Margaret Wente wrote the following in her Globe and Mail column on good news for 2009:
If you've been puzzled about all this snow we're getting, here's an explanation. "Global warming has stopped for the last few years," declares Roger Pielke Sr., professor emeritus of Colorado State University's department of atmospheric science. Despite numerous forecasts that we were heading toward the hottest year on record since the Medieval Warm Period, the hottest year on record remains 1998.
Along the way, many other widely publicized predictions have bitten the dust. Bestselling author Tim Flannery, for example, has been warning for years that Australia's major cities would soon run out of water and succumb to drought. Instead, the reservoirs have filled up nicely again after an exceptionally rainy spring. Australia's magnificent coral reefs, once thought to have been devastated by the impact of global warming, have bounced back remarkably. In the Arctic, where people have been warning of a catastrophic melt, the ice cover this fall increased by 10 per cent from last year. The incidence of hurricanes, meantime, has not increased at all, and the link with global warming remains unproven.
Will the world start warming up again? Beats me. But even if it does, Nature and human beings may be more adaptable than we think.
Virtually all of that is breathtakingly ignorant.
We got more snow last winter because global warming stopped?!?! Not to put too fine a point on it, but WTFF!!
From the UK's Met Office (Dec. 16) :
In a preliminary report, released today on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the global mean temperature for 2008 is 14.3 °C, making it the tenth warmest year on a record that dates back to 1850.
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia maintain the global climate record for the WMO. They say this figure is slightly down on earlier years this century partly because of the La Niña that developed in the Pacific Ocean during 2007.
La Niña events typically coincide with cooler global temperatures, and 2008 is slightly cooler than the norm under current climate conditions. Professor Phil Jones at the CRU said: "The most important component of year-to-year variability in global average temperatures is the phase and amplitude of equatorial sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific that lead to La Niña and El Niño events".
The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990–1999.
Look at the accompanying chart in the news release. The coldest years are all from the 19th century. 2008 -- which in Toronto, many people described as a "typical" winter in the 1970s, although anomalous today -- would have been a scorcher in the time of Charles Dickens. To get to that level, we needed a strong La Nina event.
Wente doesn't mention that 1998 was an especially intense El Nino year, in which warm Pacific ocean currents bubble up and help heat the atmosphere. The next hottest year was in 2005, which wasn't an El Nino year. But again, if you look at the decadal increments, the 2000s have been a warmer decade than the 1990s. That's the important part. Just because a new record isn't set every year doesn't mean the Earth's climate isn't warming.
As for 2009? The Met Office again (Dec. 30):
2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Niña.
According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4 °C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.
During La Niña, cold waters rise to the surface to cool the ocean and land surface temperatures. The 2009 forecast includes an updated decadal forecast using a Met Office climate model. This indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.
Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said: "Phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña have a significant influence on global surface temperature. Warmer conditions in 2009 are expected because the strong cooling influence of the recent powerful La Niña has given way to a weaker La Niña. Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Niño develops."
These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends as Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, explains: "The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 °C, was 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000."
As to spring rains in Australia, here's a Dec. 16 article from The Age:
The report shows 2008 global temperatures were a third of a degree above the long-term average and Australian temperatures sat at about 0.3 of a degree above the long-term average — making 2008 Australia's 15th warmest year.
"It's warmer than most previous La Nina years, which (usually means) a cooling of the Pacific Ocean," senior climatologist Andrew Watkins, from the National Climate Centre, said.
Victoria recorded its ninth driest year and there are indications this will continue, with forecasts pointing to an exceptionally dry autumn and a very dry start to spring in southern Australia.
Australia's drought-hit farmlands may see vital summer rains from a La Nina system that could develop next year, bringing relief after a year of sweltering temperatures above the global average, scientists said on Wednesday. ...
La Nina brings cooler temperatures and rain to the western Pacific as a result of cooler ocean water. An El Nino, on the other hand, is brought about when the heating of the western Pacific leads to drier weather and is the main factor behind the worst drought in a decade in Australia.
Watkins said the late 2007 La Nina was warmer than most La Nina years and warmer, drier conditions fuelled mid-latitude droughts across the globe, in Australia, California, Argentina and Africa.
Australian rainfall in 2008 was below average, particularly during the main cropping and pasture season from April to October.
"These conditions exacerbated severe water shortages in (Australia's) agriculturally important Murray-Darling Basin, resulting in widespread crop failures in the area," said the WMO report.
For context on Flannery (he's a favourite target of Wente), here's an Independent article from April 20, 2007:
Australia is in the midst of a crippling drought, the country's worst on record. Many towns and cities have been forced to enact drastic water restrictions as reservoirs have run dry. Rivers have been reduced to a trickle. The drought has severely damaged the agricultural sector. Farmers are raising emaciated cattle and sheep. Cotton-lint production has plummeted. Wine grape and rice output has collapsed. Agricultural production has fallen by almost one-quarter in a year. And it is estimated that the drought has knocked three-quarters to 1 per cent off the country's growth as a whole.
And now the government is reaching for desperate measures. Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, has announced there may be a ban on the use of the country's largest river system for irrigation unless there is significant rainfall over the next two months. The government is preparing to wrest regulatory control of the Murray and Darling rivers from the five states through which they run to ensure that water is reserved for urban drinking supplies and farmers' domestic use.
The Australian drought began to ease in late 2007, about the time that the latest La Nina event began. However, note this from a May 5, 2008 Reuters article:
"Several years of above average rainfall are required to remove the very long-term (water) deficits," said the bureau (of Meterology).
"The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."
On coral reefs, here's this from Reuters (Jan. 2):
Coral growth since 1990 in Australia's Great Barrier Reef has fallen to its lowest rate for 400 years, in a troubling sign for the world's oceans, researchers said on Thursday.
This could threaten a variety of marine ecosystems that rely on the reef and signal similar problems for other similar organisms worldwide, Glen De'ath and colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science said.
On arctic sea ice, from the BBC (Dec. 17):
Arctic ice cover in summer has seen rapid retreat in recent years.
The minimum extents reached in 2007 and 2008 were the smallest recorded in the satellite age.
On Oct. 28, the BBC quoted UK researcher Seymour Laxon as saying the following:
"The time when Arctic sea ice is going to disappear is open to a lot of debate," he said.
"About five years ago, the average projection for the sea ice disappearing was about 2080.
"But the ice minimums, and this evidence of melting, suggests that we should favour the models that suggest the sea ice will disappear by 2030-2040, but there is still a lot of uncertainty."
Thomas Knudson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote the following on a web page about hurricanes and global warming:
i) It is premature to conclude that human activity--and particularly greenhouse warming--has already had a discernible impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.
ii) It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense on average and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.
So we won't get more hurricanes from global-warming driven hurricanes, but they'll be fiercer? That is good news! :^)
It's presumptuous of me to write New Year's resolutions for anyone, but Wente might want to start with: "I will not write about climate change off the top of my head. I will do some cursory Googling first."
It seems like only Tuesday that Wente wrote: "I'll try to do better next year, although I'm not sure I'll succeed."
Oh well. There's always 2010.