Age of no reason
Australian conservative journalist Andrew Bolt has fun with Greenie deceptions:
WHAT a relief it was, to be given the top 10 reasons to panic about global warming. At last - the list that would save me from doubt! It's been tough, resisting this new faith. I'd ask for proof that humans really have been heating the world up to hell with their exhausts, and believers would stare at me as if I were coal. As a furious green told a weekend paper, sceptics like me are "Holocaust deniers that make themselves look so disgustingly evil".
Even during these latest warnings that the Great Barrier Reef would die in 20 years and polar bears soon after - wild warnings to coincide with the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol - I couldn't find faith. So I thanked The Age, Australia's most Left-wing daily paper, for launching a crusade to convert sinners like me - pages and pages on global warming, starting on Saturday with a huge graphic: "10 Reasons to Start Worrying Now." And a headline screaming: "WAKE UP. THIS IS SERIOUS." Here, then, was a carefully researched list of the 10 clearest signs a serious newspaper could find of the harm already caused by global warming. These 10 Truths had to end all doubt. But - forgive me my sin - I checked this list against the facts. Forgive me again, but is this tosh truly all it takes to panic an entire newspaper - and so many of you, dear readers? Is reason now dead? Let's go through The Age's 10 "reasons to start worrying now", so you can see I do not say all this for the fun of farting in church.
1: Hudson Bay
Claim: "Polar bears have become thinner", as sea ice retreats. Facts: A Canadian Wildlife Service study did say Hudson Bay's bears were thinner - but as polar bear expert Mitch Taylor recently noted: "We're seeing an increase in bears that's really unprecedented." The CWS study also said earlier melting of sea ice may make it harder for bears to catch food - but said this melting affected only western Hudson Bay. Indeed, there was "a gradual cooling trend in eastern Hudson Bay . . . and the Labrador Sea". What's more, Greenland, which also has polar bears, has cooled since 1940. More bears, then. And more cold.
2: Tuvalu
Claim: These Pacific islands are "shrinking with rising sea levels". Facts: Australia's National Tidal Facility monitors Tuvalu's sea levels and found: "The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year", with "no visual evidence of any acceleration". At this rate, Tuvalu's seas will in 100 years rise by the thickness of a pen. "We have never believed these island will go under water," said University of South Pacific oceanographer Than Aung. But our seas have risen - 120 metres in the 17,000 years since the last Ice Age, without human gases to fuel it. Satellites detect almost no rise in the past decade.
3: Antarctica
Claim: Fewer Adelie penguins breed, as seas warm. Facts: The New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 1990 found "the numbers of Adelie penguins in the Ross Sea have increased greatly", and suggested global warming was to blame. Now there are fewer Adelies (in some colonies, but not overall) and that's a sign of warming, too. Yeah, sure, whatever. But several recent studies, including one by NASA, agree Antarctica - with 90 per cent of the world's ice - has grown colder and more ice-bound over the past 20 years or more. Ice-breakers this month had to cut through 80 nautical miles of ice instead of the usual 10 to reach McMurdo station.
4: Glacier National Park, Montana, US
Claim: Montana's glaciers are melting away. Facts: Climatologist Professor Patrick Michaels says these glaciers have melted since the end of the Little Ice Age 150 years ago - well before we were belching all this carbon dioxide - and Montana's temperatures in the past century of growing industrialisation have not risen significantly.
5: China
Claim: Many of China's glaciers are melting. Facts: China has had to thaw out from the Little Ice Age that killed the famous citrus groves of Jiangxi. The Chinese Science Bulletin in 2003 said scientists found evidence in peat deposits in Hongyuan that China had a warm period around 1000 years ago, before the Little Ice Age, "suggesting ... the main driving force of Hongyuan climate change is from solar activities". Fancy - warming being caused by the sun. New studies agree solar activity may indeed be behind some of the surface temperature changes we think we've seen - a 0.6 C warming from 1890 to 1940, followed by a cooling of 0.2 C until 1975, and a 0.4 C warming since.
6: Afghanistan
Claim: A long drought in Afghanistan, and also in Australia, "may be the product of climate change". Facts: Afghanistan's drought seems broken by recent heavy rain and snow. Rainfall over Australia rose slightly over the past century, says the Bureau of Meteorology, and our worst known drought came in the 1890s. But do such inevitable changes to local climates prove anything?
7: Great Barrier Reef
Claim: Warmer seas are turning the reef white. Facts: An El Nino caused coral bleaching in 1998, but the reef recovered, as it did again in 2002 - and from worse events in 1782-1785 and 1817. After all, the reef is 60 million years old, and has survived much hotter times. Dr Andrew Baker, head of America's Coral Research Laboratory, says bleaching may be how a coral adapts - by expelling one of the algaes that help it thrive to make room for a better one. In fact, reefs "could do well in a warmer world", Australian geochemist Professor Malcolm McCulloch has said, since "warmer ocean temperatures allow expansion of reefs to sub-tropical regions".
8: Arctic Ocean
Claim: The ice is melting. Facts: The Arctic warmed until 1938, but then cooled before warming again - so is still no "hotter" now than it was 60 years ago. Greenland, however, is still colder and icier than it was then, says the Danish Meteorological Institute, and was once so warm that Vikings thought it a truly green land.
9: Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alps
Claim: Snow gums have moved up the ranges as they've warmed. Migratory birds are affected too. Facts: One study claims snow gums are now found 30m higher up mountains. Horror - more trees! But does this prove a global warming? No one knows. Another study found four species of migratory birds now arrive a little earlier in spring - but one a little later. Yes, and...?
10: The Netherlands
Claim: Flycatcher birds migrate from Africa to find Europe so warm that the caterpillars they eat have emerged sooner than usual. Facts: Very sad, but is global warming or local warming to blame? And are a few warmer years in one area a trend, or a natural cycle of an Earth that knew warmer times often before?
And that is it. That's The Age's list of the most frightening signs of global warming. See how little there is in it to justify this panic. The truth is that despite the hype, not much about global warming is known for sure, not even how much the Earth has heated, and whether our carbon dioxide (CO2) caused it. So say even lead authors of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose doctored "predictions" are most used to frighten us.
One of them, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asks: "Will increases in CO2 affect the climate significantly? Are significant changes occurring now? Climate models suggest the answer is yes. Real data suggests otherwise."
Adds another, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "The temperature is always changing for the earth, so it has only two choices - going up or going down. It has done both, and that doesn't say it's due to CO2; it doesn't say it's going to continue; it doesn't say anything beyond that." This is why Lindzen calls the Kyoto accord, which demands expensive cuts to our emissions, "absurd".
But so much is absurd in the global warming hysteria, not least the media's willing surrender of its reason.
Source
Group Using Polar Bear to Force Greenhouse Gas Reduction
The liars fail to mention evidence that polar bears are actually thriving of course
"A conservation group is attempting to use the federal Endangered Species Act to clobber the U.S. government over global warming. The Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday announced it has filed a formal petition to have the polar bear added to threatened species list. "Polar bears may become extinct by the end of end of this century because their sea-ice habitat is literally melting away due to global warming," the group said in a message on its website.
Listing polar bears under the Endangered Species Act will "provide broad protection to polar bears," the Center said; and it will require federal agencies to "ensure that any action carried out, authorized, or funded by the United States government will not 'jeopardize the continued existence' of polar bears, or adversely modify their critical habitat." So, if global warming is threatening polar bears, the U.S. government would be obliged to do something about greenhouse gas emissions that (some believe) cause global warming.
The Center for Biological Diversity noted that the U.S. currently produces 24 percent of the world's greenhouse gases -- and it says the Bush administration has adopted a climate plan "that will allow emissions to continue to grow rapidly. The United States must quickly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a small fraction of current levels or polar bears will become extinct," said Kassie Siegel, lead author of the polar bear petition.....
As Cybercast News Service previously has reported, the Endangered Species Act frequently is invoked by activists to stymie landowners, ranchers, farmers, developers, road-builders and the oil, mining and timber industries. For many, it's become more of a "land use" issue than a species protection issue.
A bill introduced in the 108th Congress to reform the Endangered Species Act is expected to be reintroduced in the current 109th Congress. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) has said he will make ESA reform a priority for his committee. According to Pombo, "Under the mantra of species protection, radical environmental organizations use the ESA to raise funds, block development projects, and prohibit legal land uses of nearly every kind. "By filing inordinate numbers of lawsuits under the ESA, environmental organizations have hand-cuffed the [Fish and Wildlife Service] to courtroom defense tables, draining the time, money, and manpower Congress intended the service to spend on species recovery in the field."
More here
GLOBAL WARMING BELIEF IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF AN OLD SCIENTIFIC FOLLY
Note: This is from an article NOT specifically concerned with environmentalism but its applicability is obvious
"There is a strange incongruity, observable throughout the intellectual history of man, that never ceases to amaze me. Why is it in the field of ideas that dramatic new visions of truth are so often met with vehement opposition from a society's intellectuals -- the very men of the mind who are most dedicated to the pursuit and demonstration of truth? How can the intellectuals of today's era -- so acutely aware of humanity's bigoted resistance in the past to Galileo, Semmelweis, Pasteur, and other radical discoverers of history -- succumb to the same blind obstinacy in face of the new truths confronting them?
There are several reasons why this propensity for intolerance to new thinking has prevailed throughout history among intellectuals. As the physicist Fred Hoyle tells us, scientists are human. They are, far more often than the lay public perceives, victims of dogmatism and the tendency of all humans to argue from pre-set ideas.
Despite their much-heralded pledge to objective inquiry, scientists are quite capable of bias and suppression in order to preserve their long-standing beliefs. When a large portion of one's life has been passionately devoted to the validation of an idea, it becomes most difficult to accept the invalidity of that idea. Therefore truth, the most highly prized goal of all, is often forsaken to protect fragile egos and support previous convictions.
This tendency of scientists to be obstinate in the face of new truth manifests itself through the paradigm shift. As Thomas S. Kuhn demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all of science is based upon the establishment of paradigms, or what can be termed an overall "way of viewing things" in a particular field. And once a paradigm is established, it becomes difficult for most thinkers to dispute its basic premises even when that paradigm is found to be in error.
For example, the 1st century Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, established the Ptolemaic paradigm of the solar system, which depicted the earth as its center with the sun and planets revolving around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo came along and overthrew this way of thinking with a truer paradigm that depicted the sun as the center of the solar system. Newton established the mechanistic paradigm in physics during the early 18th century, and Einstein followed with a much truer relativity paradigm two hundred years later. Pasteur established the germ paradigm in medicine during the 19th century, while Darwin gave us the evolution paradigm in biology.
A paradigm is thus an all-inclusive Big Picture based upon a fundamental premise in a field of study that undergirds the "why of things" in that particular field. Even when false, a paradigm often prevails as accepted truth for a long period of time because the prevailing minds and methodology of the era are inadequate to grasp reality more clearly. But falsity persists as truth also because humans fall prey to inertia. They seek mental comfort and choose paths of least resistance, which leads them to settle into a certain paradigm as if it is inviolable. For example, even after Copernicus made it obvious around 1500 AD that the Ptolemaic concept of the universe was a fallacy, it still prevailed in intellectual circles for another 180 years until Galileo drove the final nails into its coffin.
Herein lies one of the great human dilemmas: Once a "way of viewing things" is entrenched in any given field, even when new knowledge comes along to refute such a paradigm, it becomes practically impossible (because of the flaws of human nature) for most intellectuals to think outside that paradigm's constraints. They will defend the entrenched view even when its basic conception is shown to be foolish and impossible, especially if they have devoted a vital part of their lives to the teaching and promotion of that "way of viewing things."
This is presently our situation in many intellectual fields. Like the medieval dogmatists, today's academic community also clings to irrational paradigms in face of overwhelming evidence that their views are as untenable as the flat earth theories of old......
Sadly, this kind of blindness and dogmatism in face of error is the inevitable nature of the discovery of truth. The great majority of a society's intellectual community becomes locked into its established paradigms even when those paradigms are shown to be as moronic as treating disease with leeches and creating wealth with paper money. The great majority sees only what is established, never new truths to be discovered. Only a select few who are contrarian thinkers can see the truth and are willing to endure the inevitable ostracism to promote it.
It is to such contrarian minds that the world owes its advances (i.e., its paradigm shifts) -- socially, politically, morally and scientifically -- for the contrarian is possessed of the vision to see beyond his fellows and the courage to challenge firmly entrenched error. He has the ability to mentally encompass wider vistas and integrate more profoundly the vast conceptualizations necessary to get at the truth in any given field of inquiry.
Most importantly the contrarian mind is not plagued with the desire to be popular and acclaimed in his own time. He cares little for establishment acceptance. Not that he will shun acclaim if it happens to come to him, but it is not the primary motivation driving him. Truth is what compels him. Herein lies his strength and one of the important reasons for his acute clarity. The contrarian is not obsessed with popularity, and therefore does not delude himself with the entrenched dogmas of the herd as the more common minds do.
