NYT Lambasted For Ignoring Louisiana Floods, So They Ran Stories On Global Warming
Al Gore Blames Deadly Louisiana Floods On Global Warming — Just As New Studies Debunk His Claim
Former Vice President Al Gore told a group of environmentalists the recent heavy downpours and flooding in places like Houston and Louisiana are made worse by man-made global warming.
“Texas has really been hit hard by the climate crisis and, for the last 35 years, has had more billion-dollar-plus climate disasters than any other state,” Gore said said at an event held Tuesday by his activist group, The Climate Reality Project. “Houston in particular has been hard hit.”
Thousands of Louisianans have been hit hard by extreme flooding in the southern part of the state, wrecking 40,000 homes and killing 11 people. Some 30,000 people have been rescued from the flooding that was brought about by days of torrential rain.
Houston, Texas was hit with flooding in April, with some parts of the city seeing 20 inches of rain. About 1,200 people were rescued and at least six people died when flash flooding trapped them inside their cars.
Environmentalists were quick to blame global warming for making flooding in Houston and Louisiana worse than it would otherwise be. Gore doubled down on such claims and used the flooding to highlight the need to slow global warming.
Climate wanted for murder!? Maryland state senator asks: ‘Did climate change kill two people in Ellicott City?’
Lawmaker: ‘Did climate change kill two people in Ellicott City?’
Erin CoxContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
Maryland state senator asks: “Did climate change kill two people in Ellicott City?”
A state lawmaker suggested Monday that climate change could be to blame for the flash-flood that killed two people and destroyed much of historic Ellicott City Saturday night.
“The deaths and damage caused by this weekend’s flash flood in Ellicott City, as well as the damage caused elsewhere, reminds us that climate change is about more than polar bears and the rising sea level in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Sen. James Rosapepe, co-chair of a key environmental subcommittee in the Maryland Senate.
He asked: “Did climate change kill two people in Ellicott City this weekend?”
Rosapepe, a Democrat, said Maryland is ill-prepared to prevent flash-flooding largely because much of its climate change planning focuses on rising sea levels.
He raised that possibility that the once-in-a-thousand-year flooding this weekend was linked to rising global temperatures.
“It would be very naive if we did not see this as part of climate change,” Rosapepe said in an interview. “Those of us who live upland are really impacted by climate change, and this is the perfect example.”
Rosapepe acknowledged science could not prove climate change caused particular flash-flood, but he said the increased frequency of flash-flooding in general is due to climate change and said that is an ongoing public safety problem for the entire state.
“It’s a little bit like terrorism, in that we don’t know what nut-job is going to shoot someone else. But we do know that there are nut-jobs out there that are likely to shoot someone,” he said. “So we have to prepare ourselves.”…
106-Year-Old Photo Makes Global Warming Alarmists Think Twice About Paris Floods
106-Year-Old Photo Makes Global Warming Alarmists Think Twice About Paris Floods
“More than 100 years ago, the Seine River rose a record breaking 8.6 m (roughly 20 feet) above usual levels, causing the catastrophe known as the 1910 Great Flood of Paris.” From the Daily Caller:
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New Paper By Zhou et al Surprises! …Heavy Precipitation Under ‘Global Warming’ Likely ‘Overestimated’
New Paper By Zhou et al Surprises! …Heavy Precipitation Under Global Warming Likely “Overestimated”
Yesterday I posted on Spiegel reporting no precipitation trend changes in Germany from warming. Today’s post once again shows the alleged link is not what we are often told it is. ================================================ Max Planck Institute: Coupling of extreme extreme precipitation to climate warming weaker than feared By Dr. Sebastian Lüning und Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt (German text translated/edited by P Gosselin) A warmer world with more precipitation? That is plausible as warmer air means a higher moisture and water vapor carrying capacity. The risk of droughts thus would be reduced. However, do higher temperatures lead to drastic increase in extreme rainfalls? Some scientists prematurely made up their minds and sold the media their personal opinion of settled science. Here they hide the fact that this is in fact heatedly debated within the science community. Very recently a new paper appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters, authored by Yu Zhou et al of the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems. The scientists found errors in the statistical processing of extreme precipitation data. Once corrected, the data show that extreme precipitation have even declined