The Most Important Weather Forecast Of All Time:
D-Day, June 6, 1944
In this newsletter:
1) LOL: EU’s CO2 Emissions On The Rise, Blaming Cold Winter
Energy Live News, 6 June 2017
2) 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Show That Modern Warming Isn’t Global, Isn’t Unprecedented And Isn’t Remarkable
No Tricks Zone, 29 May 2017
3) The Most Important Weather Forecast Of All Time: D-Day, June 6, 1944
Vencore, 6 June 2017
4) D-Day: The Sceptical Meteorologists Who Surprised The Nazis By Saying ‘Yes’ To June 6
The Times, 6 June 2014
5) David Whitehouse: Hiatus Studies Drive Climate Research
GWPF Observatory, 2 June 2017
6) The Guardian: Why We Can’t Trust Academic Journals To Tell The Scientific Truth
The Guardian, 6 June 2017
7) Mark Mills: The Real Reason Trump Left The Paris Agreement
Fortune, 5 June 2017
Energy Live News, 6 June 2017
2) 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Show That Modern Warming Isn’t Global, Isn’t Unprecedented And Isn’t Remarkable
No Tricks Zone, 29 May 2017
3) The Most Important Weather Forecast Of All Time: D-Day, June 6, 1944
Vencore, 6 June 2017
4) D-Day: The Sceptical Meteorologists Who Surprised The Nazis By Saying ‘Yes’ To June 6
The Times, 6 June 2014
5) David Whitehouse: Hiatus Studies Drive Climate Research
GWPF Observatory, 2 June 2017
6) The Guardian: Why We Can’t Trust Academic Journals To Tell The Scientific Truth
The Guardian, 6 June 2017
7) Mark Mills: The Real Reason Trump Left The Paris Agreement
Fortune, 5 June 2017
Full details:
1) LOL: EU’s CO2 Emissions On The Rise, Blaming Cold Winter
Energy Live News, 6 June 2017
The EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2015 for the first time since 2010.
According to new data published by the European Environment Agency (EEA), the 0.5% increase happened largely due to increasing demand for transport – better fuel efficiency in the sector was not enough to offset this.
The report suggests a slightly colder winter across Europe also contributed to increased emissions, due to higher demand for heating.
Road transport emissions, which account for about a fifth of total EU greenhouse gas emissions, increased for the second year in a row, by 1.6 %. Aviation emissions also increased by 3.3 %.
The increase in emissions was relatively slight, compared to the strongest annual economic growth (2.2 %) witnessed in the EU since 2007 and following a 4% decrease in emissions in 2014.
Spain, Italy and the Netherlands accounted for the largest increases in greenhouse gas emissions, with the UK showing the largest decrease (7.5%) of the European Member States.
Full post
2) 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Show That Modern Warming Isn’t Global, Isn’t Unprecedented And Isn’t Remarkable
No Tricks Zone, 29 May 2017
Kenneth Richard
“Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes” –Büntgen et al., 2017
Fig 7A —Büntgen et al., 2017
Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.
Just within the last 5 months, 58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years. Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time. And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
Succinctly, then, scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals have increasingly affirmed that there is nothing historically unprecedented or remarkable about today’s climate when viewed in the context of long-term natural variability.
Full post
3) The Most Important Weather Forecast Of All Time: D-Day, June 6, 1944
Vencore, 6 June 2017
Meteorologist Paul Dorian, Vencore, Inc.
Tuesday, June 6th, marks the 73rd anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France during World War II and the weather forecast for that historic event makes for quite an interesting story in what turned out to be a pivotal moment in world history.
SURFACE MAP 0700 GMT 06 JUNE 1944
Years of detailed planning went into the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, but success hinged on one element that no military commander could control — the weather. Defying his colleagues, Captain James Martin Stagg advised General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower to postpone the invasion of Normandy by one day from June 5th to June 6th because of uncertain weather conditions in a weather forecast that was arguably the most important of all-time.
