Science Links: 8/1/2015

Article #1: How Far Can the Human Eye See a Candle Flame?

The brightest stars, such as Vega, have a [apparent] magnitude 0. At what distance would a candle flame be comparable to a star like Vega, they asked. 

Some straightforward nighttime experiments with a candle suggested that the distance was 338 meters. “To our eyes the candle flame and Vega appeared of comparable brightness,” they say.

This is apparent magnitude. So, at 338 meters (about 370 yards or 0.2 miles) Vegas and a candle would be equally bright.

They compared the magnitude of the dimmest stars we can see with how far away the candle had to be in order for it to have the same magnitude. That distance was about 1.6 miles

Article #2: Earth's 'magnetic personality' much older than previously thought

By measuring the magnetic field of magnetite from Australian zircons, researchers concluded that the magnetic field of earth was at least or 4.2 billion years old. Or it has existed for at least 80% of earth's history.

Article #3: California ‘rain debt’ equal to average full year of precipitation

California averages about 20 inches of rain a year, but the actual amount in any given year swings fairly wildly.

California regularly experiences drought years, but this is the third year running that there has been a rain debt and the total over the last 3 years equals 1 year.

California has had larger rain debt, for example, "a 27.5 inch deficit of rain and snow occurred in the state between 1986 and 1994."

That was less of a crisis than today because the population was smaller, less agriculture was irrigated, and less water was diverted for environmental purposes.

There is a good discussion of the mechanics of the flow of air which creates both drought and surplus conditions, along with a discussion of how El Nino plays into the atmospheric dynamics.

Water for the farmers of California.

Democrats are against it. For decades, Democrats in general and California Democrats in particular have fought dam and reservoirs.

Article: An Engineered Drought

We do know two things. First, [current California Governor Jerry] Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. 

Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. 

Article: House passes another bill to bring more water to California farmers

The House on Thursday passed GOP-led legislation designed to bring more water to California's farm belt amid a severe and lengthy drought. 

Similar legislation has failed in the last two congressional sessions, and the White House and Democrats remain opposed. 

The 170-page bill also sets deadlines for the completion of feasibility studies to build or enlarge five dams in the state and ends efforts to build up salmon populations in the San Joaquin River.

Article: House Democrats float new California water bill

The Democrats’ proposal omits new water storage projects or changes that boost irrigation deliveries to San Joaquin Valley farms, which have anchored House Republican drought-fighting efforts. Instead, it includes an array of water recycling grants, watershed protection programs, groundwater cleanup assistance and desalination studies, among other efforts.

Article: California flexes muscles in water tussle with farmers

California water regulators flexed their muscles by ordering a group of farmers to stop pumping from a branch of the San Joaquin River amid an escalating battle over how much power the state has to protect waterways that are drying up in the drought.

As the rest of the article makes plain, the farmers have long-standing, legally-binding water rights that (Democrat run) California are trying to take away.

Article: Met Office caught out over its 'hottest July day ever’ claim

Since my story last week headed “Mystery grows over Met Office’s 'hottest day’”, there have been further developments. How could the Met Office justify its widely publicised claim that July 1 was the hottest July day recorded in Britain, based solely on a reading of 36.7 degrees Celsius (98 degrees Fahrenheit) made at Heathrow airport? 

When the blogger Paul Homewood (on Notalotofpeopleknowthat) tracked down four weather stations around Heathrow, none showed readings on July 1 above 35.1. He wondered how far the Met Office figure might have been influenced by the siting of its Heathrow temperature gauge, shown by aerial photographs to be surrounded by heat-radiating Tarmac and near a runway.

I have said this previously. If global warming is so obvious, why is it necessary to lie?

Article: Feds: Don't expect winter to be polar vortex redux

If you thought last winter was a horror show, with cold blasts from the polar vortex and a lack of California rain, here's some good news: No sequel is expected this year, federal forecasters say. 

Mike Halpert of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that the upcoming winter looks pretty average in general. He doesn't expect a lot of extreme conditions like last year's cold outbreaks when Arctic air dipped south with the polar vortex. 

"A repeat of last winter is not particularly likely," said Halpert, acting director of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Okay, that makes 2 recent predictions (see posts below) saying we are going to have a repeat, and one saying not.

NOAA didn't predict last winter's extremes in last year's winter forecast.

It is not reassuring that NOAA didn't predict last year's winter accurately.

And, of course, the models that make long-range weather forecasts are related to those that make the global warming and climate change forecasts.

The articles reports on predictions by several models. The NOAA prediction is the warmest of all them.

Article: New York Gets Frigid Winter Warning From Siberia Snowfall

The snow in Siberia is piling up, and if it keeps coming, people in New York may have to bundle up this winter. 

There’s a theory that the amount of snow covering Eurasia in October is an indication of how much icy air will sweep down from the Arctic in December and January, pouring over parts of North America, Europe and East Asia.

There is no mention, either way, of global warming or anthropogenic climate change in the article. Routinely, the media links every weather event, somehow, no matter how tenuous the link, to one or the other.

