Global Cooling Predicted

Pay no attention to the cooling Earth, say the scientists who advocate acceptance of the anthropogenic global warming greenhouse gas hypothesis.

It's like this folks: natural solar and climate variations which make temperatures rise are tiny, almost undetectable causes of the recent global warming which was mostly the result of our carbon dioxide emissions; but natural solar and climate variations which cause global temperatures to fall are so huge and powerful that they overwhelm the effect of greenhouse gases.

Yeah, sure. Hold that thought for the next decade or so, since it appears that global temperatures stopped rising in 1998, and may now begin declining for at least the next decade.

Wright Dares Obama to Disown Him

The irreverent Jeremiah Wright may have done Senator Obama a favor by behaving so obnoxiously over the past few days.

Obama was reluctant to disown Wright, and perhaps reasonable people would have thought less of Obama had he disowned Wright a few weeks ago.

Now, who among us would criticize Obama for "throwing Wright under the bus"?

It looks as though Wright may have decided to jump under the bus.

Did he decide that only through being truly despicable could he make it possible for Obama to do what needed to be done?

It sure looks that way -- unless you believe that Wright is just not smart enough to know that his recent behavior justified Obama's breaking relations with him.

Kerry Emanuel Has Second Thoughts -- Again

As noted in the April 11 update below, Kerry Emanuel's attempt to devise a computer model and examine the possible effect of global warming on hurricanes could be bad news for global warming alarmists -- or not, if this article accurately portrays Emanuel's second second thoughts.

Will the real Emanuel please stand up and say what he thinks?

At first it was:

The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled a novel technique for predicting future hurricane activity this week. The new work suggests that, even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries.

The research, appearing in the March issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is all the more remarkable coming from Emanuel, a highly visible leader in his field and long an ardent proponent of a link between global warming and much stronger hurricanes.

His changing views could influence other scientists.

"The results surprised me," Emanuel said of his work, adding that global warming may still play a role in raising the intensity of hurricanes. What that role is, however, remains far from certain.

But now it's:

"It strongly confirms, independently, the results in the Nature paper," Emanuel said. "This is a completely independent analysis and comes up with very consistent results."

Worldwide, both methods show an increase in the intensity and duration of tropical cyclones, the generic name for what are known as hurricanes in the North Atlantic. But the new work shows no clear change in the overall numbers of such storms when run on future climates predicted using global climate models.

However, Emanuel says, the new work also raises some questions that remain to be understood. When projected into the future, the model shows a continuing increase in power, "but a lot less than the factor of two that we've already seen" he says. "So we have a paradox that remains to be explained."

The paper published in "Nature" appeared just before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so it got a lot of media attention with its claim that global warming would increase hurricane frequency and intensity. Now, it appears that Emanuel is saying that the hypothesis published in 2005 is strongly confirmed -- but only a couple of weeks ago he was surprised to see that it wasn't confirmed by his new computer model.

Maybe Emanuel wanted to tamp down any skepticism about the possible link between global warming and hurricanes, since this is how the latest article ends:

In the many different computer runs with different models and different conditions, "the fact is, the results are all over the place," Emanuel says. But that doesn't mean that one can't learn from them. And there is one conclusion that's clearly not consistent with these results, he said: "The idea that there is no connection between hurricanes and global warming, that's not supported," he says.

Guess which version of Emanuel's beliefs will get the most attention in the news media.

Klotzbach and Gray Issue Hurricane Forecast for 2008

As noted at Science Daily, this year's hurricane forecast has been released by professors Phil Klotzbach and William Gray of Colorado State University.

What is the probability that the "mainstream news media" will let anyone know that these experts say there is no evident connection between hurricane frequency or intensity and "global warming"?

Read the part of their report that starts on page 25. Here is an excerpt:

Although global surface temperatures have increased over the last century and over the last 30 years, there is no reliable data available to indicate increased hurricane frequency or intensity in any of the globe’s other tropical cyclone basins besides the Atlantic. Meteorologists who study tropical cyclones have no valid physical theory as to why hurricane frequency or intensity would necessarily be altered significantly by small amounts (< ±1oC) of global mean temperature change. In a global warming or global cooling world, the atmosphere’s upper air temperatures will warm or cool in unison with the sea surface temperatures. Vertical lapse rates will not be significantly altered. We have no plausible physical reasons for believing that Atlantic hurricane frequency or intensity will change significantly if global ocean temperatures continue to rise. For instance, in the quarter-century period from 1945-1969 when the globe was undergoing a weak cooling trend, the Atlantic basin experienced 80 major (Cat 3-4-5) hurricanes and 201 major hurricane days. By contrast, in a similar 25-year period from 1970-1994 when the globe was undergoing a general warming trend, there were only 38 major hurricanes (48% as many) and 63 major hurricane days (31% as many). Atlantic sea surface temperatures and hurricane activity do not necessarily follow global mean temperature trends.

The conditions which actually do have an influence on hurricane frequency and intensity are right for a bad season this year, so there will probably be many chances to mislead the American public about the effect of "global warming" on this season's storms. I would bet they won't miss any opportunity to blame it all on "anthropogenic global warming" -- that is, us.

Update, April 11: This looks like bad news for the global warming pushers in the news media. It seems that one of their scientists who had argued that global warming increases hurricane intensity and frequency is having second thoughts.

Reichler and Kim Say Reliability of Computer Climate Models Cannot Be Known

Who says NASA is biased in favor of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis? They posted this among their "media alerts":

Although model-based projections of future climate are now more credible than ever before, the authors note they have no way to say exactly how reliable those projections are. There are simply too many unknowns involved in the future evolution of climate, such as how much humans will curb their future greenhouse gas emissions.

How can something which is of unknown reliability be more credible?

Apparently, the paper which is the subject of this particular "alert" concludes that current computer models do a pretty good job of simulating today's climate:

In the study, co-authors Thomas Reichler and Junsu Kim from the Department of Meteorology at the University of Utah investigate how well climate models actually do their job in simulating climate. To this end, they compare the output of the models against observations for present climate.

So, the argument is: if they can simulate today's climate, then they are "credible" as projections of climate conditions in the years to come.

True, but that bit about unknown reliability is worrisome, isn't it?

The example given doesn't dispel the worry, since the amount of change in future emissions is usually assumed for different scenarios in order to show what the projected result would be for each of them. What are the other unknowns?

And, to what extent have the current models been adjusted to get them to simulate observed climate conditions? Have they been "tweaked" to the point that they no longer follow known physical principles? (Miskolczi argues that the models do not follow physical laws.)