Benny Peiser last week sent ’round a note on his CCNet list about a study just published by Hai Xu and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the solar-climate link. “New study – Solar Activity is Primary Driving Force of Climate Change” was Benny’s subject line.

The paper wasn’t on line for free, so it took me a few days to swing by the university library and pick up a copy. It was worth it – a very interesting paper, suggesting some tantalizing long-term climate-solar links. But it doesn’t say what Benny and the other climate skeptics who have been so approvingly linking to it seem to think it says.

Xu and his colleagues used oxygen isotopes in peat bogs as a temperature proxy for the last 6,000 years at two sites in China. They compared this with models of solar output over the last 6,000 years and found that “temperature events … correspond well to solar perterubations during the last 6,000 years.” The problem, when I picked up the paper, is that the time scale did not appear fine enough to tease out the temperature increase of the last 100 years, and Xu et al., in the paper’s text, were silent on the question. So I wrote him and asked if he felt their work supported a solar explanation for the warming of the last 100 years. His response:

As you have noticed, because the time resolution of peat deposition (in our study) is not high enough to discuss the dynamic of temperatures on interannual/interdecadal scales, we did not address the cause of the ongoing global warming in the past century.

The paper is “Temperature responses to quasi-100-yr solar variability during the past 6000 years based on delta 18 O of peat cellulose in Hongyuan, eastern Qinghai-Tibet plateau, China,” by Hai Xua, Yetang Hong, Qinghua Lin, Yongxuan Zhu, Bing Hong and Hongbo Jiang, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 230, Issues 1-2 , 17 January 2006, Pages 155-164

Rick Piltz, the guy who left the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in a highly visible way last summer, has a piece in the Dec. 27 issue of the American Geophysical Union’s Eos, calling for a “Second U.S. National Climate Change Assessment.”

Piltz argues that the National Assessment, completed in 2000, was “a pioneering experiment in stakeholder engagement and societal relevance” that has been abandoned in favor of a process “in which drafts by lead authors will undergo final review at a political level prior to being published as government documents.” In addition to complaining about a lack of independence, Piltz complains that the work just plain isn’t getting done:

These prospective reports do not amount to an integrated effort to effectively inform society and policy-makers responsible for dealing with the climate change problem…. In addition, the convoluted bureaucratic process under which these reports are being developed has led to lengthy delays in even the early stages of designing and drafting them.

Only one of 21 planned reports has even been released in draft form, Piltz complains:

The whole enterprise has become bogged down.

Although a great effort may be expended over a period of yeras by a large number of scientific expert authors and reviewers to produce these reports, the process seems designed to `run out the clock’ on eight years of this administration and about $16 billion in funding for research without even coming close to producing a coherent body of assessment work on anthropogenically-influenced climate change and its implications for national policy-making and planning.

Piltz calls for “a second U.S. National Climate Change Assessment … based on advances since the 1990s in understanding the climate system and potential ecological and societal impacts of climate change in the United States.” And he calls for the institutionalization of the process, “i.e. an ongoing dialogue between scientists, policy-makers, and other stakeholders, with periodically updated, scientifically-based assessments.”

Interesting interview with hurricane guy Kerry Emanuel in today’s New York Times.

Q. There are scientists who say of fossil fuel consumption and global warming, We may not have all the evidence yet, but we ought to be acting as if the worst could happen. Do you agree?

A. It’s always struck me as odd that this country hasn’t put far more resources into research on alternative energy. Europeans are. France has managed to go 85 percent nuclear in its electrical generation. And the Europeans have gotten together to fund a major nuclear fusion project. It almost offends my pride as a U.S. scientist that we’ve fallen down so badly in this competition.

One of our regular commenters has been asking about the effect of soot on snow. It’s an issue I don’t know much about, but Roger Pielke Sr. this morning blogs a new paper discussing the issue.

Some links for tracking drought conditions in New Mexico.

The report on climate change in New Mexico is now posted.

A couple of drought- and climate-related things in this morning’s Journal worthy of note. First, the near-term outlook from Tania Soussan:

Two meteorological forecasts out Friday confirmed what anyone who’s been outside lately already knows— New Mexico is dry as a bone.
The facts and figures in the federal reports are dire.

• New Mexico received only 11 percent of its normal rain and snowfall over the last two months, putting that time period among the five driest November-December stretches in more than a century.
• Long-term precipitation deficits have pushed Santa Fe, Jemez Springs, Las Vegas, Los Alamos and Zuni into emergency drought conditions.
• Snowpack in the Pecos, Gila and Zuni-Bluewater basins has hit record lows, and snowpack in the Canadian River Basin matched the low for the past 25 years.
• Snowmelt runoff in rivers and streams this summer is forecast to be well below normal, ranging from 24 percent of average on the San Francisco River at Clifton to 70 percent at the inflow to Costilla Reservoir.

(update: The reports Tania wrote about are on line: Charlie Liles’ drought status report and the NRCS runoff forecast.)

Second, from me, a story about a very interesting report out of a task force of state agency officials on the state’s long term climate change vulnerabilities:

New Mexico faces dwindling snowpacks and dying ski areas as the planet warms over the next century, according to a new state report on climate change.

Water supplies and ecosystems likely will suffer a one-two punch as changing climate exacerbates problems caused by a growing human population, according to the report, to be released Monday.

For farmers and ranchers, the picture is less clear, the report found, though water supply problems could make grazing and irrigation less viable.

Water systems with little or no storage, such as acequia irrigation and small municipal reservoirs, could be hit hard, according to the report.

Drought, already a significant natural problem, could get worse as population grows while global warming makes water shortages more severe.

I don’t know much about sea level and climate change (what with New Mexico being landlocked, and all….), so I’m not clear on the significance of this from John Church and Neil White at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia. They seem to be saying they’ve found heretofore undetected acceleration in sea level rise:

This acceleration is an important confirmation of climate change simulations which show an acceleration not previously observed. If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.