PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet TERRA 9/2003 - 20 February 2003 2003
-------------------------------------------
"Global warming has to be one of the strangest policy
debates the
country has ever seen. Sure there are always two or more
competing sides,
pandering, demagoguery and outright dishonesty in every policy
debate.
But in the case of global warming the contrasts are so stark and
the
political statements so divorced from reality, that informed
persons are
left shaking their heads in disbelief. On the one hand, you have
politicians stating categorically: "The science is
settled!" On the
other hand, one can dig up a half dozen National Academy of
Sciences
reports from the last five years that argue that not only is the
science
not settled, but that scientists are operating in almost complete
ignorance
on many of the most basic and key assumptions behind the
theory."
--Paul Georgia, Tech Central Station, 18 February 2003
(1) AS EL NINO FADES, A COLD REALITY CHECK FOR THE U.S.
The Christian Science Monitor, 18 February
2003
(2) WELL, THEY WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN'T THEY? "BLIZZARD
CONSISTENT WITH
'GLOBAL WARMING' TREND"
CNSNEWS.com, 19 February 2003
(3) GLOBAL WARMING TRENDS
Tech Central Station, 18 February 2003
(4) HONEY, I SHRUNK THE MAMMALS! WELL ADAPTED FOR 80.000 YEARS OF
GLOBAL
WARMING
Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
(5) WILL GLOBAL WARMING SHUT DOWN THE THERMOHALINE CIRCULATION OF
THE
WORLD'S OCEANS?
CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
(6) SOLAR INFLUENCES AND DECADAL-SCALE CLIMATE CYCLES
CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
(7) TEMPERATURE TRENDS IN ANTARCTICA
CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
(8) ANOTHER COLD SPELL HITS KOREA
Korea Times, 14 February 2003
(9) SPANISH COLD SNAP SPARKS RECORD POWER DEMAND
Reuters, 19 February 2003
(10) TRUST ME: I'M THE WORLD'S GREATEST CLIMATE FORECASTER
www.john-daly.com,
16 February 2003
(11) AND FINALLY: BAD NEWS AND WORSE
The Times, 20 February 2003
==============
(1) AS EL NINO FADES, A COLD REALITY CHECK FOR THE EAST U.S.
>From The Christian Science Monitor, 18 February 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0218/p03s01-usgn.html
By Ron Scherer
NEW YORK - The winter of '03: soaring heating bills, everything
frozen for
weeks, and now, the Presidents' Day Blizzard - a storm so intense
that
meteorologists are calling it one of the great snowstorms of the
Northeast.
Around the White House, the snow blanket is more than a foot
deep. But
that's nothing compared with neighboring Maryland, where some
communities
will be digging out for days from some 50 inches of snow. At New
York's John
F. Kennedy Airport, the measuring stick showed 20 inches of snow
as of
Monday morning, with another foot of blowing, drifting white
stuff on the
way. Boston braced itself for the same.
Hey, enough of the big chill.
Actually, despite the snowdrifts and the sight of neighbors
dressed up like
Eskimos, meteorologists say this winter has not been
"exceptionally cold."
Rather, it has been "persistently cold."
In fact, the mild winters of recent years may have been
influenced by some
relatively strong El Niño events - where the waters in the
Pacific are
warmer than normal. But this winter, El Niño is fading. This may
have
allowed the weather patterns to return to normal - as in cold.
"This is really a reality check from Mother Nature,"
says Fred Gadomski, a
meteorologist at Penn State at University Park. "The winters
in the last
five years have been exceptionally mild with a lack of snow -
that was
extraordinary."
Indeed, a more normal winter means more snow on the ground. Fresh
snow, in
turn, reflects 90 percent of the heat from the sun back into the
atmosphere.
This keeps it colder. "That's a piece of the weather
quilt," says Mr.
Gadomski.
This latest icy chunk of winter arrived when a large mass of cold
air
settled over New England. With temperatures in the single digits
or even
below zero, meteorologists watched as a series of low-pressure
systems
started to suck in moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Then,
Monday, it became
a coastal storm - an old fashioned nor'easter.
As of Monday noon EST, there were at least 16 reported deaths
attributed to
the storm.....
