New Research Disputes Claims That Climate Change Helped Spark The Syrian Civil War
In this newsletter:
1) Prince Charles ‘Wrong’ On Climate Link To Syria War
Ben Webster, The Times, 8 September 2017
2) Jan Selby et al. (2017) Climate Change And The Syrian Civil War Revisited
University of Sussex, September 2017
3) New Research Disputes Claims That Climate Change Helped Spark The Syrian Civil War
University of Essex, 7 September 2017
4) Andrew Montford: Think Drought Was Behind The Syrian Conflict? Think Again.
GWPF Opinion, 8 September 2017
5) Hurricanes Harvey And Irma Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming
Alan Reynold, Cato At Liberty, 7 September 2017
6) David Whitehouse: Confidence In Climate Extremes?
GWPF Observatory, 8 September 2017
Ben Webster, The Times, 8 September 2017
2) Jan Selby et al. (2017) Climate Change And The Syrian Civil War Revisited
University of Sussex, September 2017
3) New Research Disputes Claims That Climate Change Helped Spark The Syrian Civil War
University of Essex, 7 September 2017
4) Andrew Montford: Think Drought Was Behind The Syrian Conflict? Think Again.
GWPF Opinion, 8 September 2017
5) Hurricanes Harvey And Irma Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming
Alan Reynold, Cato At Liberty, 7 September 2017
6) David Whitehouse: Confidence In Climate Extremes?
GWPF Observatory, 8 September 2017
Full details:
1) Prince Charles ‘Wrong’ On Climate Link To Syria War
Ben Webster, The Times, 8 September 2017
Scientists have accused the Prince of Wales of exaggerating the link between climate change and the civil war in Syria.
A new study found no evidence for the widely publicised theory that climate change was a factor in causing the war, in which more than 300,000 people have died and 11 million have been forced to leave their homes.
The researchers said making “overblown claims” based on poor evidence fuelled scepticism about the need for action on climate change, undermining the cause the prince was advancing.
The prince made the claim in November 2015 before the Paris climate change summit at which 194 countries agreed a global deal to cut emissions. Speaking of the threat from climate change, he said: “There’s very good evidence that one of the major reasons for this terror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”
A study by King’s College London and the University of Sussex has debunked the prince’s claim, which was also made by Barack Obama when he was US president.
The researchers found that although northeastern Syria did experience a severe drought from 2007 to 2010, before the civil war started, the drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on global climate.
The scale of migration away from northeastern Syria was “on nothing like the scale which has been claimed”, the study says. Only 40,000 to 60,000 families moved, not the 1.5 million people often quoted by proponents of the climate change link.
The study said that migration was “probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by drought.”
The study, published in the journal Political Geography, concludes: “Given the urgency of the climate change challenge and the contestation around it, plus the media’s preference for striking, overblown stories . . . it is incumbent on analysts not to exaggerate climate-conflict linkages, or to champion false but headline-friendly statistics.”
Jan Selby, lead author and director of the Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, said: “It is extraordinary this claim has become so widely accepted when the evidence for it is so thin.
Climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence this is what was going on in this case. It is vital experts and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about climate change. Overblown claims only risk fuelling climate scepticism.”
Full story
2) Jan Selby et al. (2017) Climate Change And The Syrian Civil War Revisited
University of Sussex, September 2017
Abstract
For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria’s descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria’s pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.
Full paper
3) New Research Disputes Claims That Climate Change Helped Spark The Syrian Civil War
University of Essex, 7 September 2017
A new study, published today in the journal Political Geography, shows that there is no sound evidence that global climate change was a factor in causing the Syrian civil war.
Claims that a major drought caused by anthropogenic climate change was a key factor in starting the Syrian civil war have gained considerable traction since 2015 and have become an accepted narrative in the press, most recently repeated by former US vice president Al Gore in relation to Brexit. This study, led by Professor Jan Selby at the University of Sussex, takes a fresh look at the existing evidence for these claims as well as conducting new research into Syrian rainfall data and the experiences of Syrian refugees.
