Amazon River at lowest level in 36 years in Peru

I am sure somebody has attributed this to global warming by now but is that logical? If the oceans were REALLY warming wouldn't they be evaporating off more water and thus bring about INCREASED rainfall? I think if we followed the usual Greenie logic, we would have to say that the Amazon shows the effects of global COOLING!

"The Amazon River, South America's largest, has hit its lowest level in the 36 years since records have been kept near its source in Peru, experts said. Peru's National Port Company (ENAPU) has recorded the river's level at the river port of Iquitos, in northeastern Peru, since 1969.

The level at Iquitos was reported to be 106.5 meters (349 feet) above sea level, below the previous, 1995 record of 106.6 meters (350 feet). The volume of the river's flow was a "weak" 12,000 cubic meters (424,000 cubic feet) per second, said hydrologist Jean-Loup Guyot. "It is quite clear that low levels have been more frequent in the past 10 years," said the French researcher.

The Amazon is the second-longest river in the world, after the Nile, but discharges far more water at its mouth than any other. It also drains more territory than any other, from Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay and Venezuela before running across Brazil and into the Atlantic. Low levels could bring economic havoc in areas of Peru that depend on the Amazon for shipping, by denying boats a navigable river as well as usable ports and harbors. "This year we have had adverse weather conditions that are rarely seen along the Amazon, which have resulted in less rainfall," said Ena Jaime, a climatologist with Peru's National Meteorology and Hydrology Service".

Source






LARGE GAPS IN KNOWLEDGE DON'T HOLD GREENIES UP

Post lifted from Sir Humphrey

"Last week the topic of polar ice melting was brought up. One of the issues that was most important was the probelm of models versus real life, because most of the reports discussed expected ice melting from modelling of "global warming". While it wasn't quantified it appeared that most of the models were somewhat light on the real world parameters, ie they didn't include many significant factors. A BBC report about the coming launch of the European Space Agency's launch of their new Cryosat satellite is interesting in indicating how little is known in some areas of the modelling. The satellite is going to fly a three year mission to actually measure Arctic ice thickness directly, although three years is a short time and cycles longer than a couple of years won't be evident it will do what isn't done now.

If you read around the obligatory blurb about threats to the world and so on, which permeate articles like this and distract from the real issues, then this is interesting

Data from the US space agency (Nasa) and European Space Agency (Esa) satellites (Envisat, ERS) gives the most accurate record of changes in ice cover.

But the orbits of these satellites, which are designed to study the whole of the planet, leave vast areas uncharted, in particular the nine degrees of latitude nearest the poles. Historical records suggest that this sector may be subject to the greatest thinning.

Climate models predict what may happen to ice as the planet warms. These rely on a number of assumptions - if ice melts, the ocean will become warmer, as there will be less ice to reflect radiation back into space. Scientists need hard data to feed into the models to firm up their predictions.

Huge tracts of Arctic and Antarctic ice are uncharted, areas expected to be of most significance are not studied in any detail. The models on which predictions are made are reliant on assumptions, but these are poorly tested by the lack of real information. Remarkably one of the most important predictions, ice thinning, is not directly measurable in a meaningful way. The Cryosat is intended to help that by actually doing the measurements, being able to determine altitudes to millimeter precision over an area of about a kilometre wide. The ESA web page describes the mission in more detail. For instance, the rationale for the new satellite is

The generation of radar altimeters currently flying on satellites including ERS-2 and Envisat have made a large contribution to our knowledge of the mass balance of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, but they cannot return reliable data from the ice edge, where the rate of change is greatest. Similarly, over the ocean their resolution is insufficient to detect the majority of individual pack ice pieces. The design of CryoSat's new SAR Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL) has been optimised to close these data gaps.

The current generation of survey satellites can't measure very well the very areas of most importance in this work.

"Back then, analysis of this data suggested that a significant – up to 40% - thinning had occurred since the 1960s, with the largest thinning around the pole. The big question is whether that thinning has reversed or continued as we have entered the new century."

"That question has gained even more impetus since the news that the extent of summer ice in the Arctic has reached a record minimum this year. But has it also thinned? That's the crucial question to which CryoSat will provide the answer."

