Real Climate Science

“There is a gap in our surveillance to even determine whether the vectors are changing, and new diseases are being created and spread,” said Dr. Joy M. Miller, the senior global health security adviser for the National Intelligence Council

http://www.miamiherald.com/

Last year these morons claimed Australia was in a permanent drought due to global warming. Now they say the rain is becoming more common due to global warming.

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But Prof Steffen said there was evidence that extreme weather events appear to be increasing.

“We are getting more intense rainfall events as the earth warms, but it’s difficult to pin down any individual event,” he told AAP.

“Rainfall events like the type we’ve seen in Queensland are becoming more likely as the earth warms.

“There is a long-term warming trend with or without La Nina.”

The La Nina effect, the inverse of the drought-inducing El Nino effect, results in higher-than-average sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean leading to heavy rain.

Prof Steffen said he would produce an update on the science for the committee, as part of the Garnaut climate change review update, as well as write his own independent report.

He said there was no doubt that burning coal contributes to climate change and that the increasing burning of fossil fuels meant “we’ve now got a problem on our hands”.

Global reinsurer Munich Re says the high number of weather-related natural disasters and record temperatures around the world provide “further indications of advancing climate change”.

http://www.smh.com.au/

the not-so-exceptional rainfall will continue, probably until the end of March. Professor Neville Nicholls, president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, believes that “the Queensland floods are caused by what is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) La Niña events since our records began in the late 19th century”. He was asked if the intensification was a consequence of global warming, and declined to comment. Other people have been rather too quick to claim the extreme weather as a direct consequence of global warming.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/166690/1/

The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and the reality of climate change are both victims of western culture’s remarkable capacity to accommodate and neutralise that which is most critical of it.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/01/17/3114379.htm

Lizards hate warm weather.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/17/3114349.htm

The Queensland floods are a disaster that demands our sympathy and earnest attempts to prevent similar damage in future.  But to do this properly we need to see the floods in the perspective of time, and see the history of flooding.  This is best done by concentrating on the Brisbane region simply because it has the longest historical record.

This record has been admirably collated by the Bureau of Meteorology, and the details can be seen at this site, which gives a blow-by-blow summary of the floods.

http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/brisbane_history.shtml

Below are shown the records for Brisbane and the Bremer River at Ipswich.  The variation between the two is itself of interest, showing how different records can be at relatively close locations.

This history is a necessary background to the following discussion.

One of the sidelines of disasters like the Queensland floods is that the leaders of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Campaign will try to relate the disaster to Global Warming, caused by increasing man-made carbon dioxide. This has been done for the Queensland floods by, for example,  David Karoly  who for some reason gets a lot of coverage in the press and Television in Australia (though he has no expertise in this area), and Michael Steketee, the resident AGW specialist in The Australian.

There are at least three arguments against relating the Queensland floods to Anthropogenic Global Warming.

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“Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

It has now been 855 days since any hurricane struck the US, and strong tornadoes have been on the decline for almost 40 years.

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg

h/t to NoMoreGore

DB: And what about you, what animals are you worried about becoming extinct due to global warming?

ML: Well it isn’t so much global warming that’s an issue. It’s all the other things we do as well. For example, the blue fin tuna – we are literally eating our way through them. Somehow it brings it home more, when it is people just eating things rather than displacing habitat.

http://www.currentintelligence.net/

Here is an idea. How about addressing the real problems, instead of wasting tens of billions of dollars on a non-problem?

h/t to Marc Morano

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

After another decade of no warming, now he thinks the climate is falling apart.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/from