Gore-a-thon

Começa dentro de pouco tempo. Eu vou para a caminha... Ficam aqui os links para o WattsUpWithThat e o Bishop Hill, donde retirei os três cartoons do Josh abaixo. Como diz a Judith Curry, cheira-me também que isto vai dar esturro... E nos Estados Unidos, a Mãe Natureza vai proporcionar mais um "Gore effect"...

Horngate: how contamination has been going on

Following the exposure of Horngate, I've investigated how bad science and projections from IPCC, regarding more rainfall in Eastern Africa, have contaminated other studies and planning from international organizations. What one finds is terrifying! The following pointers are probably only the tip of the iceberg. If readers know of more interesting cases, please let me know, and I'll add them further down.

I could start in many places. Take a look at Christian Aid, a registered charity in the UK. They are asking for money for East Africa right now (left side image is from their site), but what were they saying in 2009?

In eastern Africa, rainfall could increase and water supplies may therefore improve. Somalia, for example, is expected to see a 20 per cent rise in rainfall, boosting the water it receives from rivers by ten times the current supply (de Wit y Stankiewicz, 2006). A negative impact of higher rainfall may be that it creates conditions for mosquitoes to breed, exacerbating the incidence of malaria.

Collier et al., in Climate Change and Africa, are also optimistic, but their percentage is lower (sort of, because it can be more...):

In eastern Africa, including the Horn of Africa, and parts of central Africa average rainfall is likely to increase (by 15% or more).

In 2010, International Livestock Research Institute published a report intitled Climate variability and climate change and their impacts on Kenya’s agricultural sector, by Herrero et al. Following the Executive Summary, their first main observation is:

Kenya might get wetter. In Kenya, as in most of East Africa, there are very few places where rainfall means are likely to decrease. The increase in rainfall in East Africa, extending into the Horn of Africa, is robust across the ensemble of GCMs, with 18 of 21 models projecting an increase in the core of this region, east of the Great Lakes.

In this report to the World Bank from 2010, Bryan et al., try a more conservative approach. It is not the timeframe that is important, but also the "mean", referencing the above Herrero report:

In East Africa, there are very few places where rainfall means are likely to decrease, however, increases in rainfall are not likely to lead to increases in agricultural productivity as a result of poor spacing and timing of precipitation increase.

In an impressive report, in January this year, the Institute for Environmental Security also had some "good news" for the Horn of Africa:

The good news is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that in the long term in East Africa the average rainfall is expected to increase. Water stress will therefore possibly decrease in large parts of the Horn. Although large variations in rainfall (e.g. floods) can have a destructive effect on crops this climatic change may generally have positive effects for agricultural development and food security in the region. So, although temperatures are expected to have an adverse effect, rainfall patterns may positively affect food security in the Horn of Africa.

And people start talking about this stuff. Dr Mark Collins, a Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, gave a speech in the opening plenary of the Commonwealth Youth Forum in Kampala, Uganda, in November 2007. I would expect that the boys and girls there won't remember what he said:

In the short-term the most obvious impacts arising from climate change concern the global redistribution of water resources. Severe reduction in rainfall is expected in the Caribbean, Central and South America, Southern Africa and Australia. Increases in rainfall are expected across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Indian sub-continent.

Modeling over bad models, gives bad results. Doherty et al., in a paper intitled Implications of future climate and atmospheric CO2 content for regional biogeochemistry, biogeography and ecosystem services across East Africa say that a wetter East Africa is good:

Overall, our model results suggest that East Africa, a populous and economically poor region, is likely to experience some ecosystem service benefits through increased precipitation, river runoff and fresh water availability.

For those who say that the rain will only come in 2080, Doherty shows us some pretty neat graphics from the global models. Sure, in the first image below, temperatures are going to rise. In the second image, we can see the precipitation anomalies with respect to the 1981–2000 period (mmday^-1). Finally, in the last image, one can see the vegetation carbon anomalies. Quite clear that we shouldn't be waiting for 2080 to expect some quick results...


While the drought is underway, they just keep publishing. The most recent on the list was published in the July edition of the Journal of Climate. Intitled Projected Changes in Mean and Extreme Precipitation in Africa under Global Warming. Part II: East Africa, also available here, in the abstract it is also clear that it should be getting wetter now, not in some decades:

There is substantial evidence in support of a positive shift of the whole rainfall distribution in East Africa during the wet seasons. The models give indications for an increase in mean precipitation rates and intensity of high rainfall events but for less severe droughts. Upward precipitation trends are projected from early this (twenty first) century.

