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New Study Debunks Drought-Driven Food Collapse
Washington, D.C., August 25, 2011 — A year ago, a peer-reviewed report in Science magazine concluded that a warmer planet over the past decade has led to drought that has reduced plant production and threatened worldwide food security. Today, a new, peer-reviewed study in the same journal argues that the results in the first report are bogus, the result of a flawed model and contradicted by empirical evidence.
The original research bolstered those who claim that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are already causing severe consequences and will result in widespread food shortages in the years ahead. The new work undercuts that linkage.
In the original report, Maosheng Zhao of the University of Montana and Steven Running, using a computer model of “net primary production” (NPP) of plants, found a decline over 2000-2009, compared to the prior decade. The decline was found mostly in a reduction in plants in the Amazon basin, resulting from a prolonged drought.
In today’s article, an international team of scientists from the U.S. and Brazil counters that the original work was driven by a flawed NPP model that does not reflect real data. “Satellite observations of vegetation activity show no statistically significant changes in more than 85% of the vegetated lands south of 70 degrees N during the same 2000 to 2009 period,” says the most recent analysis.
A press release from Boston University, where the lead author of the debunking team was a graduate student, said the most recent work refutes “earlier alarmist claims that drought has induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade and posed a threat to global food security.” Lead author Arindam Samanta, now at Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Lexington, Mass., said, “Their model has been tuned to predict lower productivity even for very small increases in temperature. Not surprisingly, their results were preordained.”
Coauthor Marcos Costa, coordinator of global change research at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Brazil and a professor at the Federal University of Vicosa, said, “The large (28%) disagreement between the model’s predictions and ground truth imbues very little confidence in Zhao and Running’s results.” Coauthor Liang Xu, a Boston University graduate student, said the Zhao and Running work did not take into account the way the clouds and aerosols corrupt NASA satellite measurements of ground cover. “Analyzing the same satellite data products after carefully filtering out clouds and aerosol-corrupted data,” said Liang, “we could not reproduce the patterns published by Zhao and Running. Moreover, none of their reported productivity trends are statistically significant.”
In a Science “technical comment” accompanying today’s article, Zhao and Running defend their work, saying further analysis and data supports their original conclusions. “Our continuous monitoring shows that global NPP in 2010 was lower than in 2009, largely due to two large-scale droughts in Amazon and Europe. We expect that the strongest impacts of changing climate on terrestrial ecosystem productivity will continue to be manifested through the hydrologic cycle, but whether these current trends continue can only be answered by global monitoring.”
Another “technical comment” accompanying today’s article, by Belinda Medlyn of Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia, comments that the Zhao and Running findings are the result of a flawed computer models that are driven by temperature, not by actual plant data. The original researchers, she says, have not shown that NPP “has decreased over the last decade. Rather, they have shown that, if NPP is assumed to be affected by climate as specified in their model, then NPP would have declined over the past decade. It is important to make this distinction, because otherwise, we run the risk of mistaking model outcomes for reality.”
CERN CLOUD Experiment Challenges Climate Models
By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., August 25, 2011 — The long-anticipated CERN study of the impact of cosmic rays on formation of clouds in the atmosphere, published today in Nature, should prompt a major revision of the global circulation models that support claims of man-made climate warming. The CLOUD study by CERN, the European nuclear research agency, finds that cosmic rays from the sun, not man-made particles, are involved in the formation of the vast major of atmospheric aerosols.
In a briefing paper supporting its CLOUD (Cosmics leaving Outdoor Droplets) experimental results, CERN notes that “it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume” that atmospheric particulates are caused by trace pollutants and water vapor. “It is now urgent to identify the additional nucleating vapors, and whether their sources are mainly natural or from human activities.”
Jasper Kirby, lead physicist of the CLOUD experiment, said in a CERN press release, “We’ve found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and avove. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we’ve found that the vapors previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations — even with the enhancement of cosmic rays.”
The CLOUD results show that a few kilometers into the atmosphere, sulfuric acid and water vapor can form clusters and that cosmic rays cans enhance the formation by a factor of ten or more. In the lowest layers of the atmosphere, up to about a kilometer, other vapors such as ammonia are needed for the formation of the clusters. But the H2SO4, water and ammonia, even with enhancement from cosmic rays, don’t explain the quantity of aerosol formation, says CERN. So additional vapors must be involved.
