June 11, 2009
Colloquium Topic: Climate Change
How much has climate really changed? Why climate models get it wrong? How much of a role does man have in climate change compared to natural variability - volcanism, cycles on the sun and in the oceans? We heard official NOAA press releases announcing 2008 was the 8th warmest in 127 years. Yet the NASA satellite record shows the year for the globe was the coldest this decade and 14th coldest in the 30 years of satellite monitoring. We will show why this is the more reliable record for change assessment. We will show how issues with the United States and especially the global data bases make them inadequate to use for trend analysis and thus any important policy decisions based on climate change. These issues include inadequate adjustments for urban data, bad instrument siting, use of instruments with proven biases that are not adjusted for, major global station dropout, an increase in missing monthly data and questionable adjustment practices. We will reconstruct with the best data we have, how the temperatures have changed over time. We will see cycles of climate on all different time scales from decadal to hundreds of thousands of years. We will show how carbon dioxide can't be a primary driver for climate change and why the more important greenhouse gas, water vapor and the clouds that result, actually serve as a negative feedback instead of the positive feedback assumed by the climate models that produces most of the warming. We will show how, as a result, these models are failing in their forecasts with 8 years of cooling instead of steeply rising global temperatures, decreasing instead of increasing ocean heat content and slowing instead of accelerating sea level rises. We will show how multidecadal and longer cycles on the oceans and sun and volcanic activity fit the cyclical changes in the temperature data and each other and how the current and forecast states of these cycles suggest significant cooling not warming in our future. We will look at glaciers, and icecaps and show how they too are influenced by these same forcings and how recent changes are consistent with past changes.
Colloquium Speaker: Joseph D’Aleo
Joseph D’Aleo received his BS and MS in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin and was in the doctoral program at NYU. He was a professor of Meteorology and Climatology at Lyndon State College. Joe left Lyndon to become First Director of Meteorology and co-founder of the cable TV Weather Channel in 1981. He left The Weather Channel to become Chief Meteorologist at Weather Services International (WSI) in 1988. He also designed the content for Intellicast.com and did weekly stories on weather and climate as “Dr. Dewpoint”. He also was involved in product development for systems and data at WSI and worked R&D for statistical climate models used operationally in their energy and agricultural seasonal and long range forecasting. He partnered with 6 others in a commodity hedge fund that traded in energy and agriculture for 4 years. Currently he does weekly and daily agricultural forecasts for WSI and seasonal outlooks and has resumed weekly climate and weather stories for their web site Intellicast. In addition, Joe is Executive Director of ICECAP (http://icecap.us), a very popular web site devoted to climate change. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. He was also a Councilor and Chair of the Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting. He has chaired or co-chaired national conferences for the AMS and the National Weather Association.