Background
There were no computer forecast models, no satellites, radar was in its infancy and being used primarily for military purposes only, and yet General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower wanted a definitive weather forecast for the planned invasion of Normandy, France with no “ifs”, “maybes” or “possibles” attached to the wording. With definitive forecast information required and thousands of lives on the line, it is an underestimate to say that the task was daunting for chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Martin Stagg, of the British Royal Air Force. Stagg ultimately persuaded General Eisenhower to change the date of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II due to weather concerns from the 5th of June to the 6th of June in 1944. There were actually three different teams of weather forecasters involved with the Normandy invasion including the British Royal Navy, British Meteorological Office, and the US Strategic and Tactical Air Force, but Stagg was given the role as the chief meteorologist and the only meteorologist allowed direct contact with Eisenhower.
The opportunity for launching an invasion was limited to only a few days in each month to take advantage of the moon and tide. Darkness was needed when the airborne troops went in, but moonlight once they were on the ground. Spring low tide was necessary to ensure extreme low sea level so that the landing craft could spot and avoid the thousands of mined obstacles that had been deployed on the beaches. If this narrow time slot was missed, the invasion would have been delayed for two weeks. Eisenhower had tentatively selected June 5th as the date for the assault which was one of the few days in early June that met these criteria.
Saturday, June 3rd
By Saturday, June 3rd, the forecasts began to be highly unfavorable for a June 5th invasion. High pressure areas were over Greenland and the Azores, with low pressure centers moving east-northeast across the Atlantic. It seemed probable that the high winds and sea would rule out the 5th as D-day. Nevertheless, “Ike” pushed ahead for now with his plans for a June 5th invasion.[…]
Post D-Day
By D-Day plus 12 days, the flow of men and supplies over the beaches was running smoothly: 314,514 troops, 41,000 vehicles, and 116,000 tons of supplies had been landed on the American beaches, with almost identical figures for the British beaches. Had General Eisenhower postponed the invasion, the only option would have been to go two weeks later, and this would have encountered the “worst channel storm in 40 years” as Churchill later described it, which lasted four days between 19 and 22 June. In fact, Eisenhower sent a letter to Captain Stagg saying in reference to the major storm that occurred in the potential second time slot for the invasion, “I thank the Gods of war we went when we did.” For the rest of his life, in moments of stress, Group Captain Stagg would remember some words spoken to him by General Morgan, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, in the tension-filled days leading up to the postponement: “Good luck Stagg: may all your depressions be nice little ones, but remember, we’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post if you don’t read the omens right.”
Years later, during their ride to the Capitol for his inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked President Eisenhower why the Normandy invasion had been so successful. Ike’s answer: “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans!”
Full post
4) D-Day: The Sceptical Meteorologists Who Surprised The Nazis By Saying ‘Yes’ To June 6
The Times, 6 June 2014
Simon Pearson
The outcome of D-Day was decided not on the beaches of Normandy, but by weather systems in the mid-Atlantic and the ability of rival teams of meteorologists to interpret the forces of nature. The Americans were confident in long-range five-day forecasts. The British were sceptical, believing they could forecast only two days ahead at best. The teams clashed repeatedly.
The outcome of D-Day was decided not on the beaches of Normandy, but by weather systems in the mid-Atlantic and the ability of rival teams of meteorologists to interpret the forces of nature.
As unfavourable conditions developed during that early summer 70 years ago, three teams of meteorologists produced reports for the Allied commander, General Dwight D Eisenhower, who laid down the conditions necessary for invasion — and his preferred date: June 5. Across the Channel, a single team of Germans watched the weather.
One of the men who took part in this great drama was Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand naval officer, who, as a Rhodes Scholar, studied mathematics at New College, Oxford and trained as a meteorologist with the Royal Navy. Today, he lives in a care home in southern France, the country he helped to liberate and, even at the age of 98, retains vivid memories of events in June 1944.
Hogben had already distinguished himself as a naval officer before he was asked to work with Geoffrey Wolfe, a Cambridge-educated engineer, in the Admiralty team forecasting the D-Day weather.
As an instructor lieutenant, responsible for training, intelligence and meteorology on HMS Sheffield, he had witnessed several major naval actions: the sinking of the German battleship Bismark in May 1941; the Battle of the Barents Sea — when Sheffield engaged the German pocket battleships Admiral Hipper and Lutzow in the Arctic in December 1942; and Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa a year later.
Decorated for bravery and promoted instructor lieutenant-commander, he had also developed his skills as a weatherman. “OnSheffield, I was making forecasts every day from the data coming in and from the state of the sea,” he says.
