After numerous media reports said the #Great Barrier Reef was dead from #Climate Change, reef divers wanted to correct the record: coral bleaching doesn’t mean death. Last month, researchers led by the ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said that many regions of this natural wonder were dead and global warming was at fault. Now they’re back with even more dreadful news.
The government-funded ARC group, led by Professor Terry Hughes, recently completed aerial surveys to determine if the damage was centralized or spread across the 1,400-mile-long structure. The group was also behind many of the misleading headlines sounding the reef’s premature death knell last month. Bleaching, as many experts point out, is not the same as mortality, and can’t be determined from the cockpit of an airplane.
The surveys that Hughes conducted can’t distinguish what caused the ghosting of the corals. To determine the cause, divers need to do an up-close examination to determine if the bleaching was from storm damage, crown-of-thorns starfish (their number one predator), sea level rise, or warmer water. The flyovers actually indicate the most likely cause was from low tides and falling sea levels.
Bleaching doesn’t equal death
Aerial surveys also can’t determine if the coral is really dead. That’s what divers, who run and own tour operations on the reef, are worried about. The executive director of the Marine Park Tourism Operators Col McKenzie said that some sites frequented by tourists have been hit hard by bleaching and emphasized the coral wasn’t dead and would likely recover.
“People are equating bleaching with death,” McKenzie told Australia’s Cairns-Post. “Well, it doesn’t quite work that way.” Because coral lives a few feet below the surface, aerial surveys don’t capture the full extent of a reef’s health, giving a false impression of widespread ghosting.
McKenzie said Far North Queenslanders need to let other people know what the true effects of bleaching
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Bloomberg News is promoting anecdotal claptrap. Excerpt:
By Brian K. Sullivan – Bloomberg News
It’s not your imagination. The weather has been weird.
So weird, in fact, it’s had an almost biblical feel: a February tornado in Massachusetts; record wildfires across the Great Plains and beyond; more snow than ever in the Sierra Nevada; and temperatures whiplashing from balmy to frigid, killing crops and coaxing flowers out of their winter slumber.
While some of the swings may result from chance, scientists agree climate change is adding to weather mayhem and that the world will have to brace for worse. President Donald Trump is also seeking to roll back measures to fight global warming, saying the regulations kill jobs.
“The bottom line: It’s not just in our minds that the weather is changing,” said David Titley, a meteorology professor at Pennsylvania State University. “It is changing, and changing rapidly in ways we understand and ways we are just beginning to examine.”
Start with the temperature. The winter of 2016-17 marked the second mildest on record, according to Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with the National Centers for Environmental Information. February, which has been warming faster than any other month through the decades, also was the second warmest in the 138-year global record. There were some bizarre temperature readings along the way. Like a high of 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 Celsius) in Chicago on Feb. 18. Or 72 degrees in Boston less than a week later.
The month was so mild that natural gas inventories rose earlier than in any year going back to 1994, when records began, and plants threw off winter’s yoke and began to grow.
More nonsense here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-10/there-was-nothing-normal-about-america-s-freakish-winter-weather?bcomANews=true
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Climate Depot Rebuttal:
Bloomberg media is claiming: “It’s not your imagination. The weather has been weird.”
Actually, it is your imagination, the weather is normal. A few basic rebuttals below.
Norther Hemisphere Winter Snow Extent Continues Rising Trend – ‘Well above avg., ranking 9th highest since 1967’
Scientist to Congress: ‘No evidence’ that hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes are increasing
NOAA Tornado data revealing 2016 as ‘one of the quietest years since records began in 1954’ and below average for 5th year in a row
Inconvenient NOAA report: ‘It is premature to conclude (AGW has) already had a detectable impact on’ hurricanes…
By P Gosselin on 8. April 2017
What follows is a wrap up of an article written by skeptic climate and weather site wobleibtdieerderwaermung.de here.
It writes that for thousands of years it has been the solar and ocean cycles that have been influencing the weather worldwide and in Germany.
And looking at data objectively, it is pretty clear that there is little relationship between weather/climate and the rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, as the global warming pause between 1997-2016 shows:
Linear trend of RSS temperatures. No warming in 224 months despite the current powerful El Niño-event. “The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 8 months since May 1997, though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings have occurred during the period of the Pause.“ Source: The Pause hangs on by its fingernails.
Naturally climate models continue to grossly overstate the trend for global temperature:
IPCC climate models obviously have assumed an excessively high value for CO2 climate sensitivity. Source: On Natural Climate Variability and Climate Models.
The IPCC climate model projections diverge increasingly from the measured reality, year after year.
In fact new studies have clearly exposed three decisive errors in the programming of climate models:
1. The cooling effect of aerosols has been over-estimated by a factor of 2: Hamburg Max Planck Institute for Meteorology: Aerosols cool less than originally thought.
2. The warming effect of CO2 in in the atmosphere is as a result overestimated by a factor of 2 or three. See: Die kalte Sonne site here (German).
3. The complex effect of fluctuations in solar activity are poorly accounted for in climate models. Solar Forcing of Climate – NIPCC
The consequences: All parameters when used realistically lead to a considerably lower global and regional warming — especially in the future, see following chart:
Source: Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model
It’s time to end the hysteria surrounding CO2 and its grossly exaggerated effects on climate and the ridiculous efforts of protecting the climate on every point on the planet every day for 30 years (whose statistical average is the World Meteorological Organization’s definition of climate). Very little can be accomplished trying, and the price would be enormous and ruinous.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/08/pause-or-not-climate-models-continue-to-grossly-overstate-global-temperature-trends/#sthash.ozs3j696.dpuf…
From NCAR/UCAR: BOULDER, Colo. — The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year’s unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe.
