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Words on Weather & Climate — March 11, 2010
Your Carbon Footprint
by CRAIG JAMES
There are many places you can go online to calculate what is called your “carbon footprint,” or how much carbon dioxide your daily activities release into the atmosphere. A Google search of “CO2 calculator” brought up over 700,000 hits in .36 seconds. I’ve even seen carbon dioxide emissions included on new automobile stickers lately.
Meteorologist Craig James, new Squire columnist
The goal of these calculators, of course, is to encourage you to cut back on CO2 emissions to “save the planet.” The numbers are usually presented in tons of CO2, so they sound quite impressive. If you really feel guilty about driving that SUV, you can send money to several companies (such as NativeEnergy), and they will take that money and invest in wind and methane power to offset the amount of CO2 you have produced, in case you actually don’t want to give up your SUV.
However, wouldn’t it be helpful to know just how much impact our reduction of CO2 will actually have on the climate? How much human-induced climate change is being prevented by changing your light bulbs, from biking to work, or from slashing national carbon dioxide emissions in whatever ways possible? Isn’t this the number we really need to know? Unfortunately, this is the number the calculators don’t tell you.
Since climate model projections of the future climate are what are being used to attempt to scare us into action, climate models should very well be used to tell us how much of the scary future we are going to avoid by taking the suggested/legislated/regulated actions. I’ve never seen that number published anywhere.
But even though you and I don’t have access to the global climate models, there is a fairly simple way, with the use of a handheld calculator, we can determine how many tons of CO2 emissions are required to change the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by one part per million (ppm). Then we can figure out how many ppm of CO2 it takes to raise the global temperature one degree Celsius (1°C).
There is a little math involved here, so if you don’t want to follow along, you can jump ahead to the answer, but it won’t be nearly as much fun that way. I will keep this quite simple, but if you want to see more detail, including any assumptions that are involved, you can go to this web site: www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/30/what-you-cant-do-about-global-warming/.
Over the past 150 years or so, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased about 100 ppm, from approximately 280ppm to 380ppm, and global temperatures have risen about 0.8ºC over the same time. That, of course, is if you believe the way the temperature observations have been manipulated. If you’ve read my earlier articles, you already know why I think the 0.8°C warming is fantasy, but let’s play in that ballpark for now and go with this number.
Dividing the concentration change by the temperature change (100ppm/0.8ºC) produces the answer: it takes 125 ppm to raise the global temperature 1ºC.
I’ll spare you all the details, but using numbers from the Carbon Dioxide Information Center and the World Climate Report article I cited above, we can know that it takes about 14,138 million metric tons (mmt) of CO2 to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration by approximately 1 ppm. Since it takes 125 ppm to raise the global temperature by 1°C, we can multiply 14,138 mmt by 125 ppm and find that it takes approximately 1,767,250 mmt of CO2 to raise the global temperature by 1°C.
We are almost to the answer we need, and I think you’ll see this calculation is worth the effort. The goal of many climate alarmists, including the Waxman-Markey Bill in Congress, is to reduce the CO2 emissions in this country by 83% between 2005 and 2050. In 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States’ CO2 emissions were about 6,000 mmt, so 83% below that would be 1,020 mmt, or a reduction of 4,980 mmt CO2. If we divide 4,980 mmt of CO2 by 1,767,250 mmt of CO2 needed to raise the temperature by 1°C, we get 0.0028ºC!
This is the answer! If the entire United States—just barely behind China in the production of CO2 emissions—reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 83% below current levels, it would only amount to a reduction of global warming of less than three-thousandths of a degree Celsius.
I strongly support energy conservation and the development of new energy sources, but please don’t ask me to believe that reducing my carbon footprint has anything to do with reducing global warming.
Craig James has been retired since July 1, 2008, after 40 years of broadcasting television weather. He was chief meteorologist at WZZM-TV for 12 years and chief meteorologist at WOOD-TV for 24 years. He is a graduate of Penn State University, where he received a Centennial Fellowship Award. He was also honored as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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Words on Weather & Climate — March 4, 2010
Winter 2009-2010
by CRAIG JAMES
Meteorologist Craig James, new Squire columnist
The calendar says winter lasts until March 20 this year. However, meteorologists consider winter to be the three full months of December, January and February. Spring is March, April and May, etc. So winter is over, right? Any snow now is spring snow. Can’t you see the difference?
So how did the temperatures turn out this winter season in West Michigan? In Grand Rapids, the temperature for the three months was 1.6 degrees above average. In Muskegon, it was 1.1 degrees above average, but in Kalamazoo it was 1.6 degrees below average. So the northern part of our area was a little warmer and the southern part a little cooler. My forecast in the December 10 edition of this newspaper was for temperatures to be “near to a little below average.” I’d give myself a “pretty close but not exactly right on” for the forecast.