over the past 15 years. When accounting for the past 25 years, they found a much weaker relationship between extreme precipitation and temperature than that found by other groups. Zhou et al conclude that the danger from extreme precipitation events as a consequence of global warming was strongly overestimated and that it must be corrected downwards. In the future extreme rain may even become less. What follows is the paper’s abstract: On the detection of precipitation dependence on temperature Employing their newly proposed interannual difference method (IADM), Liu et al. (2009) and Shiu et al. (2012) reported a shocking increase of around 100% K−1 in heavy precipitation with warming global temperature in 1979–2007. Such increase is alarming and prompts us to probe into the IADM. In this study, both analytical derivations and numerical analyses demonstrate that IADM provides no additional information to that of the conventional linear regression, and also, it may give a false indication of dependence. For clarity and simplicity, we therefore recommend linear regression analysis over the IADM for the detection of dependence. We also find that heavy precipitation decreased during the global warming hiatus, and the precipitation dependence on temperature drops by almost 50% when the study period …
Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3438756/posts
The Paris floods, that saw extreme rainfall swell the river Seine to its highest level in decades, were made almost twice as likely because of the manmade emissions driving global warming, scientists have found. As artworks in the Louvre were moved to safety and Paris’s cobbled walkways were submerged, the French president, Francois Hollande, blamed the floods on climate change. Now a preliminary analysis by a group of scientists, including the Dutch weather agency and the University of Oxford, has concluded the risk of the flooding event in Paris was almost doubled – multiplied by a factor of 1.8 -…
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An eminent climate scientist explains what caused the record rains in Texas
“With the lack of a positive trend in monthly springtime precipitation, there is no direct observational evidence that the record-setting May 2015 statewide rainfall total in Texas had an anthropogenic component.”
From the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
The mainstream news media have become more cautious in their coverage of extreme weather, unlike their previous uncritical reporting of everything as climate change. For example, see this by USA Today: “Wild weather shifts in Texas spark concern about “new normal’.” And “Climate Change May Have Souped Up Record-Breaking Texas Deluge” by Elizabeth Harball and Scott Detrow at Scientific American on 27 May 2015 — “Deadly downpours flooded Texas and Oklahoma and may have been exacerbated by global warming.” The link to climate change is strongly implied, but not stated as definite. The text reports climate scientists’ uncertainty about attribution of events to climate change.
Activists ignore the science, preferring simple narratives. Bill Nye, the children’s science guy, says on CNN: “The floods in Texas, the strengthening storms… these things are a result of human activity making things worse.” As usual, the most over-the-top story comes from fantasy writer – climate activist Robert Marston Fanney (bio here) at his blog RobertScribbler: “The Merciless Rains of Climate Change Hammer Houston, Southeast Texas.”
Eventually scientists will produce papers with more definitive information. Here’s an excerpt from an early analysis (click on the link to read it in full)…
“The faucet: Informal attribution of the May 2015 record-setting Texas rains“
by John W. Nielsen-Gammon (see his bio)
Texas state climatologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M
From NOAA’s Annual Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop, Oct 2015
… Analysis: More nonsense from AP’s Seth Borenstein on floods allegedly worsened by ‘global warming’
More nonsense from Seth Borenstein:
With clay soil and tabletop-flat terrain, Houston has endured flooding for generations. Its 1,700 miles of man-made channels struggle to dispatch storm runoff to the Gulf of Mexico.
Now the nation’s fourth-largest city is being overwhelmed with more frequent and more destructive floods. The latest calamity occurred April 18, killing eight people and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage. The worsening floods aren’t simple acts of nature or just costly local concerns. Federal taxpayers get soaked too.
Extreme downpours have doubled in frequency over the past three decades, climatologists say, in part because of global warming. The other main culprit is unrestrained development in the only major U.S. city without zoning rules. That combination means more pavement and deeper floodwaters. Critics blame cozy relations between developers and local leaders for inadequate flood-protection measures.
The nearest USHCN station to Houston is Liberty, 40 miles away. Below is the whisker plot for daily rainfall there.