Hogben and Wolfe were one of two British teams. The second, put forward by the Met Office, consisted of Charles Douglas, the chief forecaster who was known for his photographic memory of meteorological events, and Sverre Pettersen, a Norwegian. The third team was American, with Irving Krick and Benny Holzman, two well-known weathermen from the California Institute of Technology. Each day, the three teams reported their findings to Group Captain James Stagg, a Scot who had been superintendent of the Kew Gardens observatory in 1939. He briefed Eisenhower.
For operational reasons, the American commander needed a full moon, a low tide, little cloud cover and light winds so that troops in landing craft could get ashore quickly, the gliders and parachutists could operate efficiently, and the Allied fighters and bombers could find their targets.
The forecast was not good. Indeed, climatic data suggested the odds against the forecasters finding the right conditions was 13-1 in June 1944. The Americans were confident in long-range five-day forecasts. The British were sceptical, believing they could forecast only two days ahead at best. The teams clashed repeatedly.
According to William Bryant Logan, author of Air: The Restless Shaper, they succeeded, “not because of the brilliant work of any solitary forecaster, but because a group of forecasters imitated the weather. They jostled, yelled, scribbled, and cast malevolent looks at one another. They fought it out and voted. And in the end, they were just right enough.”
Full story
5) David Whitehouse: Hiatus Studies Drive Climate Research
GWPF Observatory, 2 June 2017
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
The reduction in global temperature after the recent El Nino continues though not as swiftly as some predicted. The next few months will be interesting to see if it returns to levels seen before the recent El Nino took place when global annual average temperatures changed little for at least 15 years.
Whilst some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not, and never has existed, many scientists accept it and are seeking explanations. Akira Oka and Masahiro Watanabe, both of Tokyo University, writing in Geophysical Research Letters see two phases in the 1998 – 2012 slowdown. In their model they see warming in the Pacific between 1998 – 2002 and then a hiatus due to the increased heat storage below 700 m in the subtropical Southern Ocean. “The study provides clear evidence that the deeper parts of the Southern Ocean play a critical role in the post-2002 warming slowdown,” they say.
One recent paper I find problematic is by Lu Dong and Michael McPhaden, both from NOAA. They talk of the, “pronounced long-term centennial time scale linear warming trend during the last hundred years due to GHG forcing.” I would not go so far, and neither would the IPCC, in believing that all the warming of the last century or so is down to greenhouse gasses alone. As for the linear trend, one can draw a straight through anything!
They say the 2001 – 2013 hiatus is due to the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, saying somewhat presumptively; “The prevailing view is that internally generated variations associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) dominate decadal variations in GMST, while external forcing from greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols dominate the long-term trend in GMST over the last hundred years.”
They add; “The most recent warming hiatus apparent in observations occurred largely through cooling from a negative IPO extreme that overwhelmed the warming from external forcing. An important implication of this work is that when the phase of the IPO turns positive, as it did in 2014, the combination of external forcing and internal variability should lead to accelerated global warming. This accelerated warming appears to be underway, with record high GMST in 2014, 2015, and 2016.”
I beg to differ that the accelerated warming appears to be underway given the recent strong El Nino makes such a detection impossible.
Another paper that falls into the same trap is Shineng Hu and Alexey Federov, both of Yale University, in Geophysical Research Letters called, “The extreme El Nino of 2015-16 and the end of the global warming hiatus.” They say the hiatus was caused by a succession of weak El Ninos.
They maintain that their results confirm that weak El Niño activity, rather than volcanic eruptions, was the cause of the hiatus, while the rapid temperature rise is due to atmospheric heat release during 2014–2016 El Niño conditions concurrent with the continuing global warming trend. This is the same mistake as the previous paper.
Quasi-stagnation
Shang-Ping Xie and Yu Kosaka in Current Climate Change Reports also ask what caused the hiatus between 1998 – 2013. They maintain that the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature acts as a pacemaker for the hiatus and claim that the temperature rise after a major El Nino proves it. I think this is a bit of a stretch but at least they recognise the importance of “hiatus” research which they say, “has led to a wide recognition of the importance of internal variability for global mean surface temperature trends over a decade and longer. The strengthened connection between the climate variability and change communities is an important legacy of hiatus research.”