==============
(2) WELL, THEY WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN'T THEY? "BLIZZARD
CONSISTENT WITH
'GLOBAL WARMING' TREND"
>From CNSNEWS.com, 19 February 2003
http://www.cnsnews.com/Culture/archive/200302/CUL20030220a.html
Marc Morano
Senior Staff Writer
(CNSNews.com) - The record-breaking blizzard of 2003, which left
more than
two feet of snow in some areas of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast,
was "very
much in line with the predictions of climate models" that
predict
human-caused "global warming," according to an
environmentalist in
Washington.
When asked whether predictions of "global warming" have
been altered by the
unusually cold and snowy winter, including the recent blizzard,
Melissa
Carey, a climate change policy specialist with the Environmental
Defense
Fund, said the climate change models actually predict this type
of weather.
"It's very hard to link one event for sure, but certainly,
increased extreme
events like this are very, very much in line with the predictions
of climate
models, definitely," Carey told CNSNews.com.
"One thing climate change models predict is more increased
precipitation and
more extreme precipitation events like flooding or
blizzards," she added.
Carey believes that the earth's climate is changing for the
worse.
"Our system is becoming out of balance. That means we may
have much, much
hotter summers, and we may have much, much drier winters. We may
have an
increased frequency of extreme storms like hurricanes and
tornados," she
added.
Carey sees human activity as the cause of climate uncertainty.
"It's not all
about warming, it's really about the changes in our climate and
our
environment that go along with the increases of the concentration
of
greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere," Carey explained.
The world is facing dire consequences if no policy action is
taken,
according to Carey.
"The CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions generated by the very
first automobile
that rolled off the assembly line here in the U.S. are still in
the
atmosphere. They accumulate over time," Carey said.
But Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market
environmental think
tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, accused Carey of
"selling a lie"
about "catastrophic man-made global warming" and the
"myth of a stable
climate."
Horner believes environmentalists will attribute any adverse
weather event
or patterns to man-made climate change in order to further their
policy
goals.
"It's always getting hotter or colder or wetter or drier.
Whatever happens -
and weather always happens - it's clearly evidence of global
warming to
them," Horner said.
"Climate is inherently unstable. It is always changing. This
supposed
'balance' that man upsets is mythical," Horner explained.
"To insist otherwise is to view the entirety of man's
presence not as part
of the environment but as a pollutant," he added.
Horner believes the only consistent belief among
environmentalists is that
man is at the center of any weather-related changes.
"First, man caused cooling, then warming. The darned climate
kept changing,
but the insistence that man simply must be ruinous didn't,"
Horner
said......
=============
(3) GLOBAL WARMING TRENDS
>From Tech Central Station, 18 February 2003
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/envirowrapper.jsp?PID=1051-450&CID=1051-021803D
By Paul Georgia 02/18/2003
Global warming has to be one of the strangest policy debates the
country has
ever seen. Sure there are always two or more competing sides,
pandering,
demagoguery and outright dishonesty in every policy debate. But
in the case
of global warming the contrasts are so stark and the political
statements so
divorced from reality, that informed persons are left shaking
their heads in
disbelief.
On the one hand, you have politicians stating categorically:
"The science is
settled!" On the other hand, one can dig up a half dozen
National Academy of
Sciences reports from the last five years that argue that not
only is the
science not settled, but that scientists are operating in almost
complete
ignorance on many of the most basic and key assumptions behind
the theory.
An NAS report, published in 1998, states: "Without a clear
understanding of
how climate has changed naturally in the past, and the mechanisms
involved,
our ability to interpret any future change will be significantly
confounded
and our ability to predict future change severely
curtailed." Another NAS
report published that same year states: "Large gaps in our
knowledge of
interannual and decade-to-century natural variability hinder our
ability to
provide credible predictive skill or to distinguish the role of
human
activities from natural variability." In 2001, the NAS
admitted that " ...
the observing system available today is a composite of
observations that
neither provide the information nor the continuity in the data
needed to
support measurements of climate variables."
Far from being settled, the science is still in its infancy.
"Climate
research is only at the beginning of its learning curve, with
dramatic
findings appearing at an impressive rate. In this area, even the
most
fundamental scientific issues are evolving rapidly," says
the NAS.
Dr. David Wojick, who has a Ph.D. in mathematical logic and
philosophy of
science and author of a recent review of NAS climate reports,
argues that
there has been a quiet revolution in climate science. "It
seems that we have
discovered or confirmed a number of natural mechanisms of climate
change, at
least 10 in fact. These mechanisms provide alternative, competing
explanations for global warming, alternative to, and competing
with, the
theory of human-induced warming. Also alternative to, and
competing with,
each other.
