Stop the Climate Madness! If the climate had been steady and unchanging, there won’t be any evolution or bio diversity

(ScienceDaily) The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years," said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State.

"These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years."

According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn State, the current leading hypothesis suggests that evolutionary changes among humans during the period the team investigated were related to a long, steady environmental change or even one big change in climate.

"There is a view this time in Africa was the 'Great Drying,' when the environment slowly dried out over 3 million years," she said. "But our data show that it was not a grand progression towards dry; the environment was highly variable."

According to Magill, many anthropologists believe that variability of experience can trigger cognitive development.

"Early humans went from having trees available to having only grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have had to change in response," he said. "Changes in food availability, food type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal with those changes.

The result can be increased brain size and cognition, changes in locomotion and even social changes -- how you interact with others in a group. Our data are consistent with these hypotheses. We show that the environment changed dramatically over a short time, and this variability coincides with an important period in our human evolution when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use."

The researchers -- including Gail Ashley, professor of earth and planetary sciences, Rutgers University -- examined lake sediments from Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. They removed the organic matter that had either washed or was blown into the lake from the surrounding vegetation, microbes and other organisms 2 million years ago from the sediments. In particular, they looked at biomarkers -- fossil molecules from ancient organisms -- from the waxy coating on plant leaves.

"We looked at leaf waxes because they're tough, they survive well in the sediment," said Freeman.

The team used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine the relative abundances of different leaf waxes and the abundance of carbon isotopes for different leaf waxes. The data enabled them to reconstruct the types of vegetation present in the Olduvai Gorge area at very specific time intervals.

The results showed that the environment transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland.

To find out what caused this rapid transitioning, the researchers used statistical and mathematical models to correlate the changes they saw in the environment with other things that may have been happening at the time, including changes in the Earth's movement and changes in sea-surface temperatures.

"The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time," said Freeman. "These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa. Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water. The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement."

The team also found a correlation between changes in the environment and sea-surface temperature in the tropics.

"We find complementary forcing mechanisms: one is the way Earth orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding Africa," Freeman said. The researchers recently published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with another paper in the same issue that builds on these findings. The second paper shows that rainfall was greater when there were trees around and less when there was a grassland.

"The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape like Africa," said Magill. "The plants are so intimately tied to the water that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity.

"Together, these two papers shine light on human evolution because we now have an adaptive perspective. We understand, at least to a first approximation, what kinds of conditions were prevalent in that area and we show that changes in food and water were linked to major evolutionary changes."

Next Big Chill breakout last week of Jan: Multiple Stratospheric Warmings Confirm Polar Vortex Collapse Probable

(Andrew in http://theweathercentre.blogspot.in) I believe there is now solid evidence that a polar vortex collapse is probable in at least a few stratospheric levels in the next few weeks (for those wanting my definition of a collapse, see the last paragraph or two).

Part I: The First Warming

The first warming is ongoing, and has been ongoing for several days now. This sudden stratospheric warming is located in the mid-stratosphere at the 50 millibar level, as shown in the below animation:

The most intense warming is centered over northern Canada and the Arctic Circle, as shown by the highest maroon colored anomalies in the animation. This warming suggests even more warm air is being forced into the stratosphere, and the polar vortex should sustain damage from this. For those unfamiliar with the polar vortex, it is the low pressure system (vortex) that sits in the North Pole (polar) and holds cold air up. When the vortex is weakened, cold air tends to flow south. This is also known as the negative Arctic Oscillation.

We also use something called the EP Flux to measure what direction the 'wave' of this sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) is moving. Longer arrows with warmer colors tend to signal a stronger wave of this warm air. We can see how the SSW has evolved from the lower stratosphere to the upper stratosphere by December 31, the bottom right image. It is typical for the EP Flux to spike like this when an SSW occurs.

