Will global warming damage marine parks?

The article below says it will. Surprise! But it is nonsense on stilts.  All it does is take figures from Greenie modelling and plug them into new models.  It is guesses upon guesses.  So it is not even carefully founded prophecy that works from first principles.  So, like almost all prophecy, it is bound to be wrong and falsified by events.  That the prophecy will be wrong is therefore your best guess

Climate change threatens the world’s marine protected areas

John F. Bruno et al.

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a primary management tool for mitigating threats to marine biodiversity1,2. MPAs and the species they protect, however, are increasingly being impacted by climate change. Here we show that, despite local protections, the warming associated with continued business-as-usual emissions (RCP8.5)3 will likely result in further habitat and species losses throughout low-latitude and tropical MPAs4,5. With continued business-as-usual emissions, mean sea-surface temperatures within MPAs are projected to increase 0.035 °C per year and warm an additional 2.8 °C by 2100. Under these conditions, the time of emergence (the year when sea-surface temperature and oxygen concentration exceed natural variability) is mid-century in 42% of 309 no-take marine reserves. Moreover, projected warming rates and the existing ‘community thermal safety margin’ (the inherent buffer against warming based on the thermal sensitivity of constituent species) both vary among ecoregions and with latitude. The community thermal safety margin will be exceeded by 2050 in the tropics and by 2150 for many higher latitude MPAs. Importantly, the spatial distribution of emergence is stressor-specific. Hence, rearranging MPAs to minimize exposure to one stressor could well increase exposure to another. Continued business-as-usual emissions will likely disrupt many marine ecosystems, reducing the benefits of MPAs.

Nature Climate Changevolume 8, pages499–503 (2018)





NEW BOOK: From Malthus to Mifepristone: A Primer on the Population Control Movement

by William Kay (Author)

Part One of this book provides a history of the population control movement from 1798 to 1998. Proper focus is given to the eugenicist, racist and economic motivations of the elite groups driving and funding population control.

Part Two profiles the leading organisations of the modern population control movement.

The book offers unique and extensive coverage of the political economy of the abortion, contraception, and sterilisation industries; and of the efforts of governments and elites to bring on sweeping changes in sexual and reproductive behaviour. Particular attention is given to the funding of the modern abortion-contraception-sterilisation complex.

The complete book has 200 pages of text and 30 pages of footnotes and bibliography. The book contains 233 standard footnotes plus links to the official webpages of 137 the most prominent organizations within the modern population control movement. The bibliography also contains links and references to scores of books, academic papers, government reports and news articles dealing with population control. There is also a list of 43 lists of population control organizations (which number in the thousands) gleaned from the Internet.

SOURCE




Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now

There is an article below from the "New Yorker" by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert.  She is very good at regurgitating Warmist talking points but shows no sign of critical thinking about Hansen's prophecies.  Immediately below her article is another article that shows what she could have written if she had any brains

On June 23, 1988—a blisteringly hot day in Washington, D.C.—James Hansen told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” At the time, Hansen was the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and though his testimony was certainly not the first official warning about the “greenhouse effect”—a report to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, predicted “measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” in the decades to follow—it was the first to receive national news coverage. The Times ran the story at the top of the front page, with a graph showing a long-term rise in average global temperatures.

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of Hansen’s testimony, and it would be hard to think of a more lugubrious milestone. In the intervening three decades, nearly half of the Arctic ice cap has melted away, the oceans have acidified, much of the American West has burned, lower Manhattan, South Florida, Houston, and New Orleans have flooded, and average temperatures have continued to climb. Just last week, a team of scientists reported in Nature that the rate of melt off Antarctica has tripled in the past decade; as the Washington Post put it, “If that continues, we are in serious trouble.” (Were the Antarctic ice to melt away entirely, global sea levels would rise by two hundred feet; if just the more vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, sea levels would rise by about ten feet.) Also last week, scientists reported that most of Africa’s oldest baobab trees have died, probably because of climate change, and last month researchers showed that rising CO2 levels were reducing the nutrient content of rice, which is probably the single most important food source for people. Yet Washington continues to ignore the problem, or, worse still, to actively impede efforts to address it. How can this be?

A possible answer, which seems to be the one that Hansen himself, at least in part, subscribes to, is that scientists are to blame. Hansen is now seventy-seven and retired from NASA. He recently told the Associated Press that he regrets not being “able to make this story clear enough for the public.” Many climate scientists seem similarly to believe that they are not good at conveying information to lay audiences, and, as a result, dozens of Web sites and several whole organizations have been created to help them communicate better.

As someone who has interviewed a lot of climate scientists—including, on several occasions, Hansen—I can attest that, as a group, they are not particularly good at expressing themselves. (I once wrote a Profile of Hansen, and watched him lose even audiences predisposed to adore him.) But thirty years into the so-called climate debate—fifty-three years, if you go back to the report to L.B.J.—I also think it’s time to put this particular story line to rest.

