Report: Global Warming Didn't Cause Big Us Drought

WASHINGTON (AP) — Last year's huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn't caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds.

Scientists say the lack of moisture usually pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico was the main reason for the drought in the nation's midsection.

Thursday's report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn't see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn't have been forecast.

"This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event."

Researchers focused on six states — Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa — but the drought spread much farther and eventually included nearly two-thirds of the Lower 48 states. For the six states, the drought was the worst four-month period for lack of rainfall since records started being kept in 1895, Hoerling said.

He said the jet stream that draws moisture north from the Gulf was stuck unusually north in Canada.

Other scientists have linked recent changes in the jet stream to shrinking Arctic sea ice, but Hoerling and study co-author Richard Seager of Columbia University said those global warming connections are not valid.

Hoerling used computer simulations to see if he could replicate the drought using man-made global warming conditions. He couldn't. So that means it was a random event, he said.

Using similar methods, Hoerling has been able to attribute increasing droughts in the Mediterranean Sea region to climate change and found that greenhouse gases could be linked to a small portion of the 2011 Texas heat wave.

Another scientist though, blasted the report.

Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded university-run research center, said the report didn't take into account the lack of snowfall in the Rockies the previous winter and how that affected overall moisture in the air. Nor did the study look at the how global warming exacerbated the high pressure system that kept the jet stream north and the rainfall away, he said.

"This was natural variability exacerbated by global warming," Trenberth said in an email. "That is true of all such events from the Russian heat wave of 2010, to the drought and heat waves in Australia."

Hoerling noted that in the past 20 years, the world is seeing more La Ninas, the occasional cooling of the central Pacific Ocean that is the flip side of El Nino. Hoerling said that factor, not part of global warming but part of a natural cycle, increases the chances of such droughts.

Some regions should see more droughts as the world warms because of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, he said. But the six state area isn't expected to get an increase of droughts from global warming — unlike parts of the Southwest — Hoerling said.

http://drought.gov/drought/content/drought-task-force-report-page

 

By the time today's babies graduate college, there's a very good chance they could celebrate with a cruise across the North Pole.
That's according to the latest study on Arctic summer sea ice, the frozen pack that lingers through the Northern Hemisphere summer. In past decades, there's been less summer ice, and it's growing thinner.
The research, published online Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says major sea ice loss could come within a decade or two, though some ice will stick around near Greenland and Canada's Arctic islands.
The results come from analyzing different approaches to predicting Arctic sea-ice melt. Researchers James Overland, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Muyin Wang, of the University of Washington, looked at three common modeling techniques to come up with the best forecast for when the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer.
"There is no one perfect way to predict summer sea ice loss in the Arctic," Wang said in a statement. "So we looked at three approaches that result in widely different dates, but all three suggest nearly sea ice-free summers in the Arctic before the middle of this century," she said.
Here are brief descriptions of the three modeling styles the study takes on:
Models relying on past sea ice trends, or changes in total amount of sea ice, predict a nearly ice-free Arctic by 2020.
A more stochastic approach, which incorporates random large sea-ice melting events, like the big ice losses in 2007 and 2012. This model suggests the Arctic could be ice-free by 2030.
The climate modelers, who rely on global climate information to gauge Arctic warming, estimate sea-ice loss will hit around 2060. This is likely too slow, Overland and Wang report in their study.
No matter the model, it's reasonable to conclude that a nearly ice-free Arctic summer will very likely occur before 2050, and possibly by 2025 or 2035 (in a decade or two), Overland and Wang said in the study.
Less Arctic summer ice will have global impacts, from opening shipping lanes and exploration for resources such as oil and gas to further warming the Arctic by exposing more ocean to the sun's warmth (open ocean absorbs the sun's rays, while ice reflects them). Arctic warming is also changing the jet stream's pattern, with steeper waves that bring extreme weather to lower latitudes, studies show.
"Rapid Arctic sea ice loss is probably the most visible indicator of global climate change; it leads to shifts in ecosystems and economic access, and potentially impacts weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere," Overland said in a statement.

http://news.yahoo.com/goodbye-arctic-summer-ice-181633531.html

 

Sounds like fun..... But I digress....In the event this cruise doesn't happen - How will you celebrate bad data, being misinformed and scaring widows and babies? Just curious......Just an FYI...I won't hold you accountable if GW doesn't pan out....

 

Of course it didn't. When the earth's temperatures were warmer we had more of a lush tropical planet. Unfortunately, it looks like we may be in for some 'global cooling' instead. This may be the last hot summer in the northern hemisphere for quite a while.

FC would be better off if he quit listening to his Wang. That will get you in trouble every time.

 

The 'climate alarmists' were never held accountable when global cooling in the 1970s never panned out.

It would be best this time if they put the 'climate scientists' promoting this nonsense on trial for the harm they have done to society via their deliberate fraud in order to obtain more 'research' money.

 

The fact is that CO2 levels have gone up 35% in the last 150 years due to man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. How could that NOT make temps go up? And they have. It's a very simple common sense thing......... that the fossil fuel industry doesn't want you to think about. The science is settled. 97% of the world's climatologists and all the world's science organizations are in agreement about it. The deniers just look foolish now.

 

The majority of scientists predicted global warming.

 

Says the guy who continues to post a pie chart that a total of 68 scientists wrote papers supporting supporting global warming in the 1970s, while ignoring the thousands of papers focussed on global cooling.

Unlike you, I was alive & paying attention in the 1970s, the media, schools, and scientists were pushing global cooling. This is evidenced by the many links posted in ET from the 1970s including the link from the CIA report in the 1970s stating that global cooling was the top climate issue outlined by scientists that may cause unrest in nations. Of course you choose to ignore all of this information while continually chirping the global warming alarmist mantra.

 

Which part of the fact that CO2 levels LAG temperature by 800 years do you fail to understand?

 

It doesn't.