From New Scientist Sumatra: the Sunda trench lies close by far beneath the ocean Planet Observer/Getty By Michael Marshall Here is a radical solution to dangerous climate change: create lakes of liquid carbon dioxide on the seabed, and keep the greenhouse gas out of the air. As well as cutting our emissions of carbon dioxide,…
via Watts Up With That?
September 19, 2017 at 10:20AM
Guest post by David Middleton
Hurricane Maria is a really bad storm. This criticism of the media’s coverage of it is in mo way meant to dismiss, disregard or devalue the harm that this storm will bring to many people.
With Irma we had variations of the following headlines:
Now we have…
Hurricane Maria is following Irma’s path and getting stronger
By Susannah Cullinane and Holly Yan, CNN
Updated 4:05 AM ET, Mon September 18, 2017[…]
Screen capture of CNN video that accompanied the article:
If their paths cross, they can’t be following the same path.
And from the Beeb…
Hurricane Maria batters Dominica as category five storm
19 September 2017
From the section Latin America & Caribbean[…]
Maria is moving roughly along the same track as Irma, the hurricane that devastated the region this month.
[…]
Dr. Jeff Masters’ Weather Underground has a very user-friendly collection of hurricane graphics (proof that climate is not weather). Using a combination of Weather Underground and National Hurricane Center graphics, I put together a comparison of the paths of these two storms. The lack of similarity should be intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers…
Maria historical track and forecast models (5 AM EDT 19 Sept 2017) and Irma historical track.
Previous image with National Hurricane Center’s 5-day forecast cone.
Why? Why is there this obsession with Maria following the same path as Irma? Yes… That was a rhetorical question.
Hurricane Maria’s Path: Is it On the Same Track as Irma?
Tropical Storm Maria – soon to be Hurricane Maria – is taking a similar path, at least so far, as Hurricane Irma. That has a lot of people in Florida and, especially, throughout the Caribbean, on edge.
However, is Hurricane Maria really taking a similar path to Hurricane Irma? The answer is yes, in its early stages (and you can see the forecast cones for both later in this article). However, the September 18 spaghetti and forecast cone models show that Maria may then veer to the north and miss the United States and Florida completely. Be aware, though, that these are just projections, and they also preliminarily showed Irma hitting the east coast or veering out to sea before she shifted course and struck the western coast of Florida.
[…]
Maria’s path has never been similar to Irma’s. Their paths couldn’t be much more different for “likely” paths of September hurricanes…
Prevailing tracks of September Atlantic hurricanes (NOAA).
Irma and Maria tracks on September prevailing track map.
The paths of Irma and Maria are similar in the same way that the paths of interstate highways I-10 and I-20 are similar… They go from east to west and hit some of the same States.
Other “brilliant” headlines:
via Watts Up With That?
September 19, 2017 at 09:20AM
It has resulted in such headlines as that in the Times; We were wrong — worst effects of climate change can be avoided, say experts.
This is bound to infuriate some who maintain that there is no evidence that the slowdown in surface temperatures ever existed – an increasingly difficult stance to justify.
The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience by a team of scientists led by Richard Millar of the University of Oxford. It has recalculated the carbon budget for limiting the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above temperatures seen in the late 19th century. It had been widely assumed that this stringent target would prove unachievable, but the new study would appear to give us much more time to act if we want to stay below it.
It says that the world has warmed more slowly than has been forecast by computer models, and that the IPCC had overstated the impact of emissions. One of the authors, Professor Michael Grubb of University College London, admitted past predictions were wrong, and that he had changed his mind about the timescales involved in man-made climate change.
Some have responded to this paper by saying that the computer models were developed a decade or so ago and that they are bound to be looking a little inaccurate a decade later. So much is obvious. But it is far cry from the message by some strident climate scientists who maintain that the models accurately portray the real world — even when the evidence has been strong and growing that they do not. To have the discrepancy between climate model predictions and reality acknowledged in Nature Geoscience is good. It has already resulted in a substantial debate about this most fundamental approach to assessing the impact of man-made climate change, demonstrating once again that ‘the science’ is definitely not settled.
While one group of scientists argue that we have more time, another think we have not.
The news release just issued by the Met Office; “A Pacific flip triggers the end of the recent slowdown,” is one of the most misleading releases I have ever read. It is curiously timed as much of the data for 2017 is obviously not in yet. Mind you, the Met Office has a habit of jumping the gun on temperature data — almost every year — with varying degrees of accuracy, and a habit to predict warmer temperatures than observed.
It says that a new analysis of 15-year running means of global surface temperature reveals that the slowdown in global warming seen between 1999 – 2014 is over thanks to three years of record temperatures. The end of this period was marked by globally high temperatures induced by an intense El Nino.
Must we say once again that using such a strong El Nino – a weather event – to calculate long-term climate trends is comparing apples and oranges? The HadCRUT4 global surface temperature database is flat between 2002 and 2014, a trend bound to be increased by the presence of high temperatures due to weather at the end of the database.
The Met Office has also offered yet another explanation for the slowdown. It is, it claims, due to temperature cycles in the Pacific which went into a cold phase in the 1990s and is now starting a warm phase. Professor Adam Scaife, the head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “The end of the recent slowdown in global warming is due to a flip in Pacific sea-surface temperatures. This was due to a change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which entered its positive phase, warming the tropics, the west coast of North America and the globe overall.”
However, what the Met Office fails to mention is that we may also be facing a shift in Atlantic temperatures to a cool phase, the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). In 1995, after a relatively quiet period in the Atlantic, the AMO flipped to the warm phase. In in a few years we are likely to see it flip back to its cool phase again, with its concomitant effect on global temperatures.
Nobody has any real idea what global surface temperatures will do in the near future. There are strong indications that the globe has been cooling. It could be that declining temperatures will revert to what they were before the 2015/16 El Nino event, bringing with it the return of the slowdown.
In short, assumptions made about important details of climate science that were accepted a decade ago are becoming increasingly frayed. Let us hope that a new era of scientific reality will replace the far-to-simple messages previously proclaimed to the public.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
September 19, 2017 at 08:56AM
By Paul Homewood
Yesterday I reported on the latest attempt by the CCC to scare the public about worsening heatwaves.
According to PBC Today:
Now, the CCC has warned people could be at risk if action is not taken. According to the organisation, the number of deaths due to heat waves is set to more than triple by 2040. With 7,000 deaths a year expected to be attributed to deadly heatwaves, the CCC is calling on the government to act now.
The last real heatwave in the UK, July 2006, is often held up as an example of how many excess deaths occur in hot weather.
According to the Met Office, there were 680 excess deaths.
But how reliable are these guesstimates?
The first thing to note is that the summer months traditionally have the lowest death rates of the whole year, with August lowest of all months. This hardly supports the general assertion that hot weather is harmful to health.
Now let’s home in on the summer season. I have included September as it has a similar death rate to June:
As we can see, the percentage of deaths in 2006 was not in any way unusual. Indeed, the highest percentage was in 2011, one of the coldest summers in the last decade. (I have used “percentage of annual deaths”, as the annual death rate has been creeping up in recent years).
And what about the month of July itself?
We actually find that the death rate was lower in 2006 than the following two, wholly unexceptional years.
There seems to be little evidence to show that the heatwave in July 2006 had any long term effect on death rates.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 19, 2017 at 08:03AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 