The ‘Terrifying Risk’ of Climate Change in Scotland
I don’t know if its my imagination, but the media seem to have gone into overdrive reporting the terrifying risks of climate change alongside too-cheap-to-meter solar and wind power that is to be our salvation.
Last week, the Sunday Herald carried one of the worst pieces of climate change doomer porn I’ve ever seen: Revealed: climate change and the terrifying risk to Scotland. One problem I have with this post is that The Herald article does not link to the reports cited. Reference is made to Scottish National Heritage (a government agency) and The UK Committee on Climate Change. Friends of The Earth and World Wildlife Fund are also mentioned.
Roger Andrews helped me out and compiled the references listed at the end of this post upon which I assume Rob Edwards reporting for the Sunday Herald used in compiling his article.
In my last post on UK flooding I felt inclined to forgive the BBC for simply reporting the dross published by accademics in Science. However, I will not forgive Rob Edwards and the editorial staff at The Herald for uncritically hyping the contents of what appear to be wildly inaccurate government and NGO reports. These government bodies must of course carry most of the blame for spreading unfounded propaganda designed to terrify and mislead the population. Why government agencies should be doing this is of course a pertinent question to ask.
This post is in three parts. First I take a look at some of the claims made in The Sunday Herald article about sea level rise and coastal erosion. The meat comes in part 3 where I take a detailed look at the existing climate record for the town of Stornoway that begins in 1873. If we are staring into the barrels of the Apocalypse Now, there must surely be ample evidence for this already written into the historic climate records.
Sea Level Rise
Rob Edwards, Sunday Herald:
The sea level around Edinburgh is expected to rise by between 20 and 40 centimetres by 2090.
That amounts to 2.7-5.48 mm / year.
I am no expert in analysing sea level data and so I asked Roger Andrews, who is, to take a look. Roger got back with this reply and composite chart.
I can’t do much on Scotland sea levels because there’s only one half-way-decent long-term tide gauge record in the country – Aberdeen (a composite of two records; first graph). The other records are either too short to do anything with or garbage (second graph). The third graph shows Stornoway in case you are interested.
Figure 1 Tide gauage records for Aberdeen, The Firth of Forth and Stornoway. Charts courtesy of Roger Andrews. Data from PSMSL. Aberdeen is the only long record, and it shows continuous sea level rise since about 1900. There is no sign of recent acceleration. There are multiple reasons for not trusting the composite profile for The Forth, amongst other things coal mining, sediment loading, three different widely spaced localities and Urban development around Leith.
The interpretation of sea level from tide gage data is not straightforward and a number of factors need to be taken into account:
- The volume of water in the ocean basins
- The volume and geometry of the ocean basins
- Isostasy and the rise or fall of land relative to sea level
It is normally the volume of water that people think about, when it comes to sea level, that may rise or fall depending upon ice volumes, fresh water volumes and temperature. In Scotland it is also important to consider isostasy which is the rise of the land in response to the melting of the last ice sheet 12,000 years ago. Rising land gives the impression of relative sea level falling while melting glaciers and warming oceans cause actual sea level to rise.
I don’t want to get embroiled in a too detailed discussion and suffice to say that Aberdeen appears to be the only reasonable quality, long record and it shows a linear increase in sea level since 1900, albeit a rather ragged profile. The rate of increase is a harmless ~1.2 mm/y. This is the net result of water rising faster than rising land (isostasy).
Coastal Erosion
Rob Edwards, Sunday Herald:
Major parts of Scotland’s vital infrastructure are under threat from coastal erosion and flooding, according to the latest government assessments of the dangers of climate change.
Thousands of homes and businesses and long stretches of roads and railway lines are also at risk. So are power stations, wind farms, sewers, bridges, and farmland, as well as many other crucial facilities and even golf courses.
And this Scottish National Heritage report says this:
Nearly a fifth of Scotland’s coastline is at risk of erosion, threatening some of the country’s most prized land and infrastructure within the next 30 years.
This surprised me because I already suspected that most of Scotlands coastline is rocky and not subject to immediate breach by erosion. So I did a little checking.
This Scottish National Heritage report (table 1.1) says that between 6.5 and 8.1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Scotland’s coastline comprises sandy beaches, some with sand dune systems that protect the low lying landward machair from storm surge flooding. A lot of this sandy coastline lies in the low density population areas of the highlands and islands where there is little high capital infrastructure at risk.
Its impossible for me to reconcile the doom laden rhetoric with reality. The academics should be saying that 92{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Scotland’s coastline is rocky and is well-protected from imagined deteriorating climate change and sea level rise.