Professor Jan Selby, Director of the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, says: "Our paper finds that there is no sound evidence that global climate change was a factor in sparking the Syrian civil war. Indeed, it is extraordinary that this claim has become so widely accepted when the scientific evidence for it is so thin.
"Global climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence that this is what was going on in this case. It is vital that experts, commentators and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about the conflict implications of climate change. Overblown claims not based on rigorous science only risk fueling climate scepticism."
Professor Selby worked on the study with Christiane Fröhlich from the University of Hamburg's Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), Omar Dahi from Hampshire College, and Mike Hulme from King's College London. Their article is published in a special section of the journal Political Geography, the leading outlet worldwide for the study of climate-conflict linkages. The article is accompanied by three responses from leading US-based academics, and a rejoinder from Selby and colleagues. All are available open access for a limited period.
Selby and colleagues' article finds that:
Although northeast Syria did experience an exceptionally severe drought prior to its civil war, this drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on the global climate;
Though the 2006/07 to 2008/09 drought did contribute to migration away from northeast Syria, this was on nothing like the scale which has been claimed (most likely 40-60 thousand families, rather than the 1.5 million people often quoted), and was probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by the drought;
There exists no meaningful evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in the onset of the civil war.
Mike Hulme at King's College London led original analysis of Syrian rainfall data, which showed the precise geographical and temporal limits of the 3-year drought. He says: "The drought in northeastern Syria was undoubtedly very severe, but is not necessarily part of a desiccating trend and cannot unambiguously be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions."
Christiane Fröhlich from the University of Hamburg's Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) conducted interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan with experiences of the pre-civil war drought. She says: "We need to bring the lived experience of those affected by global environmental change in to the scientific study of global warming in order to gain a fuller understanding of how its effects impact different parts of a society to varying degrees."
Omar Dahi at Hampshire College says that: "Many aspects of Syria before and after March 2011 are widely accepted as fact despite little evidence. The climate change thesis is one of them, endlessly repeated without being properly interrogated."
4) Andrew Montford: Think Drought Was Behind The Syrian Conflict? Think Again.
GWPF Opinion, 8 September 2017
Scientivists and politicians are fond of trying to blame the Syrian crisis on climate change. President Obama and his sidekick John Kerry are among the most prominent figures to repeat the claim, but they are merely at the top of a long list that includes lesser names like Ban-ki Moon and Jean-Claude Juncker and continues right on down to humbler figures like Barry Gardiner MP.
The allegations of a climate-fuelled conflict were originally stoked by a series of papers in the academic literature, and these are now the subject of a response by Jan Selby et al. in the journal Political Geography. The authors are mostly conflict researchers, but there is also a well-known figure from the climate world in the shape of Mike Hulme.
Anyone who has examined the original studies will know already that they are little more than thinly-veiled political propaganda, their claims to a place in the scientific corpus being more about where they were published than anything done by the authors. Conflict researchers have been tiptoeing around this uncomfortable issue ever since and Selby’s new paper is just the latest delicately phrased attempt to set out the facts.
For example, in one of the original studies, by the (ahem) highly controversial scientivist Peter Gleick, there is a claim that we had just witnessed “the worst long-term drought … since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent”. One of the other studies, by Colin Kelley called it “the most severe drought in the instrumental record”. Daraa, where the conflict began, was said by Gleick to have been “crippled” by the drought. Which is odd, since as Selby and his colleagues point out “none of the three key studies above provide any data on rainfall patterns in Syria specifically”.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the Selby team have unearthed the relevant data, and have great fun plotting it out for all to see. Amusingly, we learn that far from being “crippled” by drought, Daraa actually experienced average rainfall at the time it all kicked off and perhaps more importantly “there is no evidence of progressive multi-decadal drying either in the Fertile Crescent region as a whole, or in northeast Syria specifically.” As Selby observes, this is a bit of a problem to those trying to prove that multi-decadal drying caused the crisis in Syria. That there was a drought in Syria is not disputed, but at the end of the paper, the authors conclude that it’s not even possible to conclude that climate change had a role in the conflict, let alone that it was the cause.