There is a law of life that is identifiable here, and it can be stated thusly: Truth will always reveal itself only to the contrarian, for his is the only mind open enough and creative enough to see it. Not that all contrarians speak truth, for the world is chock full of nuts wading in delirium. But the truth will always come to us only through contrarian minds -- thinkers like Socrates, Galileo, Adam Smith, Pasteur, Einstein, Ludwig von Mises. Establishment intellectuals are needed to solidify and disseminate already confirmed truths, but they are not capable of promoting new truths (or they are not willing to). And because of the flaws in human nature, they invariably become roadblocks to those contrarians that are capable and willing.
Such is the condition of our intellectual fields today. As always, the contrarians are at war with the establishment, and there are profound revolutions going on. Old established paradigms are being shattered. New discoveries and visions in economics, physics, philosophy, biology, medicine, etc. are pouring forth to stir up elemental debates presumed to be settled by those who argue from pre-set ideas.
More here
CARBON MYTHOLOGY
Measuring past carbon dioxide from deep ice cores (the usual method) has huge problems from ice fracturing under pressure. It means that past levels were much HIGHER than the measurements indicate. But Greenies ignore that, among other things:
A reader writes:
Note from this site that the timeline for all recorded history, apparently begins in 1750. No mention of what CO2 levels might have been in the preceding 5 billion years. Like the carboniferous era, approximately 400 million years ago, when CO2 levels were well over 1,500 ppm - or roughly 4-5 times *higher* than now. Are the Greenies stupid or merely dishonest? According to this link:
"Earth's atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm"
Apparently, the dinosaurs drove a surprising number of SUVs. In celebration of Kyoto's enactment on this day, I shall drive a few extra miles in order to help produce more plant food.
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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.
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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Saturday, February 19, 2005
Friday, February 18, 2005
UNRAVELLING SCIENTIFIC HOCUS POCUS
Some excerpts below from a recent article in The Wall St. Journal. An article there will reach a wide and influential audience. Note the report of a coverup.
One of the pillars of the case for man-made global warming is a graph nicknamed the hockey stick. It's a reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years based on records captured in tree rings, corals and other markers. The stick's shaft shows temperatures oscillating slightly over the ages. Then comes the blade: The mercury swings sharply upward in the 20th century. The eye-catching image has had a big impact. Since it was published four years ago in a United Nations report, hundreds of environmentalists, scientists and policy makers have used the hockey stick in presentations and brochures to make the case that human activity in the industrial era is causing dangerous global warming.
But is the hockey stick true? According to a semi-retired Toronto minerals consultant, it's not. After spending two years and about $5,000 of his own money trying to double-check the influential graphic, Stephen McIntyre says he has found significant oversights and errors. He claims its lead author, climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues used flawed methods that yield meaningless results.
Dr. Mann vigorously disagrees. On a Web site launched with the help of an environmental group, he has sought to debunk the debunking, and counter what he calls a campaign by fossil-fuel interests to discredit his work. "It's a battle of truth versus disinformation," he says.
But some other scientists are now paying attention to Mr. McIntyre. Although a scientific outsider, the 57-year-old has forced Dr. Mann to publish a minor correction. Now a critique by Mr. McIntyre and an ally is being published in a respected scientific journal. Some mainstream scientists who harbored doubts about the hockey stick say its comeuppance is overdue. The clash has grown into an all-out battle involving dueling Web logs, a powerful senator and a score of other scientists. Mr. McIntyre's new paper is circulating inside energy companies and government agencies. Canada's environment ministry has ordered a review.
Mr. McIntyre's critique isn't going to settle the broader global-warming debate. Indeed, he takes no strong position on whether fossil-fuel use is heating the planet or, if so, how to cope. He just says he has found a flaw in a main leg supporting the global-warming consensus, the consensus that led to an international initiative taking effect this week: Kyoto. The Kyoto protocol obligates the 35 industrialized nations that ratified it -- which don't include the U.S. -- to reduce emissions of six gases 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The thinking behind it is straightforward: Human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, generates carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that accumulate in the atmosphere; there they trap the sun's heat the way a greenhouse does; to reduce the heat, reduce the gases.
But that will mean far-reaching industrial changes. Mr. McIntyre's complaint is that supporters of Kyoto pushed for it by wielding a graph, the hockey stick, whose validity they'd never fully scrutinized. "Give me a break -- we are making billion-dollar decisions," he says, noting that businesses, by contrast, must carefully audit their financial statements and projections.
Many skeptics contend that liberal environmental agendas are behind alarming global-warming headlines, though often skeptics bring policy agendas of their own. Think tanks backed with funding from the energy industry have waged a wide campaign to cast doubt on key scientific results. "Climate science today is fully politicized," says Roger Pielke Jr., head of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Mr. McIntyre says he hasn't received any industry funding......
The problem, says Mr. McIntyre, is that Dr. Mann's mathematical technique in drawing the graph is prone to generating hockey-stick shapes even when applied to random data. Therefore, he argues, it proves nothing. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Dr. Zwiers, chief of the Canadian agency's Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis, says he hasn't had time to study Dr. Mann's rebuttals in detail and can't say who is right......
Mr. McIntyre first became interested in the hockey stick in late 2002 after seeing the graph in materials distributed by the Canadian government. "What struck me is that it looked very promotional," he says, "and I wanted to see how they made it." As a financial consultant to small minerals-exploration companies, he was mindful of how wrong estimates of the size of Borneo gold deposits lay behind the 1997 Bre-X Minerals scandal. Mr. McIntyre, who won math contests in high school and a math scholarship to the University of Toronto, says he'd always been disappointed in not having any academic accomplishments "despite having a good mind."
Mr. McIntyre e-mailed Dr. Mann requesting the raw data used to build the hockey stick. After initially providing some information, Dr. Mann cut him off. Dr. Mann says his busy schedule didn't permit him to respond to "every frivolous note" from nonscientists. The climate-statistics expert, now 39, gained a big career boost from initial publication of the graph in 1998 and 1999. Although others had sought clues to past temperatures, his team was among the first to stitch many disparate records together to span hundreds of years across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Scientists already knew that average global temperatures had risen about one degree Fahrenheit since 1900. Now the hockey stick, showing only smaller fluctuations in earlier centuries, was seen as a breakthrough. The IPCC used it to back a striking conclusion: The 1990s were probably the warmest decade in 1,000 years. This conclusion helped shut down skeptics' claim that the 20th century's greater warmth might be due to natural factors such as changes in solar intensity.
Some scientists had doubts, however. The graph gave little emphasis to what's known as the "medieval warm period," the years around 1000 A.D. when the Norse colonized Greenland. It also seemed to smooth over a cold epoch starting in the 15th century called "the little ice age." Others worried that it relied too heavily on growth rings from a small number of ancient trees, such as California bristlecone pines that can live thousands of years clinging to mountainsides.
Some also disliked Dr. Mann's self-confident persuasive style, among them Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Yet because the graph so neatly strengthened the case for man-made warming, Dr. Broecker says, "a lot of people grabbed that hockey stick." From the outset, the graph was a target of numerous lobbyists and skeptics. When Mr. McIntyre became interested in it, he quickly teamed up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph who'd written a book questioning global warming. (The two met on an Internet chat group for climate skeptics.) In October 2003, Energy & Environment, a British social-science journal known for contrarian views, published an initial critique by the pair.
The two were invited to Washington as a vote neared on a bill to cap fossil-fuel emissions. They met with Sen. James Inhofe, who heads the environment committee and has called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." The Oklahoma Republican relied on doubts raised by a variety of skeptics in leading successful opposition to the bill in 2003. Mr. McKitrick says he was paid $1,000 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research and lobbying group, and had his travel costs picked up by another lobby group. Mr. McIntyre, who briefed lobbyists with the National Association of Manufacturers, says he has taken no payment.
Dr. Mann and scientists close to him viewed this as a political attack, not science. Dr. Mann offered a strong rebuttal of the Canadians' 2003 journal article, explaining that it didn't correctly apply his techniques. In doing so, however, he revealed details of his data and mathematical methods that hadn't appeared in his original paper. When Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick pointed this out to Nature, the journal that first published the hockey-stick graph, Dr. Mann and his two co-authors had to publish a partial correction. In it, they acknowledged one wrong date and the use of some tree-ring data that hadn't been cited in the original paper, and they offered some new details of the statistical methods. The correction, however, stated that "none of these errors affect our previously published results."
Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn't know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in," he says.
Mainstream scientists have also been scrutinizing the hockey stick. One, Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS center, has presented theoretical findings arguing that Dr. Mann's technique could sharply underestimate past temperature swings. Indeed, new research from Stockholm University on historical temperatures suggests past fluctuations were nearly twice as great as the hockey stick shows. That could mean the 20th-century jump isn't quite so anomalous.
Mr. McIntyre says he intends to continue his audit of climate science and has demanded that other researchers send him details of their work. He isn't satisfied with the responses so far. "When I ask them for additional data, you can imagine how cooperative they are," he says.
More here
JERRY POURNELLE NAILS THE COVERUP
You can prove anything with secret data and algorithms.
"There is a long piece on the global "hockey stick" in today's Wall Street Journal that explains something I didn't understand: Mann, who generated the "hockey stick" curve purporting to show that the last century was unique in all recorded history with its sharp climb in temperature, has released neither the algorithm that generated his curve nor the data on which it was based.
I had refrained from commenting on the "hockey stick" because I couldn't understand how it was derived. I've done statistical analysis and prediction from uncertainty much of my life. My first job in aerospace was as part of the Human Factors and Reliability Group at Boeing, where we were expected to deal with such matters as predicting component failures, and deriving maintenance schedules (replace it before it fails, but not so long before it fails that the costs including the cost of the maintenance crew and the costs of taking the airplane out of service are prohibitive) and other such matters. I used to live with Incomplete Gamma Functions and other complex integrals; and I could not for the life of me understand how Mann derived his famous curve. Now I know: he hasn't told anyone. He says that telling people how he generated it would be tantamount to giving in to his critics.
More on this after my walk, but the one thing we may conclude for sure is that this is not science. His curve has been distributed as part of the Canadian government's literature on why Canada supports Kyoto, and is said to have been influential in causing the "Kyoto Consensus" so it is certainly effective propaganda; but IT IS NOT SCIENCE. Science deals with repeatability and openness. When I took Philosophy of Science from Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa a very long time ago, our seminar came to a one-sentence "practical definition" of science: Science is what you can put in a letter to a colleague and he'll get the same results you did. Now I don't claim that as original for it wasn't even me who came up with it in the seminar; but I do claim Bergmann liked that formulation, and it certainly appealed to me, and I haven't seen a better one-sentence practical definition of science. Mann's work doesn't meet that definition, and those who use Mann's curve in their arguments are not making a scientific argument.
One of Pournelle's Laws states "You can prove anything if you can make up your data." I will now add another Pournelle's Law: "You can prove anything if you can keep your algorithms secret.""
AND "THE TIMES" OF LONDON WEIGHS IN ON THE WEIRD POLITICS OF "GLOBAL WARMING"
"Global warming has a way of prompting metaphors so bad they destroy a claim to seriousness. This week's prize goes to Klaus Toepfer, head of the Kenya-based United Nations Environment Programme. Climate change could lead to Earth "spinning out of control", he warned, neglecting to describe the time when the planet's climate, or rotation, have been under control.
Africa, he continued, is where "the hammer of global warming will . . . likely hit hardest", using an image of a targetted blow to describe the threat of unpredictable and diffuse change. The "spectre at the feast", he concluded, was the chance that models had underestimated the effect.
It is part of the politics of global warming that there can be no let up in the warnings of catastrophe, in case people think the problem solved. Toepfer's vocabulary perfectly illustrates the genre, with its muddle of inflated expectations and supernatural threats. Such prophesies have poured in this week even though yesterday, the Kyoto Protocol, the most ambitious concerted attempt to combat climate change, finally came into force, seven years after the summit which gave it its name.
The alarm calls are understandable politics, if some have more scientific basis than others. Even though Kyoto is now in force, it has created new headaches. Inflaming public concern may seem like a good way to tackle them. The first is that it has huge gaps, as critics see it. According to the Protocol, the 34 industrialised countries which have ratified the treaty are legally bound now to slash output of greenhouse gases before 2012, with different targets set for each depending on the level of emissions in 1990.
But the US is absent, and there are no binding curbs on the giants of the developing world, China and India. Critics of the Bush Administration find these "flaws" endlessly provocative. They fret about how to bring these rebels within the corral. But this should not be a distraction. There was never any question that the US Congress would sign up to a treaty which would have required the US to make cuts of 7 per cent in its emissions, given the country's dependence on cars.
