Monday, March 4, 2013

BBC's Harrabin pitches drought, flooding scares and need for 'urgent action,' but 2011 UN report mutes flood and drought predictions, Nature study says no drought change in 60 yrs.

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A BBC scary weather headline and first 80% of article promotes floods and extreme weather due to human CO2. At the end of the entry, non-CO2 factors are revealed. A 2011 UN study on extreme weather states it has "low confidence in predicting future floods"(p. 6) and "low to medium" confidence predicting droughts (p. 6). Also regarding drought, a Nov. 2012 Nature study reported no increase in drought for the past 60 years. Following is BBC's non-CO2 portion followed the the CO2 terror portion:

3/3/13, "UK must adapt for weather extremes, says Environment Agency," BBC, Roger Harrabin

"Part of the UK’s flooding problem is due to previous policies. For decades, farmers were paid to drain boggy land in order to improve it for grazing. This caused water to rush off the fields into rivers, whereas previously it would have been held in the bogs to smooth out the flow into rivers throughout the year. In addition, many flood plains have been built on." (item at end of article)

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BBC reports "urgent action" is "vital" as "global temperatures" rise. Even the UK Met Office says no warming has taken place for 15 years and none is expected until at least 2017. No one is in a position at this moment to predict a resumption of warming and even if they were China's coal use is high and heading higher so no other country's "actions"are relevant. The BBC article began as follows:

"Britain must become more resilient to both drought and flooding, Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith has said. New figures from the agency show that one in every five days saw flooding in 2012, but one in four days saw drought. 

Rivers such as the Tyne, Ouse and Tone fell to their lowest and rose to their highest flows since records began, within a four-month period of the year."...

[Ed. note: The amount of time entailed in the phrase, "since records began" isn't indicated.]

(continuing): "Lord Smith said urgent action was vital to help "prepare and adapt" many aspects of Britain for such extremes.

Meteorologists fear that extremes of weather may increase as global temperatures slowly rise."...

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Nov. 2012 Nature study says little drought change in 60 years:

11/16/12, "Global drought changed little last 60 years: a problem for global warming predictions?" Washington Post, J. Samenow

"An oft-referred to global warming projection is an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts. But averaged over the globe, a new study published in Nature Wednesday finds little change in drought over the past 60 years.

Just a few years ago the prevailing wisdom was that a global drying trend had commenced in the 1970s. In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded: “More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. Increased drying linked with higher temperatures and decreased precipitation has contributed to changes in drought.”

But the IPCC backtracked some from that statement in a 2011 report on climate change and extreme events. The report simply stated there is medium confidence some parts of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts while other regions have seen decreases in drought, including central North America.

The results of this new Nature study seem to affirm that a clear global drought signal - that one could link to global warming - has not yet emerged.

Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated, the study authored by Princeton researchers Justin Sheffield and Eric Wood and Australian researcher Michael Roderick says. “More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”"...

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2011 UN Special Report on extreme weather events revises 2007 view, expresses "low confidence" predicting increased flooding, low to medium confidence predicting drought:

11/18/11, "Weather disasters to increase report warns, climate change signal slow to emerge for some extremes," Washington Post, J. Samenow

"The “2011 UN Report, "Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation, Summary for Policy Makers" (SREX) is somewhat guarded about the links between manmade climate change and hurricanes, floods, droughts and weather disaster losses. And some of its findings are more conservative and characterized by greater uncertainty than the major volume released by the IPCC in 2007, known as the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

So how has the science of climate change and weather extremes changed, and what does it mean?...

On the issue of observed and projected changes in floods, SREX comes close to punting [p. 6]:

* It states they can’t tell if floods have increased or decreased: “[we have] overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes.” 

* It states confidence is low in predicting changes in future floods, though based on physical reasoning concludes (with medium confidence) that increases in heavy rainfall should contribute to increases in local flooding

As for droughts, SREX’s conclusions are also highly qualified [p. 6]:

* It states there is medium confidence some parts of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts while other regions have seen decreases in drought, including central North America. These findings appear to back track a bit from AR4 which stated the global area affected by drought had likely increased.

* SREX is also wishy-washy in its future projections for drought assigning medium confidence that they will intensify in some areas but cautioning elsewhere confidence is low."...

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1/9/13,The crazy climate change obsession that’s made the Met Office a menace, UK Daily Mail, James Delingpole  

"This week it has admitted there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening. The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve. 

Until then, it had been confidently predicting temperature rises of at least 0.2 degrees per decade, with a succession of years exceeding even the record-breaking high of 1998. Its latest chart, however, confirmed in a press release earlier this week, tells a very different story: no more global warming is expected till at least 2017....


Somewhere in the world, a weather record is being broken almost every day. This is normal.'

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1/31/13, "The Growing Irrelevance of U.S. Climate Policy," Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org

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1/9/13, "Surprise Surprise... Global warming has stalled, admits Met Office," UK Daily Express, John Ingham 

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2/21/13, "IPCC Head Pachauri Acknowledges Global Warming Standstill," The Australian, Graham Lloyd

"The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend."... 


The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. - See more at: http://www.thegwpf.org/ipcc-head-pachauri-acknowledges-global-warming-standstill/#sthash.SrDucInI.dpuf





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