Month: June 2016

From the UNIVERSITY OF EXETER and the “weather is not climate” department comes this press release that comes with a blindingly obvious title. So far, the efforts trying to link “climate change” to extreme weather events usually come up short. Often they come amplified in social media by activists like Bill McKibben who sees climate change occurring behind almost every weather event and uses that as a tool to keep his followers excited and active. But the reality is that extreme weather just hasn’t been on the increase. Hurricane frequency is flat and accumulated cyclone energy has been down, and hasn’t reached levels seen in the 1990’s, US landfalling hurricanes of Category 3 or greater continue in an unprecedented 10 year drought,  tornadoes aren’t increasing, in the U.S. at least, heat waves aren’t getting worse, even though activists like to falsely claim so, much of…

By PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER and PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Currently, details are few, but apparently the results of a major scientific study on the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds are going to have large implications for climate change projections—substantially lowering future temperature rise expectations.

In a blog post from the Department of Meteorology of the University of Reading, Dr. Nicolas Bellouin describes some preliminary results from a research study he leads investigating the influence of aerosols on cloud properties.  The behavior of clouds, including how they are formed, how long they last, how bright they are, etc., plays a very large role in the earth’s climate system, and is considered the weakest part of global climate models. The climate model cloud deficiency results from a combination of scientific uncertainty about cloud behavior, as well as the modeling challenges that come from simulating the small spatial and temporal scales over…

Guest essay by Giordano Bruno

Hopefully everybody remember Sallenger’s “hot spots” of sea level acceleration along the East Coast of the US.

Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran & Peter A. Howd, Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America, Nature Climate Change 2, 884–888 (2012), doi:10.1038/nclimate1597

This was one of the many examples of bad science misinterpreting the sea level oscillations by cherry picking the time window.

As 6 more years of data have been collected, let see if the hotspots are now the “hottest on record” or if they have cooled down.

The logic of Sallenger & co. was based on the comparison of the rate of rise of sea levels over the first and second half of time windows of 60, 50 and 40 years, i.e. the comparison of the rate of rise over the first and the last 30, 25 and…

UAH Global Temperature Update for May, 2016: +0.55 deg. C

June 1st, 2016 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.