IPCC Saga Continues

The IPCC needs to have these past reports all formally withdrawn for revision.  It has become abundantly clear that data manipulation and suppression of dissent was central to the formulation of these reports.

A full peer review by an independent group of scholars has become necessary to accomplish two things:

1          Clear the air.

2          Determine the validity of the data used and whether specific papers may have been improperly reviewed.   After all others will want to reference these papers and their data in the future and it is now necessary to get second opinions because of the reputational damage now done.

The process is embarrassing, but I fail to see how much worse it can get.  Right now they are been treated to death induced by a thousand revelations.   We undoubtedly will soon be hearing from the night janitor.

Perhaps the vigorous new review procedures can be applied directly to the past three years and attached to the next report.

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods - such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 - could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm".

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts - but were ignored.

The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said:

"We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific."

The academic paper at the centre of the latest questions was written in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a London consultancy, who later became a contributing author to the section of the IPCC's 2007 report dealing with climate change impacts. He is widely respected as an expert on disaster impacts.

Muir-Wood wanted to find out if the 8% year-on-year increase in global losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger than could be explained by the impact of social changes like growth in population and infrastructure.

Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, might suggest that global warming was to blame. If proven this would be highly significant, both politically and scientifically, because it would confirm the many predictions that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of natural hazards.

In the research Muir-Wood looked at a wide range of hazards, including tropical cyclones, thunder and hail storms, and wildfires as well as floods and hurricanes.

He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970-2005, however, he found a 2% annual increase which "corresponded with a period of rising global temperatures,"

Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in insurance payouts.

Despite such caveats, the IPCC report used the study in its section on disasters and hazards, but cited only the 1970-2005 results.

The IPCC report said: "Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% a year." It added: "Once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

Muir-Wood's paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006. The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.

He said: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it. Muir-Wood's study actually confirmed that."

Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the Tyndall Centre, which advises the UK government on global warming, said there was no real evidence that natural disasters were already being made worse by climate change. He said: "A proper analysis shows that these claims are usually superficial"

Such warnings may prove uncomfortable for Miliband whose recent speeches have often linked climate change with disasters such as the floods that recently hit Bangladesh and Cumbria. Last month he said: "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact. Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."

Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished."

Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as long and technical as the IPCC's round-up of climate science. "Part of the problem could simply be that expectations are too high," said one researcher. "We have been seen as a scientific gold standard and that's hard to live up to."

Professor Christopher Field,director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written.

He said: "The 2007 study should be seen as "a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around." However he confirmed he would be introducing rigorous new review procedures for future reports to ensure errors were kept to a minimum.

North and South were out of Synch during Holocene

This is an interesting bit of data. Some very good work has established that the climate separation between hemispheres is much more decisive than we had any reason to either conjecture or support. That there is a present separation in climatic behavior is apparent but there was no reason to think of such a separation as other than temporary.

Now we can expect such separation as normal and this goes a long way to downgrading the likely importance of solar output variation as a climate driver, unless as a driver, it obviously changes wind systems that give us such a signature. Except been out of synch, that is also militated against.

This is actually the first positive evidence that works directly against the solar proposition should it stand up. The time frames are too variable and large to accept any attempt to fine tunes results.

My own instincts have always been to view the sun a flat out fuel maximized burning system that simply is unable to vary in any significant manner. That we have fussed over the little surface variation observed is useful in piecing together solar dynamics and developing a model for magnetic field variation.

The fact is that our own internal variation in managing our own climate is superior to any solar variation and this powerfully dominant system needs to be respected more because it stores heat for later release much better than obvious.
This is an important finding and needs to be additionally confirmed.

North and south were out of synch

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/39024

The Mediaeval Warming Period and Little Ice Age features of past climate in the Northern Hemisphere are backed up by extensive evidence but there is much less data on palaeoclimate available for the Southern Hemisphere. As a result it hasn't been clear whether these phenomena extended across the globe.

