same as „b‟ for satellite based SST measurements (NCEP OI v2), 1983-2016 years; (d) The same as ‘b‟ for databases of satellite measurements of lower troposphere temperature (UAH MSU v6.0 and RSS MSU v3.3), 1980-2016 years; (e) Comparison of global meridional wind at 300mb height of NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (green line) and adjusted surface temperatures (red line), 1950-2014 years; (f) Comparison of satellite measurements of outgoing longwave radiation (UMD/NCEI) at 30N-70N (green line), at 30S-70S (blue line) and adjusted surface temperatures (red line), 1950-2014 years.

Abstract

The residual dynamics left after adjusting global surface temperature anomalies (1950-2014) for short-term variability from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and volcanic eruptions have a staircase pattern. Linear trends for three quasi-stable periods 1950-1987, 1988-1997 and 1998-2014 are near zero with nearly all warming occurring during two step-like shifts in the years 1987/1988 and 1997/1998. We analysed several global datasets: HadCRUT v4.5 – land and sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies; ICOADS v2.5 – SST anomalies measured from ships; NCEP OI v2 – SST measured by satellite instruments; UAH MSU v5.6 and RSS MSU v3.3 – two satellite datasets measuring temperature of the lower troposphere (TLT). The ENSO signal was removed by EOF analysis, and gave comparable results for all datasets. A similar staircase behavior was found in global NCEP/NCAR reanalyses of 300mb meridional wind and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) in northern and southern midlatitudes. These many different sources confirm the reality of the regime-shift staircase structure of recent warming, which is masked by short-term ENSO variability and the effects of volcanic eruptions.

Introduction

Regime-shift like structures in decadal climate change have been detected in many studies of temperature and related climatic variables (Yasunaka and Hanawa 2002; Chavez et al. 2003; Lo and Hsu 2010; Reid and Beaugrand, 2012; Jones, 2012; Reid et al., 2016; Jones and Ricketts, 2017). Much attention has been given to a pause in warming (hiatus) during 1998-2014 (Tollefson 2014). We recently suggested and applied a simple method to adjust HadCRUT4 surface temperature anomalies for ENSO effects (Belolipetsky et al. 2015). After this adjustment for major ENSO and volcanic effects, the hiatus is even more pronounced. Moreover, we observed similar quasi-stable periods during 1950-1987 and 1988-1997 and almost all the warming occurred during the ~1987 and ~1997 shifts. It should be mentioned that a similar shift has likely occurred in 2015-2016, but this issue is outside the scope of this short paper. Here we want to demonstrate the reality of the staircase pattern using different measurements and climate parameters. It is well known that most short term global temperature variability is due to the well-defined ENSO natural oscillation (see: Wang and Fiedler, 2006). During strong El Niño events global average temperature rises by a few tenths Kelvin and reverts back subsequently. If spatial patterns are considered however, it is seen that global average temperature is most influenced by changes in the eastern tropical Pacific (Wang and Fiedler, 2006). Our 2015 study (Belolipetsky et al. 2015) takes into account variability in the spatial pattern of ENSO. Here we have applied the same method that uses a simple linear regression model to a broader set of parameters to reveal a clear staircase pattern in warming global temperature in the middle of the 20th century. [….]

Discussion and conclusion

Yasunaka and Hanawa (2002) define a regime shift as an “abrupt transition from one quasi-steady climatic state to another, and this transition period is much shorter than the length of the individual epochs of each climatic state”. Subtracting the ENSO signals from global temperature time series is not the only technique that has been used to detect 1987/1988 and 1997/1998 shifts. Shifts with the same timing have been detected by other methods and for many other parameters (Reid et al. 2016; Lo and Hsu 2010; Li et al 2010; Hare and Mantua 2000). Reid et al. (2016) for example analysed 72 different biological and physical time series from different regions over the period 1946 to 2012. They detected 165 statistically significant step changes, 40% of which were close to 1987 and 25% close to 1997. The identification of the shifts in so many different parameters provides further support for the reality of the 1987 and 1997 global temperature shifts revealed here. Thus a very simple model almost totally reproduces global surface temperature dynamics from 1950 to 2014 – a linear sum of ENSO and the staircase signal with two shifts.

Full paper

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September 16, 2017 at 03:32AM

This was the news from NSIDC on Sept 5th, 2017: Average sea ice extent for August 2017 ended up third lowest in the satellite record. Ice loss rates through August were variable, but slower overall than in recent years. Extensive areas of low concentration ice cover (40 to 70 percent) are still present across much of the Eurasian…

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September 16, 2017 at 03:08AM

In the blink of an eye, Australia’s media circus has finally woken up to the scale and scope of Australia’s self-inflicted power pricing and supply calamity. More ink has been spilt in the last few weeks on the subject than in the whole of the last decade. Wind power capital, South Australia’s blackouts and load … Continue reading The Nuclear Option: Atomic Solution to Australia’s Energy Crisis

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September 16, 2017 at 02:31AM