Part II: The Second Warming

After this first warming, it appears that we will be seeing a second warming in the next 10 days. Let's look at the zonal wind forecast from the ECMWF for Day 7:

In areas of negative zonal anomalies, you can find winds that favor the destruction of the polar vortex, while warm color winds tend to favor the formation and sustainment of the polar vortex. This is what the sudden stratospheric warming is- a change in winds. SSW's are indeed accompanied by these bursts of deep negative zonal wind anomalies which damages the polar vortex and can lead to cold outbreaks if the SSW is strong enough (which this one should be).

The two images above express 'waves' of geopotential heights. Wave 1 is on the top, and Wave 2 is on the bottom. In areas of warmer colors in either image, higher heights are observed, meaning high pressure has a tendency to form. In a similar situation, darker colors tend to indicate lower heights and thus low pressure areas form. Both images are forecast for Day 10. Let's start with Wave 1. Wave 1 will be going nuts over the SSW as it introduces high pressure anomalies to the upper stratosphere in response to the SSW.

Again, going against the polar vortex (which is a low pressure system). By Day 10, because the First Warming is done, it will begin to die off. However, Wave 2 will begin to strengthen during that Day 10 timeframe, and this strengthening will occur through the upper and middle stratospheric levels, meaning that this second warming would theoretically have more of an impact across the whole stratosphere. In comparison, the Wave 1 had significant high pressure anomalies focused on the upper stratosphere.

This second warming should derail the polar vortex further to the point of a split, which we will discuss more on below.

Part III: The Split

By the time the second warming begins, the polar vortex has sustained enough damage that it must split into multiple pieces in order to sustain itself. This is shown in these ECMWF forecasts for different stratospheric levels:

100 millibar forecast for Day 10.

50 millibar forecast for Day 7.

 millibar forecast for Day 10.

The 100mb level is closest to the troposphere (where we live), the 50mb layer defines the middle of the stratosphere, and the 5 millibar level is as far up the stratosphere I can get without putting up an image that resembles chaos, not a forecast.

I want to start with the 50 millibar layer. Think back to high-school biology for a moment. Recall that when cells divide, they originate from one parent cell and split into two daughter cells in order to make the object stronger (whether it be a cell wall (plant) or a cell membrane (animal)). Well, the polar vortex works similar, but not entirely the same. When the polar vortex is damaged, it will split into two vortices, called daughter vortices, in order to still maintain some control over cold air in the Arctic. When this split happens, it is not to strengthen itself like biology taught us, it is to keep itself alive, rather than experience a collapse in the single parent cell, resulting in chaos across the board. This 50mb layer clearly shows the split in progress by Day 7.

Now let's dart over to the other layers. The 5 millibar layer has a lot of things going on at once. In this case, there are actually three daughter vortices. One is located in Canada, another in western Europe, and the third vortice in Asia. They are all shown as several ovals tightened close to each other with decreasing numbers as you go toward the center of these ovals. The lowest pressure is identified with an 'L', in this case found over Canada. Also happening is a warming event, shown as the warmer colors in this image and happening over Europe and the Northeast US into the Canadian Maritimes. This will further weaken the vortices. High pressure has also built in over the Arctic in the absence of a single parent vortice, with the high pressure defined as an 'H'. The 100 millibar level does not show as severe a split or as severe a warming episode, mostly because the warming has been confined to the middle and upper stratosphere. However, if the geopotential Wave 2 forecast works out, that could change.

A few potential vorticity forecasts also show the split of the polar vortex:

 

Potential Vorticity at (roughly) 106 millibars at Day 10.

Potential Vorticity at (roughly) 50 millibars at Day 10.