Now a team from the US, France, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland has come up with a technique for precisely measuring the date at which glaciers in New Zealand's Southern Alps began to retreat. Their study indicates that climate in the southern hemisphere was frequently out of step with climate further north over the last 7,000 years or so, during the Holocene period.

"The robust finding of our work is that the glaciers in New Zealand were out of phase with those in the northern hemisphere – Swiss Alps and Scandinavia," Joerg Schaefer of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told environmentalresearchweb. "This holds true in particular for the prominent northern climate feature labelled the Medieval Warm Period-Little Ice Age interval, the former being a warm period between about 900–1100 AD and the latter being the dominant cold in the north during the Holocene. This result argues for the importance of regional climate drivers, and we suggest changes in atmospheric circulation patterns to be important."

Schaefer and colleagues used a cosmogenic dating technique to analyse glacier fluctuations. By measuring the concentration of beryllium-10 in the moraines deposited by the glaciers they were able to date the glacier's retreat. Beryllium-10 forms when cosmic rays hit rock and concentrations gradually build up over time.

"New Zealand has one of the best resolved and preserved moraine records worldwide, and our team refined the cosmogenic dating method to a degree that we now can date even the young Holocene moraines," said Schaefer. "Holocene climate signals are small in amplitude, [and] very hard to detect in any climate archive. Glaciers are extremely sensitive to such small changes, and even the small climate swings of the Holocene forced the glaciers to fluctuate signficantly, which is documented in the moraine record – sediment ridges the glacier piles up while the glacier is steady in one position, i.e. in equilibrium with the prevailing climate."

The researchers found that New Zealand's Mueller, Hooker and Tasman valley glaciers have fluctuated frequently over the last 7000 years, with glacial advances becoming slightly smaller over time. Glaciers around Mount Cook reached their largest extent around 6,500 years ago when the Swiss Alps and Scandinavia were relatively warm. Northern glaciers, on the other hand, hit their peak roughly 6000 years later, during the Little Ice Age of 1300–1860 AD. New Zealand glaciers showed additional peaks during the northern hemisphere's Mediaeval Warming Period, just before the Little Ice Age.

"Our results also manifest how frequently the southern glaciers fluctuated during the rather stable Holocene," said Schaefer. "This illustration of the outstanding sensitivity of glaciers to small climate changes is a worrying finding giving the ongoing climate warming."

The researchers reckon atmospheric circulation changes in the southwest Pacific were a factor in forcing the glacier fluctuations.

Now the team would like to use its dating technique to create a global map of glacier fluctuations that would "provide information about climate changes on the continents we do not have yet, and would, in turn, provide a rigorous calibration data set for any climate models".

"This is what we have in mind for the near future in an effort that certainly includes the wider community due to its very ambitious scope," said Schaefer. "But I am very optimistic that we can get this done."
The researchers reported their work in Science.

About the author
Liz Kalaugher is editor of environmentalresearchweb.

China Mountain Notes

These two stories are of some interest. The reality of a warmer climate over the past forty years has shown up clearly in the retreat of glaciers world wide. But this is a lagging indicator.

The year old temperature reversal will now begin to be felt here and elsewhere and we could expect to see snow accumulation to begin in earnest. No one wants to see a massive reduction in these particular glaciers or the Columbia for that matter.

The second story argues an association with a dam and the major quake that hit china a few months ago. The timing was far too coincidental and it must be assumed that linkage between cause and effect is probably real.

Engineers need to be far more circumspect regarding dams and related fault systems and defensive measure need to be identified.

The good news is that it may be possible to stress test a dam by fully loading it and then largely draining it while making sure that everyone is safe. It was an expensive lesson but it may make it possible to build dams in dangerous locales.

It is reasonable to have confidence once the dam has passed through a full load and release cycle, particularly if a quake results that then surely locks down the fault.

Shrinking glaciers worry Chinese

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Shrinking_glaciers_worry_Chinese_999.html

by Staff WritersXining, China (UPI) Feb 4, 2009

The steady retreat of glaciers on China's Qinghai-Tibet plateau during the past 40 years is troubling, scientists in the Asian nation said Wednesday.