In contrast to Hu and Federov, Monerrie et al in Environment Research Letters, say that since 1998 there has been a “quasi-stagnation” in global temperatures because of volcanic emissions. “Despite a continuous increase in well-mixed greenhouse gases, the global-mean surface temperature has shown a quasi-stabilization since 1998. This muted warming has been linked to the combined effects of internal climate variability and external forcing. The latter includes the impact of recent increase in the volcanic activity and of solar irradiance changes.
They conclude that the observed recent increase in the volcanic activity led to a reduced warming trend (2003-2012) of 0.08°C in ten years. The induced cooling is stronger during the last five-year period (2008–2012), with an annual global mean cooling of 0.04°C (+/−0.04°C). The cooling is similar in summer (0.05°C+/−0.04°C cooling) than in winter (0.03°C+/−0.04°C cooling), but stronger in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere.
As we have said before, observations are one thing models are another. Comparing climate models with observations Austin Hope (University of Maryland) et al say that climate models warm too quickly, by a factor of two. That will annoy some people as there has been some news stories about a new paper by Iselin Medhaug and colleagues in the May 4 issue of Nature that concludes that climate models are describing the observations exactly.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
6) The Guardian: Why We Can’t Trust Academic Journals To Tell The Scientific Truth
The Guardian, 6 June 2017
Julian Kirchherr
Scholars complain these days that trust in science is in decline. But there are good reasons for it. If we scientists take to the streets to claim we are armed with the truth, only further disillusionment will follow.
Hundreds of thousands of scientists took to streets around the world in April. “We need science because science tells the truth. We are those who can fight the fake news,” a friend who participated in one of the March for Science rallies told me. I really wish this were true. Sadly, much evidence suggests otherwise.
The idea that the same experiment will always produce the same result, no matter who performs it, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to truth.
However, more than 70% of the researchers (pdf), who took part in a recent study published in Nature have tried and failed to replicate another scientist’s experiment. Another study found that at least 50% of life science research cannot be replicated. The same holds for 51% of economics papers (pdf).
The findings of these studies resonate with the gut feeling of many in contemporary academia – that a lot of published research findings may be false.
Just like any other information source, academic journals may contain fake news.
Full post
7) Mark Mills: The Real Reason Trump Left The Paris Agreement
Fortune, 5 June 2017
The Paris climate agreement was never about climate science. Anchored in the premise that climate science is “settled,” the accord seeks to dramatically change humanity’s energy supply. Here, the matter really is settled: It’s not going to happen.
Paris advocates assert that, despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement, we face an inevitable transition to a multitude of new low-carbon energy technologies that will consign hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—to history’s dust heap. All we need to birth the new energy future are the right “incentives,” which Paris provides: The only way to meet aspirational carbon emissions reductions is to replace hydrocarbons.
This so-called multitude of options actually distills to just three things: biofuels, windmills, and solar panels. Some environmentalists include nuclear fission as well. There’s no new physics here: The first fission reaction was in 1939, the first photovoltaic cell was created in 1954, windmills date to the Middle Ages, and making alcohol (the dominant biofuel) predates recorded history.
But, say Paris supporters, all we need are moonshot government programs to see energy tech emulate the “Moore’s Law” progress that happened in computing (the doubling in computer power every two years). Yet to their inconvenience, the physics of energy won’t cooperate.
Fueling humanity is not like putting a few people on the moon. It’s like putting everybody on Earth on the moon—permanently. No amount of money obviates the costs of fighting gravity. But pundits in awe of Silicon Valley’s prowess analogize today’s green energy companies to the disruption of landline phone businesses after the advent of cell phones or the disruption of taxis by Uber.
Unfortunately, the physics of energy production scales in exactly the opposite direction of the physics of information production. If aircraft, for example, followed Moore’s Law, a loaded Boeing 777 could reach Japan from New York by burning a housefly’s weight in fuel. Engineers and mathematicians can trick bytes to go faster and slip into ever smaller spaces, but only in science fiction are similar tricks possible with physical objects or humans.
Better technology has brought solar and wind costs down dramatically in the past decade. And, fueled by over $100 billion in subsidies, while wind and solar have increased 10-fold over a decade, they still supply, respectively, just 0.3% and 2% of America’s energy. …
But there is a stubborn idea that more money—subsidies, tax incentives, grants, or enforced standards—will make solar and wind 10 times cheaper yet again. While all technologies get better over time, they also approach physics’ limits eventually. Aircraft turbine manufacturers brag about single-digit percentage gains in fuel efficiency precisely because those machines are near thermodynamic limits in converting heat to thrust.