Aberdeen lies at the south end of one of the longest sand beach and dune systems in Scotland. Just north of the city lies Balmedie Beach, a spot I have visited regularly for over 40 years. A little bit further north is Donald Trump’s famous (notorious for many) golf course on the Menie Estate. Forty years ago this area was largely deserted. But today, given a spot of sunshine, it is overrun with people. At Balmedie I have observed the destruction of marram grass cover and the erosion of dunes by several meters by the action of thousands of feet.
Figure 2 School children causing severe dammage to the dune system at Balmedie.
The Climate Hitory of Stornoway
Stornoway (population ~12,000) is the only major town on the Island of Lewis on the outer Hebrides of Scotland. Scotland has 10 climate stations that appear on the main Met Office server (Figure 3), but only Stornoway has a long record that begins in 1873 and that is the reason I chose Stornoway to represent the climate history of Scotland. The climate station is located at the airport, 15 above sea level. I dare say there was no airport in 1873 and the possibility exists that the records are perturbed by the encroachment of 20th century infrastructure. If there are man-made perturbations, I cannot spot them.
Figure 3 Locations of Scottish main climate recording stations (Wick is obscured). Screen cap from the Met Office data download centre. Bottom left is Belfast in N Ireland.
The UK Met Office stations record daily maximum temperature and daily minimum temperature and these daily figures are rolled into monthly means (Figures 4 and 5). The number of days when there is air frost are also recorded and rolled into monthly totals (Figure 6). Total monthly rainfall and sunshine are also recorded (Figures 7 and 8).
The reason for showing these charts, summarising monthly climate data from 1873, is to allow the reader to make up their own mind about the evidence that exists for an unfolding climate catastrophe. Indeed, the idea that a climate catastrophe is unfolding in Scotland must surely be based on evidence like that shown in this series of charts.
Figure 4
Figure 5 This is one of the most significant charts since a monthly mean minimum temperature <0˚C is the result of extreme cold conditions. Stornoway sits on the margin of the Atlantic Ocean and is bathed by the tepid waters of the Gulf Stream. The first cold cycle ends in 1902. The second cold cycle begins with a bang in January 1945 and ends in 1986 (41 years). The cold event of Dec 2010 is significant since it may mark the beginning of a new cold cycle. Months with <0˚C mean temperature span December to March with a focus on February and a surprising large number in March. From 1902 to 1945 months with mean minimum temperature <0˚C were virtually absent. The same applies to the period 1986 to 2010.
Figure 6 The rise and fall of monthly airfrost days, unsurprisingly, follows the pattern of monthly mean <0˚C days shown in Figure 5. Note the spike in 2010.
Figure 7 The two wettest months by far are December 1898 and December 1900. Scientific instinct tells me these should be linked to large volcanic eruptions, but none are recorded at this time.
Figure 8 The sunshine records begin in 1929.
In order to illustrate any trends it is necessary to role the data into 1 year averages or totals. The annual temperature averages have been converted to anomalies (dT) by deducting the mean of the whole 143 year series (1874 to 2016) from each annual mean value.
This exercise reveals cyclical variation in the data (~60 years?) and regressions show the maximum temperatures increasing at a harmless 0.6˚C per century and the minimum temperatures increasing at 1.1˚C per century.
Figure 9 A feature of many climate records is that they display cyclicity on a multi-decade scale. In the N Atlantic realm this is often attributed to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) or a combination of these. The record for Stornoway begins in a cyclical cold phase and ends in a cyclical warm phase. It is this coincidence that is largely responsible for the small positive gradient that runs through the data, and, for example, starting in a warm phase and ending in a cold phase (1898 to 1996) produces a totally flat gradient (-0.05˚C per century). Ignoring the cyclical coincidence, the rate of warming is still a harmless 0.6˚C per century.
Figure 10 The rate of temperature rise in the minimum (night time) temperatures is somewhat higher at 1.1˚C per century. Stornoway is remote and isolated from urban heating. The airport was opened in 1937 and changes to the IR radiative properties of the climate recording site may have something to do with this.
Figure 11 The total number of days per year with air frost is declining at a rate of 11 days per year per century. This is in keeping with the observation of gradual warming, however, there is a clear cyclical pattern with a period of lower air frost days from about 1910 to 1946 and from about 1980 to 2010. Looking at the series of mean monthly minimum temperatures confirms this cyclical pattern (Figure 5). This observation is important. To register a mean monthly minimum temperature that is negative is the result of a prolonged period of frosty nights. This does not happen every year. But in Stornoway from 1874 to 1902 this occurred on a regular basis on 18 monthly occasions. And then not at all for the next 43 years until 1945. But then prolonged frosts returned and persisted until 1986 before once again stopping in the more recent warmer spell. Like the temperature charts, much of the gradient seen here is down to the data series beginning on a cyclical high and ending on a cyclical low.
Read more at euanmearns.com
Trackback from your site.