By Paul Homewood
Alessandra Giannini
Another recipient of President Macron’s largesse is Alessandra Giannini, Research Scientist at Columbia University.
Her speciality is studying effects of warming oceans on Africa’s Sahel region.
According to the Washington Post:
“I jumped at the promise of a five-year contract!” said Alessandra Giannini, a professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who studies the effects of warming oceans on Africa’s Sahel region.
She saw Macron’s video and, weary of short-term grants and worried about growing budget pressures in the United States, applied. “I am a midcareer scientist almost entirely supported by federal research grants. My contract with the university is renewed yearly contingent on funding,” she said in an email.
Giannini’s research has conclusively demonstrated that the persistent drought that afflicted the Sahel region in the 1970s and 1980s could be tied to rising sea surface temperatures worldwide. That meant there was no need to blame local population pressures on the environment to explain the drought.
Recently, she has examined what portion of surface temperature changes can be ascribed to fossil fuel burning. “In the case of the Sahel, it’s looking more and more like the combination of greenhouse gases and aerosols specific to the second half of the 20th century played an important role in drought,” she wrote.
Giannini plans to do an additional 15 to 20 years of research — “I love my job!” she wrote. But she said over the past 15 to 20 years, it had already become harder to obtain federal funding, “meaning many more proposals to submit and resubmit, which ultimately fragments work into bits too small to be able to find some cohesion, and time to think about the big picture questions.”
With budget pressures and the prioritizing of defense spending over discretionary spending, and “the savage tax cuts for the rich that are making the rounds of Congress,” she said it wasn’t hard to see “blood and tears coming our way.”
This statement tells us much:
1) The likes of Giannini are almost solely reliant on federal research grants
2) This, despite the hype, has little to do with Trump. It has been getting harder to obtain funding for the last 15 to 20 years, according to her.
3) The final paragraph shows up her far left views, and also the selfish greed of herself and her colleagues, who seem to believe they have a right to gold plated, guaranteed federal grants, regardless of whatever junk they produce, and without having to properly justify them.
4) This whole business has little to with the advance of science, and everything to do with money grubbing.
But what about her scientific work?
Last year she wrote this article for the International Institute for Environment and Development:
What caused the great Sahelian drought of the 1970s and 80s? For the past 10 or so years, state-of-the-art climate models have consistently shown how the shift from the anomalously wet conditions that characterised the 1950s and 60s, to persistent drought in the 1970s and 80s, actually happened.
There have been two starkly contrasting arguments. The first long-held view points to unsustainable human activity, exacerbated by rapid population growth, triggering a downward spiral of environmental decline. Local people are responsible: they have overgrazed, exceeded the ‘carrying capacity’ of pastoral land, cultivated ‘marginal’ agricultural land, and cut wood for fuel.
Stripping away vegetation from the land and degrading the soils may have changed the winds in the region in a way that perpetuated the drought.
The second suggests that the origin of drought is in the oceans, and that industrialisation may be to blame.
But could oceans have really caused the Sahelian drought? As counterintuitive as it may seem there is a simple physical explanation.
Changes in the surface temperature of the oceans
The climate of the semi-arid Sahel is characterised by extreme seasonality. For most of the year, it does not rain at all. Streams and ponds run dry, and even the majestic Niger river hesitates.
Then, as the sun passes overhead and land warms, the monsoon presses northward, feeding moisture-laden air, because of its oceanic origin, inwards to the dry continent, bringing rain – at times torrential – for three to four months, before retreating southward again.
For rain to occur the air that rises needs to be moist. As it rises, a parcel of air cools and condenses the moisture in it, which falls out as rain. The ocean is at an advantage compared to land, because parcels of air that evaporate from the ocean are rich in moisture.
In contrast, especially at the beginning of the rainy season, a parcel of air rising from the dry surface of the semi-arid Sahel will have little moisture of its own, apart from that which has been imported from the ocean, thousands of kilometres away, with the monsoon.