Says Kirby, “It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulfuric acid, water and ammonia alone. Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapors are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds. This will be our next job.”
The experiment used a beam of particles from CERN’s Proton Yynchrotron accelerator to provide a controllable source of cosmic rays to be injected into a state-of-the-art chamber to replicate the atmosphere.
The CERN statements are careful not to overstate the results of CLOUD, which have been awaited in the atmospheric science community for years. Says the briefing paper, “This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapors have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects of clouds have been confirmed.”
Particulates and clouds play a large, and not well-understood, component of how the global climate behaves. MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen, long a powerful skeptic of man-made global warming, is an expert on clouds and has criticized climate models in the past for not incorporating cloud phenomena very skillfully.
Science writer Andrew Orlowski in the UK online science and technology magazineThe Register commented today, “Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a ‘heliocentric’ rather than an ‘anthropogenic’ approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.”
What Polar Bear Decline?
Washington, D.C., August 15, 2011 — It’s about those polar bears. You know, the ones endangered by global warming turning the Arctic into Florida, the poster predators of man’s inhumanity to the Earth. Those cute figures who have graced Coca-Cola ads and memorabilia for decades.
Well, maybe they aren’t that endangered after all. An essay by zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley in London’s Spectator newspaper last week discusses the issue of the lovable top predators of the North. Also, it turns out that a wildlife biologist who sparked a tide of concern over the plight of the white bears of the ice may have been faking it when he reported spotting dead polar bears floating in Arctic waters in 2004.
First, to Ridley — who faced a polar bear from a tent in Norway’s Spitzbergen Island in the summer of 1978. “Today,” he writes, “bears are now far more common in Spitzbergen and the other islands of Svalbard. They are more common all over the Arctic than 33 years ago.” In 1966, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated the world’s population of polar bears at 10,000. In 2006, the IUCN’s estimate was 20,000-25,000 and the monitoring group says there has been no decline since then.
In large part, that’s due to an end to shooting and trapping bears. A 1973 international agreement ended sport and commercial hunting of the bears (no doubt driving up the price of polar bear rugs considerably). Another component of the population figures is that we just don’t know a heck of a lot about long-term bear population changes. They are long-lived and slow to breed, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes. Coordinated monitoring of the population of the mammals that reaches across the entire Arctic only started in the late 1960s.
Courtesy: NOAA
Then there are those four dead polar bears, which Al Gore fretted over in his An Inconvenient Truth film, presumably drowned in open water trying to move from one vanishing ice flow to another. “But polar bears often swim long distances — one was recorded swimming 400 miles,” writes Ridley, “and nobody knows how unusual it was for four to get caught in a storm and drown.”
If those drowned bears were real. National Public Radio reported last week that the wildlife biologist who reported seeing the drowned bears in 2004 — Charles Monnett — is “under investigation by the Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General.” The New York Times reported the week before that Monnett had been “placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation into ‘integrity issues’, according to a copy of a letter posted online by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.”
Writes Ridley, “The polar bear is a specialist seal-eating predator (so it is little wonder that it goes for other elongated, six-foot mammals when hungry). It occupies a specific niche: the ice edge. It cannot survive on unbroken Arctic sea ice, because seals are not found there. Nor can it survive on ice-free seas because it cannot kill seals in open water.”
If global warming causes the ice-free season to be longer, notes Ridley, the bears at their southern-most range might die out. On the other hand, “areas further north, currently too solidly frozen for seals, will become more hospitable to bears.”
Those most alarmed by the prospect of a warmer climate claim that 2007 saw the greatest Arctic ice retreat on record. But the record only goes back to 1979. The 1920s and 1930s were surely warmer. Ridley observes that there have been plenty of previous warm periods, all the way back to the Holocene Optimum, some 5,000 years ago. “Polar bears certainly survived such warmer spells,” he concludes, “presumably by ranging somewhat further north. Indeed, fossils suggest that polar bears already existed in their current form from during the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago, when the Arctic was almost certainly wholly free of ice in late summer.”
Ex-CIA chief Slams Smart Grid
Washington, D.C., August 14, 2011 — I don’t often agree with former CIA director James Woolsey. In fact, I can’t think of a time that I have ever agreed with him.
