“fairly
consistent with the IPCC reports”.
Imagine their painful predicament when global media ignored their claims of
confirmation of their prediction that extreme weather events will increase as
level of greenhouse gases increases in the atmosphere.
Instead, the media almost in unison attributed these recent extreme weather
events including the US, Russian and Japanese Heatwaves, Leh Cloudburst & Pakistan
Floods to a polar jet stream anomaly that resulted it to be frozen in a place
for more than a month due to blocks or anti-cyclone climatic phenomena. Perhaps
the BBC delivered the most painful of these blows to Anthropogenic Global
Warming (AGW) theory. Once their trusted mouthpiece, BBC was forced to admit
that the sun was a more powerful driver of climate than global warming:
“The sun is seriously affecting the earth’s climate; indeed, the effect
is so dramatic that it will create increasingly cold winters in Europe but that
none of this has got anything to do with general global warming. The combined
solar and oceanic processes resulting in latitudinal shifts in the jets and all
other air circulation systems provide a complete explanation for all observed
climate variability with any CO2 effect either neutralized in the process or
wholly immeasurable compared to natural variability.”
The AGW crowd could offer only a weak defense.
"If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with
climate change, the answer is yes”, said
Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as
a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
Science should be objective and should not start with preconceived ideas of
truth or what should be true. Gavin is an example of when beliefs that are
normally regarded as the province of science become subject to an ideology that
decides in advance the answers. Science is about determining how and why the universe
behaves as it is observed to behave. It is not about hunches.
Most AGW scientists however were more cautious like Omar Baddour, chief of
climate data management applications, WMO headquarters in Geneva.
“We’ll always have climate extremes. It looks like climate change is
exacerbating the intensity of the extremes. It is too early to point to a human
fingerprint behind individual weather events”, he
said.
Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring
and attribution at the UK Met Office, said it was impossible to attribute any one
of these particular weather events to global warming alone.
Why were most AGW scientists hesitant to confidently claim the AGW
link?
Perhaps Gerald Meehl from the National
Centre for Atmospheric Research, Colorado, US provided an insight. He told the
New Scientist magazine
“While climate
change has been cited as one possibility, there was no way to test the theory,
as the resolution in climate change models was too low to replicate weather
patterns such as blocking events.”
In other words, all those claims that
greenhouse gases has increased the frequency of extreme events is simply
just bunk as they have no method to monitor causes such as blocks.
Madhavan Rajeevan, a senior meteorologist at the Indian Space Research Organisation
(ISRO) was even more franker in an interview to the Times of India.
“There is a common thread to all these events, though none of the
dynamical models (an approach where scientists use computer programmes to
simulate the atmosphere and forecast the weather) seemed to have predicted
these patterns of weather. This heavy rainfall over the country is still not
explicable.”
In other words, IPCC models are simply
thrash! That was proved two years ago when Indian scientists fed in real
observed data for whole of 20th century and still found IPCC models way off the
mark in predicting the monsoons. Simply put, the IPCC did not factor in polar
jet streams and anti-cyclones (blocking) in their Global Circulation Models
(GSM).
As IPCC scientists reluctantly admit their computer climate models are
not detailed enough at present to reproduce blocking events, making it
impossible to say whether rising greenhouse gas concentrations makes extreme
events as recently seen more likely to happen. AGW also has no explanation to
what triggers these polar jet stream blockages. The recent spate of extreme
weather events accordingly fully illustrated the bankruptcy of AGW theory as
their so called “climate change models” are unable to reproduce the events that
are being linked to these climate changes.
In fact, the recent wave of
extreme weather left a lot more carcases than those of warmist Professor Iqbal
Khan. Leh’s drinking water problem has been often used as a symbol of
“catastrophic” climate change by the likes of Greenpeace and their cohorts like
Max Martin an enviro-journalist now writing a chapter in India Disaster Report
2010 on “Climate Change” induced disasters:
"There
is evidence of faster melting and receding of Himalayan glaciers in future,
possibly affecting the flow of great rivers - the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra
- of the Indian sub-continent. Already in the higher reaches, like in the
Ladakh region, there are signs of water stress. There is not enough water from
the glaciers during the sowing period in April and May, so villagers in Leh
harvest spring water, freeze it and use it for planting seeds (Martin 2009)."
Quite a convincing argument but all the media
coverage has provided us now more details of Leh’s agro-climatic factors and
socio-economic conditions. We now discover that rainfall of Leh is extremely
low - it receives an average of just 117 mm (4.6 in) of rainfall per year, or
10 mm (0.4 in) per month, that puts in within the category of an arid
region. In fact, it falls within the category of Gobi, Atacama and Tibet
plateau with snow-fed rivers sneak through rugged mountains and deep gorges. A
region exposed to very little to sun resulting in negligible evaporation and
almost no rainfall.
This is a temperature average based on more than 100 years of data, suggesting
that the so-called “climate change” has nothing to do with its present day
drinking problems. Leh has always had a drinking water problem but now
additionally compounded by population growth, expansion of tourism
infrastructure and shift to be more water intensive cropping pasterns. Tapping
glacier melt through artificial lakes in all probability is a traditional
adaptation practice, not something recent as made out to be by AGW activists.
They were simply taking advantage of the gullibility of huge sections of
uninformed public who would not bother to check facts!
The second myth the disasters punctured is the dubious claim that 80% of the
Indus water is received from glacier melt, making it extremely vulnerable to
global warming and as result, and therefore has the potential to create massive
drinking water and irrigational problems for hundreds of millions in South Asia
depending on it. This year’s monsoons have practically killed such a bogus
claim for good as it makes it beyond doubt where Indus gains its flows by
illustrating this in the most exaggerated form! This does not any way refute
the fact that the Indus River flows originate from the Himalayan glacier melt but
only that its dependence on the latter is highly exaggerated.
How Did the Omega Block
Cause all these Disasters?
The reputed scientific journal, New Scientist
provided the most authoritative of these scientific explanations, attributed to
kinks in the polar jet stream, which was quickly accepted by most of the global
media.
The jet stream is an upper-level river of air, between the altitudes of about
30,000 – 40,000 feet (10,000 – 12,000 meters) that whip round the upper
atmosphere. Its wave-like shape is caused by Rossby waves – powerful spinning
wind currents that push the jet stream alternately north and south like a giant
game of pinball.
In July, one arm of the stream went north, another south. The patch in the
middle is Russia's drought. A circulating pattern of air has been sitting over
Russia for far longer than normal; causing the extreme temperatures and
wildfires they have had there. However, what has happened over Pakistan was
even stranger. The southern arm of the Jet stream looped down so far it has
crossed over the Himalayas into northwestern Pakistan. In addition, the result
is that the fast moving jets stream winds high up have helped suck the warm,
wet, monsoon air even faster and higher into the atmosphere - and that has
caused rains like those that no one can remember. It in fact turbo charged the
monsoon.
Meteorologists who study the phenomenon say
that it is producing unusual holding patterns, which keep weather systems in
one place and produce freak conditions. Part of the jet stream’s meandering is
tied to regular shifts of air towards and away from the pole, called Rossby
waves. These powerful spinning wind currents are caused by the Earth’s shape
and rotation, pushing the jet stream from east to west at high altitudes. However,
the driving force of the recent extreme events had been traced to a stationary
weather system that has remained locked in place over western Russia since
mid-June. The atmospheric is termed to be “blocked” when atmospheric
circulation patterns remained fixed in place, instead of being
progressive.
The graph for 24 - 30th
July which shows a succession of meanders along the jet stream, with a
northward meander (ridge of high pressure) over the Atlantic, a southward
meander (trough of low pressure) over Europe.