While the ice has been retreating in summers, no one actually knows if it is also thinning, which is crucial in the debate. If it isn't thinning much then "global warming" is not a large factor since retreating edges would be caused by sea currents. Here is another nugget

"As a scientist I am interested in using CryoSat data for validating our sea ice models, and combining the data with other met-ocean data to better understand the variability of sea ice thickness," Haas explains. "We also want to assimilate sea ice thickness into our models."

Sea ice thickness is not currently modelled, this is just one of the reasons to take "models" with a grain of salt. If you don't know what is included, excluded and assumed then it is very hard to rely on their predictions. Or this may be the most telling quote

"Despite all available measurements of snow accumulation, ice velocity, surface and basal melting and iceberg discharge, it is still not known for certain even whether the ice sheet is growing or shrinking." CryoSat should remedy this state of affairs.

With all current knowledge the actual state of the ice sheets is unknown, pretty much all the modelling is speculation at this point.

Reading press releases from scientific groups about this or that measurement of an ice field indicating the imminent flooding of a city is pretty much an exercise in fiction. It is important to remember that models are not scientific theories, they do not hold the same status and pretty much all models will eventually be found wanting in critical aspects. The current state of knowledge is quite poor, in relation to the policies and massive actions being proposed to deter the results of some modelling. Improved data collection helps improve modelling, but even that cannot make the existing models account for longer term cycles that are neglected in the models. The three year Cryosat mission will tell us what is happening now, but it won't be able to say anything about decadal or century long cycles (they will appear as trends). What it does do is improve a section of the puzzle."

One of the points raised in the "Comments" was good fun:

Actually satellite measurement has shown that the Antartic ice cover is thickening over the bulk of the continent. The only exception being the Antartic peninsula (which lies outside the Antartic circle). Naturally the Nature article that reported this quoted a Global Warmer who claimed that GCMS predicted this very result. Increased warmth leads to increased evaporation leads to increased precipition bla bla.... All of which begs the question if Global Warming causes the Antartic Ice cover to increase why doesn't it do the same in the Northern Hemisphere?"





PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA

More like Shinto than science, actually. Article by Christopher Pearson

Of late, I have fallen into a strange habit. Between six and eight o'clock in the morning I've taken to tuning into the ABC's Radio National. What possesses me? It's not undertaken as a penance or, as some of the Quadrant circle use it, to maintain the rage. It's more a matter of field study; akin to coming across bits of corrugated iron in a paddock and lifting them up to see what's underneath.

What's disclosed in those early morning encounters is a Lilliputian parallel universe; a dark, microcosmic parody of the workaday world. Like Swift's, it operates on a recognisable but slightly different time zone, one in which the Berlin Wall hasn't quite fallen and where the likes of Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and John Pilger still rule the conversational roost.

One of the Radio National world view's more disconcerting features is its enthrallment to apocalyptic science. Sometimes, listening to Fran Kelly discussing the latest portents of global warming, I can almost hear the polar ice melt and rising waters lapping at the front doorstep. No hint of licensed scepticism, no inkling that this may be just one more millennial fantasy, is allowed to obtrude. This is not a radio show. It's a sacramental observance for true believers.

It was while listening to Radio National that I first began to understand Tim Flannery, the director of the South Australian Museum and author of a number of popular science books. Previously I've dismissed him in this column as the P.T. Barnum of his profession, just a showman. But, as his new book The Weather Makers makes plain, he's more shaman than showman, a folk mystic and prophet for the New Age remnant.

Mainstream science is committed to sceptical inquiry, to falsifiable hypothesis and empirical method. Flannery embraces the Gaia principle: that the Earth is a single, planet-sized organism. This mystical theory was first advanced, at least in its modern form, by a mathematician called James Lovelock in 1979. He named it Gaia after an ancient Greek earth goddess.

Flannery hopes to keep a foot in the rationalist camp by suggesting: "Let's use the term Gaia as shorthand for the complex system that makes life possible, while recognising all the while that it may result from chance." From the standpoint of scientific method that is still, at best, a superfluous hypothesis. How does he justify it?