"Each of these mechanisms can in theory explain all of the
changes in 20th
Century climate. Human greenhouse gas emissions are therefore
just one of
many alternative hypotheses. In addition, the evidence for
warming due to
greenhouse gas emissions is no greater than for any of the other
mechanisms."
As a result of this revolution, increases in our understanding
about climate
change have been paralleled by increases in the uncertainty about
man's
contribution, if indeed there is one.
At a briefing for congressional staffers and media sponsored by
the Cooler
Heads Coalition on Feb. 7, Jesse Ausubel, a researcher at The
Rockefeller
University, laid out a framework for thinking about global
warming issues.
There are several points at which the issue is being debated.
There are the
issues of energy use, emissions and concentrations; climate
sensitivity, or
how much the climate may warm due to increases in greenhouse gas
concentrations; the potential impacts on ecosystems and people,
and so on.
Ausubel argued that many of these issues are essentially
unknowable. Climate
sensitivity, for example, has been estimated at different
extremes. The
aggregate results from peer-reviewed scientific studies show a
normal
distribution of climate sensitivities. Some suggest that a
doubling
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will warm the climate by
about 4.5
degrees Celsius. Others show low climate sensitivity, which would
lead to a
warming of 1.5 degrees C. Still others fall somewhere in the
middle. As
Ausubel stated, "The pile of papers keeps getting larger,
but the shape of
the pile never changes."
The real debate, according to Ausubel, lies in the trends in
energy use.
This is one variable that is known, and as Ausubel has
discovered, the world
has experienced a sustained long-running reduction in carbon
intensity in
its energy use. Wood, still a major source of fuel in less
developed
countries, has a hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of 1 to 10. Coal's H:C
ratio is 1
to 2, oil 2 to 1, and methane or natural gas about 4 to 1.
The world has been steadily decarbonizing for the last 150 years,
from wood
to coal to oil, and now to methane. Ausubel argues, somewhat
controversially, that total decarbonization is in our future and
that the
economy will run on hydrogen, powered by nuclear power. That may
well be the
case.
One of the major implications of decarbonization is that energy
policy may
be irrelevant. As Ausubel has noted elsewhere, neither Queen
Victoria nor
Abraham Lincoln decreed a policy of decarbonization. Yet, the
system pursued
it." Decarbonization and our path to the hydrogen economy
will happen
regardless of government decrees or federal research money.
Ausubel also takes to task the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate
Change for its assumptions on energy use. When Ausubel
extrapolated
decarbonization trends out to the year 2100 and compared it to
the IPCC's
1990 "business as usual" (BAU) scenario he found that
they bore little
resemblance to one another. The IPCC's BAU scenario was a flat
line, which
assumes technical stagnation, or what Ausubel dubs the Brezhnev
Scenario.
But properly understood, BAU is a technologically dynamic and
progressive
scenario that will eliminate CO2 by 2100. The IPCC's 2001 Third
Assessment
Report uses 40 scenarios that show decarbonization and
carbonization going
in all different directions with no probabilities attached.
Next time you hear politicians drone on and on about scientific
opinion on
global warming and the need to expend hundreds of billions of the
taxpayer's
hard earned money on new energy technologies to stop it, keep in
mind two
things: the science is becoming less settled each day, and the
energy system
may well take us where we want to go long before the politicians
have
figured out what is going on.
Copyright 2003, Tech Central Station
=========
(4) HONEY, I SHRUNK THE MAMMALS! WELL ADAPTED FOR 80.000 YEARS OF
GLOBAL
WARMING
>From Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
The University of Michigan
News Service
412 Maynard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1399
Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan
Phone: (734) 647-1853
E-mail: rossflan@umich.edu
February 17, 2003
Methane and mini-horses: Fossils reveal effects of global warming
DENVER, Colo. -- How will global warming affect life on Earth?
Uncertainties
about future climate change and the impact of human activity make
it
difficult to predict exactly what lies ahead. But the past offers
clues, say
scientists who are studying a period of warming that occurred
about 55
million years ago.
