Video: Drought, Hurricanes and Heat Waves – 2012 in Perspective

Full Title: Drought, Hurricanes and Heat Waves – Climate Change and Global Warming in the United States – 2012 in Perspective

In this video, we’ll examine the exceptional and historic nature of the recent drought in the United States and see how well the IPCC’s climate models simulated precipitation in the US since 1900 and we’ll look at how well the models performed globally during the satellite era.

We’ll examine hurricane data in an effort to put the 2012 season into perspective, and we’ll plot the sea surface temperatures along Sandy’s storm track to see the impact of global warming on that hurricane.  We’ll also determine how well the climate models simulated the sea surface temperatures along Sandy’s track.

There was also a heat wave in the United States in 2012. Should heat waves occur more often in a warming world and how well do the IPCC’s climate models simulate US land surface air temperatures?

Last, we’ll briefly discuss global warming in general.

SOURCES

Regional and Contiguous U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index data is available from NOAA here. The NOAA data for the U.S. National Percent Area that’s Moderately to Extremely Dry can be found at the webpage here.

The gridded NCDC precipitation data is available on a gridded basis through the KNMI Climate Explorer, as are the CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) climate model outputs, the HADISST and ERSST.v3b sea surface temperature data, the CAMS-OPI global precipitation data and the GHCN-CAMS land air surface temperature dataset.

The Reynolds OI.v2 sea surface temperature data can be downloaded on a gridded basis through the NOAA NOMADS website here.

SHAMELESS PLUG – INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?

As shown in this post, El Niño and La Niña events are the primary causes of regional precipitation variability throughout the globe. (The ENSO-related comparison graphs in this post are new. They were not presented in my book discussed in this section.)

Also, sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.

Who Turned on the Heat? was introduced in the blog post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing. The book was updated recently to correct a few typos.

Please buy a copy. Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account. Simply scroll down to the “Don’t Have a PayPal Account” purchase option. It’s only US$8.00.

VIDEOS

For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat?, see Parts 1 and 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. You may also be interested in the video Dear President Obama: A Video Memo about Climate Change.