The Royal Society does glacier melt

About a fifth of the world's population relies on this glacier fed water every year for their drinking water, for sanitation, for irrigation for crops and for hydroelectric power. That's countries like India, China, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan.

Prof Neil Glasser of the University of Aberystwyth.

Professor Glasser was speaking in a video promoting the Royal Society's Summer Exhibition.

Unfortunately he seems unaware of the meteorological phenomenon known as "the monsoon". This confusion among glaciologists as to where precisely people in India get their water from has been apparent for some time now. This four-year old article refers to "creeping hyperbole" on the subject and even features Peter Gleick referring to "misinformation". Another scientist featured in that article was quoted as follows:

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The desperation of the polar bear scientist

According to New Scientist, some scientists recently discovered a polar bear eating a dolphin. This is not really a surprise since by all accounts polar bears will eat pretty much anything they can lay their paws on. Still, for the polar bear specialist it is a good opportunity to try to push a global warming story, so at the end of the article we get this:

As the climate warms, [polar bear specialist Ian] Stirling believes the sight of polar bears tucking into weird meals could become more common. Polar bears are "willing to take and use anything possible when available", he says.

Which just goes to show how low polar bear scientists will go in their desperation to keep the funds flowing.

Guardian's gargantuan garbage

The Guardian is going full-on bonkers over climate change this morning. Much like most other mornings I suppose.

Today's dose of hysteria is about what climate change is going to do to our weekends, and author Karl Mathiesen insists that beer, chocolate and coffee are all going the way of the dinosaurs and that the weather is going to be rubbish to boot.

OK, pick a claim and fact check it. Let's take the beer:

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Carbon Brief on the Sahel

The Carbon Brief is doing one of those "news management" pieces that inevitably follow anything that could reasonably be construed as representing good news on the climate change front. As readers are aware, a recent paper pointed to increases in rainfall in the Sahel, seeking to link these to global warming.

This of course was rather off-message and such heterodoxy has to be dealt with. Step forward Roz Pidcock and Robert McSweeney whose factcheck (a monicker that is presumably facetious) put forwards a corrective from the paper's lead author:

...claims that climate change is "helping Africa" are misleading and that a temporary respite from the Sahel drought is no reason to slow action on tackling climate change.

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Texas models

There has been a bit of flooding in Texas and, with weary inevitability, the activist-inclined press are wondering about connections to climate change. The Conversation US has invited Texas state climatologist John Nielson-Gammon to explain and to be fair he makes a reasonable fist of it, but there is still the usual tendency to discuss climate model outputs in their current state of disarray as if they were meaningful. Take this for example:

Studies have shown the odds of very intense rainfall in this part of the country have gone up substantially over last century. The cause and effect with climate change and surface temperature is fairly direct. There’s definitely a connection there.

No there isn't. Climate models have little ability to predict rainfall, and none at all at local levels. Even the IPCC describes their abilities in this area as "modest". If there is "definitely" a connection, if the thermodynamics are so simple, why do climate models do so badly?

Whither DeSmog?

One of the very first briefing papers issued by GWPF was on the greening of the Sahel. The Foundation's then deputy director Phillip Mueller put forward the idea that rather than making droughts on the fringes of the Sahara more severe, climate change was, if anything, actually making things better. This observation was suitably couched in caveats that noted, quite correctly, that we really couldn't say one way or the other what would happen in the future.

I don't remember the paper garnering a lot of attention at the time, but there was a typically wild-eyed response from those mini-Ehrlichs at DeSmog, which included this shot from the hip:

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Spot the climate spiv

The Guardian discusses Bjorn Lomborg's work today in a podcast which can be found here. The panel chosen to take part consisted of Chris Hope, Mark Maslin and Adam Vaughan. And if that doesn't put you off, a couple of minutes listening to it will do the trick, or at least it did me.

Just before nodding off, I did take in Mark Maslin's claim that renewables only appear uncompetitive because fossil fuels are subsidised so heavily. (Why the Guardian thought to raise this topic with Maslin, a geographer, is beyond me). Given that the vast majority of subsidies of fossil fuels are applied outside the European Union, this is of course entirely irrelevant to policy decisions in the UK, and it is grossly misleading of Maslin to suggest otherwise.