Until this week, that is, when Woolsey offered a short, sharp elbow to the policy ribs of the smart grid during an appearance on Energy Now, a weekly TV energy-related news show (financed by gas company Chesapeake Energy).
In a 1-minute segment on the show, Woolsey said, “they’re constructing a smart grid that will make it easier for you or me to all our homes on our cell phones and turn down our air conditioner on a hot afternoon. But that may well mean that a hacker in Shanghai can do the same thing with his cell phone, or worse. A so-called smart grid that’s as vulnerable as what we’ve got is not smart at all. It’s a really, really stupid grid.”
Woolsey said a key part of the problem is that no one is in charge. “You can search forever through the federal code to find who that person might be,” he said. Woolsey suggested that the proper federal official to regulate grid security is the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He added that it would be a good idea for the Pentagon to work with local utilities on beefing up the security weaknesses of the grid.
The pointed remarks from the former CIA chief drew praise from Consumer Reports. The publication of Consumers Union said it “has also expressed concerns about the smart grid, though our issues stem from the fct that it is not clear whether consumers will reap any real savings, or whether utility companies will come out ahead.” Consumers Union was one of five consumer groups that last August issued a 28-page report detailing their objections to current trends in smart grid policy and development. Also joining Consumers Union were the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, AARP, National Consumer Law Center, and Public Citizen.
The consumer groups’ report raised several complaints about the current approach to the smart grid, including cyber security. The report said, “While utilities typically assure regulators and policymakers that their new Smart Grid systems will meet all required standards, more work is needed to examine the resources, skills, and investments necessary to actually implement those standards, monitor systems, and spot potentially dangerous intrusions and attempts to infiltrate the utility’s data systems through the new meters.”
New Spencer Research Challenges Climate Models
By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., August 1, 2011 — A recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing raises a profound challenge to the conventional wisdom about global warming predictions based on global circulation computer models. The paper by Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shows that Earth’s atmosphere is better at releasing energy to space when the climate warms than the computer models assume.
Spencer’s analysis is based on data from NASA’s Terra satellite. Spencer, long a prominent global warming skeptic, was in charge of the NASA satellite temperature monitoring for many years and continues that oversight as a researcher at the university’s Earth System Science Center.
According to Spencer, the models show climate warming that is faster than the atmospheric data demonstrate. The issue is “feedback,” a key element of dispute between advocates of the computer models and their warming forecasts and the skeptics such as Spencer and MIT’s Richard Lindzen. Do the physical mechanisms at work in the climate reinforce warming or mitigate it? “The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” says Spencer. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Spencer’s work shows that the atmosphere releases more energy than the models incorporate and release it faster. The models are based on the climate absorbing solar energy until the warming peaks. The satellite data shows the climate shedding energy well before the warming event reaches a peak. “At the peak,” Spencer says, “satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained.”
It’s all well-understood physics, argues Spencer: The first law of thermodynamics, aka the conservation of energy. “We show it actually holds for global-average temperature changes: A radiative accumulation of energy leads to a temperature maximum…later. Just like when you put a pot of water on the stove, it takes time to warm. But while it only takes 10 minutes for a few inches of water to warm, the time lag of many months we find in the real climate system is the time it takes for several tens of meters of the upper ocean to warm. We showed unequivocal satellite evidence of these episodes of radiant energy accumulation before temperature peaks…and then energy loss afterward. Energy conservation cannot be denied by any reasonably sane physicist.”
The thrust of Spencer’s findings is to complicate the mix of forces that drive the climate, which the computer models simplify, or over-simplify in Spencer’s view. “The main finding from this research,” says Spencer, “is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”
The important result of Spencer’s latest work is that it shows that the climate models, on which all of the doomsday predictions and policy prescriptions are based, are incapable of verification. In his blog, Spencer writes, “Did we ‘prove’ that the IPCC climate models are wrong in their predictions of substantial future warming? No, but the dirty little secret is that there is still no way to test those models for their warming predictions. And as long as the modelers insist on using short term climate variability to ‘validate’ the long term warming in their models, I will continue to use that same short term variability to show how the modelers might well be fooling themselves into believing in positive feedback. And without net positive feedback, manmade global warming becomes for all practical purposes a non-issue. (e.g., negative cloud feedback could more than cancel out any positive feedback in the climate system).”