That is a point which Tony Blair grasped early on. But his notion of a "Kyoto-lite" to include the US - a scheme for rewarding new "green" technology, without binding commitments on emissions - has brought him brickbats within Europe and the Labour party. One of the mysteries of the politics of climate change is why Blair has boxed himself into such an awkward corner. His interest in the subject appears to have sprung from the darkest days of the Iraq row. Whatever his own convictions, the political use was clear.
A commitment to the cause of climate change was a useful offer to those who loathed the war, particularly to those who claimed it was "all about oil", and to young, "green" voters. But it has taken him quickly into difficult territory, otherwise known as the loathing of nuclear power in parts of his party. Britain has no easy way to explain how it will counter the sharp rise in its emissions once existing nuclear stations close, without building more.
Nor, to take the second "flaw", is the dispute with China and India susceptible to a quick burst of pressure. They are resentful that the industrialised world, which grew rich on the unpenalised use of coal and oil, does not want to allow them the same freedom. Their resistance on this point is simply one aspect of a new assertiveness on many fronts. It is helping to stall the current Doha round of global trade talks, among others. But that may be a better forum in which to unpick their objections, offering deals which are more clearly of reciprocal benefit.
Source
Kyoto treaty a pointless exercise
An Australian economist comments:
"Today the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions comes into force. If you believe the climate change propagandists, it is the first step in saving the world from the terrible consequences of global warming. The truth is Kyoto is a joke. It will do next to nothing to lower the rate of global emissions of greenhouse gas and provides no workable framework for future action. By 2012, when ratifying countries' commitments under Kyoto to cut CO2 emissions expire, we will find key countries have failed to comply and global emissions will be rising steadily as the result of world growth.
For this we can all be thankful. The costs of following a Kyoto-style system of emission caps and timetables would, on most available studies, exceed the benefits. This is not, of course, what you will hear from the legion of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, companies and politicians who have taken seats on the Kyoto gravy train. But privately at least the smart ones know Kyoto is a dead duck.
This does not, apparently, include the retreaded Labor leader Kim Beazley and his environment spokesman Anthony Albanese. Boldly undaunted by the disastrous failure of Labor's forest policy and its electorally unproductive alliance with the Greens, they launched a pro-Kyoto stunt for Valentine's Day. Labor's Valentine's Day gift to the Australian people, Beazley told a press conference in Sydney, was Anthony Albanese's Avoid Dangerous Climate Change Bill. This bill would require the Howard Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol within 60 days of its being carried, which fortunately it won't be.
Urging Australians to make the Protocol their Valentine comes close to advocating national necrophilia. Kyoto has been a corpse since December. That was when the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held their 10th session in Buenos Aires. The aim of the European Union and its allies among the green non-government organisations and lobby groups was to use Buenos Aires to both celebrate the coming into force of the Protocol and to prepare the way for its extension beyond 2012. Recognising just how limited Kyoto was, the idea was to get agreement to a so-called second commitment period, with tougher emission targets for developed countries and a commitment from the developing countries, particularly China and India, to emission targets.
Instead the European Union was isolated and rebuffed by the developing countries, notably India and China, who joined with the US to reject any move to extend the system of enforceable caps on emissions that is at the heart of the Kyoto approach. So, importantly, did Italy - an EU member. Its environment minister declared there was no point in trying to replace Kyoto with something similar after 2012 when it was unacceptable to the US, India and China. According to a Reuters report last week, even the European Commission is backing off any binding commitment on future emission reductions after 2012. It said any future EU commitments to further reductions should depend on the level and type of participation of other big emitters.
The failure of Kyoto should not come as a surprise. Following a series of attempts in 2002 and 2003 by the Green's Bob Brown and by Labor to introduce a bill to, guess what, force the Government to ratify Kyoto in 60 days, it was finally introduced and was referred to a Senate committee for inquiry and report. One of the witnesses to appear before it was Australia's then ambassador for the environment, Chris Langman, from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. "The question is," Langman told the committee, "how can we engage India and China, where most of the growth in the global emissions will take place over the next several decades, in a way that is effective from an environmental point of view? I have very little sense from the negotiations that the [Kyoto] protocol and its approach of binding quantitative caps on emissions, is feasible in terms of engaging those countries." ....
Attempts to turn every unusual weather event into confirmation of these forecasts by climate change propagandists and politicians, from England's Tony Blair to Australia's Beazley, should be seen for what they are - either misinformed or fraudulent. Rather than let them alarm you, ask yourself this: do you think people who can't tell you whether it will rain next Wednesday are really capable of building models that tell you what the climate will be like 100 years from now? I wouldn't trust any economic modelling that forecast what the world economy would look like a century hence, and climate models are at least as flawed as economists' ones".
More here
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Some excerpts below from a recent article in The Wall St. Journal. An article there will reach a wide and influential audience. Note the report of a coverup.
One of the pillars of the case for man-made global warming is a graph nicknamed the hockey stick. It's a reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years based on records captured in tree rings, corals and other markers. The stick's shaft shows temperatures oscillating slightly over the ages. Then comes the blade: The mercury swings sharply upward in the 20th century. The eye-catching image has had a big impact. Since it was published four years ago in a United Nations report, hundreds of environmentalists, scientists and policy makers have used the hockey stick in presentations and brochures to make the case that human activity in the industrial era is causing dangerous global warming.
But is the hockey stick true? According to a semi-retired Toronto minerals consultant, it's not. After spending two years and about $5,000 of his own money trying to double-check the influential graphic, Stephen McIntyre says he has found significant oversights and errors. He claims its lead author, climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues used flawed methods that yield meaningless results.
Dr. Mann vigorously disagrees. On a Web site launched with the help of an environmental group, he has sought to debunk the debunking, and counter what he calls a campaign by fossil-fuel interests to discredit his work. "It's a battle of truth versus disinformation," he says.
But some other scientists are now paying attention to Mr. McIntyre. Although a scientific outsider, the 57-year-old has forced Dr. Mann to publish a minor correction. Now a critique by Mr. McIntyre and an ally is being published in a respected scientific journal. Some mainstream scientists who harbored doubts about the hockey stick say its comeuppance is overdue. The clash has grown into an all-out battle involving dueling Web logs, a powerful senator and a score of other scientists. Mr. McIntyre's new paper is circulating inside energy companies and government agencies. Canada's environment ministry has ordered a review.
Mr. McIntyre's critique isn't going to settle the broader global-warming debate. Indeed, he takes no strong position on whether fossil-fuel use is heating the planet or, if so, how to cope. He just says he has found a flaw in a main leg supporting the global-warming consensus, the consensus that led to an international initiative taking effect this week: Kyoto. The Kyoto protocol obligates the 35 industrialized nations that ratified it -- which don't include the U.S. -- to reduce emissions of six gases 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The thinking behind it is straightforward: Human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, generates carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that accumulate in the atmosphere; there they trap the sun's heat the way a greenhouse does; to reduce the heat, reduce the gases.
But that will mean far-reaching industrial changes. Mr. McIntyre's complaint is that supporters of Kyoto pushed for it by wielding a graph, the hockey stick, whose validity they'd never fully scrutinized. "Give me a break -- we are making billion-dollar decisions," he says, noting that businesses, by contrast, must carefully audit their financial statements and projections.
Many skeptics contend that liberal environmental agendas are behind alarming global-warming headlines, though often skeptics bring policy agendas of their own. Think tanks backed with funding from the energy industry have waged a wide campaign to cast doubt on key scientific results. "Climate science today is fully politicized," says Roger Pielke Jr., head of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Mr. McIntyre says he hasn't received any industry funding......
The problem, says Mr. McIntyre, is that Dr. Mann's mathematical technique in drawing the graph is prone to generating hockey-stick shapes even when applied to random data. Therefore, he argues, it proves nothing. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Dr. Zwiers, chief of the Canadian agency's Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis, says he hasn't had time to study Dr. Mann's rebuttals in detail and can't say who is right......
Mr. McIntyre first became interested in the hockey stick in late 2002 after seeing the graph in materials distributed by the Canadian government. "What struck me is that it looked very promotional," he says, "and I wanted to see how they made it." As a financial consultant to small minerals-exploration companies, he was mindful of how wrong estimates of the size of Borneo gold deposits lay behind the 1997 Bre-X Minerals scandal. Mr. McIntyre, who won math contests in high school and a math scholarship to the University of Toronto, says he'd always been disappointed in not having any academic accomplishments "despite having a good mind."
Mr. McIntyre e-mailed Dr. Mann requesting the raw data used to build the hockey stick. After initially providing some information, Dr. Mann cut him off. Dr. Mann says his busy schedule didn't permit him to respond to "every frivolous note" from nonscientists. The climate-statistics expert, now 39, gained a big career boost from initial publication of the graph in 1998 and 1999. Although others had sought clues to past temperatures, his team was among the first to stitch many disparate records together to span hundreds of years across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Scientists already knew that average global temperatures had risen about one degree Fahrenheit since 1900. Now the hockey stick, showing only smaller fluctuations in earlier centuries, was seen as a breakthrough. The IPCC used it to back a striking conclusion: The 1990s were probably the warmest decade in 1,000 years. This conclusion helped shut down skeptics' claim that the 20th century's greater warmth might be due to natural factors such as changes in solar intensity.
Some scientists had doubts, however. The graph gave little emphasis to what's known as the "medieval warm period," the years around 1000 A.D. when the Norse colonized Greenland. It also seemed to smooth over a cold epoch starting in the 15th century called "the little ice age." Others worried that it relied too heavily on growth rings from a small number of ancient trees, such as California bristlecone pines that can live thousands of years clinging to mountainsides.
Some also disliked Dr. Mann's self-confident persuasive style, among them Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Yet because the graph so neatly strengthened the case for man-made warming, Dr. Broecker says, "a lot of people grabbed that hockey stick." From the outset, the graph was a target of numerous lobbyists and skeptics. When Mr. McIntyre became interested in it, he quickly teamed up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph who'd written a book questioning global warming. (The two met on an Internet chat group for climate skeptics.) In October 2003, Energy & Environment, a British social-science journal known for contrarian views, published an initial critique by the pair.
The two were invited to Washington as a vote neared on a bill to cap fossil-fuel emissions. They met with Sen. James Inhofe, who heads the environment committee and has called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." The Oklahoma Republican relied on doubts raised by a variety of skeptics in leading successful opposition to the bill in 2003. Mr. McKitrick says he was paid $1,000 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research and lobbying group, and had his travel costs picked up by another lobby group. Mr. McIntyre, who briefed lobbyists with the National Association of Manufacturers, says he has taken no payment.
Dr. Mann and scientists close to him viewed this as a political attack, not science. Dr. Mann offered a strong rebuttal of the Canadians' 2003 journal article, explaining that it didn't correctly apply his techniques. In doing so, however, he revealed details of his data and mathematical methods that hadn't appeared in his original paper. When Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick pointed this out to Nature, the journal that first published the hockey-stick graph, Dr. Mann and his two co-authors had to publish a partial correction. In it, they acknowledged one wrong date and the use of some tree-ring data that hadn't been cited in the original paper, and they offered some new details of the statistical methods. The correction, however, stated that "none of these errors affect our previously published results."
Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn't know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in," he says.
Mainstream scientists have also been scrutinizing the hockey stick. One, Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS center, has presented theoretical findings arguing that Dr. Mann's technique could sharply underestimate past temperature swings. Indeed, new research from Stockholm University on historical temperatures suggests past fluctuations were nearly twice as great as the hockey stick shows. That could mean the 20th-century jump isn't quite so anomalous.
Mr. McIntyre says he intends to continue his audit of climate science and has demanded that other researchers send him details of their work. He isn't satisfied with the responses so far. "When I ask them for additional data, you can imagine how cooperative they are," he says.
More here
JERRY POURNELLE NAILS THE COVERUP
You can prove anything with secret data and algorithms.
"There is a long piece on the global "hockey stick" in today's Wall Street Journal that explains something I didn't understand: Mann, who generated the "hockey stick" curve purporting to show that the last century was unique in all recorded history with its sharp climb in temperature, has released neither the algorithm that generated his curve nor the data on which it was based.
I had refrained from commenting on the "hockey stick" because I couldn't understand how it was derived. I've done statistical analysis and prediction from uncertainty much of my life. My first job in aerospace was as part of the Human Factors and Reliability Group at Boeing, where we were expected to deal with such matters as predicting component failures, and deriving maintenance schedules (replace it before it fails, but not so long before it fails that the costs including the cost of the maintenance crew and the costs of taking the airplane out of service are prohibitive) and other such matters. I used to live with Incomplete Gamma Functions and other complex integrals; and I could not for the life of me understand how Mann derived his famous curve. Now I know: he hasn't told anyone. He says that telling people how he generated it would be tantamount to giving in to his critics.
