Tuesday 27 January 2009

Several inches of global warming in the deserts … none in the Antarctic [updated]

Here’s one for Al Gore:   several inches of global warming have fallen in the deserts of the United Arab Emirates, just 25 kilometers from Ras al Khaimah City, one of the emirates in the UAE.

    The extreme cold spell brought the temperature on top of the Jebel Jais mountain cluster, situated at a height of 5,700 feet, to as low as -3 degree Celsius on Friday night, as the snow blanketed an area extending over 5kms.
    Major Saeed Rashid Al Yamahi, Manager of the Air Wing of RAK Police, who flew a helicopter to the top of the Jebel Jais mountain, said that the entire area was covered with 10 cm of snow…
    Aisha al Hebsy, a woman in her 50s who has lived in the mountains near Jebel Jais all her life, said snowfall in the area was so unheard of the local dialect does not even have a word for it. Hail is known as bared, which literally translates as cold. "Twenty years ago we had lots of hail," said Ms al Hebsy. "Last night was like this. At four in the morning we came out and the ground was white."

The first snowfall in living memory in the area was on December 28, 2004…. 

Naturally, the news has travelled widely.  This is another slap in the chops for global warming doomsayers, says The Australian.

UPDATE:  Yes, global warming doomsayers will say one shouldn’t rely on single events such as this to argue against their claims – despite the fact that single events are what constitute effective falsification, and that the doomsayers themselves are more than happy to use single events (even ones they’ve made up) to bolster their doomsaying.

Doomsayers have been happy, for example, to post pictures of calving ice shelves off Antarctica to bolster their flagging mantra that we’re all about to die – using the news of the warming Antarctic peninsula to frighten people into thinking the whole continent is beginning to melt, and all that ice is going to drown us.  “A recent study” by one Eric Steig had the whole litany of doomsayers cock-a-hoop.  “Antarctica getting warmer not cooler” said the ABC. “Scientists solve enigma of Antarctic 'cooling',” said The Guardian.  “Global warming hits Antarctica, study finds,” said CNN.

Puncturing their bubble however is the methodology of the new “study.”  As Christopher Booker expains in The Daily Telegraph, the Antarctic is not warming up. Steig has not been recording existing temperature measurements – instead he’s written a computer models to give him the temperature measurements he wants, and the world’s media have been only too happy to go along with the ruse.

Yet even the IPCC is askance at the perfidy.

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."

Yes.  Me too.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is why the greenies are now moaning about 'climate change' instead of 'global warming' - so they can still claim to be right, despite their predictions being incorrect.

Soon they'll even manage to convince people that they've claimed that this change was a natural thing all along, but that mankind is accelerating it and is still evil.

It'll probably be my mate's fault that it snowed in the UAE, because he's always driven trucks and V8s and owns a factory. I'll have a word with him.

Julian said...

PC,
Last week CNN had - as its lead for around a day - a new study showing that Antartica was warming, and the consequences of this. It usually takes a few days for such studies to be discredited but I see that the The Telegraph (Hat tip Marcus at SOLO) is already reporting on the questionable methodology employed. Of course too late to change the headlines now.

"But then a good many experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations.

The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit."

Julian

Eric Crampton said...

Right now, on iPredict, New Zealand's political stock market, you can put money on stocks that pay off based on global warming. It's free to open an account and you can deposit $1000. Then, you can trade shares that pay out based on whether 2009 is warmer than 2008 and on whether 2009 is the warmest year on record (ie warmer than 1998). Shares pay out at $1 if the event happens, so the prices of those shares are the traders' best guess as to the probability of those outcomes.

I am currently massively short on the "warmest year ever" stock. It's trading at $0.21, which means folks figure there's more than a 20% chance of 2009 being the warmest year ever. If you look at the underlying historical record, the probability of that happening is no more than 5%. The stock is trading at 16 cents over fundamental value.

If you think that it's less than 21% likely that 2009 will be the warmest year ever, go put your money where your mouth is. I have. Take money from the folks who believe all the doom and gloom. It's damned easy. And it's the right thing to do.

If you want to see why I think that the price shouldn't be higher than $0.05, go to the iPredict blog and check my two posts on the data series: here and here.

Eric Crampton said...

Correction: current price is now $0.23. I've shorted another 100 shares...

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Berend de Boer said...

PC: Yes, global warming doomsayers will say one shouldn’t rely on single events such as this to argue against their claims – despite the fact that single events are what constitute effective falsification

Nice to hear that fossilized trees that have grown through "hundreds of millions of years" of "the geological column" can now be admitted as evidence.