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Uberhubering

I commend to BH readers Chris Hope's Twitter output this morning. Chris is at a climate conference in Stockholm at the moment, where delegates are being royally entertained by somebody called Matt Huber, from Purdue University. Huber shows that if you assume crazy things on climate sensitivity and crazy things on emissions you can come up with some truly crazy predictions. His talk is apparently generating "intense interest". I have made some excerpts from Chris's tweets below.

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The extraordinary benefits of global warming

Whenever you mention the benefits of global warming, upholders of the climate consensus tend to go all vague and mumbly, with lots of circumlocutions around the idea that maybe the benefits are just not so clear as the harms that they say will befall us.

One of the great bones of contention in the impacts area has been the balance between deaths due to heatwaves and reduced deaths to to cold, but a paper in the Lancet looks as if it is going to put this particular debate to bed. This is partly because of the size of the sample - some 74 million deaths were analysed - but also because of the vastly greater number of deaths from cold - 20-fold more than deaths from heat.

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With apologies to Joel Pett

I found myself thinking about a well-known climate change cartoon by Joel Pett, and wondered if the wording didn't need to be changed slightly (original here). The words on the left come from the Climategate emails.

Diary dates, hunger games edition

Word reaches me of an event in Aberdeen next week:

How To Feed The World
19 May 2015, 18:00 – 19:30 New King’s 6, Old Aberdeen

A panel of experts will discuss the challenge of feeding the ever-growing population.

The world will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have consumed in all of human history; an even more daunting challenge considering this increased production has to come from a finite amount of agricultural land amid a changing climate. As a result, business as usual will not do it and novel strategies are required.

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Heatwaves affect wheat yields without causing problems

Further to the last post, the news on wheat yields is similarly interesting. Today Tack et al report that the wheat yields are affected by both extreme spring heat and freezing events in the autumn. Their regression analyses reveal that the benefits from warmer temperatures - namely fewer freezing events - will be outweighed by the losses from increasingly prevalent spring heatwaves. It's all going to be worse than we thought.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is expecting a bumper wheat harvest.

The world is awash in wheat and is likely to remain that way, the UN FAO said in its latest semi-annual Food Outlook report. The past two years have both seen record wheat crops, leaving exceptionally large inventories—and lower prices.

It will be a disaster, but not yet.

Sea level rising faster without causing problems

Two papers on sea level have caught the eye this week. Chris Watson and colleagues from the University of Tasmania claim to have detected an error in the satellite measurements for the 1990s. Having corrected the alleged error, more recent decades are warming relatively faster and so a certain amount of vindication of the climate models' projections of acceleration is claimed.

Meanwhile, Kench and colleagues working at the University of Auckland have found no evidence that coral atolls are sinking beneath the waves. Having monitored 29 islands in Funafuti Atoll, they find if anything a slight increase in land area.

Climate tragedy

Another polar climate change expedition has come to grief. Previous adventures have ended in farce. Unfortunately this time the story is a tragedy.

The Coldfacts organisation, funded by the Dutch arm of WWF, has sent two men to the high Canadian Arctic, to look at sea ice:

Polar explorers Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo (The Netherlands) will head for the Canadian High Arctic / Nunavut to gather valuable datasets for scientific research on sea ice in the heart of the so-called "Last Ice Area".  This is the area where summer sea ice cover is expected to be most resilient to warming and to remain for decades to come. Anticipating on this resilience, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has identified this region as an area for which special stewardship should be sought through consultation of and cooperation with stakeholders. A solid science base is needed to do this.

However an emergency message has been received and all contact has been lost. The two are presumed drowned.

Slow news day

It's a slow news day so far today, so I'll go with a Guardian-talking-drivel-on-climate story, which is a bit like a Pope-is-Roman-Catholic story, but can occasionally provide some light relief. Today's headline from the fount of foolishness is 

Extreme weather already on increase due to climate change, study finds.

Unfortunately for the Guardian, the study in question, by Fischer and Knutti, is actually nothing to do with observations of extreme weather at all. Instead it is about their attribution to humankind. You have to wonder whether the headline writers even read the paper.

And if you look at the study, it turns out to be just an extension of the use-shonky-GCMs-to-blame-humankind approach adopted by others in the past.  I'm hugely amused by its suggestion that GCMs, which have precisely zero ability to predict precipitation, can be used to show that "18% of moderate daily precipitation extremes over land are attributable to the observed temperature increase since preindustrial times". Particularly since in the IPCC's view it's hard to find any evidence of changes in extreme weather anyway.

It's like...magic.