More on this after my walk, but the one thing we may conclude for sure is that this is not science. His curve has been distributed as part of the Canadian government's literature on why Canada supports Kyoto, and is said to have been influential in causing the "Kyoto Consensus" so it is certainly effective propaganda; but IT IS NOT SCIENCE. Science deals with repeatability and openness. When I took Philosophy of Science from Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa a very long time ago, our seminar came to a one-sentence "practical definition" of science: Science is what you can put in a letter to a colleague and he'll get the same results you did. Now I don't claim that as original for it wasn't even me who came up with it in the seminar; but I do claim Bergmann liked that formulation, and it certainly appealed to me, and I haven't seen a better one-sentence practical definition of science. Mann's work doesn't meet that definition, and those who use Mann's curve in their arguments are not making a scientific argument.
One of Pournelle's Laws states "You can prove anything if you can make up your data." I will now add another Pournelle's Law: "You can prove anything if you can keep your algorithms secret.""
AND "THE TIMES" OF LONDON WEIGHS IN ON THE WEIRD POLITICS OF "GLOBAL WARMING"
"Global warming has a way of prompting metaphors so bad they destroy a claim to seriousness. This week's prize goes to Klaus Toepfer, head of the Kenya-based United Nations Environment Programme. Climate change could lead to Earth "spinning out of control", he warned, neglecting to describe the time when the planet's climate, or rotation, have been under control.
Africa, he continued, is where "the hammer of global warming will . . . likely hit hardest", using an image of a targetted blow to describe the threat of unpredictable and diffuse change. The "spectre at the feast", he concluded, was the chance that models had underestimated the effect.
It is part of the politics of global warming that there can be no let up in the warnings of catastrophe, in case people think the problem solved. Toepfer's vocabulary perfectly illustrates the genre, with its muddle of inflated expectations and supernatural threats. Such prophesies have poured in this week even though yesterday, the Kyoto Protocol, the most ambitious concerted attempt to combat climate change, finally came into force, seven years after the summit which gave it its name.
The alarm calls are understandable politics, if some have more scientific basis than others. Even though Kyoto is now in force, it has created new headaches. Inflaming public concern may seem like a good way to tackle them. The first is that it has huge gaps, as critics see it. According to the Protocol, the 34 industrialised countries which have ratified the treaty are legally bound now to slash output of greenhouse gases before 2012, with different targets set for each depending on the level of emissions in 1990.
But the US is absent, and there are no binding curbs on the giants of the developing world, China and India. Critics of the Bush Administration find these "flaws" endlessly provocative. They fret about how to bring these rebels within the corral. But this should not be a distraction. There was never any question that the US Congress would sign up to a treaty which would have required the US to make cuts of 7 per cent in its emissions, given the country's dependence on cars.
That is a point which Tony Blair grasped early on. But his notion of a "Kyoto-lite" to include the US - a scheme for rewarding new "green" technology, without binding commitments on emissions - has brought him brickbats within Europe and the Labour party. One of the mysteries of the politics of climate change is why Blair has boxed himself into such an awkward corner. His interest in the subject appears to have sprung from the darkest days of the Iraq row. Whatever his own convictions, the political use was clear.
A commitment to the cause of climate change was a useful offer to those who loathed the war, particularly to those who claimed it was "all about oil", and to young, "green" voters. But it has taken him quickly into difficult territory, otherwise known as the loathing of nuclear power in parts of his party. Britain has no easy way to explain how it will counter the sharp rise in its emissions once existing nuclear stations close, without building more.
Nor, to take the second "flaw", is the dispute with China and India susceptible to a quick burst of pressure. They are resentful that the industrialised world, which grew rich on the unpenalised use of coal and oil, does not want to allow them the same freedom. Their resistance on this point is simply one aspect of a new assertiveness on many fronts. It is helping to stall the current Doha round of global trade talks, among others. But that may be a better forum in which to unpick their objections, offering deals which are more clearly of reciprocal benefit.
Source
Kyoto treaty a pointless exercise
An Australian economist comments:
"Today the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions comes into force. If you believe the climate change propagandists, it is the first step in saving the world from the terrible consequences of global warming. The truth is Kyoto is a joke. It will do next to nothing to lower the rate of global emissions of greenhouse gas and provides no workable framework for future action. By 2012, when ratifying countries' commitments under Kyoto to cut CO2 emissions expire, we will find key countries have failed to comply and global emissions will be rising steadily as the result of world growth.
For this we can all be thankful. The costs of following a Kyoto-style system of emission caps and timetables would, on most available studies, exceed the benefits. This is not, of course, what you will hear from the legion of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, companies and politicians who have taken seats on the Kyoto gravy train. But privately at least the smart ones know Kyoto is a dead duck.
This does not, apparently, include the retreaded Labor leader Kim Beazley and his environment spokesman Anthony Albanese. Boldly undaunted by the disastrous failure of Labor's forest policy and its electorally unproductive alliance with the Greens, they launched a pro-Kyoto stunt for Valentine's Day. Labor's Valentine's Day gift to the Australian people, Beazley told a press conference in Sydney, was Anthony Albanese's Avoid Dangerous Climate Change Bill. This bill would require the Howard Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol within 60 days of its being carried, which fortunately it won't be.
Urging Australians to make the Protocol their Valentine comes close to advocating national necrophilia. Kyoto has been a corpse since December. That was when the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held their 10th session in Buenos Aires. The aim of the European Union and its allies among the green non-government organisations and lobby groups was to use Buenos Aires to both celebrate the coming into force of the Protocol and to prepare the way for its extension beyond 2012. Recognising just how limited Kyoto was, the idea was to get agreement to a so-called second commitment period, with tougher emission targets for developed countries and a commitment from the developing countries, particularly China and India, to emission targets.
Instead the European Union was isolated and rebuffed by the developing countries, notably India and China, who joined with the US to reject any move to extend the system of enforceable caps on emissions that is at the heart of the Kyoto approach. So, importantly, did Italy - an EU member. Its environment minister declared there was no point in trying to replace Kyoto with something similar after 2012 when it was unacceptable to the US, India and China. According to a Reuters report last week, even the European Commission is backing off any binding commitment on future emission reductions after 2012. It said any future EU commitments to further reductions should depend on the level and type of participation of other big emitters.
The failure of Kyoto should not come as a surprise. Following a series of attempts in 2002 and 2003 by the Green's Bob Brown and by Labor to introduce a bill to, guess what, force the Government to ratify Kyoto in 60 days, it was finally introduced and was referred to a Senate committee for inquiry and report. One of the witnesses to appear before it was Australia's then ambassador for the environment, Chris Langman, from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. "The question is," Langman told the committee, "how can we engage India and China, where most of the growth in the global emissions will take place over the next several decades, in a way that is effective from an environmental point of view? I have very little sense from the negotiations that the [Kyoto] protocol and its approach of binding quantitative caps on emissions, is feasible in terms of engaging those countries." ....
Attempts to turn every unusual weather event into confirmation of these forecasts by climate change propagandists and politicians, from England's Tony Blair to Australia's Beazley, should be seen for what they are - either misinformed or fraudulent. Rather than let them alarm you, ask yourself this: do you think people who can't tell you whether it will rain next Wednesday are really capable of building models that tell you what the climate will be like 100 years from now? I wouldn't trust any economic modelling that forecast what the world economy would look like a century hence, and climate models are at least as flawed as economists' ones".
More here
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Thursday, February 17, 2005
HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE
From a Pro-Greenie site: "The large spike in global temperature in 1998 was associated with one of the strongest El Ninos of recent centuries, the scientists say, and a weak El Nino contributed to the unusually high 2002-2003 global temperatures."
Figure that one out!
The reader who pointed me to that outstanding example of Greenie logic also has a request:
Can any reader point us to such a site or quote the relevant information from some printed source?
I have also just put up an angry letter about Greenie follies from another reader here
Another briefer email just in:
And an angry email from a Canadian farmer:
'Pollutants' in whale blubber are naturally produced
Noxious chemicals found in whale blubber may not be entirely artificial, research shows. Some of the compounds, which resemble the environmentally polluting chemicals we create as flame retardants, may be produced by sponges and other sea creatures. Scientists have known for years that certain artificial chemicals in the environment can accumulate in animals, especially in predators that eat other contaminated animals. Such tenacious molecules, called halogenated organic compounds, include the toxic pesticide DDT.
Recently, a group of similar compounds was identified in marine animals, but its source was not known. Were these methoxylated polybrominated diphenyl ethers (MeO-PBDEs) the natural products of slow, soft marine creatures, such as sponges? One sponge in the Indian Ocean had been shown to produce a MeO-PBDE, perhaps to deter predators or parasites. Or were they derived from discarded flame retardants, slightly altered by some biological process on the way? Unaltered flame-retardant molecules have been found in animal and fish tissues, including human breast milk.
Chris Reddy, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, sought to answer this question by looking at the different isotopes of carbon in the molecules. MeO-PBDE that had been produced by plants or animals would contain a consistent percentage of radioactive carbon-14, which is present at low levels throughout the ocean. If, on the other hand, the MeO-PBDE were artificial, it would have been made out of carbons from petroleum that was so old that all the carbon-14 would long since have decayed. "We call it a 'dead or alive' approach," says Reddy.
The idea was simple, but the task was anything but. Reddy's colleague Emma Teuten spent months working with a smelly 10-kilogram sample of blubber from a fatally beached True's beaked whale (Mesoplodon mirus). "I cut the skin off, and diced it and blended it, which gave something the consistency of a strawberry smoothie," she recalls. Then she burned off the fat with acid and isolated small amounts of MeO-PBDEs from it.
Carbon-14 was present in levels consistent with the surrounding ocean, the researchers report in Science. This suggests that the MeO-PBDE was a natural creation, and Reddy's team suggests that it accumulated in the whale after it ate some unknown creature, perhaps a squid, that had in turn gobbled up the organic creator of the chemicals.
More here
SOME REALISM FROM ALASKA
Alaska's climate seems to be heating up fast, with eroding coastlines, melting glaciers, oozing permafrost and retreating sea ice. Some researchers argue that these changes can definitely be blamed on greenhouse-gas emissions. Not so fast, says atmospheric scientist John Walsh, one of the country's leading investigators into climate change. "I think there's a (human-caused) part to what's going on, but at least as large in my view is the natural variability," Walsh says. "For that reason, I would hesitate to predict that the next 30 years will see a warming comparable to the last 30 years."
Walsh is the chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He helped write the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for the international Arctic Council, to be released later this year.
Q. What is the most dramatic evidence of climate change in Alaska?
A. The most dramatic I would have to say is the sea ice distribution. The last three or four summers, we've had ice really unprecedented distances offshore north of Alaska. And the past few winters, we've had very little ice in the Bering Sea, and this winter is following the pattern very well. There's not much ice out there.
I think the one other area I find impressivein Alaska is the glacier wastage that's been studied by the glaciologists. Alaska's loss of glacial ice over the past several decades is actually larger than anywhere else, in terms of contribution of water to sea level. There's even more fresh water being lost from Alaska glaciers than Greenland. And the photographs tell the story. There is some very impressive evidence there.
Q. Are we losing sea ice because of changing air temperatures or because of changes in ocean currents?
A. That's a really good question. It may be the temperatures, it may also be the wind, and it may also be the ocean current bringing more heat in from the Atlantic, and from the Pacific as well. And I don't think there are real good answers. What does seem clear is that in the early 1990s, actually '90 to '92, there were a few years of wind patterns that did push most of the thick ice away from where it had been found for decades. In a sense, the Arctic Ocean did not recover from those few years, even though the winds have (since) returned to a more normal pattern. So my hunch is that winds are at least part of the story. The oceanography also seems to be finding indications of an inflow of warm water below the surface of the sea ice from the Atlantic Ocean. ... So that's another push toward less ice.
Q. Given all this, is there any doubt that climate change is well under way?
A. There are skeptics, and there are skeptics at a couple of levels. Even if we all agree that there's change going on, there will still be debate as to whether it's anthropogenically driven - greenhouse-gas driven - or whether it's attributed to natural variation or some other factor. There's even some who'd argue that we're just seeing ups and downs, cycles so to speak, that are part of natural variability and that we aren't experiencing a trend. Now the proponents of that argument arebecoming fewer and farther between as time goes on. But even when the (public overview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) came out back in November, there was some reaction by some of what I'd call conservative science groups saying that (the report) was overplaying the trend itself and that it was overplaying the human attribution.
Q. Do we know what would be happening to the climate if people stopped releasing greenhouse gases?
A. When they run (supercomputer) models without the greenhouse gases, without the global greenhouse gases increasing, there are ups and downs that last for a decade or two - in temperature and several of the other variables. And these ups and downs do tend to be larger in the Arctic than they are in the global average. So these swings - the ups and downs that last a decade or two - are apparently part of the natural climate system.
