Is it still climate week? Yes, it must be, since John Kerry, who pretending to be secretary of state, has said climate change is just as urgent as ISIS. Also ebola.
No word yet on whether all the trash from the weekend’s climate march has been picked up yet, nor whether Leo DiCaprio picked up the tab. But then there’s this inconvenient headline from the Los Angeles Times a few days back:
Naturally occurring changes in winds, not human-caused climate change, are responsible for most of the warming on land and in the sea along the West Coast of North America over the last century, a study has found.
The analysis challenges assumptions that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been a significant driver of the increase in temperatures observed over many decades in the ocean and along the coastline from Alaska to California.Changes in ocean circulation as a result of weaker winds were the main cause of about 1 degree Fahrenheit of warmingin the northeast Pacific Ocean and nearby coastal land between 1900 and 2012, according to the analysis of ocean and air temperatures over that time.
So what low-down, Koch-funded climate skeptic produced this study? Um. . .
The study, conducted by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Washington, was published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Not to worry, though. The Animal House of the climate campaign made sure that we don’t get carried away here. Cue the Kevin Bacon scene, played in this sequel by board-certified climatista Kevin Trenberth, saying “Stay calm! All is well!”
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the study, said its conclusions about long-term trends were probably overstated because the quality of data from the early 20th century was poor and unreliable. The results may also reflect the fact that the northeast Pacific is an area of the globe where past studies have shown the “signal” of climate change is low relative to the “noise” of natural variability.“There is no doubt that regionally, the changes in temperature are dominated by changes in the atmospheric circulation that likely have little or nothing to do with climate change,” Trenberth said. But, he added, “this does not call into question the concept of global warming.”
Just one question: if the “quality of the data from the early 20th century was poor and unreliable,” then remind me again why we’re supposed to treat Michael Mann’s Hockey Schtick (or any other temperature reconstruction) so reverentially? Oh I forgot—because 97 percent!
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