Sunday, September 25, 2011

Warmist nutjob forgets the dinosaurs

The dinosaurs flourished in a very warm climatic period and were both cold-blooded and VERY large. But you would never guess that from the effusions of the alleged scientist below. According to him they should have been about the size of mice.

And this crap was published in "New Scientist". But "New Warmist" has been a better name for that publication for some time now


It is well established that cold-blooded species get smaller as the climate heats up, says Andrew Hirst of Queen Mary, University of London. Experiments show that, on average, 1 °C of warming reduces their adult body mass by 2.5 per cent. The mystery is why.

To find out, Hirst pulled together data on 15 species of copepod that swim in the open sea, focusing on how they grew at different temperatures. As temperatures rose, the copepods got heavier faster. Hirst thinks that's because physiological reactions accelerate at warmer temperatures, allowing the copepods to bulk up faster.

But they also matured to adulthood faster, so their rapid growth ground to a halt at a young age. The overall effect was such that the warmer copepods wound up smaller.

It's not clear why temperature has such a strong effect on the way these organisms mature, but Hirst suspects evolution favours organisms that are flexible in how fast they mature to adulthood. In a competitive environment, this increases the odds that individuals will reproduce before they are killed.

More HERE





Another fluff-headed Leftist who wouldn't know science if she fell over it

She saw an iceberg break off a glacier and that confirms global warming for her. The fact that icebergs have ALWAYS broken off glaciers seems unknown to her feeble brain

There's nothing like a glacier crumbling into the sea in front of your eyes to remind you that climate change is more than an abstract reason to recycle egg boxes and wine bottles.

Right now, I'm writing from a small ship's cabin in one of the most isolated, desolate places on earth: the northern tip of Svalbard in the high Arctic, where I have come on an expedition, part of the point of which was to see what I've just seen. Which was a shelf of translucent blue ice the height
of a house falling into the water like wet cake.

It's not that I didn't believe in climate change before this. On the contrary: I am of the background and generation that grew up in the mid-1990s with the notion of environmental destruction as an inevitability.

I was raised on the animation FernGully: the Last Rainforest and traumatic colouring books full of sad baby seals and herons choking on plastic bags. This gentle indoctrination was supposed to motivate us to grow up and save the planet, but by the time we were old enough to object, the forests were disappearing and the oilfields burning fast enough for it all to seem too late.

I now realise that, even before the Copenhagen Summit 2009 put paid to the prospect of a green international deal, I had decided that there was nothing I could do. At some point, I decided that my special fight was simply to make sure, to the best of my limited ability, that whatever society is left after the floodwaters settle is as fair and free as possible. I have this luxury, of course, because I grew up in a hilly place in England and my house is not going to be underwater for a while yet.

This, for the generation that grew up after the collapse of communism, is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a bonfire.

The greatest threat to the future of humanity is now not political brinkmanship, but paranoid indifference: the certainty that the future is both finite and short and that all we can do is burn what little of the remaining money we have and hope civilisation outlasts us.

More twaddle HERE




Another fluffhead is reviving the old ocean acidification scare

That warming would cause the oceans to outgas CO2 and thus REDUCE acidity seems unknown to her. The studies which have shown that increased acidity does NOT do the harm to marine organisms that she claims also seem unknown to her

Marine chemist Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, has been collecting water samples in the North Pacific for over 30 years. He’s observed a decrease in pH at the upper part of the water column, notably the region where carbon dioxide from automobile exhaust, coal-fired power plants, and other human activities has collected. This surface water is now acidic enough to dissolve the shells of some marine animals such as corals, plankton, and mollusks in laboratory experiments. Feely’s findings are just one sign of a troubling global phenomenon called ocean acidification.

We spend a lot of time worrying about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as a form of pollution and also as a key greenhouse gas that traps solar heat. But we pay less attention to the effects emissions have in the ocean. There is no debate that rapidly increasing seawater acidity is the result of man-made carbon emissions.

“The chemistry of the uptake of carbon dioxide and its changing pH of seawater is very, very clear,” explains Feely.

The oceans absorb an estimated 22 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every day. This buffers the greenhouse effect by drawing the planet-warming gas out of the atmosphere and storing it in water, but at a great cost to ocean life. This carbon mixes with the salt water to create carbonic acid, which immediately breaks down, forming bicarbonate and hydrogen. And this excess hydrogen increases the water’s acidity.