Back in 1988, just about the only information available on climate change was written in the dry-as-standard-deviations style of academic science. The following year, Bill McKibben published the first book on the subject aimed at a popular audience, “The End of Nature.” Since then, more generally accessible books have been written on the climate than even the most avid reader could possibly keep up with; these include kids’ books, comic books, and even a coloring book. Meanwhile, countless newspaper and magazine articles, television specials, and documentaries have appeared on the topic. Above all, climate change has become obvious. You don’t need to read or watch or hear about it; in many parts of the world, all you have to do is look around. The southwestern United States, for instance, is currently experiencing such a severe drought that water restrictions are in place and many national forests are closed. “Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” Deke Arndt, the chief of climate monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration center in Asheville, North Carolina, recently told the A.P. “The train is in our living room now.”

Instead of using this anniversary to lament the failures of climate scientists, I’d like to propose that we use it to celebrate—well, “celebrate” probably isn’t quite the right word, but maybe recognize—their successes. Three decades ago, led by Hansen, they made a series of predictions; for the most part these have proved to be spectacularly accurate. That we, the general public, have failed to act on these predictions says a lot more about us than it does about them.

I happened to interview Hansen last year, for a video project. I asked him if he had a message for young people. “The simple thing is, I’m sorry we’re leaving such a fucking mess,” he said. Could the message be any clearer than that?

SOURCE






Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?

James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.

Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.

Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.

What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.

As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.

Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.

The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models—and the U.N.’s—is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases. Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures. The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal.

These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?

On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.

That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a lukewarming planet.

SOURCE






Australia's supermarket plastic bag ban ‘like religion’

Although the small extra inconvenience of the new system does not bother me, it is clear that the ban on convenience bags takes us back 50 years for no provable beneft. I remember in my youth that all women took with them a wicker basket or a string bag to go shopping

The ban is a craze driven by false reporting, nothing else. It is third world countries that are responsible for the suffering of some marine creatures.  We dispose of ours properly.  In most of Africa and Asia they do not

The author of a landmark study into plastic bags has likened to “religion” their impending removal from supermarkets, suggesting ­arguments against them are “complete furphies you can demolish in a few minutes of analysis”.

Phillip Weickhardt, lead ­author of a 2006 Productivity Commission inquiry into waste management, said raising fines for littering made more sense.

“This is largely religion, deeply felt,” he told The Weekend Australian. “Plastic bags are useful: ­hygienic, water proof. They have multiple uses and functions,” he added.

Coles will join Woolworths in removing “single use” plastic bags from its stores next month, extending nationwide bans on the ubiquitous bags already in place across all states and territories ­except NSW and Victoria.

“The evidence plastic bags hurt marine life is very unpersuasive. When we looked at this we found that a lot of studies just cite each other; in fact we sourced it all back to some guy in Canada in the 1970s who’d done a study on the effect of fishing ropes on marine life,” he said.

Woolworths surveyed 12,500 of its customers last month, finding more than three-quarters wanted plastic bags scrapped. The retail giant, which gave out 3.2 billion plastic bags last year, points to a CSIRO study that found up to a third of the world’s turtles and 43 per cent of seabirds had eaten plastics.

The Productivity Commission in 2006 concluded: “Plastic bags take up little landfill space, and their inert characteristics can ­actually help to reduce a landfill’s potential for adverse environmental impacts”. “The true extent to which plastic-bag litter injures populations of marine wildlife, as opposed to individual animals, is likely to remain very uncertain ­because it is extremely difficult to measure,” it added.

Mr Weickhardt said: “Our conclusion generated the most angry vocal response from people who, with religious fervour, believe this is critical.”

The retail giants will instead offer a range of reusable bags, ­including 15c recycled bags.

A recent study in Britain, where plastic bags are taxed, found re­usable bags needed to be reused up to 173 times before they had a lower environmental impact than ordinary plastic bags.

“The environmental impact of all types of carrier bag is domin­ated by resource use and production,” it found.

“Whatever type of bag is used, the key to reducing the impacts is to reuse it as many times as possible and where reuse for shopping is not practicable, other reuse, eg store-place bin-liners, is beneficial,” it said.

A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study found San Francisco’s 2007 plastic bag ban killed people because reusable bags increased shoppers’ exposure to harmful bacteria that can infest them. “The San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths,” the authors concluded.

RMIT economist Sinclair ­Davidson said he was surprised Coles and Woolworths would ­“deliberately pursue a policy that they know will reduce the consumer satisfaction”.

“How consumers react remains to be seen — I suspect we’ll see less impulse purchasing,” Professor Davidson said.

“All-up, this is a virtue-signalling policy being adopted by Coles and Woolies; I suspect they have done their market research and are pretty confident they can impose their world view on consumers with little consequence.’’

SOURCE

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