From ClimateREALISM

The Indianapolis Star (IndyStar) published a story claiming climate change is causing dangerous weather changes in Indiana. Climate change is a fact, but data shows, contrary to what is implied by the expert interviewed by the IndyStar, that neither flooding, nor hot temperatures have become more extreme or common in Indiana than they have been historically in the state.

IndyStar reporter Karl Schneider interviewed Gabe Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, for his story, “Climate change not ‘theoretical, or even debatable,’ an IU expert says. What’s the solution?”

“Climate change already is affecting the everyday lives of Hoosiers and experts at Indiana University are exploring potential solutions,” writes Schneider.

“We do have some significant short-term challenges and one of them is flooding,” Filippelli told Schneider. “We’re already seeing a lot more extreme rainfall events and … we’re going to see even more into the future.

“The other issue is extreme heat. We see an increase in extreme heat events globally, but also right here in Indiana …,” Filippelli continued to opine.

I say opine because the data on flooding and extreme heat in Indiana refute his claims.

Concerning extreme rainfall and flooding, data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that Indiana’s single day record for precipitation was set in August 1905, more than 118 years of global warming ago. Also, although records do indicate the mid-western United States is receiving modestly more precipitation now on average during the present period of modest warming than it did in the early and mid-20^th century, this has not led to a worsening of flooding. In fact, in its most recent report the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it has detected no changes in flooding and that it can attribute no particular floods or patterns in floods to human caused climate change.

Concerning extreme heat, once again data from the NCEI refute Filippelli’s uncorroborated assertion that extreme heat is increasing. Indiana’s single day maximum temperature record, of 116℉ was set in 1936, 87 years of climate change ago. Indeed, more record hot temperatures in the United States were set during the dust bowl decade of the 1930s than in any other decade before or since, and far more record high temperatures for the country were set prior to 1950, before the recent period of modest warming, than have been set or tied in the past 70 years of climate change. Only six high temperature records have been set or tied since 2000 during what most alarmists call the hottest two decades on record. By contrast, 25 state maximum temperature records set in the 1930s still stand as records today.

Neither flooding nor extreme heat have worsened during the recent period of modest warming. Had Schneider checked the data, rather than relying on “expert opinion,” he could easily have established this fact and produced an accurate story, rather than one more in a long line of climate crisis scare stories.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.

From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

Numerical weather prediction has improved dramatically over the past decades, providing potent warnings for extreme weather, such as hurricanes.

There are few better examples than the prediction of Hurricane Lee, which will make landfall near the Maine/New Brunswick border late Saturday.

The U.S. global model, the GFS, has been spectacularly skillful in predicting this storm, well more than a week ahead.

The latest forecast run shows the storm making landfall near the international border around 5 PM PDT on Sunday.  That is a 54-h hour prediction  This is so close enough in time…and so consistent with other model forecasts… that you can be assured that this is close to what will happen.

But how did extended forecasts do?

The 72-h prediction is pretty much the same.

The 126 h prediction is nearly identical in position:

The 198 hr (8.25 day) forecast has a strong hurricane in pretty much the same location.

Folks, this is a stunningly good forecast for over a week ahead.

Professor Brian Tang of the University of Albany has a wonderful website that verifies the hurricane track (position) forecasts of major modeling/forecasting systems.  The results for Hurricane Lee are shown below for forecasts of 120 hours (5 days) or less.  

In general,  the track accuracy gets better for shorter forecasts…which makes sense. But let’s compare the American model (blue color, AVNO), the European Center model (red color), and the UKMET office model (green color).  The human (official) forecast is shown in black.

Wow.  The American model is STUNNINGLY accurate at all projections in time.  

It is FAR better than the nominally top two global modeling systems in the world:  the European Center and UKMET.  The forecast error is under 100 km (60 miles) for all projections shown. 

Extraordinary.  

The model forecasts are better than the official Hurricane Center forecasts….I suspect that humans are probably hedging their bets with the European Center model solution.😅

This was a truly excellent forecast and not the only success for the American model this season.  Hopefully, this extraordinary performance will be persistent for future storms, perhaps reflecting recent improvements in the U.S. global modeling system.

Finally, I should note there are real policy implications of the rapidly advancing weather prediction skill now available to decision-makers.  Excellent forecasts can help protect people and economic assets from extreme weather.

Better forecasts are the first line of defense against severe weather. 

 Better forecasts have great potential for reducing the negative impacts of global warming.  

One of the reasons I have spent some time trying to calm down some who are panicking over global warming and extreme weather.

Climate-related deaths are down…and I mean WAY down.  Better adaptation and a richer world have contributed, but so have better forecasts.

Importantly, we have only begun taking advantage of improved forecast skill. 

The winds on Maui were nearly perfectly predicted on August 7-8 of this year, yet 115 people died and nearly 10 billion dollars in damage was done. We could have easily stopped the carnage, by shutting off the power and effectively evacuating the population.

Most major wildfires are related to strong winds and such winds are often forecast with great skill.  Few should be a surprise.

In summary, coastal New England has had nearly a week to prepare for strong winds and heavy precipitation (over northern Maine)– and we can be proud of the technological advances and investments in NOAA  and in other government agencies that made such forecasting prowess possible.

If the mainstream media is to be believed, the climate “crisis” is accelerating fast. Everything is so much worse than last year, and next year will be much worse than this year, and so on.

But just how much more potent is the greenhouse effect now than last year? It’s something that is not made obvious in discussion of emissions (globally seemingly flatlining according to EDGAR) or even as reflected in CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere.

The consequences of climate change arise downstream of the physical drivers. The most important driver of present interest is CO₂ concentrations, to which global atmospheric temperature increases are related by a logarithmic function. As we know, CO₂ concentrations are inching up year by year, but the thing that is dinned into us more often than anything else is the importance of the CO₂emissions themselves, in other words our current account spending, when the problem is in fact the overdraft.