In a joint project of the University of Michigan, the University
of New
Hampshire and the Smithsonian Institution, researchers have been
analyzing
fossils from the badlands of Wyoming found in a distinctive layer
of bright
red sedimentary rock that was deposited at the boundary between
the
Paleocene and Eocene epochs -- a time of apparent sudden climate
change. The
researchers described their findings in a paper presented Feb. 16
at the
annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
"The interval of Earth history that we're studying is marked
by a short-term
global warming event thought to have occurred when something
triggered the
release of methane from methane clathrate -- a kind of 'methane
ice' found
in ocean sediments," said Philip D. Gingerich, professor of
geological
sciences at the University of Michigan. Within about 10,000 years
of peak
warming, mammals such as primates and the groups that include
horses and
deer appeared together for the first time in North America,
apparently
having crossed land bridges from other continents.
As the warm spell continued, the animals showed an intriguing
response: they
became smaller. For example, "horses from this period that
had been the size
of a small dog were reduced to the size of a Siamese cat,"
Gingerich said.
When the climate returned to normal, the animals became normal
size again.
To understand why dwarf versions of the various animals appeared
and then
disappeared from the fossil record, Gingerich turned to
colleagues at the
University of Michigan Biological Station who are studying the
effects of
elevated carbon dioxide levels -- associated with global warming
-- on plant
growth.
"They find that if you grow plants in a carbon dioxide-rich
atmosphere, the
plants love it. They grow fast. It's easy for them." But in
the process, the
plants incorporate less protein and more defensive compounds than
they
normally would. Insects that eat these plants grow more slowly,
and the same
might be true of mammals, Gingerich reasoned.
Furthermore, "the reproductive cycles of mammals that live
in seasonal
environments are tuned to seasonal cycles," Gingerich said.
"If an animal
has a one- or two-year period in which to grow to maturity and
reproduce,
and it's trying to do that on a diet that's difficult to digest
and not very
nutritious, it's not surprising that it would evolve to be
smaller. And it's
also not surprising that when times are good again and carbon
dioxide levels
are lower and plants grow like they normally should, that the
animals would
go back to what we think of as their normal size."
It's not clear whether the body size trends represent true
evolutionary
change or whether the larger species were simply replaced by
smaller sister
species, but Gingerich hopes to answer that question as he
continues to work
on the project.
He and his coworkers, William C. Clyde of the University of New
Hampshire
and Scott L. Wing and Guy J. Harrington of the Smithsonian
Institution, also
hope their work will improve understanding of climate change in
general.
"This is a model of an event in the past that involved
change and recovery
from change," Gingerich said. "During that 80,000-year
period, mammals
didn't go extinct; they adapted through dwarfing. And eventually,
the system
worked itself back to the previous state."
But just because Earth and its inhabitants recovered from global
warming in
the past don't assume we have nothing to worry about now,
Gingerich
cautions. "In today's Earth, additional warming could set
off a methane
release that would bump the Earth's temperature up by several
degrees --
enough to melt polar ice and raise sea level and cause many other
problems
that would be difficult to survive. That's what makes the
temperature rises
we're measuring now more worrisome than those that occurred in
the past."
============
(5) WILL GLOBAL WARMING SHUT DOWN THE THERMOHALINE CIRCULATION OF
THE
WORLD'S OCEANS?
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
http://www.co2science.org/edit/v6_edit/v6n8edit.htm
Ever ready to evoke visions of climatic catastrophe with respect
to
potential consequences of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2
content, Science
magazine says "River Flow Could Derail Crucial Ocean
Current" in its 13 Dec
2002 online introduction to the News of the Week item of the same
title by
Stokstad (2002), who provides a short commentary on the report of
Peterson
et al. (2002) that serves as the basis for the new climate
hysteria. As
usual, however, the magazine's hype is without a solid basis in
empirical
fact.
So what did Peterson et al. do to cause such a flurry of concern
and lead
certain folks, who should know oh-so-much-better, to go so far
astray in
their intimations about the future? Very simply, they
plotted annual values
of the combined discharge of the six largest Eurasian Arctic
rivers
(Yenisey, Lena, Ob', Pechora, Kolyma and Severnaya Dvina) - which
drain abut
two-thirds of the Eurasian Arctic landmass - against the globe's
mean annual
surface air temperature (SAT), after which they ran a simple
linear
regression through the data and determined that the combined
discharge of
the six rivers seems to rise by about 212 km3/year in response to
a 1°C
increase in mean global air temperature. Then they
calculated that for the
high-end global warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate
Change (IPCC) to occur by 2100, i.e., a temperature increase of
5.8°C, the
warming-induced increase in freshwater discharge from the six
rivers could
rise by as much as 1260 km3/year (we calculate 5.8°C x 212
km3/year/°C =
1230 km3/year), which represents a 70% increase over the mean
discharge rate
of the last several years.