Higher acidity, in turn, makes life difficult for marine animals by hampering their ability to form shells and skeletons. For microscopic plankton and many other species at the base of marine food chains, this means slower growth and potential population decline. These problems trickle up to affect the large fish that depend on smaller organisms for food.

Acidification also causes some coral species to grow more slowly or disappear. Since coral reefs support 25 percent of the ocean’s species of fish, this spells widespread trouble. Marine ecosystems are so interconnected, in fact, that scientists cannot predict the full effects of acidification. They only know that changes in the availability of food and in community structure can scale up quickly.

More HERE




Warmist Professor Can’t Read Graphs

Gunnar Schade: "Based on current trends, he said, within 50 years, Texas will no longer be able to sustain the growth of cotton or corn and desertification will occur".

BUT:

There is no trend in Texas temperatures since at least 1895:



SOURCE (See the original for links)





Another Professor Resigns – From The Belgian European Society of Engineers and Industrialists SEII

Yet another professor, Dr. Ir. Henri A. Masson, has resigned from yet another once prestigious organisation, which too has succumbed to the darkness of climate dogmatism and censorship.

In late August the Société Européenne des Ingénieurs et Industriels (European Society of Engineers and Industrialists – abbreviated SEII) had organised a conference where scientists S. Fred Singer and Prof. Claes Johnson, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had been scheduled to speak on climate change.

However this all came to the attention of IPCC Vice Chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, who found that skeptic views have no place in the climate religion, and so moved quickly and demanded the SEII disinvite the 2 distinguished speakers. The conference had to be moved.

For SEII event coordinator Dr. Henri A. Masson, this closed-minded attitude by the SEII and van Ypersele became intolerable and so he has submitted his resignation. Google translation from the French below:
Attention: Mr. Philippe Wauters, President

Subject: my resignation from positions held within the SEII and cancellation of my membership of Seiya.

Mr. President,

I just read the official document prepared by the Secretary General of the SEII on the case "Climategate," by which he informed the Executive Directors, an overwhelming majority, you reiterated his confidence, despite the factual evidence that I provided earlier, which establish the reality of their lies you have made.

It appears that, after having denied in writing, you have had to acknowledge that you have acted following an intervention of a "third person", as euphemistically called the Secretary General in his letter to the Directors, the intervention of another person is in fact a protest letter from Professor van Ypersele. For me, that means, it is nothing other than having participated in influence peddling, based on defamatory statements that you do not even bother to check paspris, and you have given to external pressures to SEII to censor players defending an opposing view to that of Mr. Van Ypersele and bodies they represent.

These facts are indisputable, regardless of the casuistic arguments you are trying to develop to evoke a serious procedural error that I committed. In the absence of extremely vague definition of the limits of the mandate entrusted to me in the training activities of Seiya, and more specifically those designed to facilitate a "philosophy café pilot to the controversy on climate", I do not see what is the procedure I would not have followed the simple execution of a recurrent activity of the working group that I run for over a year.

When to send a diary or a record of meeting such a working group of SEII, or try to invite new members to join him, for it is and only what it is in this case, I think it is customary to use a paper headed SEII to this effect, without having to involve the Bureau whenever ; Moreover, without the intervention of Mr. van Ypersele, you would more than likely not find anything to say about it.

But of course there is no requirement the Office to remain consistent and objective in his judgments.

The facts that I reproach you are strategic in nature for Seiya. Try to exonerate them using specious arguments of procedure do not grow. It would have been much wiser to recognize that you have been eroded by Mr. van Ypersele, based on the reputation dontil still enjoys in Belgium, despite its links to the most radical branch of Greenpeace. Supporting evidence, I have provided the occasion for a week to review your position, you would not take it.

So I can only note that neither you nor the Executive will share a number of values ​​that are dear to me and which I have never traded and will not compromise the future.

As a result, I present to you my resignation of all the functions I occupied in the SEII. I also want to be taken off the membership list and stop receiving your mailings.

I reserve, in addition, freedom to plead my good faith, with supporting evidence in the case between us, with people and institutions of my choice.

Please accept my feelings for the occasion.

Prof. Dr. Ir Henry A. Masson


SOURCE




The Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather, 1900–2010

This does not sit at all well with Warmist claims of increases in extreme weather. But much of the decline is of course due to technological and economic advance. It is precisely technological and economic advance that is the bete noir of the Greens, however -- JR

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by 98% since the 1920s

Indur M. Goklany and Julian Morris

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas:

Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.

Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.

Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.

To put the public health impact of extreme weather events into context, cumulatively they now contribute only 0.07% to global mortality. Mortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems.

More HERE

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