Global warming is shrinking insects: Study reveals the four largest beetle species in Canada have shrunk 20% in the last 45 years in an attempt to survive hotter temperatures

This claim is a hardy perennial.  It flies in the face of the fact that the age of the dinosaurs was warmer than today. And they were LARGER than present day terrestrial creatures.  The entomologsts below have ignored a basic law of statistics -- that correlation is not causation.  There were probably plenty of other things in the environment affecting the bugs as the climate (slightly) warmed

Researchers in Canada found that some native beetle species are getting 20 per cent smaller as their habitats get warmer.

They say their study provides evidence that climate change is affecting the size of organisms.

Assistant professor of botany and zoology Dr Michelle Tseng at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who oversaw the research, said: 'In nature, there is so much going on that can affect body size so we weren't sure we were going to see anything.

'This research provides evidence that climate change is affecting even the smallest organisms out there.'

Scientists expect living organisms to respond to climate change in three ways - by moving to new regions, changing the timing of their life stages or shrinking.

Up until now, most of the evidence for organisms shrinking has come from laboratory work where the environment and living conditions can be tightly controlled.

Dr Tseng asked students in her fourth-year class to look into whether that is happening by examining beetle specimens in UBC's Beaty Biodiversity Museum collection, as well as historical weather data.

They selected eight species of beetles from the Lower Mainland and Okanagan for their data set.

They photographed more than 6,500 beetles and inputted information about each insect, when it was collected and where it was found into a database.

Sina Soleimani, one of the students who co-authored the paper, said: 'We got data from 100 years of caught specimens.
Researchers wanted to know if animal species' were shrinking

'It's cool that people have been collecting these insects since 1910 and noting all of their collection information. That's probably what makes our paper stand out.'

The students measured whether the beetles had changed in size in the last 40 or 100 years.

They then used a climate database from the faculty of forestry to gather data about changes in the environment for the two regions where the beetles lived.

Shrinking in body size is seen from several global warming events.

With the global temperatures set to continue to rise, it is expected the average size of most animals will decrease.

At first, the figures didn't indicate a clear trend - some beetles were shrinking, some were not.

But by taking a closer look, they found that it was the larger beetles that were shrinking, while the smaller ones were not.

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Greenland’s recent temperature drop

They say it is just weather, not climate.  14 years of bad weather? It sounds like the 70 years of bad weather that Russian farmers had in the old Soviet union.  The amusing thing is that Greenland is part of the Arctic and Warmists regularly have orgasms about the slightest warming in the Arctic. "Last year, winter sea ice fell to the smallest extent on record" is the excited sort of utterance we hear. A change of just ONE year is paraded as significant. If the Arctic warms it is climate.  If it cools it is just weather

Using satellite data, a group of scientists has studied the development of temperature over the past 15 years in a large part of Greenland.

More precisely, they looked at surface temperatures (the temperature close to the Earth’s surface) in a part of the country that is not covered by ice—around one fifth of the surface area of Greenland.

Intuitively, you may think that temperature throughout all of Greenland has been increasing, but that is not the case. When you look at the yearly average, the ice-free parts of Greenland show a slight drop in temperature between 2001 and 2015. With swings in temperature from year to year.

However, these results should not be interpreted as “proof” that the Earth is not warming, say the scientists behind the research, which is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
This is weather, not climate

You need to have thirty years’ worth of data before you can “talk about climate,” says Professor Bo Elberling, an environmental geochemist and senior scientist on the study.

So we should be wary of discussing these results in the context of climate change, says Elberling, who is head of the Center for Permafrost (CENPERM) at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

“What’s interesting here is that with these new data we have a unique description of the spatial distribution of surface temperatures across the entire ice-free part of Greenland, which we couldn’t pull out of the approximately 45 weather stations that cover Greenland today,” he says.

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Trump Slashes Budget of Global Warming Madrassa

Slowly but surely the Trump administration is draining the climate swamp.