The link between this conclusion and the postulated shutting down
of the
thermohaline circulation of the world's oceans resides in the
hypothesis
that the delivery of such a large addition of freshwater to the
North
Atlantic Ocean (augmented by presumed increased freshwater
discharges from
other Arctic rivers and meltwater from Greenland) may slow - or
even stop -
that location's production of new deep water, which latter
phenomenon
constitutes one of the main driving forces of the great oceanic
"conveyor
belt" that redistributes heat around the world and brings
considerable
warmth to Europe [see North Atlantic Deep Water in our Subject
Index].
Although we, too, are inclined to give a certain amount of
credence to this
concept, we are not inclined to accept the tremendous
extrapolation that
Peterson et al. make in extending their Arctic freshwater
discharge vs.
global surface air temperature (SAT) relationship to the great
length that
is implied by the IPCC's predicted high-end warming of 5.8°C
over the
remainder of the current century.
Consider, for example, that "over the period of the
discharge record, global
SAT increased by [only] 0.4°C," according to Peterson et
al. Do you think
it's reasonable to extend the relationship they derived across
that small
range of temperature variability fourteen and a half times beyond
the range
of the independent variable used to derive it? We surely
don't, nor should
any other rational person.
Consider also the Eurasian river discharge anomaly vs. global SAT
plot of
Peterson et al. (their Figure 4), which we have replotted in the
figure
below. Enclosing their data with simple straight-line upper
and lower
bounds, it can be seen that the upper bound of the data does not
change over
the entire range of global SAT variability, suggesting the very
real
possibility that the upper bound corresponds to a maximum
Eurasian river
discharge rate that cannot be exceeded in the real world under
its current
geographic and climatic configuration. The lower bound, on
the other hand,
rises so rapidly with increasing global SAT that the two bounds
intersect
less than two-tenths of a degree above the warmest of Peterson et
al.'s 63
data points, suggesting that 0.2°C beyond the temperature of
their warmest
data point is all the further any relationship derived from their
data may
validly be extrapolated.
In light of these observations, which are so plain as to be
almost
impossible to not understand, there would appear to be absolutely
no reason
for making the type of attention-grabbing statement contained in
the
headline of Science magazine's News of the Week report on the
article of
Peterson et al., especially when it is known that statements of
this type
serve as welcome fodder for climate alarmists who typically blow
them even
further out of proportion, to where they ultimately bear almost
no
relationship to what is really known. As Stokstad (2002)
correctly notes,
"many experts caution that too little is known to make any
solid predictions
about such effects [as those discussed in the Peterson et al.
article]." In
fact, he reports, one of those experts - oceanographer Knut
Aagaard of the
University of Washington in Seattle - says he would be very
careful about
considering any predictions about "the influence of the
runoff and changes
in the overturning of the North Atlantic" as being
"anything more than very
loose speculation."
We wholeheartedly agree.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Peterson, B.J., Holmes, R.M., McClelland, J.W., Vorosmarty, C.J.,
Lammers,
R.B., Shiklomanov, A.I., Shiklomanov, I.A. and Rahmstorf,
S. 2002.
Increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean. Science
298: 2171-2173.
Stokstad, E. 2002. River flow could derail crucial
ocean current. Science
298: 2110.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change
===========
(6) SOLAR INFLUENCES AND DECADAL-SCALE CLIMATE CYCLES
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/summaries/dsccsi.htm
In their review of the relationship between solar activity and
climate
during the Holocene and portions of the last great ice age,
Chambers et al.
(1999) say there is "increasing evidence for solar-driven
variations in
earth-atmospheric processes, over a range of
timescales." In this summary,
we highlight some of the recent scientific literature in support
of a
solar-influence on climate at decadal and multi-decadal time
scales.
With a periodicity of 10 to 11 years, the Schwabe (Sunspot) Cycle
is one of
the more publicized decadal-scale solar cycles thought to exert a
significant influence on earth's climate, the imprint of which
has been
postulated among proxy climate records across the globe (Chambers
et al.,
1999). Other solar cycles of multi-decadal timescale include the
approximate
22-year double sunspot, or Hale Cycle, and the approximate
78-year (72- to
83-year) Gleissberg Cycle. Additionally, there may be other
decadal cycles
of solar origin of which we are not yet aware. Dean et al.