Solar cells and wind turbines are now in the same boat. There are no game-changing advances left in the core technologies; both are now on the curve of diminishing returns. (Biofuels crossed that Rubicon centuries ago.) Nor are there big gains in economies of scale for the underlying components—concrete, steel, fiberglass, silicon, wires, and glass are all already in mass production.
If we want a different energy revolution, we’ll need new discoveries in the physical sciences. That can only emerge from basic research, not from more subsidies for yesterday’s technologies.
Meanwhile, the world’s nearly 8 billion people and $80 trillion economy depend on hydrocarbons to supply over 80% of global energy; oil fuels 98% of transportation.
Meaningful changes to this status quo won’t come from the Paris agreement with or without the U.S., unless there’s a revolution in physics. And the latter will require very different priorities. Perhaps it’s time to chase real science.
Full post
Energy Live News, 6 June 2017
The EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2015 for the first time since 2010.
According to new data published by the European Environment Agency (EEA), the 0.5% increase happened largely due to increasing demand for transport – better fuel efficiency in the sector was not enough to offset this.
The report suggests a slightly colder winter across Europe also contributed to increased emissions, due to higher demand for heating.
Road transport emissions, which account for about a fifth of total EU greenhouse gas emissions, increased for the second year in a row, by 1.6 %. Aviation emissions also increased by 3.3 %.
The increase in emissions was relatively slight, compared to the strongest annual economic growth (2.2 %) witnessed in the EU since 2007 and following a 4% decrease in emissions in 2014.
Spain, Italy and the Netherlands accounted for the largest increases in greenhouse gas emissions, with the UK showing the largest decrease (7.5%) of the European Member States.
Full post
2) 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Show That Modern Warming Isn’t Global, Isn’t Unprecedented And Isn’t Remarkable
No Tricks Zone, 29 May 2017
Kenneth Richard
“Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes” –Büntgen et al., 2017
Fig 7A —Büntgen et al., 2017
Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.
Just within the last 5 months, 58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years. Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time. And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
Succinctly, then, scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals have increasingly affirmed that there is nothing historically unprecedented or remarkable about today’s climate when viewed in the context of long-term natural variability.
Full post
3) The Most Important Weather Forecast Of All Time: D-Day, June 6, 1944
Vencore, 6 June 2017
Meteorologist Paul Dorian, Vencore, Inc.
Tuesday, June 6th, marks the 73rd anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France during World War II and the weather forecast for that historic event makes for quite an interesting story in what turned out to be a pivotal moment in world history.
SURFACE MAP 0700 GMT 06 JUNE 1944
Years of detailed planning went into the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, but success hinged on one element that no military commander could control — the weather. Defying his colleagues, Captain James Martin Stagg advised General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower to postpone the invasion of Normandy by one day from June 5th to June 6th because of uncertain weather conditions in a weather forecast that was arguably the most important of all-time.
Background
There were no computer forecast models, no satellites, radar was in its infancy and being used primarily for military purposes only, and yet General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower wanted a definitive weather forecast for the planned invasion of Normandy, France with no “ifs”, “maybes” or “possibles” attached to the wording. With definitive forecast information required and thousands of lives on the line, it is an underestimate to say that the task was daunting for chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Martin Stagg, of the British Royal Air Force. Stagg ultimately persuaded General Eisenhower to change the date of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II due to weather concerns from the 5th of June to the 6th of June in 1944. There were actually three different teams of weather forecasters involved with the Normandy invasion including the British Royal Navy, British Meteorological Office, and the US Strategic and Tactical Air Force, but Stagg was given the role as the chief meteorologist and the only meteorologist allowed direct contact with Eisenhower.
The opportunity for launching an invasion was limited to only a few days in each month to take advantage of the moon and tide. Darkness was needed when the airborne troops went in, but moonlight once they were on the ground. Spring low tide was necessary to ensure extreme low sea level so that the landing craft could spot and avoid the thousands of mined obstacles that had been deployed on the beaches. If this narrow time slot was missed, the invasion would have been delayed for two weeks. Eisenhower had tentatively selected June 5th as the date for the assault which was one of the few days in early June that met these criteria.