Q. So people should understand that the role played by greenhouse gases in recent climate change is not settled yet?
A. Right.
Q. And it's still not absolutely clear that we're launched on a permanent warming trend?
A. Right. There are going to be bumps in the road along the way. Actually, the analogy that I heard that I think is very good is the analogy to the stock market in a bull market situation. The market may be going up, but along the way there are ups and downs, there are corrections.
Source
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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.
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.
*****************************************
From a Pro-Greenie site: "The large spike in global temperature in 1998 was associated with one of the strongest El Ninos of recent centuries, the scientists say, and a weak El Nino contributed to the unusually high 2002-2003 global temperatures."
Figure that one out!
The reader who pointed me to that outstanding example of Greenie logic also has a request:
"I've read that roughly 30% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emmisions are due simply in human respiration. In other words, the world just breathing emits more CO2 than all SUVs and powerplants combined. What I'd love to see compared is the emission rate for CO2 between an average, modern SUV driven a mile and the amount of CO2 exhaled by an average person riding his bicycle one mile. I would not be at all shocked to find out that the bicyclist emits more CO2 per mile than does a new SUV.....do you know of a site listing CO2 emissions per mile?
Can any reader point us to such a site or quote the relevant information from some printed source?
I have also just put up an angry letter about Greenie follies from another reader here
Another briefer email just in:
"There has been a string of ecoterror incidents by the ELF and other environmental extremists in California over recent weeks. An arrest has been made in a case where several incendiary bombs were planted at the construction site of a housing development, but they didn't explode. ELF claimed responsibility in a letter received by a newspaper. The suspect? 21 year-old Ryan Daniel Lewis of Newcastle, CA.
Newcastle is an upscale semi-rural community near Sacramento, the kind that is full of custom homes and ranch retreats nestled between foothills and farms. Lewis lived with his parents in a custom 2-story home on Fox Hill Lane and - get this - Lewis drove an SUV! The home was newly built in 2001, surely on land that at one time was pristine habitat for some poor beetle or mouse. No doubt the home was constructed out of murdered trees.
But I understand that environmentalists are Very Important People, so they don't have to live by the standards they would impose on all us 'little people'. Its not their upscale homes, expansive acres, or polluting personal automobiles that are the problem. Its all those other people! Typical enviro-hypocrites and eco-narcissists.
And an angry email from a Canadian farmer:
"In the last ten years, the strident voices have been those of David Suzuki (apparently THE expert scientist on climatology), and Environment Canada weather people with zero credibility, but fervent views on global warming and the disaster that will befall Canada. They are brazen enough to suggest changes that we must make to adapt. As a farmer, I would not try growing subtropical fruit in Manitoba, as Env. Canada predictions suggest should be possible in a few decades.
Last winter, Environment Canada predicted a warm summer and suggested that farmers should plant corn and other long-season heat-loving crops. The summer was the most frigid, misty and rainy one that I can remember. Old timers concur. The season was marginal even for growing wheat!! If we get even colder weather we might have to start raising Reindeer like Siberian residents.
What kind of SUCKER would trust Environment Canada to accurately predict climate 100 or even 10 years ahead??
'Pollutants' in whale blubber are naturally produced
Noxious chemicals found in whale blubber may not be entirely artificial, research shows. Some of the compounds, which resemble the environmentally polluting chemicals we create as flame retardants, may be produced by sponges and other sea creatures. Scientists have known for years that certain artificial chemicals in the environment can accumulate in animals, especially in predators that eat other contaminated animals. Such tenacious molecules, called halogenated organic compounds, include the toxic pesticide DDT.
Recently, a group of similar compounds was identified in marine animals, but its source was not known. Were these methoxylated polybrominated diphenyl ethers (MeO-PBDEs) the natural products of slow, soft marine creatures, such as sponges? One sponge in the Indian Ocean had been shown to produce a MeO-PBDE, perhaps to deter predators or parasites. Or were they derived from discarded flame retardants, slightly altered by some biological process on the way? Unaltered flame-retardant molecules have been found in animal and fish tissues, including human breast milk.
Chris Reddy, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, sought to answer this question by looking at the different isotopes of carbon in the molecules. MeO-PBDE that had been produced by plants or animals would contain a consistent percentage of radioactive carbon-14, which is present at low levels throughout the ocean. If, on the other hand, the MeO-PBDE were artificial, it would have been made out of carbons from petroleum that was so old that all the carbon-14 would long since have decayed. "We call it a 'dead or alive' approach," says Reddy.
The idea was simple, but the task was anything but. Reddy's colleague Emma Teuten spent months working with a smelly 10-kilogram sample of blubber from a fatally beached True's beaked whale (Mesoplodon mirus). "I cut the skin off, and diced it and blended it, which gave something the consistency of a strawberry smoothie," she recalls. Then she burned off the fat with acid and isolated small amounts of MeO-PBDEs from it.
Carbon-14 was present in levels consistent with the surrounding ocean, the researchers report in Science. This suggests that the MeO-PBDE was a natural creation, and Reddy's team suggests that it accumulated in the whale after it ate some unknown creature, perhaps a squid, that had in turn gobbled up the organic creator of the chemicals.
More here
SOME REALISM FROM ALASKA
Alaska's climate seems to be heating up fast, with eroding coastlines, melting glaciers, oozing permafrost and retreating sea ice. Some researchers argue that these changes can definitely be blamed on greenhouse-gas emissions. Not so fast, says atmospheric scientist John Walsh, one of the country's leading investigators into climate change. "I think there's a (human-caused) part to what's going on, but at least as large in my view is the natural variability," Walsh says. "For that reason, I would hesitate to predict that the next 30 years will see a warming comparable to the last 30 years."
Walsh is the chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He helped write the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for the international Arctic Council, to be released later this year.
Q. What is the most dramatic evidence of climate change in Alaska?
A. The most dramatic I would have to say is the sea ice distribution. The last three or four summers, we've had ice really unprecedented distances offshore north of Alaska. And the past few winters, we've had very little ice in the Bering Sea, and this winter is following the pattern very well. There's not much ice out there.
I think the one other area I find impressivein Alaska is the glacier wastage that's been studied by the glaciologists. Alaska's loss of glacial ice over the past several decades is actually larger than anywhere else, in terms of contribution of water to sea level. There's even more fresh water being lost from Alaska glaciers than Greenland. And the photographs tell the story. There is some very impressive evidence there.
Q. Are we losing sea ice because of changing air temperatures or because of changes in ocean currents?
A. That's a really good question. It may be the temperatures, it may also be the wind, and it may also be the ocean current bringing more heat in from the Atlantic, and from the Pacific as well. And I don't think there are real good answers. What does seem clear is that in the early 1990s, actually '90 to '92, there were a few years of wind patterns that did push most of the thick ice away from where it had been found for decades. In a sense, the Arctic Ocean did not recover from those few years, even though the winds have (since) returned to a more normal pattern. So my hunch is that winds are at least part of the story. The oceanography also seems to be finding indications of an inflow of warm water below the surface of the sea ice from the Atlantic Ocean. ... So that's another push toward less ice.
Q. Given all this, is there any doubt that climate change is well under way?
A. There are skeptics, and there are skeptics at a couple of levels. Even if we all agree that there's change going on, there will still be debate as to whether it's anthropogenically driven - greenhouse-gas driven - or whether it's attributed to natural variation or some other factor. There's even some who'd argue that we're just seeing ups and downs, cycles so to speak, that are part of natural variability and that we aren't experiencing a trend. Now the proponents of that argument arebecoming fewer and farther between as time goes on. But even when the (public overview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) came out back in November, there was some reaction by some of what I'd call conservative science groups saying that (the report) was overplaying the trend itself and that it was overplaying the human attribution.
Q. Do we know what would be happening to the climate if people stopped releasing greenhouse gases?
A. When they run (supercomputer) models without the greenhouse gases, without the global greenhouse gases increasing, there are ups and downs that last for a decade or two - in temperature and several of the other variables. And these ups and downs do tend to be larger in the Arctic than they are in the global average. So these swings - the ups and downs that last a decade or two - are apparently part of the natural climate system.
Q. So people should understand that the role played by greenhouse gases in recent climate change is not settled yet?
A. Right.
Q. And it's still not absolutely clear that we're launched on a permanent warming trend?
A. Right. There are going to be bumps in the road along the way. Actually, the analogy that I heard that I think is very good is the analogy to the stock market in a bull market situation. The market may be going up, but along the way there are ups and downs, there are corrections.
Source
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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.
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.
*****************************************
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
OZONE AND STRAWBERRIES: A GREENIE SQUAWK
The fact that in 18 years the Montreal Protocol has made absolutely no difference to earth's ozone hole is not mentioned
"This was to be the last year that strawberry farmers in the United States were to be able to use a biocide known as methyl bromide. Instead, the farmers may end up using record quantities of the gas, which significantly contributes to the depletion of Earth's protective shield, the ozone layer. In 1987, leaders from throughout the world, including President Reagan, agreed in Montreal to a treaty pledging to phase out its use. But the pledge has proved harder to live up to than initially hoped. Research has not found a substitute that is as cheap and effective as methyl bromide. That, however, is an inadequate reason for perpetual dependency. Another political solution - a simultaneous, universal phaseout of its use - is the only fair one.
A problem with the initial solution, stemming from the Montreal Protocol, is that it was the equivalent of unilateral disarmament for the California strawberry farmer. Under the original idea, an emerging competitor to the California farmers - Mexico - would not have to stop using methyl bromide at the same time. Farmers south of the border would have at least two more years to keep using the gas, which kills various weeds and insects in the soil to produce a weed-free field of abundant berries. These varying timetables for methyl bromide created the prospect of an unfair playing field. And it left too much doubt whether Mexico would actually ban methyl bromide's use.
Despite lots of research - much of it at the University of California, Davis - a new, painless solution did not emerge. There are some other chemicals that kill insects and weeds and bugs, but they are quite toxic and not as effective. "Basically, we need to breed strawberries that are resistant to soil pests," UC Davis researcher Steve Fennimore told the San Jose Mercury News. But would consumers swallow such a genetically modified strawberry?
Absent a technological breakthrough, strawberry farming without methyl bromide would mean higher costs for farmers, which means higher costs for consumers. The new costs are a function of more labor and less productivity. If every farmer in every country has to live by these rules, however, it ought to be a price consumers should be willing to live with. Earth can't live without its ozone layer".
Source
POLITICS RULE "WARMING" DEBATE
At a recent global warming conference in Exeter called by UK prime minister Tony Blair, all the usual fears were aired. Yet real debate about climate change seems to be strictly prohibited.
The week before, another conference organised by the Scientific Alliance at London's Royal Institution raised critical questions about the global warming thesis. This time the Royal Society's president Sir Bob May received frontpage coverage for arguing that the event would be biased and dangerous.
'On one hand we have the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], the rest of the world's major scientific organisations, and the government's chief scientific adviser, all pointing to the need to cut emissions', he wrote. 'On the other we have a small band of sceptics, including lobbyists funded by the US oil industry, a sci-fi writer, and the Daily Mail, who deny the scientists are right. It is reminiscent of the tobacco lobby's attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer. There is no danger this lobby will influence the scientists. But they don't need to. It is the influence on the media that is so poisonous.'
But in fact, those labelled 'sceptics' and those regarded as 'mainstream' actually share much in common. Professor Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), usually regarded as a sceptic but also a lead author for the IPCC, agrees that there is consensus among scientists. That consensus is as follows:
1. While there are inconsistencies in the temperature data, it is very likely that the world has got a bit warmer over the past 100 years - 0.6 degrees Celsius, on average, give or take 0.2 degrees either way.
2. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the world will tend to get.
3. That human activity has led to a significant increase in carbon dioxide levels, from 280 parts per million in the centuries before 1750, to 380 parts per million now.
4. Economic trends will tend to further increase carbon dioxide levels - so it is very plausible that the world will get warmer in the coming decades, all other things being equal.
The big questions in this debate are about the causes, extent and significance of climate change. While carbon dioxide is one potential cause, it is far from alone. The climate has always been in a state of flux, over shorter or longer periods, so it is likely that there are many natural factors at work in addition to any effect humans might be having.
As to the extent of climate change, almost everyone agrees that we simply don't know. It is true that carbon dioxide levels will increase, but a law of diminishing effect applies - so, as more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, each extra percentage increase has less and less effect.
If carbon dioxide levels did eventually double from their pre-industrial levels, all other things being equal, it is likely that the temperature would rise by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. That represents a noticeable warming - but nothing that would demand urgent global action.....
