muso wrote on Dec 18^th, 2010 at 9:55pm:



What did I tell ya? Its statistics, climate science is.

PARIS — Experts pin the floods that have ravaged northeastern Australia on a weather phenomenon known as La Nina but are cautious whether the peril could be amplified by climate change.

La Nina, or "girl child," is the counterpart of El Nino, or "boy child," together comprising a pendular swing of extreme weather that affects the Pacific Rim but can be disruptive as far as the coast of southern Africa.

El Nino occurs when the trade winds that circulate surface water in the tropical Pacific start to weaken.

A mass of warm water builds in the western Pacific and eventually rides over to the eastern side of the ocean.

The outcome is a major shift in rainfall, bringing floods and mudslides to usually arid countries in western South America and drought in the western Pacific, as well as a change in nutrient-rich ocean currents that lure fish.

Eventually, El Nino peters out, sometimes when a cold phase -- La Nina -- starts to dominate.

At that point, the reverse happens: countries in the eastern Pacific face drier weather and those on the west, such as Australia's Queensland, get drenched.

"2010 began with El Nino conditions in the Pacific followed by a rapid transition into La Nina during (the southern hemisphere's) autumn," Australia's Bureau of Meteorology says on its website.

"(...) By July, La Nina conditions were well established and most areas of Australia experienced very much above average rainfall. The second half of the year (July to December) was the wettest on record for Australia."

In the 20th century, scientists identified 25 moderate or strong El Ninos and 17 episodes of La Nina. The toll to human life and property, in droughts and floods, has sometimes been huge.

The back-and-forth cycle -- formally known as the El Nino/La Nina-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO -- occurs every two to seven years.

Because sea temperature plays such an important role, some climate experts are keen to determine whether man-made global warming might make it more frequent or vicious.

Prudence, though, is the watchword. ENSO is a complex mechanism and reliable oceanographic data reaches back only a century or so, which is minute given that climate history spans billions of years.

"There is no consistent indication at this time of discernible changes in projected ENSO amplitude or frequency in the 21st century," the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) crisply announced in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

In an interview with AFP, Baylor Fox-Kemper, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado, explained: "Many models indicate that there is a link between El Nino and climate change, but they don't agree as to what that change should be.

"Furthermore, El Nino is so noisy [a term meaning complex] that it takes many centuries of data to be sure that a change has occurred.

"Since we have only a limited amount of trusted real-world data, we are unable to validate which of these models is closest to the truth."

Others say that despite the unknowns, logic dictates that global warming is bound to have an impact on ENSO.

"With a warmer world, one would expect the atmosphere to hold more moisture, so that when it does rain, it is heavier," said New Zealand specialist Jim Salinger.

"So La Nina rainfall events are expected to be more intense... (although) at this stage, it is not known whether La Nina events will become more frequent."

Link -
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iBfsIWgwO-VrPz-HOxdzN65JwFqw?...

CRAP>>>>>>

beware wrote on Jan 8^th, 2011 at 4:43pm:


You should beware, lest people do not understand what your CRAP means!

muso wrote on Jan 11^th, 2011 at 9:15am:


I gather you live somewhere close to Toowoomba?

How are you situated, personally, are the floods close by where you live or are you ok, from that viewpoint?

I'm sure, I speak for all, when I say, keep safe!

2010 tied for Earth's warmest year on record

Last year tied with 2005 as the world's warmest on record, according to data released Wednesday by the National Climatic Data Center. Records began in 1880.
It was also the wettest year on record globally as measured by average precipitation, according to the center. Heavy rain in Asia due to the monsoon (which led to disastrous floods in Pakistan) and tropical storms in Central America contributed to the extreme precipitation amounts.

The Earth's average temperature in 2010, as in 2005, was 58.12 degrees, which is 1.12 degrees above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees.

It was the 34th consecutive year that the global temperature was above average, according to the data center. The last below-average year was 1976.
"This warmth reinforces the notion that we're seeing climate change," says David Easterling, chief of scientific services at the data center in Asheville, N.C.

Not so fast, says Pat Michaels, a climatologist with the Cato Institute in Washington. "If you draw a trend line from the data, it's pretty flat from the 1990s. We don't see much of a warming trend over the past 12 years."

He says the gloom-and-doom projections on global warming are likely to be too hot. "The projections will have to come down," Michaels says.

The climate center reports that the global land surface temperatures for 2010 were the warmest on record, at 1.80 degrees above the 20th-century average. The global ocean surface temperature for 2010 tied with 2005 as the third-warmest on record, at 0.88 degrees above the 20th-century average.

Several exceptional heat waves occurred during 2010, the center reported, bringing record high temperatures and affecting tens of millions of people. Russia endured an unprecedented two-month heat wave last summer: On July 29, the Moscow Observatory recorded its highest-ever temperature of 100.8 degrees.

"Although we can't attribute any individual event to climate change," Easterling says, "the probability of these events does increase as the climate warms."

Center data show the global average surface temperature has risen more than 1 degree since the start of the 20th century. Much of the warmth occurred in the past three decades. Nine of the Earth's 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, and all 12 of the warmest years have occurred since 1997.

In a separate global temperature report released last week, 2010 finished in a tie with 1998 for the warmest year in the 32-year satellite temperature record, according to John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH).

Unlike the climate center's surface-based temperatures, UAH's data are based on instruments aboard satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about 5 miles above sea level.

The satellite data show that the globe continues to warm unevenly. Warming increases as you go north: The Arctic Ocean has warmed an average of almost 3 degrees in the past 32 years.

Another global surface temperature report released Wednesday — from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York — said 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year.

Link -
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2011-01-12-2010-warmest-ye...
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Warmer & Wetter!

muso wrote on Jan 15^th, 2011 at 7:55am:

Well, perhaps one, guess when ?