The whole thing is rather devastating and it certainly deserves publicity at least as wide as the original wild claims received. But let’s not hold our breath.
5) Hurricanes Harvey And Irma Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming
Alan Reynold, Cato At Liberty, 7 September 2017
Yes, warmer ocean temperatures would logically seem to correlate with more or stronger hurricanes, but as shown below, they don’t.
“Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like: It’s time to open our eyes and prepare for the world that’s coming.” That August 28 Politico article by Slate weatherman Eric Holthaus was one of many trying too hard to blame the hurricane and/or flood on climate change.
Such stories are typically infused with smug arrogance. Their authors claim to be wise and well-informed, and anyone who dares to question their “settled science” must need to have their eyes pried open and their mouths shut.
There will doubtless be similar “retroactive forecasting” tales about Irma, so recent story-telling about Harvey may provide a precautionary warning for the unwary.
I am an economist, not a climatologist.* But blaming Harvey on climate change apparently demands much lower standards of logic and evidence than economists would dare describe as serious arguments.
Atlantic’s climate journalist said, “Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.” But Harvey’s maximum rainfall of 51.88 inches barely exceeded that from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 (48”) and Hurricane Easy in 1950 (45”). And what about Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979, which put down 42 inches in 24 hours near Houston (Harvey took three days to do that)? In such cases, attributing today’s extreme weather to “climate change” regardless of what happens (maybe droughts, maybe floods) is what the philosopher Karl Popper called “pseudoscience.” If some theory explains everything, it can’t be tested and it is therefore not science. (Popper’s favorite examples of pseudoscience were communism and psychoanalysis.)
Seemingly plausible efforts to connect Harvey to climate change are precariously based on another unusual event in 2015–16, not long-term climate trends. In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer wrote that “Harvey benefitted from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average.” Thank you, 2015–16 El Nino.
Meyer’s source is a single unsourced sentence from “Climate Signals beta” from the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Climate Nexus” project run by Hunter Cutting (“a veteran political director who develops communications strategy”). Perhaps it would be wiser to consult the National Hurricane Center about Gulf temperatures, which shows they are averaging about one degree (F) above the baseline.
Looking back at any unpredicted weather anomaly, “fact-checking” journalists can alwayscount on Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth to spin some tale explaining why any bad weather (but never good weather!) must surely be at least aggravated by long-term global climate trends. “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly,” writes Michael Mann. Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased from about 86 degrees to 87 “over the past few decades,” he says, causing “3–5% more moisture in the atmosphere.” He neglected to point out other compensatory things he surely knows, like that the same climate science predicts a more stable tropical atmosphere, reducing the upward motion necessary for hurricanes.
Even The Washington Post’s esteemed Jason Samenow got onto shaky ground, writing that “rainfall may have been enhanced by 6 percent or so, or a few inches.” It would have been nice if he noted that Harvey’s maximum observed rainfall of 51.88 inches is statistically indistinguishable from the aforementioned Amelia’s 48, forty years ago.
In either case, to blame the Gulf’s temperature and moisture in August 2017 on a sustained global increase in water temperatures requires more than theory or “confidence” (faith). It requires evidence.
As it happens, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were not rising significantly, if at all, during the years between the two super-strong El Ninos of 1997–98 and 2015–16. On the contrary, a January 2017 survey of four major data sources finds that “since 1998, all datasets show a slowdown of SST increase compared with the 1983–1998 period.” That may sound as if SST had been increasing rapidly before 1998, but that too is unclear: “Prior to 1998, the temperature changes in Global, Pacific, and Southern Oceans show large discrepancies among [four leading estimates], hindering a robust detection of both regional and global OHC [ocean heat content] changes.”