We don't even have sufficiently good data to be able to gauge the accuracy of these models. Satellites to measure temperature evenly across the Earth's surface have been operational since 1979. Data prior to 1979 relies on surface weather stations and weather balloons, which are not evenly spread around the world. Good records exist for North America and Europe over a period of about 100 years, but there have never been many stations for the 70 per cent of the Earth covered by water, or the 38 per cent of the rest that is desert or mountains.
This means that scientists cannot say for sure what the average temperature of the Earth was in 1900 - and the problem gets worse the further back we go. If the starting point data for a model is wrong, even slightly wrong, it could have a major impact on the outcome. Worse, it is impossible to test the model. If you want to see how good a model is, perhaps the best way to test it is to start it from as long ago as possible, and see if the results match what really happened. This doesn't work if we don't know what really happened more than two or three decades back.......
The one thing we can be pretty sure about is that, one way or another, the climate will change. Even during the course of the twentieth century, we have seen global temperatures rise in the period up to 1940, decline through to the 1970s (creating fears of a new Ice Age), and rise again thereafter. Only the last stage of this process could plausibly be caused by greenhouse gas emissions, which suggests there are substantial natural variations going on regardless of anything humans do.
The problem is that the scientific debate has been politicised, which distorts the presentation and discussion of the evidence. Environmentalists are particularly to blame here, for they have a moral message to convey: that human beings are screwing up the world. This message has now been taken on board across society, and has almost become common sense. In an atmosphere where every new report is either leapt upon to produce further gloomy conclusions about our future, or prematurely dismiss the case for global warming, it's unlikely that the science remains uncorrupted..... It is likely that we will only be able to understand and cope with climate change through a rigorously critical examination of data, models and theories. But the climate created by this politicised debate may make that impossible.
More here
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
The fact that in 18 years the Montreal Protocol has made absolutely no difference to earth's ozone hole is not mentioned
"This was to be the last year that strawberry farmers in the United States were to be able to use a biocide known as methyl bromide. Instead, the farmers may end up using record quantities of the gas, which significantly contributes to the depletion of Earth's protective shield, the ozone layer. In 1987, leaders from throughout the world, including President Reagan, agreed in Montreal to a treaty pledging to phase out its use. But the pledge has proved harder to live up to than initially hoped. Research has not found a substitute that is as cheap and effective as methyl bromide. That, however, is an inadequate reason for perpetual dependency. Another political solution - a simultaneous, universal phaseout of its use - is the only fair one.
A problem with the initial solution, stemming from the Montreal Protocol, is that it was the equivalent of unilateral disarmament for the California strawberry farmer. Under the original idea, an emerging competitor to the California farmers - Mexico - would not have to stop using methyl bromide at the same time. Farmers south of the border would have at least two more years to keep using the gas, which kills various weeds and insects in the soil to produce a weed-free field of abundant berries. These varying timetables for methyl bromide created the prospect of an unfair playing field. And it left too much doubt whether Mexico would actually ban methyl bromide's use.
Despite lots of research - much of it at the University of California, Davis - a new, painless solution did not emerge. There are some other chemicals that kill insects and weeds and bugs, but they are quite toxic and not as effective. "Basically, we need to breed strawberries that are resistant to soil pests," UC Davis researcher Steve Fennimore told the San Jose Mercury News. But would consumers swallow such a genetically modified strawberry?
Absent a technological breakthrough, strawberry farming without methyl bromide would mean higher costs for farmers, which means higher costs for consumers. The new costs are a function of more labor and less productivity. If every farmer in every country has to live by these rules, however, it ought to be a price consumers should be willing to live with. Earth can't live without its ozone layer".
Source
POLITICS RULE "WARMING" DEBATE
At a recent global warming conference in Exeter called by UK prime minister Tony Blair, all the usual fears were aired. Yet real debate about climate change seems to be strictly prohibited.
The week before, another conference organised by the Scientific Alliance at London's Royal Institution raised critical questions about the global warming thesis. This time the Royal Society's president Sir Bob May received frontpage coverage for arguing that the event would be biased and dangerous.
'On one hand we have the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], the rest of the world's major scientific organisations, and the government's chief scientific adviser, all pointing to the need to cut emissions', he wrote. 'On the other we have a small band of sceptics, including lobbyists funded by the US oil industry, a sci-fi writer, and the Daily Mail, who deny the scientists are right. It is reminiscent of the tobacco lobby's attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer. There is no danger this lobby will influence the scientists. But they don't need to. It is the influence on the media that is so poisonous.'
But in fact, those labelled 'sceptics' and those regarded as 'mainstream' actually share much in common. Professor Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), usually regarded as a sceptic but also a lead author for the IPCC, agrees that there is consensus among scientists. That consensus is as follows:
1. While there are inconsistencies in the temperature data, it is very likely that the world has got a bit warmer over the past 100 years - 0.6 degrees Celsius, on average, give or take 0.2 degrees either way.
2. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the world will tend to get.
3. That human activity has led to a significant increase in carbon dioxide levels, from 280 parts per million in the centuries before 1750, to 380 parts per million now.
4. Economic trends will tend to further increase carbon dioxide levels - so it is very plausible that the world will get warmer in the coming decades, all other things being equal.
The big questions in this debate are about the causes, extent and significance of climate change. While carbon dioxide is one potential cause, it is far from alone. The climate has always been in a state of flux, over shorter or longer periods, so it is likely that there are many natural factors at work in addition to any effect humans might be having.
As to the extent of climate change, almost everyone agrees that we simply don't know. It is true that carbon dioxide levels will increase, but a law of diminishing effect applies - so, as more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, each extra percentage increase has less and less effect.
If carbon dioxide levels did eventually double from their pre-industrial levels, all other things being equal, it is likely that the temperature would rise by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. That represents a noticeable warming - but nothing that would demand urgent global action.....
We don't even have sufficiently good data to be able to gauge the accuracy of these models. Satellites to measure temperature evenly across the Earth's surface have been operational since 1979. Data prior to 1979 relies on surface weather stations and weather balloons, which are not evenly spread around the world. Good records exist for North America and Europe over a period of about 100 years, but there have never been many stations for the 70 per cent of the Earth covered by water, or the 38 per cent of the rest that is desert or mountains.
This means that scientists cannot say for sure what the average temperature of the Earth was in 1900 - and the problem gets worse the further back we go. If the starting point data for a model is wrong, even slightly wrong, it could have a major impact on the outcome. Worse, it is impossible to test the model. If you want to see how good a model is, perhaps the best way to test it is to start it from as long ago as possible, and see if the results match what really happened. This doesn't work if we don't know what really happened more than two or three decades back.......
The one thing we can be pretty sure about is that, one way or another, the climate will change. Even during the course of the twentieth century, we have seen global temperatures rise in the period up to 1940, decline through to the 1970s (creating fears of a new Ice Age), and rise again thereafter. Only the last stage of this process could plausibly be caused by greenhouse gas emissions, which suggests there are substantial natural variations going on regardless of anything humans do.
The problem is that the scientific debate has been politicised, which distorts the presentation and discussion of the evidence. Environmentalists are particularly to blame here, for they have a moral message to convey: that human beings are screwing up the world. This message has now been taken on board across society, and has almost become common sense. In an atmosphere where every new report is either leapt upon to produce further gloomy conclusions about our future, or prematurely dismiss the case for global warming, it's unlikely that the science remains uncorrupted..... It is likely that we will only be able to understand and cope with climate change through a rigorously critical examination of data, models and theories. But the climate created by this politicised debate may make that impossible.
More here
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Wind Power: NYT Gives both sides to the story! (Sort of)
It must be on its way out! Wind power will alway be hugely more costly because you have to duplicate wind generators with conventional generators for the times when the wind is not blowing. Some excerpts:
"With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else. Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.
The center, 150 miles east of Albuquerque, opened in the summer of 2003 and is one of the largest in the country. The power is bought by the state's largest utility, Public Service of New Mexico, and provides about 4 percent of that company's electricity over the course of a year. In March, when demand is low and winds are usually strong, the project generates 10 percent of the electricity the company supplies. The state has established a goal of using 10 percent renewable energy by 2011. The governor, Bill Richardson, a former secretary of energy, has said that New Mexico could become "the Saudi Arabia of renewables."
Across the country, the increase in gas prices has made a fundamental difference in the purchasing decisions of utility companies, said Michael A. O'Sullivan, senior vice president of FPL Energy, which owns and operates the New Mexico center. "Gas prices helped get - pardon the pun - the wind at our backs," he said in a telephone interview from the company headquarters in Juno Beach, Fla. At $6 per million B.T.U.'s, the standard unit in which gas prices are quoted, the fuel needed to produce a kilowatt-hour costs more than 5 cents at an inefficient gas plant, and more than 4 cents at the most efficient plants.
Last fall, Congress restored the Production Tax Credit, worth 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour after taxes, for wind energy projects completed by the end of 2005. Counting that credit, Mr. O'Sullivan said, his company sells wind energy for 3 to 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. The tax credit and steeper natural gas prices are driving the increased interest in wind energy.
But there are problems, even supporters say. "One of the things the wind folks do not talk about is when the wind blows," said George E. Kehler, manger of alternative and renewable energy at Dow Chemical. West Texas, for example, is notoriously windy, but mostly at night and in the winter, when the electric market is glutted with cheap power from coal and nuclear plants. Peak electric load, and peak use of gas in electricity generators, occurs in summer, during the day.
But most of the year the wind is not blowing nearly hard enough to make 206 megawatts. Mr. Brown said his company was not certain how much more heavily it could depend on wind energy without the threat of blackouts. The variability was obvious here on Thursday morning, with wind that looked to be suitable for kite flying, but which the center's employees said was weak. A control room display showed the wind blowing at 5.5 meters a second (about 12 miles an hour) and the "swooshing" from the 110-foot-long blades was slow, turning at about 16 revolutions a minute instead of the optimum 20. The plant was producing only about 25 megawatts, or one-eighth of its capacity.
More here
A GREENIE NEWS ORGANIZATION
The Associated Press has recently run two global warming stories by AP Special Correspondent Charles P. Hanley that misrepresent objective facts about climate, apparently for the purpose of leading readers to believe that human activities are causing the planet to warm significantly.
The AP published the same faulty information in another Hanley article nearly a year ago.... The re-publication of information the AP should know to be faulty falls on the heels of another grossly misleading AP story about a global warming report entitled "Meeting the Climate Challenge." Readers of the AP story about the report would likely conclude the report was issued by scientific research organizations - but the sponsors were liberal activist groups.
The New York Times and CBS News once were considered beyond the reach of public criticism. They are no more. Wire services such as the Associated Press may be less obviously vulnerable because its reporters are less visible personalities while its work product tends to be presented in a low-key manner. Nonetheless, the AP is hugely influential while the accuracy of its reporting is questionable at best. If this volatile mix continues, increased scrutiny is inevitable.
The most recent Haney stories (for examples, see "Glaciers Shrinking in a Warming World," Washington Post, January 29, 2005, and "Antarctica's Ice Seems to be Safe, at Least for Now," USA Today, February 7, 2005) contain the following:
These sentences are fairly transparent attempts to convince the reader that the global warming hypothesis is true. They go beyond editorializing to provable inaccuracy, however:
On the second matter, the AP article on the report "Meeting the Climate Challenge," the AP began its story:
Readers could be forgiven for believing the three organizations sponsoring the report are independent, objective scientific research organizations. Certainly nothing in the AP's text tells anyone not already familiar with the groups that they are anything but objective:
The three left-of-center organizations were more open about their agenda than the AP was on their behalf.
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
It must be on its way out! Wind power will alway be hugely more costly because you have to duplicate wind generators with conventional generators for the times when the wind is not blowing. Some excerpts:
"With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else. Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.
The center, 150 miles east of Albuquerque, opened in the summer of 2003 and is one of the largest in the country. The power is bought by the state's largest utility, Public Service of New Mexico, and provides about 4 percent of that company's electricity over the course of a year. In March, when demand is low and winds are usually strong, the project generates 10 percent of the electricity the company supplies. The state has established a goal of using 10 percent renewable energy by 2011. The governor, Bill Richardson, a former secretary of energy, has said that New Mexico could become "the Saudi Arabia of renewables."
Across the country, the increase in gas prices has made a fundamental difference in the purchasing decisions of utility companies, said Michael A. O'Sullivan, senior vice president of FPL Energy, which owns and operates the New Mexico center. "Gas prices helped get - pardon the pun - the wind at our backs," he said in a telephone interview from the company headquarters in Juno Beach, Fla. At $6 per million B.T.U.'s, the standard unit in which gas prices are quoted, the fuel needed to produce a kilowatt-hour costs more than 5 cents at an inefficient gas plant, and more than 4 cents at the most efficient plants.
Last fall, Congress restored the Production Tax Credit, worth 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour after taxes, for wind energy projects completed by the end of 2005. Counting that credit, Mr. O'Sullivan said, his company sells wind energy for 3 to 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. The tax credit and steeper natural gas prices are driving the increased interest in wind energy.