Siberia is already cold, laying down thick snow. This causes Siberia to reflect more heat, more quickly, into space, cooling faster. Between the cold air of Siberia, the cold area of the Arctic, and the normally cold air of Canada, we might be in for a very cold, and snowy, winter.

Last year, the snow level across Eurasia was the fourth highest for the month in records going back to 1967. 

The last time this happened, the 1960's, was in the middle of a period of cooling that led to the "coming ice age" stories of the very early 1970's.

Cohen is trying to understand what makes snow pile up in Eurasia. His hypothesis is that the melting of the Arctic ice cap has put more moisture into the atmosphere, which provides fuel for the higher snowfall. He said he hasn’t been able to discover a solid link between the two.

Whoops! I was wrong! They did try to link cold, snowy weather to global warming.

So the period of the "coming global ice age" was also a period of global warming. Who knew?

Article: NASA study finds 1934 had worst North American drought of last thousand years

Summary:

A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium. Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America.

The Dust Bowl, in the middle of the Great Depression, was a large human and ecological disaster. Large amounts of farm soil blew off the farms of the Midwest so that dust was falling in New York City.

Two sets of conditions led to the severity and extent of the 1934 drought. First, a high-pressure system in winter sat over the west coast of the United States and turned away wet weather -- a pattern similar to that which occurred in the winter of 2013-14. Second, the spring of 1934 saw dust storms, caused by poor land management practices, suppress rainfall. 

"In combination then, these two different phenomena managed to bring almost the entire nation into a drought at that time," said co-author Richard Seager….

Farms in the Midwest now practice a variety of conservation methods to reduce the chance of this happening again.

This type of high-pressure system is part of normal variation in the atmosphere, and whether or not it will appear in a given year is difficult to predict in computer models of the climate. 

These droughts, the recent California drought and the 1934 Dust Bowl are normal parts of the climate and weather of North America.

This will need to be repeated because activists will try to claim every burp and hiccup in the weather as PROOF of anthropogenic climate change.

Article: BRUTALLY COLD 2014-15 WINTER SHAPING UP FOR THE UNITED STATES

Winter 2014-15 looks like a repeat of 2014-15.

Lots of information in the link.

[Updated] Article: Some of 2013's weirdest weather had the fingerprints of man-made climate change, studies show

Organized by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...

Sorry, NOAA has lost a lot credibility with the real scandals surrounding its data. Their massaged weather data is beginning to differ more and more from the NASA satellite data which result, instead, from the direct measure of the temperature of the entire earth.

Researchers found that climate change increased the odds of nine extremes: Heat waves in Australia, Europe, China, Japan and Korea, intense rain in parts of the United States and India, and severe droughts in California and New Zealand. The California drought, though, comes with an asterisk.

A very large asterisk. A study in a post below notes that the California drought is due to a lack of warming. And I have read repeatedly that the drought is due to a normal weather pattern that recurs on a regular basis.

Additionally, all the most recent IPCC reports, including the leaked portions of the most current ones, downplay this exact claim.

Scientists couldn't find a global warming link to an early South Dakota blizzard, freak storms in Germany and the Pyrenees, heavy rain in Colorado, southern and central Europe, and a cold British spring.

These were not due to global warming. These were scientifically shown to be acts of God.

For years, scientists said they could not attribute single weather events — like a drought, heat wave or storm — to man-made global warming. But with better computer models and new research, in some cases scientists can see how the odds of events increase — or not — because of climate change. 

Are these the same models that have predicted the global warming that has not occurred in almost 20 years?

Other researchers question the usefulness and accuracy of focusing on single extreme events.

That is wise.

The editors of the 108-page compilation of studies wrote that people and animals tend to be more affected by extreme weather than changes in averages, so they pay attention to it. The public often connects extreme events to climate change, sometimes wrongly, so scientific analysis like this "can help inform the public's understanding of our changing environment."

So we now have science to confirm people's wrong view of extreme weather events?

The Stanford team ran computer models with and without man-made warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas. The warming from greenhouse gases showed that the rain-blocking ridge of high pressure was more than three times more likely with man-made factors than without, Swain said.

"There's definitely a climate change signal," Swain said.

Since we have had no global warming for almost 20 years, they found a connection between the nonexistent global warming and the real drought?

Even if the models were right, because of the lack of warming they say nothing about this drought.

The California drought research has an asterisk because only one of three studies claim to find a link between climate change and the drought. Third one should not have been published, given the obvious lack of validity.

[Update]. Three studies done and reported in the same issue of a journal. Two of them find no link to global warming. One does. Guess which one gets reported in the media?

If you guessed the one I noted above that is invalid, but claiming a connection between warming and the drought, you would be right.

Article: The fickle El Niño of 2014

As per a post below, computer models had predicted a major El Nino event for this year. However, reality failed to match the models.