There is clearly no evidence of any rising trend in extreme rainfall. By far the wettest day came way back in 1994, when 18.5 inches fell on 18th October.
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1000 year rainfall study suggests droughts and floods used to be longer, worse
A study done on… golly, Antarctic Ice, allegedly shows that in the catchment area for Newcastle in NSW, Australia, the last 100 years have been pretty darn nice, compared to the past when droughts and big-wet periods used to last a lot longer.
Set aside, for a moment, that the ice cores are thousands of kilometers away and in a totally different climate, if they are right, if, then natural climate change is much worse than our short climate records are telling us. And if our current records are so inadequate and don’t represent the “old-Normal”, then we have a flying pigs of predicting the “New Normal”. Has the climate changed at all, or is the new one just like the old old one?
Hydroclimatologist and lead author, Dr Carly Tozer from the ACE CRC said the research showed exposure to drought and flood risk was higher than previously estimated.
“The study showed that modern climate records, which are available for the past one hundred years at best, do not capture the full range of rainfall variability that has occurred,” Dr Tozer said.
“The wet and dry periods experienced since 1900 have been relatively mild when we look at the climate extremes of the past millennium.”
“Looking back over the past thousand years, we see that prolonged wet periods and droughts of five years or longer are a regular feature of the climate.”
The press release and interview can tell us that we are “underestimating” the risk of drought and flood, which sounds like the usual “worse than expected” scare story beat up in the media — but it is different. This time we are underestimating the risk of natural causes of floods and droughts:
“Water resources infrastructure in Australia is still mostly designed based on statistics calculated from about the last 100 years of instrumental rainfall and streamflow observations,” Dr Kiem said.
“What this study shows is that existing water management plans likely underestimate the true risk of drought and flood due to the reliance on data and statistics obtained from only the relatively short instrumental period.”
The ABC and The Conversation don’t draw the bleeding obvious next step: If follows — as day after night, that if we’ve underestimated natural climate change — then the models have been overestimating the influence of CO2.…
Study Finds ‘No significant global precipitation change from 1850 to present’ – Published in Journal of Hydrology
By Paul Homewood
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022169415008744
A paper recently published finds that there has been no significant global precipitation change from since 1850.
ABSTRACT
Precipitation measurements made at nearly 1000 stations located in 114 countries were studied. Each station had at least 100 years of observations resulting in a dataset comprising over 1½ million monthly precipitation amounts. Data for some stations extend back to the 1700s although most of the data exist for the period after 1850. The total annual precipitation was found if all monthly data in a given year were present. The percentage annual precipitation change relative to 1961–90 was plotted for 6 continents; as well as for stations at different latitudes and those experiencing low, moderate and high annual precipitation totals. The trends for precipitation change together with their 95% confidence intervals were found for various periods of time. Most trends exhibited no clear precipitation change. The global changes in precipitation over the Earth’s land mass excluding Antarctica relative to 1961–90 were estimated to be: −1.2 ± 1.7, 2.6 ± 2.5 and −5.4 ± 8.1% per century for the periods 1850–2000, 1900–2000 and 1950–2000, respectively. A change of 1% per century corresponds to a precipitation change of 0.09 mm/year.
The stations selected offer good global coverage:
The study is particularly critical of other studies which claim to have detected significant changes over he last few decades:
Three large studies have examined global precipitation records for decades in the last part of the 20th century (Li et al., 2014). The Climate Prediction Center produced 17 years of monthly analysis (Climate Merged Analysis of Precipitation or CMAP) based on precipitation observations using rain gauges, satellite estimates and numerical model outputs (Xie and Arkin, 1997). A second dataset obtained using similar methods was found by the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) for the period 1979–2005 (Adler et al., 2003; Huffman et al., 2009). A third data reanalysis has been developed by the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) (Kistler et al., 2001). The three datasets generate time series having significant differences (Li et al., 2014; Gu et al., 2007). For the period 1979–2008, the CMAP model shows a decreasing trend of 1 mm/year. In contrast, the GPCP trend shows a nearly flat trend of 0.1 mm/year while the NCEP/NCAR model shows an increasing trend of 3.5 mm/year.
These differences …