But there are problems, even supporters say. "One of the things the wind folks do not talk about is when the wind blows," said George E. Kehler, manger of alternative and renewable energy at Dow Chemical. West Texas, for example, is notoriously windy, but mostly at night and in the winter, when the electric market is glutted with cheap power from coal and nuclear plants. Peak electric load, and peak use of gas in electricity generators, occurs in summer, during the day.
But most of the year the wind is not blowing nearly hard enough to make 206 megawatts. Mr. Brown said his company was not certain how much more heavily it could depend on wind energy without the threat of blackouts. The variability was obvious here on Thursday morning, with wind that looked to be suitable for kite flying, but which the center's employees said was weak. A control room display showed the wind blowing at 5.5 meters a second (about 12 miles an hour) and the "swooshing" from the 110-foot-long blades was slow, turning at about 16 revolutions a minute instead of the optimum 20. The plant was producing only about 25 megawatts, or one-eighth of its capacity.
More here
A GREENIE NEWS ORGANIZATION
The Associated Press has recently run two global warming stories by AP Special Correspondent Charles P. Hanley that misrepresent objective facts about climate, apparently for the purpose of leading readers to believe that human activities are causing the planet to warm significantly.
The AP published the same faulty information in another Hanley article nearly a year ago.... The re-publication of information the AP should know to be faulty falls on the heels of another grossly misleading AP story about a global warming report entitled "Meeting the Climate Challenge." Readers of the AP story about the report would likely conclude the report was issued by scientific research organizations - but the sponsors were liberal activist groups.
The New York Times and CBS News once were considered beyond the reach of public criticism. They are no more. Wire services such as the Associated Press may be less obviously vulnerable because its reporters are less visible personalities while its work product tends to be presented in a low-key manner. Nonetheless, the AP is hugely influential while the accuracy of its reporting is questionable at best. If this volatile mix continues, increased scrutiny is inevitable.
The most recent Haney stories (for examples, see "Glaciers Shrinking in a Warming World," Washington Post, January 29, 2005, and "Antarctica's Ice Seems to be Safe, at Least for Now," USA Today, February 7, 2005) contain the following:
"Temperatures globally rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, most of that attributed by scientific consensus to the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other warming "greenhouse gases," mostly from fossil fuel-burning."
and
"The warming will continue as long as "greenhouse gases," primarily carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, accumulate in the atmosphere, say the U.N. panel and other authoritative scientific organizations."
These sentences are fairly transparent attempts to convince the reader that the global warming hypothesis is true. They go beyond editorializing to provable inaccuracy, however:
Half or more of 20th century global warming occurred in the first few decades of that century, before the widespread burning of fossil fuels (and before 82 percent of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide observed in the 20th century).
The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, not carbon dioxide.
Most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not come from the burning of fossil fuels. Only about 14 percent of it does.
On the second matter, the AP article on the report "Meeting the Climate Challenge," the AP began its story:
"Global warming is approaching the critical point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea-levels would be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned Monday.
The report, "Meeting the Climate Challenge," called on the G-8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on green technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol.
"An ecological time-bomb is ticking away," said Stephen Byers, who co-chaired the task force with U.S. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, and is a close confidant of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "World leaders need to recognize that climate change is the single most important long term issue that the planet faces."
The independent report, by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the United States and The Australia Institute, is timed to coincide with Blair's commitment to advance international climate change policy during Britain's G-8 presidency...
...According to the report, urgent action is needed to stop the global average temperature rising by 2 degrees Celsius above the level in 1750 -- the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution when mankind first started significantly polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
Beyond a 2 degrees rise, "the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly" the report said, adding there would be a risk of "abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change."
It warned of "climatic tipping points" such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting and the Gulf Stream shutting down.
No accurate temperature readings were available for 1750, the report said, but since 1860, global average temperature had risen by 0.8 percent to 15 degrees Celsius.
The two degrees rise could be avoided by keeping the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 400 parts per million (ppm). Current concentrations of 379 ppm "are likely to rise above 400 ppm in coming decades and could rise far higher under a business-as-usual scenario," the report warned...."
Readers could be forgiven for believing the three organizations sponsoring the report are independent, objective scientific research organizations. Certainly nothing in the AP's text tells anyone not already familiar with the groups that they are anything but objective:
The Center for American Progress, in its "What We're About" section on its website, gives one of its four reasons to exist as "responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives." The other three cited reasons are various methods of promoting liberal political ideology.
A publication by The Australia Institute openly revealed that the report's purpose was to influence governmental action, not to provide new scientific information about the climate. Other Australia Institute publications, including press materials about the report, also make this clear. Readers of the AP story, however, are never told this.
Britain's Institute for Public Policy Research says starkly at the top left of its Internet home page "IPPR is the UK's leading progressive think tank." It also says of itself, "IPPR was formed... to act as a dynamic, independent catalyst for progressive thinking on the centre-left... [IPPR's] emergence was crucial in providing an alternative space to rival the thinking of free-market think-tanks."
The three left-of-center organizations were more open about their agenda than the AP was on their behalf.
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Monday, February 14, 2005
GREENIE OBSTRUCTIONISM GETS TOUGH RESPONSE:
About time. But a pity such sweeping measures were necessary. The Greenie "stop everything" policy undermines reasonable compromise
The Real ID Act, approved by a 261-to-161 vote, includes a number of anti-terrorism provisions approved last year by the House in response to the 9-11 commission's recommendations but dropped due to Senate opposition. "This unfinished business from last year aims to prevent another 9-11-type attack by disrupting terrorist travel," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the bill's chief sponsor.
Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005 seeks to expedite the building of a three-mile fence at the border near San Diego to staunch the flood of illegal aliens that travel through an area known as "smuggler's gulch." Environmental laws have been the project's chief roadblock, but the bill's language appears to provide an unlimited scope, reading, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section."
Significantly, it also says courts are prohibited from reviewing the secretary's decision.
A spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. -- a supporter of the bill whose district includes the border area -- said he could not comment on the scope of the measure's language. But he emphasized the need to construct the barrier as soon as possible to shut down a potential entry point by terrorists. "There is an urgent priority to finish it," said Joe Kasper. "For several years, we've been going back and forth with the California Coastal Commission to finish up this border fence, with little success." ....
A group called Defenders of Wildlife said it believes that although Sensenbrenner repeatedly has described H.R. 418 as limited only to the San Diego project, it likely would enable the secretary to waive all laws applying to the nearly 7,500 miles of border with Mexico and Canada. Rodger Schlickeisen, president of the group, called the section "extreme and unnecessary."
More here
RECYCLING: BUT WHY?
It costs more than dumping the stuff and uses up more resources so why do it? Some sort of puritan hangover from a poorer era I guess. Brisbane city where I live has had compulsory recycling for years -- complete with separate bins for "recyclables" and special trucks to collect it -- but nobody wanted the "recycled" stuff so it just get dumped too -- as a cost-saving measure
Recycling has been required for more than a decade in communities with progressive reputations, such as Madison, Wis., and several Northeastern states - with varying degrees of success.
Seattle has had ample reason to brag since 1989, when it became one of the first cities in the country to start curbside pickup of newspaper, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles and office paper. But in recent years, its recycling rate has dipped below 40 percent, down from a peak of 44 percent in 1995.
Most cities would probably envy that rate, well above the national average of about 27 percent, according to the State of Garbage in America, a report published last year by the recycling journal Biocycle. But it's far from Seattle's goal of 60 percent by the end of the decade.
So the City Council passed a mandatory recycling law that took effect Jan. 1, but penalties won't be enforced until next year. Starting in 2006, people in single-family homes won't get their trash picked up if they dump "significant amounts" of recyclables in their trash, defined by the city as more than 10 percent by volume. Owners of apartments, condominiums and businesses will face $50 fines. So far, city officials say few people have complained. Most calls have come from people wondering how to comply with the new standards. "When you tell them what the story is, they say, 'Oh, OK,'" said Tim Croll, community services director for Seattle Public Utilities, which runs the city's garbage and recycling systems. The city has budgeted $1.5 million for a three-year education campaign that began last year and includes mailers, how-to kits, a recycling hot line and friendly warning tags that open with "Why waste a good thing?"
Source
About time. But a pity such sweeping measures were necessary. The Greenie "stop everything" policy undermines reasonable compromise
The Real ID Act, approved by a 261-to-161 vote, includes a number of anti-terrorism provisions approved last year by the House in response to the 9-11 commission's recommendations but dropped due to Senate opposition. "This unfinished business from last year aims to prevent another 9-11-type attack by disrupting terrorist travel," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the bill's chief sponsor.
Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005 seeks to expedite the building of a three-mile fence at the border near San Diego to staunch the flood of illegal aliens that travel through an area known as "smuggler's gulch." Environmental laws have been the project's chief roadblock, but the bill's language appears to provide an unlimited scope, reading, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section."
Significantly, it also says courts are prohibited from reviewing the secretary's decision.
A spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. -- a supporter of the bill whose district includes the border area -- said he could not comment on the scope of the measure's language. But he emphasized the need to construct the barrier as soon as possible to shut down a potential entry point by terrorists. "There is an urgent priority to finish it," said Joe Kasper. "For several years, we've been going back and forth with the California Coastal Commission to finish up this border fence, with little success." ....
A group called Defenders of Wildlife said it believes that although Sensenbrenner repeatedly has described H.R. 418 as limited only to the San Diego project, it likely would enable the secretary to waive all laws applying to the nearly 7,500 miles of border with Mexico and Canada. Rodger Schlickeisen, president of the group, called the section "extreme and unnecessary."
More here
RECYCLING: BUT WHY?
It costs more than dumping the stuff and uses up more resources so why do it? Some sort of puritan hangover from a poorer era I guess. Brisbane city where I live has had compulsory recycling for years -- complete with separate bins for "recyclables" and special trucks to collect it -- but nobody wanted the "recycled" stuff so it just get dumped too -- as a cost-saving measure
Recycling has been required for more than a decade in communities with progressive reputations, such as Madison, Wis., and several Northeastern states - with varying degrees of success.
Seattle has had ample reason to brag since 1989, when it became one of the first cities in the country to start curbside pickup of newspaper, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles and office paper. But in recent years, its recycling rate has dipped below 40 percent, down from a peak of 44 percent in 1995.
Most cities would probably envy that rate, well above the national average of about 27 percent, according to the State of Garbage in America, a report published last year by the recycling journal Biocycle. But it's far from Seattle's goal of 60 percent by the end of the decade.
So the City Council passed a mandatory recycling law that took effect Jan. 1, but penalties won't be enforced until next year. Starting in 2006, people in single-family homes won't get their trash picked up if they dump "significant amounts" of recyclables in their trash, defined by the city as more than 10 percent by volume. Owners of apartments, condominiums and businesses will face $50 fines. So far, city officials say few people have complained. Most calls have come from people wondering how to comply with the new standards. "When you tell them what the story is, they say, 'Oh, OK,'" said Tim Croll, community services director for Seattle Public Utilities, which runs the city's garbage and recycling systems. The city has budgeted $1.5 million for a three-year education campaign that began last year and includes mailers, how-to kits, a recycling hot line and friendly warning tags that open with "Why waste a good thing?"
Source
CLIMATE CHANGE AND HORSEHOCKS
Louis Hisskink emails me as follows:
Recently Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick had a peer reviewed paper (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL021750.shtml) published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 12, 2005. They add further rigorous analysis of the Mann et al temperature reconstruction that resulted in the famous IPCC Hockey Stick Graph which showed unprecedented global warming during the 20th century. This graph has now been proven to be the result of sloppy statistical analysis and is essentially the result of pathological science.
Studying the graphs on McIntyre's blog, as well as other sites, I noticed that all of the graphs invariably are published as temperature anomaly graphs (the difference between a long period average temperature and the mean for a particular year) and that the variation was in the order of a decimal point of the temperature unit, Kelvin, or more widely known as Degrees Celsius.
This representation of data is used to enhance extremely subtle signals hidden in stronger signals. In order to further emphasise this anomalism, the vertical scale is exaggerated. What does this mean practically?
Basically nothing. The variation from the long term mean, being within +/- 0.5 Deg Celsius, is to all intents and purposes within the reading error of a standard thermometer. Furthermore a temperature variation of this magnitude is physically imperceptible. Can you detect a variation of +/- 0.5 deg Celsius in your bath water using the tip of your elbow?
This raises the issue of what accuracy can we read thermometers. As meteorological stations need to record the range of possible temperatures, specifically from -60deg Celsius to + 60 Deg Celsius, we need to construct a glass thermometer at a suitable size. As we cannot physically discern a temperature change of less than 1 degree Celsius, there is no need to calibrate a mercury thermometer in decimal fractions of a degree, hence the measurement limit of such a thermometer would be X +/- 0.5 degrees Celsius, the calibration resolution, or Measurement +/- 0.5 deg Celsius. This measurement resolution is adequate for climate purposes, since diurnal variations generally fall within a range of 45 Degrees Celsius.
