Myles' fludd

Lots of people pointing to the Richard Black posting on floods. This includes papers by such familiar names as Myles Allen. No time to comment myself, but here's a thread for those that want to discuss it.

The Royal Society and sea level

WUWT has a guest post looking at sea level rises...and possibly falls:

Based on the most current data it appears that 2010 is going to show the largest drop in global sea level ever recorded in the modern era.  Since many followers of global warming believe that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, a significant drop in the global sea level highlights serious flaws in the IPCC projections.  The oceans are truly the best indicator of climate.

Hat tip then to John Shade (of Climate Lessons fame) who notes the views on sea level rise put forward in the Royal Society's recent paper on climate change:

Because of the thermal expansion of the ocean, it is very likely that for many centuries the rate of global sea-level rise will be at least as large as the rate of 20cm per century that has been observed over the past century. Paragraph 49 discusses the additional, but more uncertain, contribution to sea-level rise from the melting of land ice.'

Oops. As John Shade notes, it woud be instructive to have an annual review of the Royal Society's paper in the light of new data.

More on Brisbane floods

Casting around for someone to blame for the Brisbane floods continues and there is an excellent article in the Australian considering the issue of whether the Wivenhoe damn should have been emptied earlier (H/T Aynsley Kellow, in the comments). There is a fairly damning quote from a local hydrologist:

When they finally did release [water from the dam], it was because they had received so much inflow this week that they were afraid the whole system would collapse. There is no doubt in my professional opinion that most of the flooding in Brisbane should have been avoided. It is extraordinary to me that people are not asking more questions about this. Brisbane should have been protected by Wivenhoe Dam. Instead, the dam is a large part of the reason the city has flooded.

There is also, however, this word of caution from an engineer who was involved in the dam's construction:

"These questions are all valid, but put it this way - you would have to have very large balls to [significantly reduce the dam's volumes in the months after the weather warnings] after 10 years of drought, because if you had got it wrong you would be accused of wasting the water" 

Global warming and Oz floods

There is a great deal of interest in this article, by Brendan O'Neill, which examines the possibility that the flooding in Australia was made worse by an earlier decision by the Queensland government to keep water levels behind the Wivenhoe dam high, since they were expecting global warming driven drought to be a problem for the foreseeable future.

The Queensland government’s belief that water conservation should be a key priority in this speedily warming world of ours appears to have led to the situation where local dams were allowed to get dangerously full. So in recent weeks, the Wivenhoe dam was running at 150 per cent to 180 per cent capacity, which means that the authorities had to start releasing water from the dam at the same time that the rain-caused flash floods were hitting Brisbane’s river system – effectively contributing to the deluge. It is surely worth asking, at least, whether Queensland officialdom’s embrace of the ideology of climate change, its fervent belief in future manmade drought and thus the need to store as much water as possible, made it unprepared for the current flooding of the Brisbane area.

Brisbane flood history

Thanks to readers who have pointed out Brisbane's flood history:

According to the BBC the flood gauge peaked at 4.46m, which makes it big, but smaller than some floods in the past, and much smaller than the megaflood in (I think) 1894.

Australian Climate sanity

The Australian Climate Madness site has a level-headed post on the meaning of the floods.

It's difficult for people who don't live in 
Queensland to understand the volumes of water we're talking about
 here. This is not some drizzling Victorian rain or misty English 
weather. This is a proper, tropical summer monsoon rainfall a bit
 further south than it normally is. The written history of Queensland is
 only about 200 years long, but it is peppered with tales of huge
 floods that astound new observers. People see the 1974 markers on
 buildings around Brisbane and think it can't possibly have 
happened. The puny infrastructure put in the way of these periodic 
deluges is nothing compared with the water volumes. It will happen 
again, at least once per lifetime of the average person. There's 
nothing that can be done. After all, it's just weather.

Australian flood news

Some excellent coverage of the climate change angle to the Queensland floods from Andrew Bolt, including some shameful attempts to exploit the situation by arch-warmist David Karoly. There is a strongly worded rebuttal from another academic, Prof Stewart Franks.

Is it enough for you that your pronouncements sound correct, irrespective of science?  Have you learnt nothing?

You are arguably the best example of the corruption of the IPCC process, and the bullshit that academia has sunk to.

Anthony Watts meanwhile points us to evidence that the flood risk was ignored to enable building development to continue.

Briggs on doommongers

Matt Briggs has been reading that Fox piece on doommongers and is charmed by Messrs Erlich, Viner et al.

In a way, Erlich’s, Viner’s, and the other gentlemen’s bald assertions of faultlessness in the face of adverse actuality is charming. You have to love a guy who is never right but sticks to his guns. He does so because his core beliefs—the theories and hypotheses that drive his predictions—are just too pretty to give up. He cherishes his theories, he pets them and speaks softly to them, he lavishes gifts on them and upon others who can appreciate the same beauty he sees—and he savages those who would call them ugly. 