Saturday, June 3rd
By Saturday, June 3rd, the forecasts began to be highly unfavorable for a June 5th invasion. High pressure areas were over Greenland and the Azores, with low pressure centers moving east-northeast across the Atlantic. It seemed probable that the high winds and sea would rule out the 5th as D-day. Nevertheless, “Ike” pushed ahead for now with his plans for a June 5th invasion.[…]
Post D-Day
By D-Day plus 12 days, the flow of men and supplies over the beaches was running smoothly: 314,514 troops, 41,000 vehicles, and 116,000 tons of supplies had been landed on the American beaches, with almost identical figures for the British beaches. Had General Eisenhower postponed the invasion, the only option would have been to go two weeks later, and this would have encountered the “worst channel storm in 40 years” as Churchill later described it, which lasted four days between 19 and 22 June. In fact, Eisenhower sent a letter to Captain Stagg saying in reference to the major storm that occurred in the potential second time slot for the invasion, “I thank the Gods of war we went when we did.” For the rest of his life, in moments of stress, Group Captain Stagg would remember some words spoken to him by General Morgan, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, in the tension-filled days leading up to the postponement: “Good luck Stagg: may all your depressions be nice little ones, but remember, we’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post if you don’t read the omens right.”
Years later, during their ride to the Capitol for his inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked President Eisenhower why the Normandy invasion had been so successful. Ike’s answer: “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans!”
Full post
4) D-Day: The Sceptical Meteorologists Who Surprised The Nazis By Saying ‘Yes’ To June 6
The Times, 6 June 2014
Simon Pearson
The outcome of D-Day was decided not on the beaches of Normandy, but by weather systems in the mid-Atlantic and the ability of rival teams of meteorologists to interpret the forces of nature. The Americans were confident in long-range five-day forecasts. The British were sceptical, believing they could forecast only two days ahead at best. The teams clashed repeatedly.
The outcome of D-Day was decided not on the beaches of Normandy, but by weather systems in the mid-Atlantic and the ability of rival teams of meteorologists to interpret the forces of nature.
As unfavourable conditions developed during that early summer 70 years ago, three teams of meteorologists produced reports for the Allied commander, General Dwight D Eisenhower, who laid down the conditions necessary for invasion — and his preferred date: June 5. Across the Channel, a single team of Germans watched the weather.
One of the men who took part in this great drama was Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand naval officer, who, as a Rhodes Scholar, studied mathematics at New College, Oxford and trained as a meteorologist with the Royal Navy. Today, he lives in a care home in southern France, the country he helped to liberate and, even at the age of 98, retains vivid memories of events in June 1944.
Hogben had already distinguished himself as a naval officer before he was asked to work with Geoffrey Wolfe, a Cambridge-educated engineer, in the Admiralty team forecasting the D-Day weather.
As an instructor lieutenant, responsible for training, intelligence and meteorology on HMS Sheffield, he had witnessed several major naval actions: the sinking of the German battleship Bismark in May 1941; the Battle of the Barents Sea — when Sheffield engaged the German pocket battleships Admiral Hipper and Lutzow in the Arctic in December 1942; and Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa a year later.
Decorated for bravery and promoted instructor lieutenant-commander, he had also developed his skills as a weatherman. “OnSheffield, I was making forecasts every day from the data coming in and from the state of the sea,” he says.
Hogben and Wolfe were one of two British teams. The second, put forward by the Met Office, consisted of Charles Douglas, the chief forecaster who was known for his photographic memory of meteorological events, and Sverre Pettersen, a Norwegian. The third team was American, with Irving Krick and Benny Holzman, two well-known weathermen from the California Institute of Technology. Each day, the three teams reported their findings to Group Captain James Stagg, a Scot who had been superintendent of the Kew Gardens observatory in 1939. He briefed Eisenhower.
For operational reasons, the American commander needed a full moon, a low tide, little cloud cover and light winds so that troops in landing craft could get ashore quickly, the gliders and parachutists could operate efficiently, and the Allied fighters and bombers could find their targets.
The forecast was not good. Indeed, climatic data suggested the odds against the forecasters finding the right conditions was 13-1 in June 1944. The Americans were confident in long-range five-day forecasts. The British were sceptical, believing they could forecast only two days ahead at best. The teams clashed repeatedly.
