Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Lubos Motl comments. I put up the Morano comment yesterday

Sharon Begley has what is known as a poultry brain - the readers of TRF also know her as the author of a lousy, but not the lousiest, article on string theory - but she has a huge, fanatically believing religious heart, especially if the task is to parrot musings by scientific titans such as Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, and Naomi Oreskes. So she decided to write, together with a few collaborators, another Goebbelsian article in Newsweek,

Global warming deniers: a well-funded machine

It is full of insults, "corrupt deniers". The criminal reasons why skeptics do what they do are "explained" in detail: for example, Pat Michaels needs some extreme weather to grow his award-winning pumpkins. ;-) But the article doesn't contain facts that would be both relevant and true. The only fair part of the article is the cover of the magazine (on the left) as long as you omit the silly footnote and the somewhat exaggerated color of the Earth (assuming it is supposed to be Earth) :-).

Marc Morano

responds here, explaining, among many other interesting things, that the alarmists have actually received 2500 times more funding (50 billion vs 19 million per decade) than the skeptics. Another response comes from

Noel Sheppard
Amy Ridenour

Ratings: Begley only gets 2.5 stars, Lindzen's article in Newsweek had 4 stars. A poll next to Lindzen's article showed that 54% of readers think that there is no permanent momentum to fight global warming. The poll attached to Begley's article shows that 38% of the readers think that global warming is not a threat to life on Earth while 6% are not sure




Chaos theory and oceans may determine the climate

Another comment from "Lumo" -- on "A mechanism for major climate shifts"

Alexander Ac has reminded me that I forgot our weekly dose of peer-reviewed denier literature on the climate. Here it is. Anastasios Tsonis and his collaborators offer

a new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts (full-text draft of the article, final PDF)

in Geophysical Research Letters. The article, published on July 12th, has a special "editor's highlight". You may also see the abstract in yesterday's ScienceDaily.



The authors focus on the oceans and something that could be called chaos theory - especially the concept of synchronized chaos. What they care about is whether the known ocean cycles - the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation - are synchronized or not.



They argue that the synchronization disappears once the coupling between all/most of these cycles gets too high: a major climate shift is a consequence. The amount of synchronization decides about the ENSO variability as well as the global temperature, as they demonstrate by an analysis of major indices in the 20th century. This climate shift may be seen as a bifurcation - branching of one possible solution into two. It is accompanied by changes of the coupling parameter which acts as an external parameter.

If you care, the shifts have occurred or will occur around 1913, 1942, 1978, 2033, 2072.

If you are interested in their predictions, a 0.2 Celsius cooling between 2005 and 2020 should be followed by a 0.3 Celsius warming until 2045 or so and by cooling in the rest of the 21st century. 2100 is seen as more than 0.1 Celsius cooler than 2005. While they admit the possibility that their curves should be superimposed with contributions such as the enhanced greenhouse effect, they have a very different explanation for the climate shift in the late 1970s that has nothing to do with aerosols or greenhouse gases.

Related: an interview with Václav Klaus for Radio Free Europe about the history of communism, the climate, and the radars. Note that on the right side, there is an English video prepared by RFE about the radars in the Brdy hills.

If you thought that the ocean and synchronized chaos was the only paper I could offer you, here are two additional ones:

1. ScienceDaily, Geophysical Research Letters: Camp and Tung, Seattle mathematicians, argue that the maxima of the 11-year cycle of the solar activity are about 0.2 Celsius warmer than the minima and this result is statistically significant. Note that in 5-year intervals, the 0.2 Celsius change is much faster than the trend attributed to global warming.
2. Belgian media inform that the Royal Meteorological Society is preparing a new study to be published in the summer that explains why CO2 cannot be the most important climate driver. Water vapor is responsible for "75 percent" of the climate change. Not sure how this is quantified and what it means.

Via Marc Morano.

England: 85th coldest July ever

In Central England, they have measured the temperatures for 349 years. This table shows that July 2007 was the 85th coldest July in history. Only 24 percent of the Julys were cooler! For comparison, let us look at the previous 11 months:

• August 2006 was the 243rd coldest August,
• May 2007 was the 253th coldest May,
• June 2007 was the 271nd coldest June,
• February 2007 was the 297th coldest February,
• March 2007 was the 311th coldest March,
• December 2006 was the 321st coldest December,
• November 2006 was the 327th coldest November,
• January 2007 was the 345th coldest January,
• October 2006 was the 346th coldest October,
• September 2006 was the 348th coldest i.e. warmest September,
• April 2007 was the 349th coldest i.e. warmest April on record.

In comparison with these numbers between 243 and 349, 85 is really small. July 2007 was a true cassandra of a new ice age. ;-)

Via Bishop Hill




The Russian pollution problem is still serious

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all. I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 - leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There's another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea - the Aral, now largely a toxic desert - and turning the world's deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia's history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there. It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there - perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It's a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Source





Doubt cast over "carbon offset" tree planting

TREE-PLANTING schemes promoted by businesses and rock bands alike to offset carbon emissions do little to combat climate change, according to a think tank. A paper by The Australia Institute released yesterday accuses governments and businesses of exploiting such "fads" to avoid the need for real cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. "By diverting people's funds and attention to projects that are unlikely to reduce emissions significantly in the long term, some offset schemes could ultimately do more harm than good," Christian Downie, the author of the report, said. "Tree-planting is the most popular type of carbon offset promoted in Australia but it is, in fact, the least effective for dealing with climate change. "The evidence indicates that offsets from renewable energy are the most effective, followed by those from energy efficiency projects, with forestry projects ranked last."

The comments are a blow to companies that have supported tree-planting to offset their carbon footprints, including BP, Sainsbury's, British Telecom, Orange, Avis and MTV. British rock band Coldplay bought 10,000 mango trees for villagers in Karnataka, in India, to offset the greenhouse gases released as a result of the production of their album A Rush of Blood to the Head. Dido, Atomic Kitten, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kylie Minogue, Kevin Keegan and the Rolling Stones have also promoted tree-planting schemes.

Mr Downie said Australia needed a compulsory accreditation scheme for carbon offset projects. He said there were strong grounds for excluding forestry-based offsets from an emissions trading system in Australia, or at least restricting their use. "Tree-planting, or forestry, cannot secure real, measurable and permanent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions because sooner or later the forest will be felled, burned or destroyed," Mr Downie said. "When (people) buy offsets from a forestry project with their airline ticket, for example, they are actually buying a promise that the immediate emissions from their flight will be gradually offset over the next 100 years. "There can be very little, if any, guarantee that this will actually happen."

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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