From 1998 to 2012, the evidence on sea surface temperatures becomes even more inconvenient. Two of the four studies show “weak warming” near the surface while the other two show “cooling, coincident with the global surface temperature slowdown [emphasis added].” In other words, the embarrassingly prolonged 1997–2014 pause or “hiatus” in global warming is also apparent in oceanic surface temperatures, not just land and atmospheric temperatures.
Keep in mind what the vaunted “climate change consensus” means. By averaging four estimates, NASA declares “Globally-averaged temperatures in 2016 were 1.78 degrees Fahrenheit (0.99 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-20th century mean.” The underlying yearly estimates are deviations from that mid-century meanؙ—“anomalies” rather than actual temperatures.
To convert anomalies into degrees NASA had to use computer models to add anomalies to temperatures in the base period, 1951–80, where the data are hardly perfect. As a result, “For the global mean,” NASA explains, “the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 14°C, i.e. 57.2°F, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58°F and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse.”
It might be rude to notice the range of error between 56 and 58°F globally (“let alone locally”) is larger than NASA’s supposed increase of 1.78 degrees over many decades. Note too that NASA’s ostensibly cooler base period, 1951–80, includes the second and third biggest floods in U.S. history.
Full post
6) David Whitehouse: Confidence In Climate Extremes?
GWPF Observatory, 8 September 2017
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
Weather extremes have been a lot in the news recently prompted by the Hurricanes Harvey and Irma wreaking destruction in the Caribbean. Some commentators say this is what to expect with man-made climate change, and that hurricanes are an example of extremes that are occurring right now along with heat waves and intense rainfall. The reality is not quite that dramatic, and the science does not stand up to the impression being given to the public.
Regarding hurricanes NOAA has issued a statement; “It is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.
Hurricanes aside, the evidence for increased extreme events occurring at the moment is not very impressive.
The IPCC’s SREX report of 2012 said there is some evidence of change in some extremes going back to the 1950s. It is very likely that there has been an overall decrease in the number of cold days and nights for North America, Europe and Australasia, and with medium confidence Asia. There is also medium confidence for a change in the length and number of warm spells and heat waves. It is likely that more regions have experienced increases than decreases in heavy precipitation events, though there are large regional uncertainties. It is likely that there has been a poleward shift in northern and southern hemisphere extra tropical storm tracks.
There is medium confidence that some regions have experienced more intense and longer droughts in Southern Europe and Western Australia, but not in Central North America and North West Australia where droughts are less frequent and less intense. There is limited to medium confidence in changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods. SREX goes on to add that there is low confidence of any changes on a global scale with uncertainty as to even the sign of the changes. It is also likely that there might have been changes in coastal high water events.
Descriptions such as “likely” and “medium confidence” are not very firm scientific statements. They do not provide a reliable scientific base from which to discuss the possible effects of man-made climate change. The public, and many advocates, do not realise this weakness, but that doesn’t matter because the subtleties are usually ignored anyway.
An abstract from a paper by Sarojini, Stott and Black, published four years later in Nature Climate Change is no more impressive in the face of a growing realisation of the scale of uncertainties involved in identifying changes.
“Understanding how human influence on the climate is affecting precipitation around the world is immensely important for defining mitigation policies, and for adaptation planning. Yet despite increasing evidence for the influence of climate change on global patterns of precipitation, and expectations that significant changes in regional precipitation should have already occurred as a result of human influence on climate, compelling evidence of anthropogenic fingerprints on regional precipitation is obscured by observational and modeling uncertainties and is likely to remain so using current methods for years to come.”
Virtual Data
It’s clear that looking at changes in occurrence rates and other changing parameters is going to take a long time. So some scientists have used a different technique. They compare observations to a virtual Earth on which there has been no man-made climate change. The justification is that there has been improvements in models, and besides they know what should be happening and that makes detecting it easier. The Nature Climate Changes paper adds, “Historical records are not conclusive, large uncertainties, have to wait a long time for the effect to show up. However expected changes may render risks based on historical data inaccurate.” In summary, you don’t get your data through nature, you get it through models.
