Real Climate Science

Below normal sea surface temperatures and air temperatures are a definitive sign of global warming.

Record-setting weather events — vast floods along the Mississippi River and shockingly destructive tornadoes in the South — have dominated the news in the U.S. for the past several weeks. Up to now, climate scientists have always been careful to say that no particular weather event can be linked directly to climate change. But many climate experts are now pointing linking climate change directly to some of these weather-related disasters.

Kevin Trenberth is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. funded by the National Science Foundation. In an April interview, Trenberth said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of extreme weather event – and added that the scientific community is still trying to understand how polluting our atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic activity.

http://www.btlonline.org/2011/seg/110527cf-btl-trenberth.html

One of his predecessors at NCAR blamed bad weather during the 1970s on global cooling.

http://news.google.com/newspapers/

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3592480,00.html

2011

http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=221118

http://calgary.ctv.ca/

http://news.google.com/newspapers

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/wrcc/nw/YearTDeptWRCC-NW.png

They just think they are cold – because they don’t understand peer review.

Citizens of Montana are being misinformed on the single most important detail concerning the effects of our increasing levels of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s temperature.

I am referring to what is called the “sensitivity” of CO2, which is defined to be the temperature increase caused by a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Direct measurements of temperature and CO2 levels over the past 700,000 years — as revealed by the ice core records of Antarctica and Greenland — show that the total sensitivity of CO2 is about 6.5 degrees Celsius. About half of this has been attributed to “fast” feedback effects (changes in water vapor and clouds) that become apparent in a few decades and the other half is due to subsequent “slow” feedback effects (such changes in the sheet ice of Greenland and Antarctica) that show up over the course of a few centuries. All of this is thoroughly explained in “Target Atmospheric CO2” in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, volume 2, pages 217-231.

Magnitude of change
The most recent ploy of the professional deniers of CO2’s effects is to acknowledge that increased CO2 will cause an increase in temperature, but then claim that the magnitude of this effect will be too small to be of importance. An excellent example of this national effort is being provided in Montana by H. Leighton Steward who presents himself as a scientific expert on the subject of climate change. He is the director of EOG, a gas and oil company formerly known as Enron. He is also the spokesperson for a fossil fuel advocacy group called Plants Need CO2, whose advertisements have been shown frequently throughout Montana.

http://billingsgazette.com/

http://www.nps.gov/

Further evidence that Katherine Hayhoe’s claim is not credible :

west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years

http://news.stv.tv/

Our old friend Katherine Hayhoe is back at it :

Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.

“It’s a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we’re seeing,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

“We are used to certain conditions and there’s a lot going on these days that is not what we’re used to, that is outside our current frame of reference,” Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.

http://news.stv.tv/

Right … Pecos, Texas is as west Texas as it gets. USHCN measured precipitation over the last five years has been considerably higher than the 1950s, and is not much below the long term mean.

The surface may be covered with snow, and it may be very cold, but the ice underneath the snow is melting like crazy.

http://earthjustice.org/blog/2011-may/melting-of-greenland-a-warning-for-the-planet

Their calculations look slightly more believable than Hansen’s.

Forget about those predicting the world ending on December 21, 2012.  There’s a group foreseeing an apocalypse sooner … much sooner actually.
Family Radio Group is waiting for what they call Judgment Day and doing the math.

It starts out with some simple arithmetic: 4990 plus 2011 minus one equals 7000. That’s how the group’s leader, Harold Camping, is predicting the demise of the world.

The group believes Noah built his ark in the year 4990 BC when they say God told Noah he had seven days to escape worldwide destruction.

But Family Radio interprets one day as 1000 years making seven days equal 7000 years and since there was no year zero (hence, the minus one), we arrive at 4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7000 a.k.a. this year.

Family Radio says in the 2nd month, the 17th day of the month a flood will strike the earth. Most people today follow the Gregorian calendar where May 21st is the 21st day of the fifth month, but the group says that date is also the 17th day of the 2nd month of the Biblical calendar of our day.

The group also states the flood waters of Noah also began on the 17th day of the 2nd month, in the year 4990 B.C.

http://www.connecttristates.com/news/story.aspx?id=619393

The dumbest global warming story below claimed a 1000 year storm surge as proof of sea level rise and global warming. We already established that sea level isn’t rising there, but there is another problem.

The world has over 200,000 miles of shoreline. If we broke that up into 10 mile sections, there are 20,000 of them. The odds of any one of them having a 1,000 year storm surge during any given year are 1,000 to 1. That means that we would expect about 20 of them per year somewhere on the planet, or one every 2-3 weeks.

The one in the article referred to a storm occurred ten years ago, so we can multiply by 10 to get the decadal frequency. We expect to see about two hundred “1,000 year” storm surges per decade.

Alarmists scour the planet for statistically meaningless events, and then present them to the faithful congregation as proof that witches really are destroying the Earth.