According to William Bryant Logan, author of Air: The Restless Shaper, they succeeded, “not because of the brilliant work of any solitary forecaster, but because a group of forecasters imitated the weather. They jostled, yelled, scribbled, and cast malevolent looks at one another. They fought it out and voted. And in the end, they were just right enough.”
Full story
5) David Whitehouse: Hiatus Studies Drive Climate Research
GWPF Observatory, 2 June 2017
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
The reduction in global temperature after the recent El Nino continues though not as swiftly as some predicted. The next few months will be interesting to see if it returns to levels seen before the recent El Nino took place when global annual average temperatures changed little for at least 15 years.
Whilst some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not, and never has existed, many scientists accept it and are seeking explanations. Akira Oka and Masahiro Watanabe, both of Tokyo University, writing in Geophysical Research Letters see two phases in the 1998 – 2012 slowdown. In their model they see warming in the Pacific between 1998 – 2002 and then a hiatus due to the increased heat storage below 700 m in the subtropical Southern Ocean. “The study provides clear evidence that the deeper parts of the Southern Ocean play a critical role in the post-2002 warming slowdown,” they say.
One recent paper I find problematic is by Lu Dong and Michael McPhaden, both from NOAA. They talk of the, “pronounced long-term centennial time scale linear warming trend during the last hundred years due to GHG forcing.” I would not go so far, and neither would the IPCC, in believing that all the warming of the last century or so is down to greenhouse gasses alone. As for the linear trend, one can draw a straight through anything!
They say the 2001 – 2013 hiatus is due to the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, saying somewhat presumptively; “The prevailing view is that internally generated variations associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) dominate decadal variations in GMST, while external forcing from greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols dominate the long-term trend in GMST over the last hundred years.”
They add; “The most recent warming hiatus apparent in observations occurred largely through cooling from a negative IPO extreme that overwhelmed the warming from external forcing. An important implication of this work is that when the phase of the IPO turns positive, as it did in 2014, the combination of external forcing and internal variability should lead to accelerated global warming. This accelerated warming appears to be underway, with record high GMST in 2014, 2015, and 2016.”
I beg to differ that the accelerated warming appears to be underway given the recent strong El Nino makes such a detection impossible.
Another paper that falls into the same trap is Shineng Hu and Alexey Federov, both of Yale University, in Geophysical Research Letters called, “The extreme El Nino of 2015-16 and the end of the global warming hiatus.” They say the hiatus was caused by a succession of weak El Ninos.
They maintain that their results confirm that weak El Niño activity, rather than volcanic eruptions, was the cause of the hiatus, while the rapid temperature rise is due to atmospheric heat release during 2014–2016 El Niño conditions concurrent with the continuing global warming trend. This is the same mistake as the previous paper.
Quasi-stagnation
Shang-Ping Xie and Yu Kosaka in Current Climate Change Reports also ask what caused the hiatus between 1998 – 2013. They maintain that the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature acts as a pacemaker for the hiatus and claim that the temperature rise after a major El Nino proves it. I think this is a bit of a stretch but at least they recognise the importance of “hiatus” research which they say, “has led to a wide recognition of the importance of internal variability for global mean surface temperature trends over a decade and longer. The strengthened connection between the climate variability and change communities is an important legacy of hiatus research.”
In contrast to Hu and Federov, Monerrie et al in Environment Research Letters, say that since 1998 there has been a “quasi-stagnation” in global temperatures because of volcanic emissions. “Despite a continuous increase in well-mixed greenhouse gases, the global-mean surface temperature has shown a quasi-stabilization since 1998. This muted warming has been linked to the combined effects of internal climate variability and external forcing. The latter includes the impact of recent increase in the volcanic activity and of solar irradiance changes.
They conclude that the observed recent increase in the volcanic activity led to a reduced warming trend (2003-2012) of 0.08°C in ten years. The induced cooling is stronger during the last five-year period (2008–2012), with an annual global mean cooling of 0.04°C (+/−0.04°C). The cooling is similar in summer (0.05°C+/−0.04°C cooling) than in winter (0.03°C+/−0.04°C cooling), but stronger in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere.