Xin Yuanhong, senior engineer in charge of a three-year field study, said the glaciers at the headwaters of the Yangtze, China's longest river, now cover 406 square miles, down from 482 square miles in 1971, Xinhua reported. The scientists said the melting, enough to fill Beijing's largest reservoir, was occurring at a "worrisome speed," the Chinese state-run news agency.

"The reduction means more than 989 million cubic meters (1.3 billion cubic yards) of water melted away," said Xin.

Xin said the accelerated melting -- a rate close to that of the Quelccaya Glacier in Peru

, the world's largest tropical ice mass -- is attributable to global warming and will have long-term affects.
"Melting glacier water will replenish rivers in the short run, but as the resource diminishes, drought will dominate the river reaches in the long term," he said.

The information gathered during the study will be used by the China Geological Survey Institute under the Ministry of Land and Resources to draft water-preservation policies.

Dam may have triggered huge China quake: scientists

by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) Feb 5, 2009

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Dam_may_have_triggered_huge_China_quake_scientists_999.html

A man-made dam may have triggered China's devastating earthquake last year, some government officials and scientists are claiming, pitting them against others who insist it was a natural disaster.

Pressure on a fault line caused by water amassed in Zipingpu dam's reservoir in the southwestern province of Sichuan may have caused the disaster that killed and left missing 87,000 people, some Chinese researchers say.

Fan Xiao, 54, a chief engineer at the government-run Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau for the past 14 years, is one of the theory's proponents.

"The Zipingpu reservoir was built right on the earthquake fault area, so it was very easy for Zipingpu to have had an impact on the fault," Fan told AFP Thursday.

The phenomenon, well known within the science community, goes by the name of "reservoir induced seismicity" and reservoirs in several parts of the world have caused smaller scale tremors.

But if true in the case of the Sichuan earthquake, this would be the first time that a reservoir caused a large scale, 8.0-magnitude tremor.

Zipingpu, a 156-metre-high dam finished in 2006, and its reservoir, which can store up to 1.1 billion cubic metres (38.5 billion cubic feet) of water, is located just five kilometres (3.1 miles) from the quake's epicentre.

Fan said the location was an important factor, as was the fact that the huge tremor happened at a key moment for the reservoir when its water level was falling at a rapid pace.

"The most dangerous period (for reservoir-induced quakes) is after the water level in a reservoir has reached its highest point, and it changes and starts going down," he said.

That sudden change can greatly destabilise a fault, according to Fan.

"And Zipingpu's water level started to change and go down rapidly just before the earthquake happened."

Lei Xinglin, a geophysicist at the government's China Earthquake Administration, also published a report in December saying the process of storing water in Zipingpu had an impact on faultlines in the area.

However other experts in China have rejected the theory, insisting the earthquake was an entirely natural phenomenon.

Wu Faquan, a researcher at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, another government-run body, said the quake was triggered by natural underground forces.

"After several studies and research, the majority of Chinese scientists have concluded that the earthquake was mainly triggered by the earth movements," he told AFP.

Pan Jiazheng, a well-known hydraulic engineer involved in the Three Gorges Dam project, also rejected the theory in an article published by Science Times, a Chinese magazine, in December.

"There has never before been a case of a reservoir triggering an 8.0-magnitude earthquake in the world," Pan said in the article.

So far, there have been at least four earthquakes of magnitude six or above in the world that have been widely recognised as having been triggered by a reservoir, including one in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

But Fan argued that these were in areas where previous seismic activity had been much lower, and that the area around the Zipingpu dam had already experienced seismic activity of 6.5 magnitude.

"So because previous seismic activity in the area was so strong, it (Zipingpu) could have induced an even stronger tremor," he said.

Fan said quake prevention should be a top priority when repairing some of the many dams that had been damaged by the Sichuan quake, and some should not even be re-built.

"But some are already being re-built, and the likelihood of stopping that is slim," he said.