Source: Scientists link California droughts and floods to distinctive atmospheric waves…
From NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory: Global Warming and Hurricanes An Overview of Current Research Results 1. Has Global Warming Affected Hurricane or Tropical Cyclone Activity? Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA Last Revised: Mar. 17, 2017 A. Summary Statement Two frequently asked questions on global warming and hurricanes are the following: Have humans already caused a…
Source: Global Warming and Hurricanes – NOAA says no measurable effect yet…
By Jeremy Hance
Climate change is rapidly becoming a crisis that defies hyperbole.
For all the sound and fury of climate change denialists, self-deluding politicians and a very bewildered global public, the science behind climate change is rock solid while the impacts – observed on every ecosystem on the planet – are occurring faster in many parts of the world than even the most gloomy scientists predicted.
Given all this, it’s logical to assume life on Earth – the millions of species that cohabitate our little ball of rock in space – would be impacted. But it still feels unnerving to discover that this is no longer about just polar bears; it’s not only coral reefs and sea turtles or pikas and penguins; it about practically everything – including us.
Three recent studies have illustrated just how widespread climate change’s effect on life on our planet has already become.
“It is reasonable to suggest that most species on Earth have been impacted by climate change in some way or another,” said Bret Scheffers with the University of Florida. “Some species are negatively impacted and some species positively impacted.”
Scheffers is the lead author of a landmark Science study from last year that found that current warming (just one degree Celisus) has already left a discernible mark on 77 of 94 different ecological processes, including species’ genetics, seasonal responses, overall distribution, and even morphology – i.e. physical traits including body size and shape.…
Guest essay by Jim Steele Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism It is puzzling why the recent 2017 publication in Nature, Global Warming And Recurrent Mass Bleaching Of Corals by Hughes et al. ignored the most critical factor affecting…
Source: Falling Sea Level: The Critical Factor in 2016 Great Barrier Reef Bleaching!…
By Kenneth Richard on 3. April 2017
650+ Skeptic Papers
Published Since 2016
During the first 3 months of 2017, over 150 papers have already been published in scientific journals that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob.
The 2017 publication rate (~50 scientific papers per month) is slightly ahead of last year’s pace. That’s because in 2016 there were 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published in scholarly journals (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) challenging the “consensus” claim that weather and climate changes are significantly determined by changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
These 150 new papers support the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate, and that natural factors — the Sun, multi-decadal oceanic oscillations (NAO, AMO/PDO, ENSO), cloud and aerosol albedo variations — have exerted a significant or dominant influence on weather and climate changes during both the past and present.
The guideline for the list of 150 scientific papers with links and summaries and graphs has been divided into 3 parts on 2 pages (Parts 1 and 2 are on the same page).
Solar Influence On Climate (37)
ENSO, NAO, AMO, PDO Climate Influence (20)
Modern Climate In Phase With Natural Variability (8)
Cloud/Aerosol Climate Influence (3)
Volcanic/Tectonic Climate Influence (1)
Climate Model Unreliability/Biases/Errors and the Pause (12)
Failing Renewable Energy, Climate Policies (2)
Warming Beneficial, Does Not Harm Humans, Wildlife (3)
No Trends In Extreme, Unstable Weather In Recent Decades (3)
Natural CO2 Sources Out-Emit Humans (2)
Fires, Anthropogenic Climate Change Disconnect (1)
Miscellaneous (5)
Lack Of Anthropogenic/CO2 Signal In Sea Level Rise (9)
No Net Warming During 20th (21st) Century (10)
A Warmer Past: Non-Hockey Stick Reconstructions (22)
Abrupt, Degrees-Per-Decade Natural Global Warming (1)
A Model-Defying Cryosphere, Polar Ice (10)
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/03/growing-skepticism-already-150-new-2017-scientific-papers-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.FQuYLxYX.dpuf…
Global Warming and Hurricanes
An Overview of Current Research Results
1. Has Global Warming Affected Hurricane or Tropical Cyclone Activity?
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA
Last Revised: Mar. 17, 2017
A. Summary Statement
Two frequently asked questions on global warming and hurricanes are the following:
- Have humans already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity?
- What changes in hurricane activity are expected for the late 21st century, given the pronounced global warming scenarios from current IPCC models?
In this review, we address these questions in the context of published research findings. We will first present the main conclusions and then follow with some background discussion of the research that leads to these conclusions. The main conclusions are:
- It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
- Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.
- There are better than even odds that anthropogenic warming over the next century will lead to an increase in the occurrence of very intense tropical cyclone in some basins–an increase that would be substantially larger in percentage terms than the 2-11% increase in the average storm intensity. This increase in intense storm occurrence is projected despite a likely decrease (or little change) in the global numbers of all tropical cyclones.
- Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones to have substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day ones, with a model-projected increase of about 10-15% for rainfall rates averaged within about 100 km of the storm center.
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http://www.thegwpf.com/quietest-hurricane-season-on-record/
Maue: “April can see some Southern Hemisphere hurricane activity — but so far, 2016-17 season is quietest on record, by far.”
ACE 1970-2017…