Here’s the latest good news, courtesy of American Geophysical Union’s Eos, in a piece headlined “Prestigious Climate-Related Fellowships Rescinded.”

It reports on the reduction (by half) of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “prestigious” Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program — or what I would call a madrasa for climate change alarmists.

Since 1992, at a cost of around $2 million per annum, the program has sponsored eight fellows a year in order “to help create the next generation of researchers needed for climate studies.”

The graduates’ list is a veritable Who’s Who of prominent climate alarmists.

Among the program’s alumni is Myles Allen, a man-made climate change specialist at Oxford University; Gavin Schmidt, now head of the notoriously climate alarmist NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies; and Heidi Cullen, who writes alarmist propaganda for the website Climate Central.

Not all alumni, it’s true, go on to shill for the great global warming scam.

For example, one alumnus — Chris Landsea, a meteorologist specializing in hurricanes — took the brave and principled decision of resigning in 2005 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Landsea objected to the way his views were being misrepresented by one of the report’s lead authors, Kevin Trenberth.

Trenberth wanted to promote the idea that “global warming” (as it was then known) would lead to an increase in intense hurricane activity.

Landsea was outraged because this contradicted all available scientific studies, including his own. So he resigned in protest, no doubt costing himself a well-paid career on the climate change gravy train.

But Landsea is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.

The majority of the Climate and Global Change Program’s 218 alumni will have gone on to positions in the science departments of some of the finest universities in the U.S. There, they will, of course, have helped entrench and promote the view that “anthropogenic global warming” is both a significant threat and an eminently worthwhile subject for scientific study.

Unfortunately for them, the U.S. is now run by an administration which doesn’t believe any of this.

Here is what President Donald Trump had to say recently on the subject in a TV interview with Piers Morgan:

    "There is a cooling and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.

    The icecaps were going to melt, there were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, OK? They’re at a record level."

This is Trump-speak for: “I’m not buying that nonsense.”

His administration is acting accordingly. With the support of administrators like Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, the draining of the climate swamp has begun.

One measure of the new approach is the dramatic reduction in the number of U.S. university grant applications mentioning the words “climate change.” According to the National Science Foundation, there was a 40 percent drop in 2017.

Another sign that time is up for the alarmists is the reduction of NOAA’s Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Where in previous years, it funded as many as eight candidates, the 2017 intake had just four. Another four had their initial offers withdrawn, which the article in Eos appears to think is a matter of great sadness.

It quotes Katie Travis, who was finishing a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University, landed a place on the program, but then subsequently had the offer rescinded because of budget cuts.

    “This was the first grant I wrote myself,” she said. “It was really validating for me to be selected, which is why it’s so crushing that the program ended up the way it did.”

But the story gets sadder still. Another victim of this savage funding cut back, it seems, was the cause of “diversity.”

    "Especially troubling to Abigail Swann, an ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, is that three of the rescinded offers were to women, whereas the four who were funded are all men. That makes the 2017 class the only one in the program’s 27-year history other than the first to be all male. Swann and two program alumni wrote a letter—since signed by more than 100 program alumni, hosts, selection committee members, and others—expressing concern that the lack of diversity makes it even harder for female geoscientists to bridge the “PhD-to-Professor gap,” a precarious career stage when many women scientists leave the field. They also noted that NOAA itself has committed to increasing diversity."

Putting aside the sarcasm for a moment, let me gently suggest that while these may feel like issues of burning importance to Abigail Swann, Katie Travis, and the author of the article, a lot of readers here will be thinking: “This is why we voted for Donald Trump.”

Indeed, the very existence of this grant program is a measure of just how out of touch liberal academia is with reality.

In what way is it or was it ever good value for taxpayers to fork out $2 million a year so that needy science PhDs like Katie Travis could feel “validated”? Or that other female PhDs could feel their diversity was being celebrated? Or that science post-graduates generally should be diverted from doing something actually beneficial to mankind and instead encouraged onto a program designed to parachute them into the almost entirely pointless $1.5 trillion-plus global warming industry?