The idea is to look at a particular heat wave and rerun it on an Earth where man-made climatic effects have been removed. If it’s stronger or longer in the real world than the virtual one the man-made climatic changes have increased its severity or frequency. If you wish you can add some numbers saying the event was made 50% or perhaps ten times more likely because of man-made climate change.
Of course it all depends upon the models and our ability to remove man-made changes from the observations. What’s worrying is that the climate models are very poor at projections and fail to adequately capture the real world. That’s something that has been admitted many times when discussing the so-called hiatus period in global surface temperatures. The hiatus lesson is that decadal natural variability is not understood. The result is, as the Nature Climate Change paper said, large uncertainties.
The process of the detection and attribution of extreme events to man-made climate change is a young one and despite papers published in peer-reviewed journals, which many mistake for statements of certainty, it is tentative. For the public however its power, skill and uncertainties are being misrepresented.
How many hurricanes feature in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel movie I wonder?
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
Ben Webster, The Times, 8 September 2017
Scientists have accused the Prince of Wales of exaggerating the link between climate change and the civil war in Syria.
A new study found no evidence for the widely publicised theory that climate change was a factor in causing the war, in which more than 300,000 people have died and 11 million have been forced to leave their homes.
The researchers said making “overblown claims” based on poor evidence fuelled scepticism about the need for action on climate change, undermining the cause the prince was advancing.
The prince made the claim in November 2015 before the Paris climate change summit at which 194 countries agreed a global deal to cut emissions. Speaking of the threat from climate change, he said: “There’s very good evidence that one of the major reasons for this terror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”
A study by King’s College London and the University of Sussex has debunked the prince’s claim, which was also made by Barack Obama when he was US president.
The researchers found that although northeastern Syria did experience a severe drought from 2007 to 2010, before the civil war started, the drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on global climate.
The scale of migration away from northeastern Syria was “on nothing like the scale which has been claimed”, the study says. Only 40,000 to 60,000 families moved, not the 1.5 million people often quoted by proponents of the climate change link.
The study said that migration was “probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by drought.”
The study, published in the journal Political Geography, concludes: “Given the urgency of the climate change challenge and the contestation around it, plus the media’s preference for striking, overblown stories . . . it is incumbent on analysts not to exaggerate climate-conflict linkages, or to champion false but headline-friendly statistics.”
Jan Selby, lead author and director of the Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, said: “It is extraordinary this claim has become so widely accepted when the evidence for it is so thin.
Climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence this is what was going on in this case. It is vital experts and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about climate change. Overblown claims only risk fuelling climate scepticism.”
Full story
2) Jan Selby et al. (2017) Climate Change And The Syrian Civil War Revisited
University of Sussex, September 2017
Abstract
For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria’s descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria’s pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.
Full paper
3) New Research Disputes Claims That Climate Change Helped Spark The Syrian Civil War
University of Essex, 7 September 2017
A new study, published today in the journal Political Geography, shows that there is no sound evidence that global climate change was a factor in causing the Syrian civil war.
Claims that a major drought caused by anthropogenic climate change was a key factor in starting the Syrian civil war have gained considerable traction since 2015 and have become an accepted narrative in the press, most recently repeated by former US vice president Al Gore in relation to Brexit. This study, led by Professor Jan Selby at the University of Sussex, takes a fresh look at the existing evidence for these claims as well as conducting new research into Syrian rainfall data and the experiences of Syrian refugees.
Professor Jan Selby, Director of the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, says: "Our paper finds that there is no sound evidence that global climate change was a factor in sparking the Syrian civil war. Indeed, it is extraordinary that this claim has become so widely accepted when the scientific evidence for it is so thin.
"Global climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence that this is what was going on in this case. It is vital that experts, commentators and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about the conflict implications of climate change. Overblown claims not based on rigorous science only risk fueling climate scepticism."