Part IV: The Cold

There is roughly a 1-3 week lag time between a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) and cold reaching the surface. Based on some research done, I feel that this timeframe should be more in the 2-4 week range this time around, which makes my expected arrival for the cold between January 22- January 27. This cold will persist for several days, especially if this second warming sticks around for a while. The weekly CFSv2 forecasts are showing such a sustained cold outbreak, as shown below in Week 3 (top) and Week 4 (bottom) temperature anomalies. [Anomalies are in Kelvin]

Look at all that blue- that's literally off the chart cold. The forecast is unable to produce any cooler anomalies, because the legend does not go any colder than that. The Week 4 forecast predicts temperature anomalies of 3.5 degrees Kelvin (roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit) below normal across much of the nation. Significant warming in Canada suggests a continued weakening of the polar vortex may occur, along with blocking that may provoke a negative NAO, but that remains to be seen.

Part V: The Third Warming?

The GFS model is then pinpointing a third stratospheric warming in the long range, shown below:

10mb temperature at Hour 300.

10mb temperature at Hour 384.

Hour 384 is notorious for never verifying, but this warming forecast has been appearing on several GFS model forecasts, meaning the model appears more certain that this will actually happen, rather than not happen. The warming looks to originate over central Canada, right in the heart of a daughter vortice at that same 10 millibar level. That would only bring further weakening to the polar vortex/vortices and continues to confirm my suspicions of a collapse.

My definition of a collapse is as follows:

"High pressure dominates the Arctic Circle, and any remaining polar vortices are weak and displaced to lower latitudes. A collapse is also believed to have happened if potential vorticity values are anomalously low."

The definition of others' accounts of a collapse is different, but this is just what constitutes my posting of a probable collapse.

Things are looking up for a big cold outbreak in late January, an outbreak that could be sustained in the second and third warmings materialize and stick around for a while.

Himalayan Glaciers recover spectacularly with 3 continuous years of snow

A few years ago, NGOs like Greenpeace; Centre for Science & Environment and Oxfam almost succeeded in creating mass hysteria around issue of the Himalayan Glacier melt due to global warming effects. They rechristened the Himalayas as the Earth’s Third Pole. They warned the consequence of its rapid melt would be that soon much of India would experience a huge water crisis, widespread agriculture failure, uncontrollable political unrest and mass migration - just to mention a few elements in their long list of fallout.

The truth: For the last decade, there had been no net melt. In the last 3 years, the glaciers are rebounding spectacularly and expanding. Here is yet another article pointing to this trend.

(Times of India): With high-altitude mountains in Himachal Pradesh experiencing up to 100 cm fresh snowfall in November month after 10 years, the abundance of snow on mountains has rejuvenated nearly one thousand glaciers and has ensured uninterrupted supply of water for drinking, irrigation and hydel projects.

Even after years of research on glaciers and climate of Himalayas, scientists have failed to learn the pattern of the weather here. While scanty snowfall and rising temperature in last decade had sparked the possibilities of fast shrinking of glaciers, good spells of snowfall in last three years have changed the trend with glaciers almost growing to their original size. Some scientists say that despite heavy snowfall in winters, the extreme heat in summers is causing the melting of the glaciers with abnormal speed and others say extreme cold in winters is neutralizing the minor effect of risen temperature in summer. Overall, speed of melting of glaciers has reduced over the past few years only due to good snowfall in winter months.

Bara Shigri, Dhaka, Beas Kund, Sonapani, Gora, Gangstang, Miyad, Gyephang, Bhadal, Chandra, Bhaga, The Lady of Keylong, Nahan, Dudhon, Parbati and Perad are some of the prominent glaciers in Himachal which give birth to hundreds of brooks and rivers. According to scientists, global warming has changed the pattern of snowfall on Himalayas. Though it could be harmful for the weather-cycle, good amount of snowfall help glaciers retain water.

"Global warming is a contentious issue but it's a reality,"

said J C Kuniyal, senior scientist with GB Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development, who is studying the behaviour of Himalayan environment for many years.

"It's good that our receding glaciers are receiving good amount of snow. Glaciers not only play an important role in balancing life of flora and fauna, but presence of snow on mountains also helps in balancing the temperature. Snowfall would give new life to underground water sources," he said.

