Lüning: Major Austrian Study Showing “Fewer Weather Extremes Today” Causes Jaws To Drop

Yesterday I posted on a new study written by Reinhard Böhm of Austria’s Leading Weather and Climate Agency ZAMG.

His comprehensive, peer-reviewed paper found that there has been no increase in weather extremes in the Austrian Alps – surprising the world’s climate scientists. This study in my view is really big, and is upsetting the Climate Establishment in Europe. Dr. Böhm is quickly becoming the new enfant terrible.

Geologist Sebastian Lüning now provides additional details at his Die kalte Sonne website. I’ve translated his essay (with some editing).

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Surprise! Fewer Weather Extremes in the Alps Region
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning

The climate is going crazy and everything is getting more extreme. It’s only a question of time before the planet gets destroyed. This is what experts close to the IPCC have been telling us for some years now. But now a scientist has taken a closer look at the hard data and has found something truly amazing. Reinhard Böhm of the Central Administration for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna has examined dataseries from 58 locations in the Alps, some of which go back to the year 1760. All the data is available in the Internet. Böhm published the study in the European Physical Journal.“

As expected also in Austria there has been a warming over the last 200 years, like almost everywhere else on the planet. That is expected and simply represents the transition from the Little Ice Age to the Modern Warm Period. The question that Böhm investigated, however, is: Did the weather get more cranky and more extreme during this time?

Austrian newspaper Die Presse here wrote:

Whether it is snowfall, heavy rains, storms or dry spells: After every notable weather event the media and experts are quick to explain that the increased frequency of extreme events of the recent past and of the coming future is due to man-made climate change. Hardly anyone questioned this claim – except for one person: Reinhard Böhm […]. In his recent research work, he evaluated up to 250 years of old weather data of the Alps region. The result even surprised him. The core message: An increased frequency of weather extremes caused by climate change – at least in the Alps region – could not be detected.”

In a press release of the Institute the stunning results were more shown in more detail (Figure 1) (see the article in Der Standard):

[On] the often quoted increase in weather extremes, this however has not been the case in the Alps. Completely to the contrary: ‘The temperature fluctuations have even decreased over the last decades,‘ summed up climatologist and study author Reinhard Böhm. […] The results of the study have left the scientists amazed.

Result No. 1: Over the last 250 years, the seasonal and annual fluctuation ranges of hot-cold, dry-wet have not gotten more extreme.

Result No. 2: Also over the last 30 years, which have been greatly impacted by man, there has been no trend to more variability when compared to the decades before.

And finally Result No. 3: The long-term development of temperature, precipitation and atmospheric pressure show two long waves of variability with a cycle of about 100 years. The climate was more variable (‘crazier”) in the middle of both past centuries, less variable (‘quieter’) at the start and end of the centuries.“

The last point is very important. As geological studies of the past 10,000 years have shown, natural cycles play an important role in the variability of the climate (see our past blog articles.

Figure 1: Changes in climate variability in southern central Europe over the past two centuries. Attention: NOT shown are the absolute values. Only the anomalies. Graphic source: ZMAG.

For the IPCC faithful, these results are quite unexpected. For years they have been claiming just the opposite. Austrian television ORF here writes:

Böhm’s study stands in contradiction to other studies that show a global increase in weather events is detected. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research spoke of a “Decade of Weather Extremes”. Also in March 2012 a Report by the IPCC showed more extreme weather events and, among other things, it is highly likely that periods of drought will occur more often over the coming decades  – in many regions of the world, among them also Central Europe.“

Böhm takes these these alarmist colleagues especially to task. What is it that is driving some scientists to always want to observe everywhere only a worsening of the climate? Die Presse writes:

Böhm doesn’t hold back on criticizing the PR work of some colleagues. To save the world from climate change, one needs lots of attention. Claims that weather extremes accompany temperature increase may be wonderful for marketing yourself, but it has got nothing to do with reality.’ “

It is wonderful to see that there is a push-back by climate scientists and that solid data and evidence is slowly gaining the upper hand. The study shows once again the importance of datasets that go far back into the past. Today’s climate can only be properly assessed when put in a historical context.
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15 responses to “Lüning: Major Austrian Study Showing “Fewer Weather Extremes Today” Causes Jaws To Drop”

  1. DirkH

    “Böhm doesn’t hold back on criticizing the PR work of some colleagues. To save the world from climate change, one needs lots of attention”

    We surely don’t need to save the world from climate change, especially not from warming.