The snowfall season runs from the first flake to the last flake. The first flakes fell this year on November 26 and the last flakes… well, I would guess we will see flakes this year into April for a six-month snow season. We have seen snow October into May before, so don’t complain. As of the end of February, the total in Grand Rapids was 70.2 inches, in Muskegon 73.2 inches, and 69.7 inches in Kalamazoo.
This gives us a snowfall that is a little above average up to this point, but certainly less than the 104.5 inches we had received by this point last winter. Muskegon’s total is almost 20 inches below what they would normally see up to this point in the winter and way below the 147.8 inches they had at this point last year. My forecast for this season was for around 70 inches in Grand Rapids. So, to be right on, I hope it doesn’t snow much more. That is possible, but not likely. Last year, from this point on in the season, we had just 0.4 inches of additional snow.
The heaviest snows and the coldest temperatures relative to average this season have been to our south and southeast. In the month of February, the cities of Pittsburgh, New York and Philadelphia, among many others, had the snowiest month ever recorded. The 77 inches for the season so far in Pittsburgh is more than twice the average for an entire season.
Dallas has received almost 16 inches this season, just shy of the snowiest season on record. Washington, D.C. has received 56 inches so far with more on the way. The average there for an entire season is just 15 inches. In Philadelphia, 79 inches has fallen already, compared to a seasonal average of just 19 inches. That’s five feet more than normal, and it will snow more before the last flake falls!
This was a cold and snowy winter across parts of North America, as well as in an area from Great Britain into Asia. Although globally, temperatures were warm for both January and February. This was due to natural causes. There has been a fairly strong El Niño along with a cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and a negative phase of what is called the Artic Oscillation. These factors have combined to produce the storm track we have seen this winter and the resulting temperature and snowfall patterns. This was well-forecast in advance by several long-range forecasters.
But recently there have been several global-warming alarmists, including Al Gore, stating that this snowy winter is entirely to be expected from global warming. What a bunch of baloney! Had there been less snow than normal, that too would have been blamed on global warming. An article in Nature 2005 stated what would seem to be obvious: “In a warmer world, less winter precipitation falls as snow.”
Or how about this comment in Science magazine in 2008? “The persistent and dramatic decline in the snow pack of many mountains in the West is caused primarily by human-induced global warming.”
In 2005, Columbia University published a study titled “Will Climate Change Affect Snow Cover Over North America?” The study ran nine climate models used by the IPCC, using data back to the late 1800s, and all nine predicted that North American winter snow cover would decline significantly with the decline starting in 1990 and a significant decline between 2000 and 2010.
This chart from the Rutgers University snow lab shows the increase in North American snow extent since 1989. The snow lab also states that “North American snow extent broke its all-time record” in early February 2010. This trend is entirely INCONSISTENT with global-warming predictions. I guess you can blame anything on global warming and simply blame the opposite on it later, and get no challenge from the mainstream media.
Craig James has been retired since July 1, 2008, after 40 years of broadcasting television weather. He was chief meteorologist at WZZM-TV for 12 years and chief meteorologist at WOOD-TV for 24 years. He is a graduate of Penn State University, where he received a Centennial Fellowship Award. He was also honored as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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Words on Weather & Climate — February 25, 2010
Climate Data, Part II
by CRAIG JAMES
Meteorologist Craig James, new Squire columnist
If you didn’t see my article from last week, I showed this chart from NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies supposedly showing about .8 degree C (1.4 degree F) warming across the globe since 1880. I think this chart is pure fantasy. Here is more on why.
Last week I wrote about the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) and the problems with bad location of thermometers on or near tarmacs, next to buildings, on paved driveways and roads, in waste treatment plants, on rooftops, near air conditioner exhausts and more. In addition, there are problems with the adjustments made for the urban heat island effect, changing thermometer locations and thermometer calibration. This article looks at the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
Back in the 1970s, there were about 6,000 climate-reporting stations in the GHCN, but that number had dropped to around 1,500 in 1990 and to a little over 1,000 now. That is the entire number of land-based surface observations used in calculating the global temperature. Temperature readings are still taken at most of the original stations, but for some reason, they have been deleted from the database.
A computer expert by the name of E. Michael Smith has done an exhaustive analysis of which stations have disappeared from the record and how the remaining data has been manipulated. You can read the details at his website at chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/agw-basics-of-whats-wrong/.