Slingo on climate models

There is an interesting interview with Julia Slingo at Nature's website at the moment. No mention of climate change, but the twin spectres of Pakistan floods and Russian warmth doing service in its place as a means to drum up support for the Met Office's hoped-for new supercomputer. Scaremongering has served the weather/climate community for so long, I guess it's hard to break the habit.

What's the biggest obstacle to creating better, hazard-relevant weather forecasts?

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. You just think: why is this so hard?

I'm sure I read somewhere recently that there is no guarantee that climate models at high resolution will be any better than what we have now. Can anyone recall having seen something like that?

Ross Clark on winter resilience

Ross Clark has an interesting article in the Express about planning for winter in the UK. While I'm unconvinced by his idea of using wholesale gas prices as a proxy for global temperature, some of his other points are much better. Take this for example:

So why is government policy so obsessed with the prospect of hotter summers and so complacent about that of cold winters? A fortune has been spent establishing a Committee on Climate Change which last September came up with its emergency plan for adapting to higher temperatures – by fixing shutters to British homes and planting trees in the streets so we can walk in the shade.

Yet planning for cold winters has been woefully deficient. An official report into transport failures last winter concluded that, beyond building a bigger stockpile of grit, we didn’t really need to do much to cope with cold winters because they would become much rarer in future. It has taken just five months to expose the folly of basing transport policy on  predictions for climate change.

Why four degrees?

There was some interesting engagement between commenters on the Kevin Anderson thread and the good professor himself. Hat tips to all concerned.

My own contribution to the comments was limited - having been snowbound since the weekend, there was a certain amount of merrymaking in the village last night by way of cheering ourselves up. The one comment I did make was to note that a temperature rise of four degrees by 2060 is extremely high in the light of the temperatures observed since the millennium. Prof Anderson's response was to refer commenters to the Phil Trans A special edition that started the thread off.

If we look at the introductory article, by New et al., there is indeed some explanation of why four degrees is considered a number that should be discussed.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord recognized the scientific view ‘that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius’ despite growing views that this might be too high. At the same time, the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the past decade and the delays in a comprehensive global emissions reduction agreement have made achieving this target extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3◦C or 4◦C within this century. Yet, there are few studies that assess the potential impacts and consequences of a warming of 4◦C or greater in a systematic manner. Papers in this themed issue provide an initial picture of the challenges facing a world that warms by 4◦C or more...

In other words, we think that CO2 emissions are going to be higher than expected therefore we need to look at higher temperature rises.

But hold on, my point was that 4 degrees by 2060 (perhaps 5 or 6 degrees per century) is high in the light of recent temperature trends. As readers of Lucia's blog know, even a trend of 2 degrees per century is on the cusp of falsification, so 5 or 6 is surely falsified at a very level of confidence.

If the trend is already falsified what is the point of looking at it, other than as part of a PR campaign?

Graun podcast dull

The Guardian's science podcast this week looks at the book Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, which looks as though it's Mark Lynas's Six Degrees all over again - the subtitle is The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, so I think you probably know the story already. Judging from the number of reviews on Amazon (four), so does everybody else.

The podcast is rather dull in terms of its scientific content, although there's plenty to enjoy, but for all the wrong reasons. Alok Jha, the presenter and Tim Radford, who runs the Guardian Science book club, nod sagely at every single one of Dyer's predictions of doom (and he packs a great many of them in). Not a question is asked, not a hypothesis probed. With such an array of extreme predictions made, you would have thought that it would have been enlightening to challenge one or two of them - or perhaps enlightenment is not the objective. This is what groupthink looks like. 

Do have a listen, and feel free to fact-check some of Dyer's more outlandish claims.

Cowrin', timorous beasties

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie.

Big, bad Pielke Jnr is in town next month and has invited the Grantham Institute to debate some current global warming issues with him.

Unfortunately, the academic staff are apparently unavailable.

All of them.

For the full ten days of Roger's visit.

You have to laugh...

WSJ on uncertainty

The Wall Street Journal looks at the IAC report and considers one of its key findings, namely that the IPCC has downplayed uncertainties in the science of global warming. In the process they consider McShane and Wyner's paper on the reliability (or lack of it) of proxy-based temperature reconstructions and also a new paper on the sensitivity of the Amazon rainforest to drought. It looks as though this sensitivity is not really understood because nobody knows how the Amazon will respond to rising CO2 levels.

As the Journal puts it:

None of this proves or disproves anything, except that our understanding of how our climate works is still evolving. Is it too much to ask the climate establishment to acknowledge as much?

Refreeze?

Just had a look at the JAXA sea ice extent graph, which I monitor from time to time. From the look of this year's chart - the red one - one could almost imagine that the refreeze has started, although of course it could be a blip. If this is the bottom, it's very early, the Arctic sea ice minimum usually being reached in the middle of September.

The global sea ice figure per Cryosphere today has in the meantime taken a downtick.