This way of thinking only gets you so far, because if this “pollutant” was cleansed from the atmosphere, every living thing on Earth would die. Some pollutant. Situation “normal” we consider to be 280 parts per million of CO₂ in the atmosphere by count of molecules, and it is against this benchmark that the climate “crisis” is judged.

Well, I decided to crunch the numbers to find out just how objectively worse this year’s climate is compared to last year’s in terms of the potency of the CO₂ in the atmosphere.

I also wanted to answer a subsidiary question: How much better would things have been this year, if the UK had not existed at all?

Some interesting numbers 1: the mass of the atmosphere

According to Wiki, the mass of the atmosphere is 5.15*10¹⁸ kg, or 5.15 petatonnes. Of that, about 3.13*10¹⁵ kg is CO₂, or 3.13 teratonnes. [Remembering that CO₂ is heavier than the other molecules.]

In Denierland, I said that the present mass of C [not CO₂] in the atmosphere is 850 Gt, which equals 3.12*10¹⁵ kg CO₂, close to Wiki’s figure.

Allowing 0.04 % CO₂ to equal this figure, you get 1 ppm CO₂ ≈ 8 Gt (billion tonnes).

Some interesting numbers 2: global emissions of CO₂

According to EDGAR, the total quantity of CO₂ emitted globally in 2022 was 38.5 Gt. This is 3.85*10¹³ kg, or roughly 1% of the quantity of CO₂ already in the atmosphere.

However, not all our emissions end up getting added to the atmospheric stock. Again referring to Wiki I find that 57% of humanity’s emissions were absorbed in 2012. I’m going to say that is reduced to 50% today, which is the same figure I used in Denierland (benefitting the alarmist case). So of the 38.5 Gt emitted, 19.25 Gt net is added to the atmosphere.

Net added last year / Existing stock = Proportion added last year

19.25 / 3120 ≈ 0.006

This is about 1 part in 167, so it would take a further 167 years for CO₂ levels to double from today’s, given no change in our behaviour. [We are already well on the way to doubling from 280. This illustration would take us from 420 to 840 in 2190 AD, although we would probably run out of fossil fuels before then.]

We already have the estimate that 1 ppm CO₂ ≈ 8 Gt, so we estimate too that the 19.25 Gt we added last year would have increased the CO₂ concentration by 19.25 / 8 ≈ 2.4 ppm.

In May last year (Wiki again) the concentration of CO₂ was 421 ppm. So on these numbers, it should now be 423.4 ppm.

What about the UK’s contribution to this increase? According to EDGAR, the UK emitted 0.34 Gt CO₂ last year. This is 0.88 % of global emissions, meaning that we are responsible for 0.0088 * 2.4 ppm, or 0.0212 ppm out of the increase of 2.4 ppm.

Some interesting numbers 3: global temperature change

We know that every time you double the CO₂ concentration, you get the same increase in global temperature. What this means is that every ppm you add is worth less in terms of warming potential than the previous. It also means that, if you have a baseline level of CO₂ (280 ppm) it is easy to calculate the temperature difference resulting from any other concentration of CO₂, with a couple of caveats.

Caveat 1: you have to put in a number for transient climate response (TCR). TCR is the fast-acting part of climate change, the bit that is relevant to a human timescale, before long-term feedbacks have reached equilibrium. Lewis & Curry (2014, ?Climate Dynamics) estimated this to be 1.33 K per doubling using an energy budget approach. Big computers give higher numbers. I’m very generously (for the alarmist case) going to call TCR = 2 K here. However, TCR is not instantaneous; it’s relevant to 2100. So the temperature change reported here would be in train but not wholly realised.

Caveat 2: there are other things going on other than CO₂ concentrations going up. There are other greenhouse gases (in particular methane), and natural cycles, volcanoes, etc. This elementary analysis ignores all those.

The function you end up with (I don’t know if this is standard, or idiosyncratic) to calculate the temperature change from the baseline is:

Or in words, the temperature change from the baseline equals TCR times the logarithm base 2 of the present CO₂ concentration divided by the baseline concentration (280 ppm).

We can now estimate the temperature increase from the baseline by plugging in TCR = 2 K and CO₂ = 423.4. The answer you get is that the global climate should be an average of

1.193 K

warmer than it was in the pre-industrial baseline situation (or it will be once the short-term feedbacks are settled).

If you plug in last year’s concentration (421 ppm) you get

1.177 K

So the annual increase in temperature in this idealised situation would be 0.016 K between 2022 and 2023, or a sixtieth of a kelvin.

What about the UK’s contribution to the temperature increase over the baseline? What if we had disappeared last year? What if, in 2022, the UK’s 0.34 Gt had not been emitted?

With the UK, the estimated increase over the baseline was 1.193 K. Without the UK, the estimate is

1.193 K

(Yes, it’s the same number because of insufficient significant figures.) In fact, on these estimates, the UK’s contribution to climate change last year was:

0.00014 K

Or roughly 1/7000^th of a kelvin.

Bottom line

Although temperatures are rising, they (or the part driven by CO₂ emissions at any rate) are rising at a non-threatening and incremental rate. With parameter estimates favouring the alarmist cause, the effect of CO₂ emissions last year was of the order of a sixtieth of kelvin. The UK’s contribution to global warming from CO₂ emissions last year was about 1/7000^th of a kelvin, again with parameter estimates favouring alarm.

If these temperature changes drive other variables and give rise to dangerous weather etc, then it seems unlikely that any such changes would be noticeable on a year-to-year basis.

The climate “crisis” is not accelerating.

Editorial

Oh, for a leader who would stop dictating every aspect of our lives, and let us get on with them.