Professor Selby worked on the study with Christiane Fröhlich from the University of Hamburg's Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), Omar Dahi from Hampshire College, and Mike Hulme from King's College London. Their article is published in a special section of the journal Political Geography, the leading outlet worldwide for the study of climate-conflict linkages. The article is accompanied by three responses from leading US-based academics, and a rejoinder from Selby and colleagues. All are available open access for a limited period.
Selby and colleagues' article finds that:
Although northeast Syria did experience an exceptionally severe drought prior to its civil war, this drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on the global climate;
Though the 2006/07 to 2008/09 drought did contribute to migration away from northeast Syria, this was on nothing like the scale which has been claimed (most likely 40-60 thousand families, rather than the 1.5 million people often quoted), and was probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by the drought;
There exists no meaningful evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in the onset of the civil war.
Mike Hulme at King's College London led original analysis of Syrian rainfall data, which showed the precise geographical and temporal limits of the 3-year drought. He says: "The drought in northeastern Syria was undoubtedly very severe, but is not necessarily part of a desiccating trend and cannot unambiguously be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions."
Christiane Fröhlich from the University of Hamburg's Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) conducted interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan with experiences of the pre-civil war drought. She says: "We need to bring the lived experience of those affected by global environmental change in to the scientific study of global warming in order to gain a fuller understanding of how its effects impact different parts of a society to varying degrees."
Omar Dahi at Hampshire College says that: "Many aspects of Syria before and after March 2011 are widely accepted as fact despite little evidence. The climate change thesis is one of them, endlessly repeated without being properly interrogated."
4) Andrew Montford: Think Drought Was Behind The Syrian Conflict? Think Again.
GWPF Opinion, 8 September 2017
Scientivists and politicians are fond of trying to blame the Syrian crisis on climate change. President Obama and his sidekick John Kerry are among the most prominent figures to repeat the claim, but they are merely at the top of a long list that includes lesser names like Ban-ki Moon and Jean-Claude Juncker and continues right on down to humbler figures like Barry Gardiner MP.
The allegations of a climate-fuelled conflict were originally stoked by a series of papers in the academic literature, and these are now the subject of a response by Jan Selby et al. in the journal Political Geography. The authors are mostly conflict researchers, but there is also a well-known figure from the climate world in the shape of Mike Hulme.
Anyone who has examined the original studies will know already that they are little more than thinly-veiled political propaganda, their claims to a place in the scientific corpus being more about where they were published than anything done by the authors. Conflict researchers have been tiptoeing around this uncomfortable issue ever since and Selby’s new paper is just the latest delicately phrased attempt to set out the facts.
For example, in one of the original studies, by the (ahem) highly controversial scientivist Peter Gleick, there is a claim that we had just witnessed “the worst long-term drought … since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent”. One of the other studies, by Colin Kelley called it “the most severe drought in the instrumental record”. Daraa, where the conflict began, was said by Gleick to have been “crippled” by the drought. Which is odd, since as Selby and his colleagues point out “none of the three key studies above provide any data on rainfall patterns in Syria specifically”.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the Selby team have unearthed the relevant data, and have great fun plotting it out for all to see. Amusingly, we learn that far from being “crippled” by drought, Daraa actually experienced average rainfall at the time it all kicked off and perhaps more importantly “there is no evidence of progressive multi-decadal drying either in the Fertile Crescent region as a whole, or in northeast Syria specifically.” As Selby observes, this is a bit of a problem to those trying to prove that multi-decadal drying caused the crisis in Syria. That there was a drought in Syria is not disputed, but at the end of the paper, the authors conclude that it’s not even possible to conclude that climate change had a role in the conflict, let alone that it was the cause.
The whole thing is rather devastating and it certainly deserves publicity at least as wide as the original wild claims received. But let’s not hold our breath.
5) Hurricanes Harvey And Irma Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming
Alan Reynold, Cato At Liberty, 7 September 2017
Yes, warmer ocean temperatures would logically seem to correlate with more or stronger hurricanes, but as shown below, they don’t.
Such stories are typically infused with smug arrogance. Their authors claim to be wise and well-informed, and anyone who dares to question their “settled science” must need to have their eyes pried open and their mouths shut.
