Category: Climate science

McLean’s folly and the climate clueless

In an astonishing press release issued last week, the New Zealand Climate “Science” Coalition predicts that 2011 will be the “coolest year globally since 1956 or even earlier”. The C”S”C bases its prediction on the work of Australian “computer consultant and occasional travel photographer” John McLean. Hot Topic readers will remember McLean as the lead author of a rapidly rebutted 2009 paper (written with Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter) which claimed that El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events were a driver of global temperature increases. I covered the full story at the time: see Mother Nature’s Sons and subsequent posts.

One unoriginal finding of the McLean paper was that global temperatures were affected by ENSO events — warming after El Niños and cooling after La Niñas. Last year NZ C”S”C member Bryan Leyland used this to “predict” a coming cooling, which was lapped up by the usual suspects. In January this year, Leyland predicted cooling would continue until at least June. Now McLean has taken this a step further by predicting that temperatures will plunge to that of a cool year 50 years ago. There’s no justification for this prediction in the press release, beyond McLean pretending that his 2009 paper showed that CO2 was a minor player in global temperature change.

Unfortunately for the credibility of all involved, McLean’s prediction is utter unphysical nonsense. Here’s why…

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Garnaut update on climate science: avoiding high risks will require large changes

Ross Garnaut, the Australian government’s climate change adviser, today published the science update [PDF] to his 2008 report. It warns that recent research has “confirmed and strengthened” the view that the earth is warming and humanity is to blame. Temperatures and sea level continue to rise, and there are worrying signs that a 2ºC target may no longer be “safe”. Garnaut comments that it is an “awful reality” that his 2008 review did not overestimate the risks of climate change. Most telling, though, are the update’s final lines. After a section discussing scientific reticence as a possible reason (pace Hansen) why published science appears to systematically underestimate the extent and dangers of probable climate change, Garnaut states:

We should, however, be alert to the possibility that the reputable science in future will suggest that it is in Australians’ and humanity’s interests to take much stronger and much more urgent action on climate change than might seem warranted from today’s peer-reviewed published literature. We have to be ready to adjust expectations and policy in response to changes in the wisdom from the mainstream science.

In other words, don’t bank on getting an easy ride. Full details below the fold.

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On an island: coping with sea level rise

A recent Rowntree Foundation report on the vulnerability to the effects of climate change by mid-century of Britain’s coastal communities has attracted some media attention. It struck me as underlining the relevance of one of the chapters in the book Adapting to Climate Change which I recently reviewed on Hot Topic. The chapter, on adaptive governance for a changing coastline, noted a strategic shift in national coastal management policy in England away from investing in expensive ‘hard’ engineered defence towards designing a more naturally functioning coastline. This means that many coastal communities now face great unease and anxiety about their future, since the new policy preferences for retreat and realignment mean no future guarantees for protection.

[See end for comments by Gareth.]

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Shake your berg thing

TasmanNASAbergs

This astonishing view of the Tasman Glacier from space, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite on March 2nd, shows the bergs in the glacial lake — the remnants of the 30 million tons of ice that broke off during the Christchurch earthquake on Feb 22nd. It’s a false colour image — red means vegetation, and the grey-browns are bare rock (and the rock debris covering the glacier itself). There’s more information at the NASA Earth Observatory. The Tasman’s near neighbour the Murchison Glacier has recently featured at Mauri Pelto’s From A Glacier’s Perspective. Both are retreating strongly.

[Update 9/3: The Earth Observatory’s latest image of the day is a stunning satellite picture of the Christchurch region, with an overlay showing shaking intensities.]

[The Chipmunks]

Riders on the storms

I listened with interest to Kevin Trenberth on the latest Climate Show describing how the increased water vapour in the atmosphere resulting from human-caused global warming is leading to greater extremes in weather events. It sent me back to take another look at the section in James Hansen’s book Storms of My Grandchildren where he explains the greatly increased strength of storms we can expect as the century unfolds, unless we leave most fossil carbon in the ground. I reviewed the book a while back on Hot Topic and thought it worth outlining more closely here, as an extension of my review, Hansen’s argument in the ten pages where he specifically addresses the storms of which the book’s title speaks.

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