The height of the ocean water relates, in part, to its temperature, and thus is an indicator of the amount of heat stored in the ocean below. As the ocean warms, the water expands and the sea level rises; as it cools, its level falls. Above-normal height variations along the equatorial Pacific indicate El Niño conditions, while below-normal height variations indicate La Niña conditions. The temperature of the upper ocean can have a significant influence on weather patterns and climate.

In other words, the oceans have not warmed as predicted by the global warming models and therefore the El Nino models were not accurate as well.

Climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, says it's too early to know for sure, but he would not be surprised if the latest Kelvin waves are the "last hurrah" for this much-hoped-for El Niño. 

Major El Nino events are "much-hoped-for" because major events are connected to episodes of global warming. The last big "spike" in warming occurred during an El Nino year, 1998. We have had no warming (and maybe a slight cooling trend) since then.

Scientists warn that unless these developing weak-to-modest El Niño conditions strengthen, the drought-stricken American West shouldn't expect any relief.

In other words, the drought in the West is a natural event, not due to climate change or global warming. It is, in effect, related to the absence of warming.

Article: The Iberian Peninsula endured tropical storms in the 18th century and severe droughts in Islamic times

While we do not have day-to-day weather data from before about 1850, weather data can be teased out of contemporaneous reports.

For example, because of documentation in the Iberian Peninsula (called "Al-Andalus") under Islamic rulers, we know that the peninsula experienced periods of drought, some long and some short.

"By collecting these events, we can say that there were important droughts in Al-Andalus between the 748-754, 812-823 and 867-879 periods in which we have come across plenty of references to droughts and related famines, which even led to people emigrating to North Africa," states Domínguez.

Additionally, weather data collected in 1724 indicate that a large tropical storm (a precursor to hurricanes) swept over the Peninsula.

Over 100,000 observations from that period taken in 16 towns such as Cadiz, Madrid, Badajoz, Palma de Mallorca, Valencia, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Palencia or La Coruña have been digitalised. This has shown the existence of high rainfall anomalies, such as that of 1780 or the cold period felt throughout Europe the year after the great eruption of the Mount Tambora volcano (Indonesia) in 1815.

One of the major problems with the "global warming is causing climate change" meme are the over-hyped predictions for "extreme weather." Extreme weather, such as droughts in the Iberian Peninsula or California, are normal, but irregular, features of the world's climate.

Article: Mythologies and Pathologies of the California Drought

The current drought is a product of nature, which has a bad periodic habit of withholding rain and snow over California, a natural occurring and long-recorded phenomenon that has nothing to do with global warming. We used to accept that fact and its corollary: most Californians preferred to live where there was the least amount of state rain and snow — and were willing to pay for the necessary infrastructure to make showering in Malibu or Monterey as natural as in Crescent City or Lake Tahoe.

The drought is caused by a long-term kink the Jet Stream. Air masses have become "stuck" and a dry one is over California for the time being. Sometimes these last for years. Sometimes for decades.

[T]he California coastal strip is an environmentally unwise place to locate millions of Californians; its swarms exist largely by water transfers from either Northern California or the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The Coast gets its water from the far eastern part of the state. In between is the "Central Valley" where so much of America's produce is grown using irrigation water. The same water the Coast wants. Who wins? A few farmers? Or the wealthy, populous, connected, wired Coast?

Article: America's Weather-Tracking Satellites Are in Trouble

[The] polar-orbiting satellites, a primary and its backup, are the ones in crisis. The primary satellite—a short-term pathfinder built to test emerging technologies—was never really intended for use. Its backup isn't much better: an aging satellite with failing sensors that passed its predicted life expectancy last year. We would send up a replacement now, but it's still being built. When it is ready, should it survive launch, it could take until as late as 2018 to transmit usable data.

"If we can send someone to the moon, why can't we...." That is a well-known cliche. But NASA and NOAA actually cannot any longer "send someone to the moon."

NASA sent someone to the moon because there was the money, the vision, and the people available to carry it out. We went from a proposal by President Kennedy to launching Gemini space craft (though not the moon mission itself) in less time that it is going to take to complete and send up an already planned weather satellite.

For most of the 1970s and '80s a partnership between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ensured that we always had two fully operational birds flying, with a backup in the barn. It was, says James Gleason, senior NASA scientist, a golden age. That all changed in 1994, when President Clinton tried to cut costs by combining the NOAA and Department of Defense weather-satellite programs. The marriage was doomed from the start. Both organizations came with top-heavy bureaucracies and their own specific needs. Together they formed a dysfunctional agency defined by budget overruns, infighting, and passive– aggressive stalemates. In all the turmoil, work on any new satellites slowed to a crawl, and any surplus dried up. By the time President Obama separated the two organizations in 2010, NOAA had to scramble to pull together a new program. As a stopgap, it sent up the only option left, our current satellite—that demonstration model, with a life span of only three to five years.

Sigh. Good intentions, trying to cut costs by cutting bureaucracy and doubling-up on missions. It could have worked, if someone had gone through and pruned the new agency of excess personnel. When a business acquires a new company, they will often fire a number of employees. But that is hard to do in the government.