There will doubtless be similar “retroactive forecasting” tales about Irma, so recent story-telling about Harvey may provide a precautionary warning for the unwary.
I am an economist, not a climatologist.* But blaming Harvey on climate change apparently demands much lower standards of logic and evidence than economists would dare describe as serious arguments.
Atlantic’s climate journalist said, “Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.” But Harvey’s maximum rainfall of 51.88 inches barely exceeded that from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 (48”) and Hurricane Easy in 1950 (45”). And what about Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979, which put down 42 inches in 24 hours near Houston (Harvey took three days to do that)? In such cases, attributing today’s extreme weather to “climate change” regardless of what happens (maybe droughts, maybe floods) is what the philosopher Karl Popper called “pseudoscience.” If some theory explains everything, it can’t be tested and it is therefore not science. (Popper’s favorite examples of pseudoscience were communism and psychoanalysis.)
Seemingly plausible efforts to connect Harvey to climate change are precariously based on another unusual event in 2015–16, not long-term climate trends. In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer wrote that “Harvey benefitted from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average.” Thank you, 2015–16 El Nino.
Meyer’s source is a single unsourced sentence from “Climate Signals beta” from the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Climate Nexus” project run by Hunter Cutting (“a veteran political director who develops communications strategy”). Perhaps it would be wiser to consult the National Hurricane Center about Gulf temperatures, which shows they are averaging about one degree (F) above the baseline.
Looking back at any unpredicted weather anomaly, “fact-checking” journalists can alwayscount on Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth to spin some tale explaining why any bad weather (but never good weather!) must surely be at least aggravated by long-term global climate trends. “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly,” writes Michael Mann. Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased from about 86 degrees to 87 “over the past few decades,” he says, causing “3–5% more moisture in the atmosphere.” He neglected to point out other compensatory things he surely knows, like that the same climate science predicts a more stable tropical atmosphere, reducing the upward motion necessary for hurricanes.
Even The Washington Post’s esteemed Jason Samenow got onto shaky ground, writing that “rainfall may have been enhanced by 6 percent or so, or a few inches.” It would have been nice if he noted that Harvey’s maximum observed rainfall of 51.88 inches is statistically indistinguishable from the aforementioned Amelia’s 48, forty years ago.
In either case, to blame the Gulf’s temperature and moisture in August 2017 on a sustained global increase in water temperatures requires more than theory or “confidence” (faith). It requires evidence.
As it happens, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were not rising significantly, if at all, during the years between the two super-strong El Ninos of 1997–98 and 2015–16. On the contrary, a January 2017 survey of four major data sources finds that “since 1998, all datasets show a slowdown of SST increase compared with the 1983–1998 period.” That may sound as if SST had been increasing rapidly before 1998, but that too is unclear: “Prior to 1998, the temperature changes in Global, Pacific, and Southern Oceans show large discrepancies among [four leading estimates], hindering a robust detection of both regional and global OHC [ocean heat content] changes.”
From 1998 to 2012, the evidence on sea surface temperatures becomes even more inconvenient. Two of the four studies show “weak warming” near the surface while the other two show “cooling, coincident with the global surface temperature slowdown [emphasis added].” In other words, the embarrassingly prolonged 1997–2014 pause or “hiatus” in global warming is also apparent in oceanic surface temperatures, not just land and atmospheric temperatures.
Keep in mind what the vaunted “climate change consensus” means. By averaging four estimates, NASA declares “Globally-averaged temperatures in 2016 were 1.78 degrees Fahrenheit (0.99 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-20th century mean.” The underlying yearly estimates are deviations from that mid-century meanؙ—“anomalies” rather than actual temperatures.
To convert anomalies into degrees NASA had to use computer models to add anomalies to temperatures in the base period, 1951–80, where the data are hardly perfect. As a result, “For the global mean,” NASA explains, “the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 14°C, i.e. 57.2°F, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58°F and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse.”