From the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, of the Imperial College of London, you get another fabulous document from 2009: The science of climate change in Africa: impacts and adaptation. In the first page, the only "good" news is:

In eastern Africa, including the Horn of Africa, and parts of central Africa average rainfall is likely to increase.

These conclusions then get included into official documents. Like this one from UN CC-­DARE. And I could go on and on... But if I can do these discoveries in an hour of dedication, imagine what more time could do... So, if you've got till the end of this post, and you know more of them, let me know (email on the top left of the blog)...

Al Gore needs some geography lessons

Mr Gore made a wrong choice for his Climate Reality stunt in Cape Verde... I've debunked it, and recently shown that Cape Verde is benefiting from Global Warming! He chose the presenter from the Canary Islands, some 1400 kilometers north of Cape Verde. Someone must tell Al Gore that Cape Verde and the Canary Islands are not the same thing! Then, it happens that Portuguese is spoken in Cape Verde, while Spanish is spoken in the Canary Islands. An important difference!

The presenter is José Ramón Calvo Fernandez, a professor of Health Education at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In the interview with Ramón in the Climate Reality site, no wonder there is not a single word about Cape Verde, because he really loves ... the Canary Islands!

This makes me wonder... I'm pretty sure that Al didn't find anyone suitable in Cape Verde to sell his snake-oil. He couldn't switch to the Canary Islands, because of a different timezone. So, instead, he switched presenters! I even wonder if the transmission will really be made from Cape Verde, or from the Canary Islands!

Then, there is the language item. Besides English, Portuguese was the only language spoken in more than one of the 24 Climate Reality locations worldwide. Portuguese is the seventh most natively spoken language in the world. But it's not one of Climate Reality's languages. Indeed, Gore has translated his site in Indonesian and French, which are the 12th and 17th most natively spoken in the World, but has left Portuguese out!

I also wonder what is delaying the Brazilian presenter for Rio de Janeiro...

More fresh water

Fresh water is a major issue that Humanity is facing. We use a lot of fresh water, most of the times, too much. And it is important that we preserve this valuable resource. But when very good news about fresh water arise, they are normally not valued by the alarmists.

This is what has happened in Brazil. Two major fresh water discoveries were made, but little has been said about it. The Verde blog brought it to my attention. Maybe, Al Gore will mention it from Rio de Janeiro, in his Climate Reality stunt?

The first discovery refers to an underground "river" that flows beneath the Amazons River, named the Hamza River. A visual representation can be seen on the image on the left, obtained here. The Hamza is a very slow flowing river, at around 10 to 100 metres/year, and is 6000 kilometres long. The flow rate is much lower that that of the Amazon, but it is much wider, at 400 kilometres. The discovery is the work of Elizabeth Pimentel, a PhD student supervised by Valiya Hamza, for whom the river was named. The good news were presented at the 12th International Congress of the Brazilian Geophysical Society, last Aug 17th.

The second discovery is related to the first, but is older. Milton Matta, and his team at LARHIMA (Laboratory of Water Resources and Environment), announced last year the discovery of the size of the Alter do Chão aquifer, believed to be bigger than the Guarani Aquifer, in terms of volume. Despite being smaller in size than the Guarani (both pictured left), the Alter do Chão aquifer is believed to have 86000 km3 of water, against Guarani's 45000 km3. This is due to a bigger thickness in Alter do Chão, which is also nearer the surface. There is enough water in this aquifer to fill Lake Superior, the third-largest freshwater lake by volume, seven times!

More Climate nazism

One year ago, the No Pressure movie was probably the worst green-nazi movie till today. There are other good candidates, though. Luboš Motl has now uncovered two nasty examples, now from Al Gore's Climate Reality project. In both videos, denial is set to end September, 14th... And this will end with skeptic slaughtering, like what occurs with the fat lady in the first video. In the second video, stupidity is the idea. In both cases, these Religion priests views are more Nazi deja-vu, which History has shown us is a bad idea.

Cape Verde is now... green!

When Al Gore launched Climate Reality, it was quite easy to debunk the facts that he had laid out about Cape Verde. Since then, Mother Nature has also jumped in, and poured a lot of rain in those Atlantic islands. The result is a countryside coated in green, as seen by a local newspaper. Please notice their joy:

The island of Santiago is now blanketed in green, making Cape Verde’s name seem less odd than it does most of the year. The green is a gift to the eyes and for the entire body, which revel in the cool breeze of the mountains and the lovely landscapes. In all of the island’s municipalities, the hopes for a good harvest increase with every day that passes and with every inch of growth of the cornstalks. (...) With the rainfall and with the plants covering the countryside, people’s joy is visible and contagious – children play in the pools of water that form, young people sit by the road side telling stories, and older folks sit in their doorways trying to calculate how many barrels of corn and beans they will be able to come up with this year.