(2002), for
example, reported finding significant decadal periodicities of
29, 32 and 42
years along with the approximate 10-year oscillation discussed
above.
Rigozo et al. (2002) detected an 11-year cycle in tree-ring width
data from
Brazil over the period 1837-1996; and Black et al. (1999)
reported finding a
12.5- to 13-year signal of climatic variability in the North
Atlantic Ocean
over the past 825 years. Additionally, Dean et al. (2002) found
an
approximate 10-year cycle in a lake sediment core obtained from
Elk Lake,
Minnesota, USA, covering the past 1500 years. Both Rigozo et al.
and Dean et
al. implicate the sun as the likely source of the approximately
11-year
periodicity noted in their records. Black et al. are less
enthusiastic
about this possibility, but they feel the sun is responsible for
driving
centennial-scale climate oscillations in their record.
In an analysis of tree-ring chronologies from northeastern
Mongolia,
Pederson et al. (2001) report "possible evidence for solar
influences" on
the regional hydrologic cycle. For the period 1651-1995, they
reconstructed
annual precipitation and streamflow histories for this region,
which upon
subjection to spectral analysis revealed significant
periodicities of 12 and
20-24 years that are believed to be solar-induced.
Nearby in China, Xu et al. (2002) examined plant cellulose ð18O
variations
in cores retrieved from peat deposits at the northeastern edge of
the
Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (32° 46'N, 102° 30'E). Power
spectrum analyses of
these data revealed multi-decadal periodicities of 79 and 88
years,
"suggesting," in the words of the authors, "that
the main driving force of
Hongyuan climate change is from solar activities."
Neff et al. (2001) also provide evidence for a solar-induced
influence on
the hydrologic cycle. For the period 9,600-6,100 years
before present, they
investigated the relationship between a 14C tree-ring record and
a proxy
record of monsoon rainfall intensity inferred from calcite ð18O
data
obtained from a stalagmite in northern Oman. Their investigation
revealed an
"extremely strong" correlation between the two data
sets; and spectral
analyses revealed statistically significant decadal and
multi-decadal
periodicities of 10.4, 26 and 89 years for the 14C tree-ring
record, and 87
years for the ð18O record.
Not far from Oman, Castagnoli et al. (2002) studied a 1400-year
ð13C record
derived from the remains of the foraminifera Globigerinoides
rubber, which
were extracted from a sediment core located in the Gallipoli
terrace of the
Gulf of Taranto (39°45'53"N, 17°53'33"E).
Variations in the ð13C of the
symbiontic foraminifera reflect the effects of productivity
varying with the
ambient light level; and because the ð13C time series can thus
provide
information on sea surface illumination at the time of planktonic
foraminifera growth, it can be utilized as a proxy for solar
radiation
variability. Similar to several of the studies referenced
above, Castagnoli
et al. found an approximate 11.3-year cycle in this record.
Furthermore,
comparison of their data with historical aurora and sunspot time
series
revealed that the three records are "associable in
phase" and "disclose a
statistically significant imprint of the solar activity in a
climate
record."
Lastly, a possible multi-decadal scale solar influence on climate
has been
reported by Domack et al. (2001), who analyzed ocean sediment
cores from the
Palmer Deep, located on the inner continental shelf of the
western Antarctic
Peninsula, covering the past 13,000 years. Spectral analysis of
their data
revealed very significant multi-decadal periodicities of 70 and
85 years,
which they suggest are perhaps driven by solar variability.
In light of these several findings, it is safe to say that as
more and more
scientists dig into all parts of the planet to study its climatic
history,
they are unearthing more and more evidence for the global reality
of a
solar-forced, as opposed to an anthropogenically-forced, climate.
References
Black, D.E., Peterson, L.C., Overpeck, J.T., Kaplan, A., Evans,
M.N. and
Kashgarian, M. 1999. Eight centuries of North
Atlantic Ocean atmosphere
variability. Science 286: 1709-1713.
Castagnoli, G.C., Bonino, G., Taricco, C. and Bernasconi,
S.M. 2002. Solar
radiation variability in the last 1400 years recorded in the
carbon isotope
ratio of a Mediterranean sea core. Advances in Space
Research 29:
1989-1994.
