Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 09/14/2009 2:12:30 PM PDT by decimon
Research conducted at Texas A&M University casts doubts on the notion that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming and raises interesting questions about the relationship between El Niño and a severe flu pandemic 91 years ago. The findings are based on analysis of the 1918 El Niño, which the new research shows to be one of the strongest of the 20th century.
El Niño occurs when unusually warm surface waters form over vast stretches of the eastern Pacific Ocean and can affect weather systems worldwide. Using advanced computer models, Benjamin Giese, a professor of oceanography who specializes in ocean modeling, and his co-authors conducted a simulation of the global oceans for the first half of the 20th century and they find that, in contrast with prior descriptions, the 1918-19 El Niño was one of the strongest of the century.
Giese's work will be published in the current "Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society," and the research project was funded by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the National Science Foundation.
Giese says there were few measurements of the tropical Pacific Ocean in 1918, the last year of World War I, and the few observations that are available from 1918 are mostly along the coast of South America. "But the model results show that the El Niño of 1918 was stronger in the central Pacific, with a weaker signature near the coast," Giese explains. "Thus the limited measurements likely missed detecting the 1918 El Niño."
Giese adds, "The most commonly used indicator of El Niño is the ocean temperature anomaly in the central Pacific Ocean. By that standard, the 1918-19 El Niño is as strong as the events in 1982-83 and 1997-98, considered to be two of the strongest events on record, causing some researchers to conclude that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming. Since the 1918-19 El Niño occurred before significant warming from greenhouse gasses, it makes it difficult to argue that El Niño s have been getting stronger."
The El Niño of 1918 coincided with one of the worst droughts in India, he adds. "It is well known that there is a connection between El Niño and the failure of the Indian monsoon, just as there is a well-established connection between El Niño and Atlantic hurricane intensity," Giese says. In addition to drought in India and Australia, 1918 was also a year in which there were few Atlantic hurricanes.
The research also raises questions about El Niño and mortality from the influenza pandemic of 1918. By mid-1918, a flu outbreak – which we now know was the H1N1 strain that is of great concern today – was sweeping the world, and the resulting fatalities were catastrophic: At least 25 million people died worldwide, with some estimates as high as 100 million deaths. India was particularly hard hit by the influenza.
"We know that there is a connection between El Niño and drought in India," Giese notes.
"It seems probable that mortality from influenza was high in India because of famine associated with drought, so it is likely that El Niño contributed to the high mortality from influenza in India."
The flu epidemic of 1918, commonly called the "Spanish Flu," is believed to be the greatest medical holocaust in history. It lasted from March of 1918 to June of 1920, and about 500 million people worldwide became infected, with the disease killing between 25 million to 100 million, most of them young adults. An estimated 17 million died in India, between 500,000 to 675,000 died in the U.S. and another 400,000 died in Japan.
Could the events of 1918 be a harbinger of what might occur in 2009?
Giese says there are some interesting parallels. The winter and spring in 1918 were unusually cold throughout North America, just at the time influenza started to spread in the central U.S. That was followed by a strengthening El Niño and subsequent drought in India. As the El Niño matured in the fall of 1918, the influenza became a pandemic.
With a moderate to strong El Niño now forming in the Pacific and the H1N1 flu strain apparently making a vigorous comeback, the concerns today are obvious, Giese adds.
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Contact: Benjamin Giese at (979) 845-2306 or b-giese@tamu.edu or Keith Randall at (979) 845-4644 or keith-randall@tamu.edu
About research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world's leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $582 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
For more news about Texas A&M University, go to http://tamunews.tamu.edu.
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El crap ping.
I get it. If one thing happens after another then the first must have caused the second! This means that my Dad’s getting discharged from the National Guard on Dec 6, 1941 caused the Pearl Harbor attack.
I could be a professor! Get me grant money now!
I give this guy credit for trying to look a little deeper into causation, rather than just saying GLOBAL WARMING or BUSH’s FAULT
Samuel P. Bush. He became an adviser to Herbert hoover after causing the 1918 flu.
Shades of Tim McCarver and Ralph Kiner’s long running joke during Met telecasts about El Niño being the cause of everything that goes wrong.
Some more idiocy. 25M to 100M dead, out of a world population of 1800M. Or 1.4% to 5.6%. In the US, where the disease probably originated, the rate was 0.6%.
The Black Death of the Middle Ages killed probably 20% to 30% of the population of Eurasia.
Previous epidemics in the time of Pericles and Justinian (and many others) had similar death rates.
During the 16th century the native population of the Americas was reduced by somewhere between 80% and 95%, almost entirely due to epidemics caused by the merging of the Afro-Eurasian and American disease ecosystems.
The 1918 flu, for all the suffering it caused, doesn't even bear comparison to such incredible catastrophes.
Aggie scientists at work!
I think the horrid conditions of World War I had more to do with the spread of the Spanish Flu than El Nino.
No horrid war conditions in the U.S. It seems to be true that the flu started in the the U.S. and spread to Europe through our soldiers. And apparently spread elsewhere from Europe.
They're saying it hit India hard and probably due to their drought. Maybe more so due to their population density.
Still lots of speculation here.
I nearly did the same back in the Army but with a dump truck and a water trailer. Does that qualify me to teach at Texas A&M?
Actually, they’ve traced the beginnings of the flu to Alaska and the garrisoned U.S. troops there, who were subsequently transported across North America and to Europe, where they spread it throughout the former war zone.
I thought it was the Midwest pig country. Iowa, maybe.
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Thanks decimon. |
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There you go, bringing up inconvenient facts.
Interesting theory, but our guys seem to have debunked it. I love this place.
The presently most accepted theory is that the flu started in Haskell County, western KS, and went with a draftee to Ft. Riley in N. Kansas. From there it spread in all directions as soldiers were shipped out. Travel on super-crowded trains and troopships created conditions for transmission about as effective as modern airliners.
Another beautiful piece of rhetoric, murdered by a brutal gang of facts.
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