Also take a look at the newspaper photos. I've posted three below! These are wonderful images from a country that is not used to it! And they are certainly not the view that Al Gore is expecting for his Climate Reality in Cape Verde...

Horngate

African droughts are a well known and historical problem. The Sahel (left map), the vast territory south of the Sahara, for instance, has a long record of past droughts. So, every time you hear Al Gore talking about droughts, you should suspect some inconvenient truths are being omitted.

And that is the case with the Sahel droughts mentioned in the Climate Reality site above. It talks about the great Sahel drought, best known because of the "Do They Know It's Christmas" song. What it does not mention is that since then, the Sahel has been getting greener! The Global Warming Policy Foundation did an excellent briefing paper on this. But this is no news today, and National Geographic was already trying to explain the unexplainable two years ago!

Al Gore should know about it, so he will probably be switching his focus to the Horn of Africa, where a severe drought is underway. As can be seen by the map on the left (detail here), several areas of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are experiencing famine or severe food shortage. The UNHCR has a special site on the issue.

While these droughts have caused some tens of thousands of deaths, and some 750 000 could die in the next four months, one would imagine that the IPCC would have predicted it. Think again! If you go to the IPCC page regarding the fractional change in precipitation changes over Africa in this century, you might find something shocking:


Now, if you're not familiar with Africa's geography, check it out again: the IPCC, in the Fourth Assessment Report, which gave them the Nobel Prize, is predicting a major rainfall increase, in the exact same region where the drought is underway! And I just can't get it, because these are predictions for a warming world. So, something must be wrong, very wrong, inside the IPCC and their 21 models... In Page 850, in the Chapter 11 Executive Summary, they summarize it:

There is likely to be an increase in annual mean rainfall in East Africa.

Then, in Page 869, in Chapter 11.2.3.2, things are even more clear:

The increase in rainfall in East Africa, extending into the Horn of Africa, is also robust across the ensemble of models, with 18 of 21 models projecting an increase in the core of this region, east of the Great Lakes.

Where did they get these predictions? AR4 references the work of Hulme et al. (2001) and Ruosteenoja et al. (2003). The first one is intitled African climate change: 1900-2100, and has a pretty interesting Figure 13, adapted in the first graph below. It shows a nice wetting trend for East Africa, for almost all the model simulations, and for the next decades (starting immediately). The second one is a Finnish report intitled Future Climate in World Regions: And Intercomparison of Model-Based Projections for the New IPCC Emissions Scenarios. It presents an intercomparison of climate changes projected for 32 regions on Earth, including Eastern Africa. Results are presented for seasonal temperature and precipitation changes between 1961–1990 and three time periods in the future centered on the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s. In the second graph below, for the period 2010-2039, most of the models show an increase in precipitation.


It gets worse. FEWS (Famine Early Warning Systems Network), which also has some very interesting data, was concluding last year:

The observed drying tendency is the opposite predicted by the 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC ) assessment.

Further down the document, more detail is provided:

The observed rainfall tendencies are substantially different from the results presented in the most recent (4th) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment (Christensen and others, 2007). Chapter 11 (Regional Climate Projections, Christensen and others, 2007) of the IPCC Working Group I report indicates that eastern Africa will likely experience a modest (5–10 percent) increase in June-July-August precipitation, a result our work, although not looking at the same months, suggests is unlikely.

Chris Funk, who works with FEWS, saw it coming, along with La Niña last year. In an article in Nature (registry needed) last month, intitled We thought trouble was coming, Chris gives an idea why this was mishandled:

The global climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were never intended to provide rainfall trend projections for every region. These models say that East Africa will become wetter, yet observations show substantial declines in spring rainfall in recent years. Despite this, several agencies are building long-term plans on the basis of the forecast of wetter conditions. This could lead to agricultural development and expansion in areas that will become drier. More climate science based on regional observations could be helpful in addressing these challenges.

This is the most important part. Not only has IPCC been useless in the last decade, but has been committing severe errors. But now, Horngate clearly shows us that IPCC has been contributing to several tens of thousands of deaths, because of inferior climate investigation, and misleading guidance. It is the time to shutdown an UN agency, that is doing more harm than good! And maybe, Al Gore will talk about all this inconvenience in a week...

[Edited 2011/09/09 to include citations from IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter11]
[Edited 2011/09/09 to include citations from Hulme et al. (2001)]
[Edited 2011/09/09 to include citations from Ruosteenoja et al. (2003)]