He says: "Does it really matter whether Gaia exists or not? I think that it does, for it influences the very way we see our place in nature. Someone who believes in Gaia sees everything on Earth as being intimately connected to everything else, just as organs are in a body. In such a system, pollutants cannot simply be shunted out of sight and forgotten, and every extinction is seen as an act of self-mutilation. As a result, a Gaian world view predisposes its adherents to sustainable ways of living."

As Dorothy famously remarked to her little dog, as they were swept up on to the yellow brick road: "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more." Consider the solipsistic logic. It matters that Gaia exists not because it's true but because it helps us to conceive of the world and our place in it in what he supposes is a desirable way.

It's an exercise in mystagoguery, justified on instrumentalist grounds. Once swallowed whole, it becomes as immune to argument as the patent falsehood that when, for any reason, a species becomes extinct, humans have somehow mutilated themselves. Species become extinct for many reasons, some quite unrelated to human activity. The idea that all changes to biodiversity are down to human mischief is as hubristic as the notion that we're collectively responsible for changes in the weather.

Bob Carter, a science professor at James Cook University, took The Weather Makers to task the other day for what he called "Mother Earthism". As he says, it's a debilitating affliction involving "a touching belief in the Garden of Eden, the halcyon state of the Earth in times before the wicked Industrial Revolution. This balmy, and barmy, garden existed in a state of existential ecological balance."

While Flannery is indeed a true believer, his general stance is that of a man of knowledge who has satisfied himself that human-generated greenhouse gases threaten our survival and is telling his readers as much as they need to know. Most of the time impending catastrophe is offered simply as the informed consensus view, but sometimes he takes us into his confidence on thorny questions of cognitive dissonance.

The most artlessly comic example occurs halfway through the book. "We must now turn to the key uncertainty that remains in all models: will a doubling of CO2 lead to a 2C or a 5C increase in warming, and can we expect a reduction in this uncertainty in the near future? This is a critical issue not least because the US Government has signalled that it will not reconsider its climate change policy until there is more certainty. Given that almost 30 years of hard work and astonishing technological advances have failed to reduce the degree of uncertainty, we should not be too sanguine about hopes for more precision."

The tone of this admission is so cack-handed and the margin for error so large. What government in its right mind, you may wonder, would commit to spending billions of dollars on the strength of computer modelling so lacking in predictive authority? Doesn't he realise how withering a light this casts on all that Gaian wisdom, not to mention the much-vaunted consensus scholarship and technological ingenuity? Probably not, I suspect.

William Kininmonth is a meteorologist with more than 40 years' experience. In the space of a single column in The Sydney Morning Herald last week he drew attention to three problems with Flannery's argument. First of all, he pointed out that historically the Earth had often experienced naturally occurring extremes of climate. Even so, "the evidence that the climate system may pass some imagined critical point that leads to runaway global warming is not convincing".

Second, he noted that, from a climatological perspective, the influence of CO2 was vastly overrated. "Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and the formation and dissipation of clouds has a bigger impact on the climate."

Finally, "climate is a complex system for exchange and transport of energy, to balance the excess solar radiation of the tropics and the deficit over polar regions. Existing computer models are not able to adequately replicate these essential energy processes, raising serious doubt over their ability to predict future climate."

In ordinary scientific debate, the proponents hammer out the issues and the matter is eventually decided on the force of evidence and argument. If an expert in the field writes an article saying there's nowhere near enough evidence for the case you're trying to make or that, whoops, you're concentrating on the wrong gas or that your computer models don't correspond to observable reality, you reply as best you can. But, for subscribers to catastrophist theories, these days belief apparently supplants the need to engage with your critics.

It is clear that Flannery and Kininmonth no longer inhabit the same universe of discourse, to return to my opening metaphor of parallel worlds. Flannery doesn't feel any personal need to defend himself in the public arena. Nor does he feel, as a museum director, that the prestige of the scientific institution he heads obliges him to do so. Instead he is content to plug his book and preach to the converted on Radio National in conversation with Phillip Adams.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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