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Newsweek Blames Midwest Floods on
Global Warming
Noel Sheppard
NewsBusters
Monday, June 30, 2008
Newsweek's senior editor Sharon Begley has taken it upon herself to
publicly declare the recent floods in the Midwest are being caused by
global warming.
Those familiar with her work shouldn't be even slightly surprised by
this, as Begley was the person responsible for the August 13, 2007, Newsweek
cover story "Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine"
which evoked widespread criticism including from one of her fellow editors.
Regardless, Begley is at it again with an article in the upcoming issue
of Newsweek disgracefully entitled, "Global Warming Is a Cause of
This Year’s Extreme Weather" (emphasis added throughout):
The frequency of downpours and heat waves, as well as the power of
hurricanes, has increased so dramatically that "100-year storms"
are striking some areas once every 15 years, and other once rare events
keep returning like a bad penny. As a result, some climatologists now
say global warming is to blame. Rising temperatures boost the probability
of extreme weather, says Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic
Data Center and lead author of a new report from the Bush administration's
Climate Change Science Program; that can "lead to the type of events
we are seeing in the Midwest." There, three weeks of downpours
have caused rivers to treat their banks as no more than mild suggestions.
Think of it this way: if once we experienced one Noachian downpour every
20 years, and now we suffer five, four are likely man-made.
As is her typical modus operandi, Begley chose not to offer any balance
concerning this recent report, or identify that top scientists around
the world have been critical of both its findings and the lead author.
As the University of Colorado at Boulder's Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr. wrote
on June 20:
This report perpetuates the use of assessments to promote a particular
perspective on climate change, such as they write in the Executive Summary
“It is well established through formal attribution studies that
the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced
increases in heat-trapping gases. Such studies have only recently been
used to determine the causes of some changes in extremes at the scale
of a continent. Certain aspects of observed increases in temperature
extremes have been linked to human influences. The increase in heavy
precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor,
and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.”
This claim conflicts with the 2005 National Research Council report
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change:
Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative
Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board
on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies,
The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp where a diversity
of human climate forcings were found to alter global average radiative
warming, including from atmospheric aersosols and due to the deposition
of soot on snow and ice. The claim of an increase in atmospheric water
vapor conflicts with a variety of observations as summarized on Climate
Science (e.g. see).
To further illustrate the bias in the report, the assessment chose
to ignore peer reviewed research that raises serious questions with
respect to the temperature data that is used in their report. As just
one example, they ignored research where we have shown major problems
in the use of surface air temperature measurements to diagnose long
term temperature trends including temperature extremes.
Pielke concluded (emphasis his):
Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as
providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should
be questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing
these reports in which they are using them to promote their own perspective
on the climate, and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that
disagree with their viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious
conflict of interest.
Of course, Begley chose not to offer her readers an opposing view, and
just continued with the hysteria:
The Midwest, for instance, suffered three weeks of intense rain in
May and June, with more than five inches falling on some days. That
brought a reprise of the area's 1993 flooding, which was thought to
be a once-in-500-years event. The proximate cause was the western part
of the jet stream dipping toward the Gulf of Mexico, then rising toward
Iowa—funneling moisture from the gulf to the Midwest, says meteorologist
Bill Gallus of (the very soggy) Iowa State University. The puzzle, he
says, is why the trough kept reforming in the west, creating a rain-carrying
conveyor belt that, like a nightmarish version of a Charlie Chaplin
movie, wouldn't turn off. One clue is that global warming has caused
the jet stream to shift north. That has brought, and will continue to
bring, more tropical storms to the nation's north, and may push around
the jet stream in other ways as well.
Interesting that Begley cited Bill Gallus, but chose to ignore some of
his other opinions concerning the floods, as well as those of one of his
colleagues. For instance, as reported by Radio Iowa on June 10 (emphasis
added):
The recent spate of wet weather that's stormed over Iowa is very similar
to what happened 15 years ago. Iowa State University meteorology professor
Bill Gallus has reviewed the data.
"In many ways, the pattern we've had the last two or three weeks
is very similar to what lasted for a much longer time in 1993,"
Gallus says. [...]
Iowa State University meteorologist Bill Gutowski says so-called "climate
change" might be a part of this weather equation, but it's too
soon to say. "There are physical reasons as well as results from
models that indicate that we could expect more intense rainfall events
occurring in a much warmer climate, but it'd be really hard to say based
on what's going on this year that this is directly an outcome of global
warming," Gutowski says. "We would need to see that the...frequency
of those events is increasing."
According to Gutowski, one of the challenges researchers face is there
are "natural fluctuations" in the climate system, so weather
data from a single year is just not indicative of any trend.
Sadly, people like Begley choose to ignore such natural fluctuations,
and, instead, blame everything on man.
On the other hand, Gallus did attach one cause of this year's flooding
to humans, but not in a fashion that supported Begley's hysteria as reported
by Iowa's Gazette on June 6 (emphasis added):
The rains' effect on Eastern Iowa streams and rivers is exaggerated
by the lack of crops in nearby fields, said Bill Gallus, Iowa State
University professor of meteorology.
"Most of the crops were delayed getting in," said Gallus.
"That tends to lead to more water running off into streams and
rivers" because there's no vegetation to catch runoff.
Such facts pertaining to the Midwest floods eluded Begley, much as
they did with her following declaration: "Hurricanes have become
more powerful due to global warming."
Really, Sharon? That's not what hurricane experts such as William Gray
and Christopher Landsea believe. In fact, if you've been paying attention,
even some of the folks cited by Nobel Laureate Al Gore have changed their
minds concerning a connection between global warming and tropical storms
including Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson.
But why should their opinions matter when you're on a roll?
Of course, the last time Begley was so reckless with her reporting, one
of her colleagues, contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, called the
piece "fundamentally misleading" and "highly contrived."
We can only hope her most recent addition to this debate is similarly
derided.
—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
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