Cooler Heads on 'Warmest Year Ever'
Copyright 1999 Electricity Daily
January 13, 1999
Once again, the U.S. media this week was mindlessly trumpeting
NASA's statements that 1998 was the hottest year ever, sea levels
continue to rise,
and man-made carbon dioxide is the culprit. But it's time to hear
some cooler
heads.
"Attempting to understand the climate is not aided by
the
fixation on extreme events as indicators of
climate change," says
John Christy of the
University of Alabama-Huntsville, who monitors satellite
temperature data for NASA.
"This exercise is misleading because of our limited knowledge
of the rates of
occurrence and the ability to publicize even marginal extremes to
fantastic
proportions without looking
at history. Perspective is often lost."
Tim Barnett,
Scripps Institute of Oceanography climatologist, notes,
"Hindsight shows that much of last year's unusual warmth was
due to the recent
El Nino short-term climate shift. Subtract the El Nino effect and
you'd probably say
something different about that nominally 'warmest' year.
Once again, natural weather changes muddled what seemed to be a
clear
global warming signal."
Adds
University of Virginia environmental sciences professor
Patrick J. Michaels,
"Observed
global warming remains far below the amount predicted by computer
models that served as the
basis for the
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change. Whatever record is used, the largest portion of the
warming of the second
half of this century has mainly been confined to winter in the very
coldest
continental air masses of Siberia and northwestern North America,
as predicted
by basic greenhouse effect physics. The unpredictability of
seasonal and annual temperatures has declined significantly. There
has been no
change in precipitation variability. In the United States, drought
has
decreased while flooding has not increased."
Finally,
R. Steven Nerem with the French-American
TOPEX/Poseidon satellite project, says,
"Once again, hindsight shows that this dramatic
sea-level rise was a short-lived response to El Nino. So too was a
0.7 F rise
in sea-surface temperature between October 1996 and December 1997.
Both
sea-level and sea-surface temperatures have returned to normal
levels."
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