    History channel about the Dark Ages
    They take a lot of care not to mention the cooling of the climate after the Roman Optimum or the climate during the Dark Ages but near the end they say
    1:27:00 “Europe got somewhat warmer starting around the year 1000”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8XVWNygDVk&feature=endscreen

  2. Casper

    Ha, ha, ha, have read that?
    http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article106381000/100-Prozent-Oekostrom-aber-nur-fuer-ein-paar-Stunden.html

    It’s like Radio Yerevan jokes

    A question for Radio Yerevan:
    Is it true that Ivan Ivanovitsh has won a red car in a lottery?
    Answer:
    Basically yes, he has. However, his name wasn’t Ivan Ivanovitsh, but Piotr Petrovitsh.
    And he hasn’t had a car, but he has had a bike.
    He hasn’t won it, but his bike has been stolen.
    Any other details were correct…

    1. Ulrich Elkmann

      Not quite – the state media did not tell you all those [Armenian], well, politically incorrect, jokes (Well, they did, but you were supposed to act as if you believed them…)
      One Russian equivalent:
      Армянское радио спрашивают:
      — Правда ли, что шахматист Петросян выиграл в лотерею тысячу рублей?
      — Правда, только не шахматист Петросян, а футболист «Арарата» Акопян, и не тысячу, а десять тысяч, и не рублей, а долларов, и не в лотерею, а в карты, и не выиграл, а проиграл.
      (Armenian Radio: – Is it true that the chess player Petrosjan did win a thousand rubles in the lottery? – It is true, but it was not the chess player Petrosian, but the football player “Ararat” Akopjan, and it was not a thousand, but ten thousand, and they were not rubles, but dollars, and he did not win them, but lost them, and it wasn’t in the lottery, but a cheque.)

    2. DirkH

      So, for the English speaking fellows: the reason that this might work on Monday is that it’s a public holiday and an extended weekend so industry demand for electricity is very low, and it is a traditional day for the Germans to do some outdoor activities, mostly consisting of beer and BBQ, so private demand is also low.

      No doubt the conformists will use this “success” as propaganda for the rest of the year.

      Of course the OTHER energy we use – the 6/7th of our energy consumption that are not electricity – are not affected at all…

  3. Ric Werme

    Cute – we have jaws dropping here, while WUWT has faces getting palmed today.

    From http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/26/facepalm-gores-dirty-energy-dirty-weather-claims-about-the-us-are-laughable-in-the-context-of-other-countries/ :
    Gore, who owns CurrentTV and appeared alongside former Obama administration “green jobs czar” Van Jones, explained that “dirty energy and dirty money” are thwarting a green economy. And that, according to the former vice president, is behind “dirty weather” due to “extreme climate events.”

  4. DirkH

    Found this quote on Nigel Cook’s blog:

    Dr Imre Lakatos explains the way forward in his article ‘Science and Pseudo-Science’:

    ‘Scientists have thick skins. They do not abandon a theory merely because facts contradict it. They normally either invent some rescue hypothesis to explain what they then call a mere anomaly or, if they cannot explain the anomaly, they ignore it, and direct their attention to other problems. Note that scientists talk about anomalies, recalcitrant instances, not refutations. History of science, of course, is full of accounts of how crucial experiments allegedly killed theories. But such accounts are fabricated long after the theory had been abandoned. … What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. Now, how do scientific revolutions come about? If we have two rival research programmes, and one is progressing while the other is degenerating, scientists tend to join the progressive programme. This is the rationale of scientific revolutions. … Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones.’

    – Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudo-Science, pages 96-102 of Godfrey Vesey (editor), Philosophy in the Open, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1974.

  5. Mindert Eiting

    The result does not really amaze me. Temperature distributions are not normal but skewed with a long left tail in the lower temperatures. In skewed distributions mean and variance are correlated. With the increasing temperatures of the past 200 years the variance must drop if the skewness remains the same. Apparently, the latter did not change, which may be the most interesting feature: sometimes we have extreme colds (left tail) but almost never extreme warms (right tail).

  6. Juraj V.

    I tested the standard deviation of some European long-term daily temp/precip records, whether their standard deviation, e.g. daily extremes increase. The result was the same – no trend or even slight downward trend.

  7. DirkH

    Green antidemocratic ideology:

    If this turns out to be true, it’s very alarming:
    The Greens, rulers of Baden-Württemberg, plan to change municipital electron law of the land to force ALL parties to have equally many women as men on their candidate list. They tried this earlier in federal politics but it was ruled unconstitutional. Now they try again in their very own fiefdom.

    (The writer of the article sarcastically points out that the planned law tramples all over the rights of the transsexuals.)

    http://nachrichten.t-online.de/gruene-gleichstellungspolitik-in-baden-wuerttemberg-geschlechtergerechte-zwangsbeglueckung/id_56542102/index?news

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