Chambers, F.M., Ogle, M.I. and Blackford, J.J. 1999.
Palaeoenvironmental
evidence for solar forcing of Holocene climate: linkages to solar
science.
Progress in Physical Geography 23: 181-204.
Dean, W., Anderson, R., Bradbury, J.P. and Anderson, D.
2002. A 1500-year
record of climatic and environmental change in Elk Lake,
Minnesota I: Varve
thickness and gray-scale density. Journal of Paleolimnology
27: 287-299.
Domack, E., Leventer, A., Dunbar, R., Taylor, F., Brachfeld, S.,
Sjunneskog,
C. and ODP Leg 178 Scientific Party. 2001. Chronology
of the Palmer Deep
site, Antarctic Peninsula: A Holocene palaeoenvironmental
reference for the
circum-Antarctic. The Holocene 11: 1-9.
Neff, U., Burns, S.J., Mangini, A., Mudelsee, M., Fleitmann, D
and Matter,
A. 2001. Strong coherence between solar variability
and the monsoon in
Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago. Nature 411: 290-293.
Pederson, N., Jacoby, G.C., D'Arrigo, R.D., Cook, E.R. and
Buckley, B.M.
2001. Hydrometeorological reconstructions for northeastern
Mongolia derived
from tree rings: 1651-1995. Journal of Climate 14: 872-881.
Rigozo, N.R., Nordemann, D.J.R., Echer, E., Zanandrea, A. and
Gonzalez, W.D.
2002. Solar variability effects studied by tree-ring data
wavelet analysis.
Advances in Space Research 29: 1985-1988.
Xu, H., Hong, Y., Lin, Q., Hong, B., Jiang, H. and Zhu, Y. 2002.
Temperature
variations in the past 6000 years inferred from ð18O of peat
cellulose from
Hongyuan, China. Chinese Science Bulletin 47: 1578-1584.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change
===========
(7) TEMPERATURE TRENDS IN ANTARCTICA
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 19 February 2003
http://www.co2science.org/journal/2003/v6n8c1.htm
Reference
Kwok, R. and Comiso, J.C. 2002. Spatial patterns of
variability in
Antarctic surface temperature: Connections to the South
Hemisphere Annular
Mode and the Southern Oscillation. Geophysical Research
Letters 29:
10.1029/2002GL015415.
What was done
The authors review what is known about Antarctic air temperature
trends over
the past few decades, as well as (1) trends in the Southern
Hemisphere (SH)
Annular Mode (SAM) and the extrapolar Southern Oscillation (SO),
(2) the
roles these phenomena may have played in orchestrating the
observed air
temperature trends, and (3) what may be the ultimate driver of
their own
behavior.
What was learned
Citing King and Harangozo (1998), the authors report that during
the past 20
years, the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced "pronounced
warming." They
note, however, that there has been "cooling at a number of
weather stations
on the coast and plateau of East and West Antarctica (Comiso,
2000)." In
fact, they say that "the analysis of Doran et al. (2002)
suggests a net
cooling of the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000,"
with the largest
cooling centered around the South Pole and the region surrounding
Dome C.
Hence, the mean trend in climate for the entire continent over
the past
three decades and more has clearly been a cooling.
Over the 17-year period 1982-1998, Kwok and Comiso also report
that the SAM
index shifted towards more positive values (0.22/decade), noting
that a
positive polarity of the SAM index "is associated with cold
anomalies over
most of Antarctica with the center of action over the East
Antarctic
plateau." Simultaneously, the SO index shifted in a negative
direction,
indicating "a drift toward a spatial pattern with warmer
temperatures around
the Antarctic Peninsula, and cooler temperatures over much of the
continent." Together, the authors say the positive trend in
the coupled mode
of variability of these two indices (0.3/decade) represents a
"significant
bias toward positive polarity" that they describe as
"remarkable."
The authors additionally report that "the tropospheric SH
annular mode has
been shown to be related to changes in the lower stratosphere
(Thompson and
Wallace, 2000)," noting that "the high index polarity
of the SH annular mode
is associated with the trend toward a cooling and strengthening
of the SH
stratospheric polar vortex during the stratosphere's relatively
short active
season in November, and ozone depletion," which is pretty
much the same
theory that has been put forth by Thompson and Solomon (2002).
What it means
Antarctica, as a whole, has been cooling for well over the past
three
decades, in direct contradiction of climate model projections.