The 11-km-long Bara Shigri is the largest glacier in Himachal, but is shrinking very fast. The Dhaka glacier in Chandrabhaga mountain ranges is also losing its length, width and height. This was proved beyond doubt when wreckage of an AN-12 aircraft which remained beneath the glacier since 1968 recently surfaced due to melting of snow. However, the thick layer of fresh snowfall has again built a safety wall on all the glaciers. The extreme cold temperature is another advantage as melting of snow has stopped almost completely.

According to Kuniyal, changing pattern of weather, which is causing extreme weather conditions and shifting of the seasons, is a matter of concern.

"Snowfall is good but heavy snowfall in lower and new areas and scanty snowfall on higher areas is sign of global warming. For now, regular spells of snowfall are good for vegetation and hydel projects as there would be enough moisture and water in summer months."

The Himalayas comprise about 15,000, glaciers which include more than 1,000 glaciers in Himachal and they store around 12,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water. Good snowfall in Himachal is beneficial for Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh and other neighbouring provinces, besides Pakistan, which get water from the state.

Sceptics weather the storm to put their case on climate

(John Spooner in TheAge) Well, so much for the 2012 apocalypse. If the ancient Mayans ever knew anything about the future, they made a serious miscalculation. The same fate has befallen the international climate change emergency brigade. About $1 billion and 18 "Kyoto" meetings later, the world has agreed to do nothing much more than meet again.

How did this frightening climate threat dissolve into scientific uncertainty and political confusion? What of the many billions of dollars of wasted public resources? Some might blame the "sceptics", the "merchants of doubt" or the "deniers". Others point to the global financial crisis.

We can say for certain that many hesitant individuals overcame the pressures of group-think, intimidation and tribal disapproval to have a closer look at the relationship between real science, politics and business.

I was once told by a friend that when it comes to scientific issues of major public concern, it is 

"not what you know but who you know".

I think he meant that my fledgling scepticism about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) was pointless, for as a cartoonist I was as unqualified to assess the science as he was.

The implication was that all who are untrained in "climate science" are required to accept the scientific and political authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its local colleagues such as the CSIRO: the scientific establishment.

I found my friend's advice baffling. Anyone familiar with the judicial process knows the gravest issues of liberty and fortune are often determined by a jury selected from the public. Expert witnesses can give evidence in support of either side at a trial. The judge must rule on questions of admissibility, but in the end it is the jury that decides which scientific evidence is to be believed.

In the climate debate, the only "judge" is the scientific method - a testable hypothesis followed by factual or experimental challenge. The "facts" here represent an anxious problem for the DAGW advocates. For example, everybody agrees that the warming trend paused 16 years ago, despite a corresponding 10 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2. This ought to be an embarrassment to the global warming alarmists. What exactly is the relationship between CO2 and temperature? Why did the warming trend stop as it did between 1945 and 1975, when CO2 emissions took off?

As Dr David Whitehouse, the former BBC online science editor, said in the New Statesman in 2007

"something else is happening to the climate and it is vital we find out what or we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly". 

Obviously we should pay close attention to the computer models that form the basis of climate scientists' projections. In fact these models apparently failed to anticipate the current pause in global warming, not to mention the abundance of post-drought rainfall in Australia. Scientific "consensus" based on these computer models is becoming rather shaky.

The reason why scientific consensus emerged in this debate is because political activists want to get things moving, and if they say that consensus is scary and urgent, then sceptics had better get out of the way.

The activist cause peaked early in 2007 when Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth became an international hit. This documentary was superficially compelling for the uninitiated, but in October 2007 the British High Court found the film contained nine errors of fact.

Professor Bob Carter of Queensland's James Cook University gave evidence in this case; few people in Australia are aware of this severe embarrassment for Mr Gore.

