ebb and flow ... Icing on the top of warming furore
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Michael J Economides
  Friday, May 16, 2008

As I discussed last month (‘Kilimanjaro claims are snow joke’), there is an astonishing array of claims, many markedly contradictory, published by scientists about the effects of global warming.

There is also a rift between those who have suggested that global warming will increase both the number and intensity of tropical cyclones and those who suggest that global warming will decrease the number of these weather events.

On February 19, 2006 on the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Bob Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, stated: ‘The one thing I think we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence is the severity of the storms, how strong the storms, these cyclonic events like hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific, are going to get – they’re gonna be more severe. The oceans of the northern hemisphere are the warmest they’ve been on record. When they get up in that temperature, they spin off hurricanes.Well, if it goes up another degree, it’s gonna spawn these with more intensity.’

In February 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report about the link between global warming and the intensity of hurricanes, especially in the Atlantic. It concluded that ‘numerous longterm changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in . . . the intensity of tropical cyclones’. Fiercer North Atlantic hurricanes are ‘correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures’.

However, global warming causes no increase in hurricanes, nor has it changed their intensity.

National Hurricane Center meteorologist Chris Landsea declared in 2006 that pre-1990 hurricane data is not sufficiently accurate to determine historical trends in hurricane intensity. ‘That’s a huge inconsistency in the study. Something is either wrong here, or there was no real change in Category 4 or 5 [storms.]’

Scientists led by physical oceanographer Chunzai Wang of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration postulated early this year that global warming may actually decrease the number of hurricanes that strike the US because warming waters may increase vertical wind speed, or wind shear, cutting into a hurricane’s strength.

Ice melting . . .

In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said: ‘The Arctic is experiencing faster melt. If this were to go, sea level worldwide would go up 20ft [my emphasis]. This is what would happen in Florida. Around Shanghai – home to 40 million people; the area around Calcutta – 60 million. Here’s Manhattan – the World Trade Center Memorial would be under water. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees, and then imagine 100 million.’

Corell told US TV’s CBS News: ‘Right now the entire planet is out of balance. This is a bellwether, a barometer. Some people call it the canary in the mine. The warning that things are coming. In 10 years here in the Arctic, we see what the rest of the planet will see in 25 or 35 years from now.’ He said all that water will raise sea levels 3ft [my emphasis] higher globally within 100 years. ‘You and I sit here, another foot. Your children, another foot. Your grandchildren, another foot. And it won’t take long for sea level to inundate. Sea level will be inundating the low lands of virtually every country of the world, ours included.’

The IPCC observed that the global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8mm a year from 1961 to 2003, and at about 3.1mm a year from 1993 to 2003. The annual average extent of the Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 2.7% per decade since the study began. IPCC projected a sea level rise of 0.26m to 0.59m in the next 100 years by using the worst-case scenario – a CO2 concentration of 1550ppm in the air. (This is 25 times less than the Al Gore claim)

. . . . or thickening

Petr Chylek and his group from the Los Alamos National Lab found that ‘the current Greenland warming is not unprecedented in recent Greenland history. Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005), a similar increase and at a faster rate (50% higher) occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920-30) when CO₂ or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause: ‘We find no direct evidence to support the claims that the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to increased temperature caused by increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.’

In January, the journals Nature and Science both reported findings about Antarctic cooling and ice thickening. The paper in Nature reported that the Antarctic has grown noticeably cooler since the mid-1980s, and that recorded air temperature across the Antarctic for the 14 years ending in 1999 declined by about 1°F. Scientists Ian Joughin (Cal Tech) and Slawek Tulaczyk (UC Santa Cruz), using the Canadian Radarsat satellite, detected that the ice in Antarctica is thickening. They detected a net gain of 26.8 billion tons of ice per year.

Climatologists and oceanographers, led by Ola Johannessen of Norway’s Nansen Environmental & Remote Sensing Center, estimated in 2007 that the interior ice grew an average 60mm per year between 1992 and 2003 at elevations above 1500m, and claimed that the growth was caused by North Atlantic oscillation. OE

Michael J Economides is a professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, and editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect OE’s position.

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