To summarize, it appears that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were deleted from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations, which are of course warmer. Consequently, readings after 1990 have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the influence of the urban heat island effect.
For example, guess how many climate stations are now in the GHCN database for California? Just four! They are San Francisco, Santa Maria, Los Angeles, and San Diego. These are all coastal, urban and low-elevation stations. All of the high-elevation, rural and cold thermometers have been eliminated.
In Canada, the number of reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to just 44 in 1991 with only one—that’s right, just one—station north of 65 degrees latitude. Russia has all of three stations left in the database north of 65 degrees. Who needs real data from the Arctic when you can just estimate it?
In both Canada and the United States, almost all cold, high-elevation stations have been dropped. In Japan, there is only one reporting station above 1,000 feet. Bolivia has no reporting stations. The entire country has had no temperature data included in the GHCN database since 1990. There are many additional examples too numerous to list.
The systematic removal of many of the cold reporting stations from the recent record, while leaving in those stations from older records, has the result of making the present look warmer than it is and making the past look colder. If you want to show warming, that’s certainly a way to do it, although it is in reality nothing less than fraudulent.
Finally, as E. Michael Smith has written, “Once the data are collected, they are subject to strange and wondrous changes and manipulations. The exact methods are more or less secret. The changes are conducted by people who often have their entire self-worth and career vested in ‘global warming.’ The results often seem disjointed from observed reality. Where there are details on the adjustment available, they can often be shown to be bogus.”
Compare the two charts shown here that depict the adjustment made to the raw temperature data at Santa Rosa, Calif. You can clearly see how the lowering of temperatures in the first part of the temperature record has resulted in what appears to be a warming trend, when the raw data showed an actual cooling trend.
There are literally hundreds of similar adjustments in both the U.S. and global temperature databases. The data has been so massaged, modified, fudged, factored, tweaked and transmogrified as to no longer represent anything that might be logically referred to as the “instrumental” record. And this is the data used to initialize the computer models. It certainly seems to be a case of “garbage in, garbage out.”
Craig James has been retired since July 1, 2008, after 40 years of broadcasting television weather. He was chief meteorologist at WZZM-TV for 12 years and chief meteorologist at WOOD-TV for 24 years. He is a graduate of Penn State University, where he received a Centennial Fellowship Award. He was also honored as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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Words on Weather & Climate, by Craig James
Meteorologist Craig James, new Squire columnist
Climate Data Part 1
It seems as if every time someone digs up anything new about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), something ugly crawls out. For example, the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency has recently discovered the IPCC incorrectly reported that 55% of that country was below sea level and would be flooded by increasing sea levels. The number should only be 20%.
There have been many other revelations recently about the IPCC, the committee established to inform the world about climate change, but let’s move on to the two really important issues in climate change. Has this past decade been the warmest decade on record and have the global computer models been forecasting way too much warming?
Let’s take a look at how the climate data is obtained and then used to construct this chart from NASA below, which shows global temperatures warming about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. I’ll start first with what is called the United States Historical Climate Network or USHCN. There are currently 1,221 reporting stations in this network with records going back into the late 1800s.
A former television meteorologist by the name of Anthony Watts took on the enormous task of having all USHCN climate reporting stations surveyed to determine if they met the National Weather Service criteria for proper siting. Over 80% of the stations have now been studied and almost 90% of those stations failed to meet that criteria. The survey shows that nine out of every ten stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited on or near tarmacs, next to buildings, on paved driveways and roads, in waste treatment plants, on rooftops, near air conditioner exhausts and more. You can read about the survey and see photos of some of the ridiculous locations of thermometers in this pdf:http://watsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf. One of my favorite examples is from The University of Arizona showing where the thermometer has recently been placed over pavement in a parking lot. It used to be over grass. Would you think this move might produce higher daytime temperatures? The thermometer shows warming but certainly not from Carbon Dioxide.
This official USHCN weather station is located in the parking lot of the Atmospheric Science Department, University of Arizona, Tucson. Photo by WARREN MEYER
Poor current location of thermometers is just one of many problems. Since records began, most thermometers have been moved several times. In Grand Rapids, the official temperature readings have moved from North Park to several locations downtown, then out to the old airport at Madison and 36th street and finally to the current location at the Gerald R. Ford Airport.
How do you compare the temperatures taken at those various locations to get a true sense of how the climate has changed over time? The reading at any one time at each of those locations will likely be different. If you have a temperature readout on your car, you know that driving from one location to another, especially on a cold, calm, winter night, will give you many different readings.