This cooling
appears to be the result of a remarkable positive trend in the
coupled mode
of variability of the SAM and SO, which appears to be driven by
phenomena of
stratospheric origin. This last point is of more than passing
interest; for
although atmospheric processes of tropospheric origin are known
to have the
ability to perturb the stratosphere, forcings in the opposite
direction have
usually been assumed to be negligible in most climate models. As
noted by
Hartley et al. (1998), however, this assumption is likely not
correct; and
amplified perturbations of various phenomena, including those
that are
solar-induced, may well be propagated downward to the
troposphere, to where
they can significantly impact earth's climate, as appears to be
what is
happening in the case of Antarctica's recent three-plus decades
of cooling.
References
Comiso, J.C. 2000. Variability and trends in
Antarctic surface
temperatures from in situ and satellite infrared
measurements. Journal of
Climate 13: 1674-1696.
Doran, P.T., Priscu, J.C., Lyons, W.B., Walsh, J.E., Fountain,
A.G.,
McKnight, D.M., Moorhead, D.L., Virginia, R.A., Wall, D.H., Clow,
G.D.,
Fritsen, C.H., McKay, C.P. and Parsons, A.N. 2002.
Antarctic climate
cooling and terrestrial ecosystem response. Nature 415:
517-520.
Hartley, D.E., Villarin, J.T., Black, R.X. and Davis, C.A.
1998. A new
perspective on the dynamical link between the stratosphere and
troposphere.
Nature 391: 471-474.
King, J.C. and Harangozo, S.A. 1998. Climate change
in the western
Antarctic Peninsula since 1945: observations and possible
causes. Annals of
Glaciology 27: 571-575.
Thompson, D.W.J. and Solomon, S. 2002. Interpretation
of recent Southern
Hemisphere climate change. Science 296: 895-899.
Thompson, D.W.J. and Wallace, J.M. 2000. Annular
modes in extratropical
circulation, Part II: Trends. Journal of Climate 13:
1018-1036.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change
==========
(8) ANOTHER COLD SPELL HITS KOREA
Korea Times, 14 February 2003
Another cold spell is expected to hit the nation today, according
to the
Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) yesterday.
The temperature will drop as low as 15 degrees below zero Celsius
today,
with the day's highs expected to be at just 5 degrees in the
later hours,
according to the weather bureau.By region, Seoul will have a
morning low of
minus 7 degrees with the mercury reaching up to zero degrees in
midday. With
a morning chill of minus 7 degrees, the temperature in Taejon
will rise to a
high of 2 degrees in the afternoon.
=============
(9) SPANISH COLD SNAP SPARKS RECORD POWER DEMAND
>From Reuters, 19 February 2003
http://biz.yahoo.com/rm/030219/energy_spain_enagas_1.html
MADRID, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Cold weather in Spain in recent days
has sparked
record demand for gas and electricity, utilities said on
Wednesday. Many
parts of Spain, even more temperate areas such as the Balearic
Islands, were
covered in snow on Tuesday. Gas pipeline operator Enagas
(Madrid:ENAG.MC -
News) said demand for natural gas reached a record 1.137
gigawatts on
Tuesday, versus a previous high of 1.111 gigawatts on January 31.
==============
(10) TRUST ME: I'M THE WORLD'S GREATEST CLIMATE FORECASTER
>From www.john-daly.com,
16 February 2003
Time to get some serious climate predictions untainted by
politics. The
world's greatest climate forecaster, Punxatawney Phil, the famous
groundhog,
spoke these prophetic words on `Groundhog Day', 2nd February 2003
-
Gov. Rendell joins this joyful throng
of several thousand strong
and he like everyone will thrill
at seeing the magic on this hill
as I make my prognostication
and give my justification:
I see my shadow beside me
and that is that magic you see.
It causes this midwinter revelry,
six more weeks of winter there will be.
Beats a model any day...
========
(11) AND FINALLY: BAD NEWS AND WORSE
>From The Times, 20 February 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,59-584143,00.html
>From Mr Jim Cowley
Sir, The threat of war with Iraq. The threat of a terrorist
attack in
Britain. Global warming. The split within Nato. Plunging stock
market values
and poor pension returns. Just when you think that things
couldn't possibly
get any worse - I hear that the Spice Girls may get together
again.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Yours faithfully,
JIM COWLEY
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