As we have said before, observations are one thing models are another. Comparing climate models with observations Austin Hope (University of Maryland) et al say that climate models warm too quickly, by a factor of two. That will annoy some people as there has been some news stories about a new paper by Iselin Medhaug and colleagues in the May 4 issue of Nature that concludes that climate models are describing the observations exactly.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
6) The Guardian: Why We Can’t Trust Academic Journals To Tell The Scientific Truth
The Guardian, 6 June 2017
Julian Kirchherr
Scholars complain these days that trust in science is in decline. But there are good reasons for it. If we scientists take to the streets to claim we are armed with the truth, only further disillusionment will follow.
Hundreds of thousands of scientists took to streets around the world in April. “We need science because science tells the truth. We are those who can fight the fake news,” a friend who participated in one of the March for Science rallies told me. I really wish this were true. Sadly, much evidence suggests otherwise.
The idea that the same experiment will always produce the same result, no matter who performs it, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to truth.
However, more than 70% of the researchers (pdf), who took part in a recent study published in Nature have tried and failed to replicate another scientist’s experiment. Another study found that at least 50% of life science research cannot be replicated. The same holds for 51% of economics papers (pdf).
The findings of these studies resonate with the gut feeling of many in contemporary academia – that a lot of published research findings may be false.
Just like any other information source, academic journals may contain fake news.
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7) Mark Mills: The Real Reason Trump Left The Paris Agreement
Fortune, 5 June 2017
The Paris climate agreement was never about climate science. Anchored in the premise that climate science is “settled,” the accord seeks to dramatically change humanity’s energy supply. Here, the matter really is settled: It’s not going to happen.
Paris advocates assert that, despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement, we face an inevitable transition to a multitude of new low-carbon energy technologies that will consign hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—to history’s dust heap. All we need to birth the new energy future are the right “incentives,” which Paris provides: The only way to meet aspirational carbon emissions reductions is to replace hydrocarbons.
This so-called multitude of options actually distills to just three things: biofuels, windmills, and solar panels. Some environmentalists include nuclear fission as well. There’s no new physics here: The first fission reaction was in 1939, the first photovoltaic cell was created in 1954, windmills date to the Middle Ages, and making alcohol (the dominant biofuel) predates recorded history.
But, say Paris supporters, all we need are moonshot government programs to see energy tech emulate the “Moore’s Law” progress that happened in computing (the doubling in computer power every two years). Yet to their inconvenience, the physics of energy won’t cooperate.
Fueling humanity is not like putting a few people on the moon. It’s like putting everybody on Earth on the moon—permanently. No amount of money obviates the costs of fighting gravity. But pundits in awe of Silicon Valley’s prowess analogize today’s green energy companies to the disruption of landline phone businesses after the advent of cell phones or the disruption of taxis by Uber.
Unfortunately, the physics of energy production scales in exactly the opposite direction of the physics of information production. If aircraft, for example, followed Moore’s Law, a loaded Boeing 777 could reach Japan from New York by burning a housefly’s weight in fuel. Engineers and mathematicians can trick bytes to go faster and slip into ever smaller spaces, but only in science fiction are similar tricks possible with physical objects or humans.
Better technology has brought solar and wind costs down dramatically in the past decade. And, fueled by over $100 billion in subsidies, while wind and solar have increased 10-fold over a decade, they still supply, respectively, just 0.3% and 2% of America’s energy. …
But there is a stubborn idea that more money—subsidies, tax incentives, grants, or enforced standards—will make solar and wind 10 times cheaper yet again. While all technologies get better over time, they also approach physics’ limits eventually. Aircraft turbine manufacturers brag about single-digit percentage gains in fuel efficiency precisely because those machines are near thermodynamic limits in converting heat to thrust.
Solar cells and wind turbines are now in the same boat. There are no game-changing advances left in the core technologies; both are now on the curve of diminishing returns. (Biofuels crossed that Rubicon centuries ago.) Nor are there big gains in economies of scale for the underlying components—concrete, steel, fiberglass, silicon, wires, and glass are all already in mass production.
If we want a different energy revolution, we’ll need new discoveries in the physical sciences. That can only emerge from basic research, not from more subsidies for yesterday’s technologies.
Meanwhile, the world’s nearly 8 billion people and $80 trillion economy depend on hydrocarbons to supply over 80% of global energy; oil fuels 98% of transportation.
Meaningful changes to this status quo won’t come from the Paris agreement with or without the U.S., unless there’s a revolution in physics. And the latter will require very different priorities. Perhaps it’s time to chase real science.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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