It might be rude to notice the range of error between 56 and 58°F globally (“let alone locally”) is larger than NASA’s supposed increase of 1.78 degrees over many decades. Note too that NASA’s ostensibly cooler base period, 1951–80, includes the second and third biggest floods in U.S. history.
Full post
6) David Whitehouse: Confidence In Climate Extremes?
GWPF Observatory, 8 September 2017
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
Weather extremes have been a lot in the news recently prompted by the Hurricanes Harvey and Irma wreaking destruction in the Caribbean. Some commentators say this is what to expect with man-made climate change, and that hurricanes are an example of extremes that are occurring right now along with heat waves and intense rainfall. The reality is not quite that dramatic, and the science does not stand up to the impression being given to the public.
Regarding hurricanes NOAA has issued a statement; “It is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.
Hurricanes aside, the evidence for increased extreme events occurring at the moment is not very impressive.
The IPCC’s SREX report of 2012 said there is some evidence of change in some extremes going back to the 1950s. It is very likely that there has been an overall decrease in the number of cold days and nights for North America, Europe and Australasia, and with medium confidence Asia. There is also medium confidence for a change in the length and number of warm spells and heat waves. It is likely that more regions have experienced increases than decreases in heavy precipitation events, though there are large regional uncertainties. It is likely that there has been a poleward shift in northern and southern hemisphere extra tropical storm tracks.
There is medium confidence that some regions have experienced more intense and longer droughts in Southern Europe and Western Australia, but not in Central North America and North West Australia where droughts are less frequent and less intense. There is limited to medium confidence in changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods. SREX goes on to add that there is low confidence of any changes on a global scale with uncertainty as to even the sign of the changes. It is also likely that there might have been changes in coastal high water events.
Descriptions such as “likely” and “medium confidence” are not very firm scientific statements. They do not provide a reliable scientific base from which to discuss the possible effects of man-made climate change. The public, and many advocates, do not realise this weakness, but that doesn’t matter because the subtleties are usually ignored anyway.
An abstract from a paper by Sarojini, Stott and Black, published four years later in Nature Climate Change is no more impressive in the face of a growing realisation of the scale of uncertainties involved in identifying changes.
“Understanding how human influence on the climate is affecting precipitation around the world is immensely important for defining mitigation policies, and for adaptation planning. Yet despite increasing evidence for the influence of climate change on global patterns of precipitation, and expectations that significant changes in regional precipitation should have already occurred as a result of human influence on climate, compelling evidence of anthropogenic fingerprints on regional precipitation is obscured by observational and modeling uncertainties and is likely to remain so using current methods for years to come.”
Virtual Data
It’s clear that looking at changes in occurrence rates and other changing parameters is going to take a long time. So some scientists have used a different technique. They compare observations to a virtual Earth on which there has been no man-made climate change. The justification is that there has been improvements in models, and besides they know what should be happening and that makes detecting it easier. The Nature Climate Changes paper adds, “Historical records are not conclusive, large uncertainties, have to wait a long time for the effect to show up. However expected changes may render risks based on historical data inaccurate.” In summary, you don’t get your data through nature, you get it through models.
The idea is to look at a particular heat wave and rerun it on an Earth where man-made climatic effects have been removed. If it’s stronger or longer in the real world than the virtual one the man-made climatic changes have increased its severity or frequency. If you wish you can add some numbers saying the event was made 50% or perhaps ten times more likely because of man-made climate change.
Of course it all depends upon the models and our ability to remove man-made changes from the observations. What’s worrying is that the climate models are very poor at projections and fail to adequately capture the real world. That’s something that has been admitted many times when discussing the so-called hiatus period in global surface temperatures. The hiatus lesson is that decadal natural variability is not understood. The result is, as the Nature Climate Change paper said, large uncertainties.
The process of the detection and attribution of extreme events to man-made climate change is a young one and despite papers published in peer-reviewed journals, which many mistake for statements of certainty, it is tentative. For the public however its power, skill and uncertainties are being misrepresented.
How many hurricanes feature in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel movie I wonder?
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
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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