Later that year, the ABC broadcast Martin Durkin's provocative documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, against the outraged objections of many prominent alarmists. How interesting. The science was "settled", the debate was said to be over and no further discussion was required. Any media professional should have been aroused by such an excited censorship campaign, and it stimulated my first cartoon on the subject (above), which depicted the family TV set as medieval stocks with an imprisoned climate sceptic being pelted by the family with their TV dinner.

It seemed to me that things changed after that documentary was screened. Perhaps the shock of hearing the likes of Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, and Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, had joined the ranks of the sceptical was just too much for some people.

Things got nasty. Someone came up with the brilliant but insidious idea of using the term "denier" to describe a person who remained agnostic or sceptical about the exact human contribution to the 0.7 degree global warming of the past 100 years. This malicious rhetoric came to be adopted by climate activists, media reporters and politicians up to head-of-state level. Many distinguished scientists such as Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, and Bill Kininmonth, former head of our National Climate Centre, were casually defamed in this way. The same label was applied to world-renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and Australia's distinguished Professor Bob Carter.

Holocaust denial describes the heartless and despicable refusal by anti-Semites to acknowledge the historical truth of the Jewish genocide of World War II. If you use the offensive term "denier" you do so for reasons best known to yourself. You may be calculating or you may be indifferent, but as Wong, Rudd and Gillard would have known, the effect is pungent. No sensible, morally responsible person wants to be stigmatised in such a way.

Some prominent Australian intellectuals to this day continue to explicitly endorse the moral equivalence between Holocaust and global warming denial. This is all the more incredible because it comes from academics who understand the horror of the Holocaust. For good measure, sceptics have also been compared with 18th century slave trade advocates, tobacco lobbyists and even paedophile promoters.

But times have changed, and since 2007, the non-scientific players in this great intellectual drama have been confronted by creeping uncertainty about many of the major climate science issues. These have included the composition of the IPCC and the credibility of its processes; remember Glaciergate? 

The IPCC predicted the end of the Himalayan glaciers based on non-scientific literature; the unusual (or not) melting of sea ice and glaciers; the evidence for warm temperatures during the medieval period; the importance of sun spots; changes (or not) in patterns of extreme weather events; ocean "acidification"; ocean warming and rising sea levels; bio-mass absorption and the longevity of molecules of atmospheric CO2; the influence of short-period El Nino southern oscillation (ENSO) and other similar oscillations on a multi-decadal scale; the chaotic behaviour of clouds; and the impact of cosmic rays on climate. Even James Lovelock, the founder of the "Gaia", movement has turned sceptic.

By early 2010, it seemed that nearly every single element of the global warming debate was up for grabs, and scandals like Climategate and gross mistakes in their work had weakened the credibility of the IPCC. Even Professor Paul Jones of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a leading contributor to IPCC calculations, confirmed in a 2010 BBC interview that the warming rates of the periods 1860-80, 1910-40 and 1975-98 were statistically similar. He also said that 

"I don't believe that the vast majority of climate scientists believe that the climate change [debate] is over".

To the great credit of The Age and its pluralistic tradition, the occasional sceptical science article has been published along with regular cartoons on the issue.

However, I still feel that the voices of highly qualified sceptics are not heard enough. In an effort to redress this imbalance, an unusual book on the sceptics' view will be published in 2013.

The text, sprinkled with cartoons and illustrations, takes the Socratic form, giving answers to commonly asked questions about the science and economics of climate change. The content is provided by a collaboration of five highly qualified experts. They include a meteorologist, the former director of the Australian National Climate Centre; a geologist, a former member of the Australian Research Council and chairman of the Earth Sciences Panel; an independent energy consultant who manages his own small hydro power station; a professor of environmental engineering (hydrology) and one of Australia's leading tax consultants.

I trust the integrity and compassion of these "deniers", and admire their courage and awesome perseverance. We hope the book will help redress the imbalance in easily accessible knowledge for a "jury" of ordinary Australians.