To be absolutely clear, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “prestigious” Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a waste of money. It always was a waste of money.

The four places on the program which have been scrapped so far are a very good start.

Let’s hope the other four places on the program are nixed soon.

SOURCE





Al Gore’s global warming vision proves more mirage than material

Al Gore’s vision of a dangerous ­climate “tipping point”, foreshadowed in his 2007 book Assault on Reason, has failed to materialise, according to a top American business professor who a decade ago challenged the former US vice- president to bet on how global ­ave­rage temperature would change.

Mr Gore’s staff said he did not take bets, but a decade on Scott Armstrong, a business professor at the Wharton Business School, has concluded that global temperature deviations since 2007 had easily fallen within the natural level of variation, and “no change” was the most accurate way to describe global weather patterns over the past decade.

“When you lack scientific evidence, the primary way to keep ‘global warming’ alive is to avoid having a testable hypothesis,” Professor Armstrong said, mocking how some observers had “touted the extremely cold weather that occurred in January (in the northern hemisphere) as another piece of evidence of global warming”.

The UN’s 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected warming of 3C every century, which prompted governments to introduce taxes and regulations to curb CO2 emissions.

Professor Armstrong said he had seen “no dangerous long-term trends” in temperature data and, in any case, “like most people”, he would prefer temperatures “a little warmer”. “A few years ago, people in the US were asked how much tax they would be willing to pay on gasoline to completely eliminate dangerous global warming — the amount was about a dollar.”

Professor Armstrong and his academic colleague Kesten Green at the University of South Australia took Mr Gore’s “tipping point” scenario, charitably, to be the “business as usual” forecast from the UN’s 2001 panel on climate change, which had anticipated a 0.3C increase in average global temperature every decade.

The “bet” was monitored on theclimatebet.com site using global temperature data from University of Alabama researchers.

“Global temperatures have ­always varied on all timescales and Professor Armstrong was not highly confident that he would win a 10-year bet when temperatures had commonly drifted up or down by 0.3C over 10-year periods in the past,” Dr Green said.

The monthly data showed the years from 2008 to 2014 were largely cooler than the 2007 average deviation, while 2016 and last year were warmer. Between AD16 and 1935, a “no change” forecast over periods of one to 100 years was “much more accurate” than a hypothesis of global cooling or warming, the academics said.

The 2001 IPCC report said “...the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”.

“The fact the last two years … favoured the warming forecast is meaningless in the context of the swings in temperature that ­occurred during the bet, and that will continue to occur in the ­future,” Dr Green said.

“Basing public policy on failed alarmist scenarios is irrational, and is causing enormous harm.”

SOURCE





Australia: The end of recycling

Recycling in Victoria is on the brink of collapse, with councils facing having to stockpile millions of tonnes of waste - or dump it in landfill - as a China export ban begins to bite.

Several councils have already had recycling contracts cut off, with the Municipal Association of Victoria warning the problem could soon spread to the entire state.

The Chinese town of Giuyu used to be a dumping ground for the world's trash. Now China has banned imports of foreign waste to crack down on its own chronic pollution problem.

Experts said any solution would be expensive, with ratepayers likely to be slugged if the crisis takes hold.

The recycling industry has been warning for some time that a decision by China – our largest export destination for recycling – to ban waste imports would have a catastrophic impact on the sector, possibly making it unviable.

Those warnings came home to roost this week. Recycling giant Visy told Wheelie Waste, a bin collector that services 11 councils in Victoria’s west including Greater Shepparton, Macedon Ranges, Horsham and Ararat, that it would stop accepting council recycling on February 9.

The company cited China’s ban as the reason for the move. Wheelie Waste declined to comment, and Visy did not respond to requests for comment.

The Age understands several other councils have also been told they will lose service. "We think ultimately there’s a potential for them all to be affected," Municipal Association of Victoria CEO Rob Spence said. "This is just the beginning of  the potential impacts."

SOURCE

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