Subtle changes in the surface temperatures of the oceans can upset this balance.
A warmer ocean may become wetter, by evaporating more and raining more locally, essentially drawing moisture away from the land.
By contrast, a cooler ocean would feed less moisture to the monsoon, and end up drying the land. Both these phenomena are implicated in the drying of the Sahel that emerged in the early 1970s.
Greenhouse gas-induced warming of the oceans, most notably the Indian Ocean, began to emerge at the same time that the North Atlantic Ocean stayed relatively cool, due in major part to the influence of sulfate aerosols that reflect solar radiation. These sulfates were the product of emissions from long-standing industrialisation in Europe and North America.
Evidence from climate modelling – testing the theories
Global models of the atmosphere simulate the large-scale climatic shift towards prolonged drought in the Sahel when run over 20th century observations of global sea surface temperatures only, that is, given no information on local land use change. ‘Coupled’ models – simultaneously simulating changes in the atmosphere and ocean – produce the same pattern. This confirms the influence of the oceans in the changing rainfall trends in the Sahel.
What is less clear is how far anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols from industrialisation have caused these changes as the ‘coupled model’ simulations typically include our best estimates of both natural and anthropogenic influences.
Let’s leave aside the patently absurd assertion that both warmer and colder oceans both apparently lead to drought.
What immediately stands out is that she is keen to blame everything on industrialisation. One could almost surmise that this has dominated her thinking from the start. As such it would potentially heavily bias her results.
But let’s look at rainfall trends in the Sahel first.
Observed rainfall trends in the Sahel.
JAS Sahel rainfall in three observational datasets, plotted as anomalies from the 1979-1998 average, and linear trends over the span of the datasets; TS3p1 and Hulme are gridded products of the Climate Research Unit, while the Global Historical Climatology Network provides individual stations that are simply averaged across the Sahel, without any attempt at dealing with inhomogeneity in the coverage.
This is from a paper by M Biasutti, “Forced Sahel rainfall trends in the CMIP5 archive”.
It states:
Rainfall in the Sahel has experienced substantial multidecadal swings and an overall reduction during the course of the 20th century (Figure 1). Paleoclimate records indicate that North Africa has suffered prolonged droughts before.
Although the period of the graph is far to short to be conclusive, there is an indication here of a cyclical pattern.
We can clearly see the severe drought in the 1970s and 80s, as well as the unusually wet period that preceded it. But it is also apparent that rainfall levels since are similar to those in the early 20thC.
So are we seeing anything other than natural variability?
If we focus on the 1970s drought, climatologists at the time were confident they knew the cause. HH Lamb for instance wrote that the post 1940 cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, combined with a much colder Arctic, shifted weather belts away from the poles.
The sub tropical anticyclones associated with the desert belts were correspondingly displaced towards the equator. As a consequence rainfall increased in Africa near the equator, while drought began to effect areas near the fringe of the desert belt, no longer visited in summer by equatorial rains.
This did not only affect Africa. In India, for instance, the monsoons tended to not go as far north during this cooling period, leaving those parts almost as badly affected as the Sahel.
There is strong evidence for this explanation. It is well established that water levels in lakes close to the equator in Africa were much higher during the Little Ice Age, whilst those nearer the Sahara were lower than now.
For instance, Lamb writes:
HH Lamb: Climate, History and the Modern World – pp235-6
None of this is rocket science. Lamb and his contemporaries did not need computer models, they simply did the hard slog of sifting through the evidence.
Our friend Giannini would rather blame it all on man, or more particularly the West. She claims that the drought resulted from the cooling effect on the Atlantic of sulfate aerosols.
In fact she has no need to dream up these fake theories, because it was the AMO that was responsible, a perfectly natural cycle that has been occurring for at least the last thousand years.
If this is typical of her work, the US are well rid of her. As for Macron, a fool and his money are easily parted!
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December 17, 2017 at 01:42PM
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