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NASA Scientist: Heat Waves Really Are From Global Warming
mdsolar writes with a tidbit from the New York Times on global warming: "The percentage of the earth's land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper. The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,' Dr. Hansen said in an interview."
No because it's just not true.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/21/worlds-worst-heatwave-the-marble-bar-heatwave-1923-24/
So we're still cooler than the 1920s
Yet more scaremongering from the statistically-incompetent Jim Hansen. Regarding the heat wave in Russia, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a press release entitled "Natural Variability Main Culprit of Deadly Russian Heat Wave That Killed Thousands"; the press release is based on a paper that was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Another paper, published in the same journal, concluded that "the heat wave falls within the realm of natural variability ... [and] appears not to be the product of long-term climate changes". Also, some researchers in Germany analyzed the data and published a paper, entitled "Large scale flow and the long-lasting blocking high over Russia", which says that the heat wave "appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability".
In short, the claim about Russia is false. The claim about the European summer of 2003 is also debunked. (I am not familiar with Texas.) And why does Hansen not mention extreme cold recently in Alaska?—is that also due to global warming? Bad weather has always existed.
I'll see your stratospheric warming and raise you a missing tropospheric hot spot.
One of the only testable predictions of CAGW is relative warming of the tropical troposphere, yet apparently the earth has not been reading the literature and is failing to conform to the 'consensus' theory. Likewise absence of significant warming in last 15 years, and lack of acceleration in sea level rise, with IPCC predictions being consistently too high in both cases.
In other branches of science failure of a predictive test of a theory is called falsification, and leads to said theory being chucked out or at minimum extensively modified. But climatology is apparently different.
So how many more years of little to no cooling will it take before the IPCC backs down on the thermogeddonist claims it is making and revises their CO2 water feedback down to more realistic (ie lower) figures? Perhaps it will be at the same time that they admit they have no idea what causes the 1100 year period warm periods (Minoan, Roman, Medieval and ... now), or why the earth has varied by 3C during the last 10000 years (mostly warmer than now), or even what the mechanism is that brings on or ends ice ages.
Frankly while they are on the receiving end of Billions in grants so long as they continue to predict catastrophe, I won't be holding my breath for any balanced or realistic assessment of model weaknesses and predictive uncertainties from the IPCC. Though thankfully it does appear that the general population is getting wise to the hyperbole, and it is dropping off the radar as a significant political issue.