Even in cases where the thermometer hasn’t moved, what was once a rural area in the late 1800s may have now become urban. This will now produce warmer temperature readings at that thermometer, especially at night, but it is not the result of CO2. This warming from urban crawl is known as the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) and is noticeable even in small towns to anyone with a car thermometer. Believe it or not, some of the climate databases make no adjustment for UHI. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have found the lack of adequate urban heat island and local land use change adjustment could account for up to half of all apparent warming since 1900.
There are many other problems with temperature readings, including what time of day the maximum and minimum temperature readings were taken and what type of thermometer was used. Each thermometer has its own bias. In the 1980s, a change in thermometers at many locations resulted in over half a degree of warming that wasn’t real.
Another big issue is regular calibration of the thermometer. From what I have been told, a National Weather Service employee does not have to request a thermometer be recalibrated unless it is believed the temperature reading is off by three degrees or more, which is more than double what the supposed change has been since 1880. How can we know to a tenth of a degree how much the earth has warmed when the thermometers can be off by as much as three degrees at times?
This is just the beginning; the US data is the best in the world. Next week I’ll show you how the global data is gathered and then manipulated to produce warming when little or none existed in the raw data. This is important because it is the data used to initialize climate models.
Craig James has been retired since July 1, 2008, after 40 years of broadcasting television weather. He was chief meteorologist at WZZM-TV for 12 years and chief meteorologist at WOOD-TV for 24 years. He is a graduate of Penn State University, where he received a Centennial Fellowship Award. He was also honored as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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Words on Weather & Climate—February 11, 2010
More IPCC goofs
by Craig James
Meteorologist Craig James, new Squire columnist
First, a quick update on the Climategate article I wrote a couple of weeks ago. The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England had many emails and documents either leaked or hacked that appeared to suggest ways of hiding data and avoiding freedom of information requests. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office just recently released a statement that said the University did break the law but no prosecution would occur because the requests were made beyond the six month statute of limitations.
However, the University has said it will now release the raw climate data requested, but oops… much of it has been destroyed. What? Isn’t that like saying we know we broke the law but you’ll just have to trust us that our conclusions are valid even though you can’t check them?
Last week I wrote about some of the charges recently made about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding conflict of interests with its chairman and the ignoring of peer reviewed data skeptical of human induced warming. I hadn’t planned on writing further about this but so many additional items have come to light that I just had to do a follow-up article. This story is beginning to sound like a soap opera.
The IPCC is a political organization charged with compiling peer-reviewed scientific research so that world governments can make policy regarding global warming. Not only has it come to light that much peer-reviewed information has been selectively ignored but many of the IPCC’s conclusions were drawn not from peer reviewed scientific research at all but from opinion papers from activist organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Here are a few examples:
1. A WWF report is cited twice as the only supporting proof of IPCC statements about coastal developments in Latin America.
2. When discussing mudflows and avalanches linked to melting glaciers, the IPCC relies on two sources, an unpublished paper and a WWF document.
3. When the IPCC advises world leaders that “climate change is very likely to produce significant impacts on selected marine fish and shellfish” it doesn’t call attention to the fact that the sole authority on which this statement rests is a WWF workshop project report.
4. The IPCC claim that “up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” was from a WWF article written by an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner and a journalist. The article itself was actually referring to logging, not climate change.
There are many other instances in the IPCC’s latest report of WWF and Greenpeace papers being used as authoritative sources. But the real eye opener is that articles found in Leisure, Climbing and Event Management magazines were used as scientific sources.
The IPCC’s claim that since 1900, “observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming”, came from two anecdotal sources. The first was interviews with mountain climbers in Climbing magazine and the second was from a dissertation written by a geography student at the University of Berne in Switzerland, where he interviewed climbers in the Alps. It turns out that in the actual dissertation itself, he never blamed global warming for the changes he observed.
And finally, in a strange departure from the staid subject of global warming, the beleaguered chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, has just released what has been described as a smutty romance novel, Return to Almora, laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. I guess it is no wonder he didn’t have time to make sure the IPCC statements were based on real science. It also turns out Dr. Pachauri is driven one mile each day to his office in a limo instead of taking public transportation as he tells the rest of the world to do.
Is this the kind of work that wins you a Nobel Prize? Is this the kind of work we should use to make political decisions that affect billions of people?
While the press in both the United Kingdom and India are having a field day with these issues, very little has been said in the mainstream media here in this country. But I did see stories about how Bin Laden blamed the United States for global warming. SIGH.
Craig James has been retired since July 1, 2008, after 40 years of broadcasting television weather. He was chief meteorologist at WZZM-TV for 12 years and chief meteorologist at WOOD-TV for 24 years. He is a graduate of Penn State University, where he received a Centennial Felowship Award. He was also honored as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
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