The daily fluctuation of the temperature in Perth, for example, varies from a minima of say 10 degrees to almost 40 degrees Celsius in summer - a 30 degree range. Superimposed on this diurnal variation is a subtle signal at the limit of detection of your measuring thermometer - variations less than 0.5 degrees Celsius. In fact variations you cannot actually measure with a standard thermometer.
Strangely, or not so strangely for climate skeptics, the debate about temperatures for the last 10,000 years is a debate over temperature anomalies within the error margin of standard mercury thermometers. This is in addition to the erroneous way in which the surface temperature measurements are collated, in 5x5 degree blocks of latitude/longitude. Vincent Gray, has done an independent analysis of the recorded surface temperatures here (http://www.john-daly.com/guests/regional.htm).
In other words much ado over nothing. This climate debate is no different from the theological debate over how many angels could be fitted onto a pinhead.
As Colonel Harry Potter of the MASH TV series would have concluded, the global warmers, or climate changers as they now have decided to call themselves, (talk about delusions of grandeur) are spruiking horsehocks.
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Louis Hisskink emails me as follows:
Recently Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick had a peer reviewed paper (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL021750.shtml) published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 12, 2005. They add further rigorous analysis of the Mann et al temperature reconstruction that resulted in the famous IPCC Hockey Stick Graph which showed unprecedented global warming during the 20th century. This graph has now been proven to be the result of sloppy statistical analysis and is essentially the result of pathological science.
Studying the graphs on McIntyre's blog, as well as other sites, I noticed that all of the graphs invariably are published as temperature anomaly graphs (the difference between a long period average temperature and the mean for a particular year) and that the variation was in the order of a decimal point of the temperature unit, Kelvin, or more widely known as Degrees Celsius.
This representation of data is used to enhance extremely subtle signals hidden in stronger signals. In order to further emphasise this anomalism, the vertical scale is exaggerated. What does this mean practically?
Basically nothing. The variation from the long term mean, being within +/- 0.5 Deg Celsius, is to all intents and purposes within the reading error of a standard thermometer. Furthermore a temperature variation of this magnitude is physically imperceptible. Can you detect a variation of +/- 0.5 deg Celsius in your bath water using the tip of your elbow?
This raises the issue of what accuracy can we read thermometers. As meteorological stations need to record the range of possible temperatures, specifically from -60deg Celsius to + 60 Deg Celsius, we need to construct a glass thermometer at a suitable size. As we cannot physically discern a temperature change of less than 1 degree Celsius, there is no need to calibrate a mercury thermometer in decimal fractions of a degree, hence the measurement limit of such a thermometer would be X +/- 0.5 degrees Celsius, the calibration resolution, or Measurement +/- 0.5 deg Celsius. This measurement resolution is adequate for climate purposes, since diurnal variations generally fall within a range of 45 Degrees Celsius.
The daily fluctuation of the temperature in Perth, for example, varies from a minima of say 10 degrees to almost 40 degrees Celsius in summer - a 30 degree range. Superimposed on this diurnal variation is a subtle signal at the limit of detection of your measuring thermometer - variations less than 0.5 degrees Celsius. In fact variations you cannot actually measure with a standard thermometer.
Strangely, or not so strangely for climate skeptics, the debate about temperatures for the last 10,000 years is a debate over temperature anomalies within the error margin of standard mercury thermometers. This is in addition to the erroneous way in which the surface temperature measurements are collated, in 5x5 degree blocks of latitude/longitude. Vincent Gray, has done an independent analysis of the recorded surface temperatures here (http://www.john-daly.com/guests/regional.htm).
In other words much ado over nothing. This climate debate is no different from the theological debate over how many angels could be fitted onto a pinhead.
As Colonel Harry Potter of the MASH TV series would have concluded, the global warmers, or climate changers as they now have decided to call themselves, (talk about delusions of grandeur) are spruiking horsehocks.
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Sunday, February 13, 2005
STUPID URBAN PLANNING IDEAS ENCOURAGE CRIME
Theory trumps the facts every time. It's private space that creates safety, not big public spaces
Burras Road was a pleasant cul-de-sac of 21 new homes in Bradford, England. Its residents were blissfully unaware that, just east of the site, approval for a proposed new shopping center required the breaching of their cul-de-sac by a bicycle-pedestrian path. Planners favored this requirement because, they say, cul-de-sacs do not encourage movement and therefore are "auto-dependent" and "anti-urban." Opening up the site would connect residents to local services, and the path would promote walking and cycling.
The path connecting the shopping center to the cul-de-sac opened in 2000. Although there is no evidence that the path has led residents to drive less, it did have a profound effect on their lives. During the next six months, a neighborhood that had been virtually crime-free saw its burglary rate rise to 14 times the national rate, with matching increases in overall crime, including arson, assault, and antisocial behavior.
Because a secondary school was located west of the cul-de-sac, the pedestrian path opened the neighborhood to a constant stream of students and others going between the school and the shopping center. Crime and vandalism became commonplace. "The path turned our piece of paradise into a living hell," one resident complained.
At a late stage, the local police crime prevention officer had tried to prevent the route from opening, predicting it would be a disaster, only to be told that the path was "sacrosanct." Residents' quality of life apparently was less important than the dubious goal of reducing auto dependency.
Architects and urban planners who call themselves New Urbanists say their proposals, including developments that mix residential and commercial uses, have homes with tiny private yards and large common areas, and feature pedestrian paths, will solve all sorts of social problems, including crime. Yet the housing and neighborhood designs they want to substitute for the modern suburb almost invariably increase crime......
With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.
A teacher of urban design at St. Louis' Washington University, Newman watched the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, an award-winning high-rise housing project that had closely followed Le Corbusier's vision of a Radiant City. Completed in 1956, the project suffered so much crime that it quickly became unlivable. Despite offering essentially free housing for many poor people, its high vacancy rates led to closure, and its 1972 demolition has come to symbolize the failure of government housing projects.
Newman noticed that there was a low-rise housing project across the street from Pruitt-Igoe whose residents were in the same socioeconomic class but that "remained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout construction, occupancy, and decline of Pruitt-Igoe." What, Newman wondered, were "the physical differences that had enabled one to survive while the other fell apart"?
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Newman carefully compared crime rates with the design features of thousands of blocks in hundreds of urban neighborhoods that collectively housed nearly half a million people.
The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible.
Relying more on mid-rise developments than high rises, New Urbanism claims to have fixed the problems of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Yet New Urbanism shares many features with Pruitt-Igoe, including the large communal areas and permeability that Newman found caused so many problems.
The authors of SafeScape were familiar with Newman's work, but they chose to misrepresent it. "Newman took the `eyes on the street' concept," Zelinka and Brennan wrote, and "argued that the reason `eyes on the street' provide safety in urban, mixed commercial and residential areas is because there is a visible link between residents and the street." In fact, Newman specifically criticized what he called "the unsupported hypotheses of Jane Jacobs." Newman's work showed that mixed-use development led to significantly higher crime, while he couldn't find any evidence that "eyes on the street" would reduce that crime. "`Natural surveillance' is not automatically created by high-density environments," he wrote, "unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families."
One New Urbanist concept built into SafeScape is the idea of maximizing common areas to create "a sense of community." While one of SafeScape's principles is "stewardship and ownership," the authors don't want private areas so much as they want to give people a "sense of ownership" in community property. To that end, say the authors, "Communities should include places that support the coming together of people," such as shops, pedestrian paths, parks, and community gardens. While these things are fine if people want them, when planners impose them on neighborhoods, the results are often disastrous.
Newman took exactly the opposite approach. "The larger the number of people who share a communal space," he found, "the more difficult it is for people to identify it as being in any way theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it." To solve this problem, "`Defensible Space' operates by subdividing large portions of public spaces and assigning them to individuals and small groups to use and control as their own private areas."
Mixed uses vs. separate uses: "Mixed land-use patterns contribute to a safer, more vital public realm," say Zelinka and Brennan. In contrast, Newman found, mixed uses "generate high crime and vandalism rates," and housing units next to commercial areas "suffer proportionally higher crime rates." More recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.
More here
SENSE GETTING THROUGH IN CANADA?
Scientists who oppose the prevailing views on climate change have been shut out of debate on the Kyoto protocol, the Commons environment committee was told Thursday.
The result is that Canada may be wasting billions of dollars trying to curb emissions of carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant, said Charles Simpson, president of a Calgary-based group called Friends of Science. "The Canadian government has refused to listen to our government's leading experts in the field," said Simpson, a retired oil industry employee. He was accompanied Carleton University geologist Tim Patterson, one of a handful of scientists across Canada who have become known as outspoken critics of the Kyoto protocol. "It is the first time to my knowledge that an independent climate scientist has addressed a committee such as this," Simpson said before introducing Patterson, whose specialty is paleoclimatology - the study of past climate.
Patterson said rising temperatures in the past century are due to natural changes in the energy of the sun, not to pollution. He mocked the view that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. "It's plant food, it's a natural part of the atmosphere." Much of the science accepted when the Kyoto treaty was negotiated in 1997 has since been disproved, he added. "If during the mid-1990s we knew what we knew today there would be no Kyoto protocol because it would have been considered unnecessary."
Environment Canada scientist Henry Hengeveld said Patterson is commenting on matters outside his field. "If he were to argue with other paleoclimatologists I would say fine, and he may be a leading scientist in that field, but he's talking about the whole gamut - climate modelling and everything else. "That's like a dermatologist commenting on the diagnosis of a neurologist. I think this is an example of someone outside his field of expertise, not having read all the literature out there . . . and really being out of his depth."
Hengeveld said climate science is a complex area with thousands of papers being produced, and it is easy to "cherry-pick" the papers that support a particular view.
Patterson's comments were welcomed by Conservative environment critic Bob Mills, who has long maintained that the Kyoto protocol is a farce. "I'm always amazed when most environmental groups seem to think that most Canadians would like to live in a cave instead of the modern economy that we have," Mills said.
Stephen Guilbeault of Greenpeace said the Kyoto protocol was based on an assessment of the latest research by approximately 1,000 leading experts from around the world, and that assessment is continually updated. Guilbeault said he did not want to live in a cave, but rather to achieve greater efficiency in the use of resources.
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Theory trumps the facts every time. It's private space that creates safety, not big public spaces
Burras Road was a pleasant cul-de-sac of 21 new homes in Bradford, England. Its residents were blissfully unaware that, just east of the site, approval for a proposed new shopping center required the breaching of their cul-de-sac by a bicycle-pedestrian path. Planners favored this requirement because, they say, cul-de-sacs do not encourage movement and therefore are "auto-dependent" and "anti-urban." Opening up the site would connect residents to local services, and the path would promote walking and cycling.
The path connecting the shopping center to the cul-de-sac opened in 2000. Although there is no evidence that the path has led residents to drive less, it did have a profound effect on their lives. During the next six months, a neighborhood that had been virtually crime-free saw its burglary rate rise to 14 times the national rate, with matching increases in overall crime, including arson, assault, and antisocial behavior.
Because a secondary school was located west of the cul-de-sac, the pedestrian path opened the neighborhood to a constant stream of students and others going between the school and the shopping center. Crime and vandalism became commonplace. "The path turned our piece of paradise into a living hell," one resident complained.
At a late stage, the local police crime prevention officer had tried to prevent the route from opening, predicting it would be a disaster, only to be told that the path was "sacrosanct." Residents' quality of life apparently was less important than the dubious goal of reducing auto dependency.
Architects and urban planners who call themselves New Urbanists say their proposals, including developments that mix residential and commercial uses, have homes with tiny private yards and large common areas, and feature pedestrian paths, will solve all sorts of social problems, including crime. Yet the housing and neighborhood designs they want to substitute for the modern suburb almost invariably increase crime......
With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.
A teacher of urban design at St. Louis' Washington University, Newman watched the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, an award-winning high-rise housing project that had closely followed Le Corbusier's vision of a Radiant City. Completed in 1956, the project suffered so much crime that it quickly became unlivable. Despite offering essentially free housing for many poor people, its high vacancy rates led to closure, and its 1972 demolition has come to symbolize the failure of government housing projects.
Newman noticed that there was a low-rise housing project across the street from Pruitt-Igoe whose residents were in the same socioeconomic class but that "remained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout construction, occupancy, and decline of Pruitt-Igoe." What, Newman wondered, were "the physical differences that had enabled one to survive while the other fell apart"?
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Newman carefully compared crime rates with the design features of thousands of blocks in hundreds of urban neighborhoods that collectively housed nearly half a million people.
The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible.
Relying more on mid-rise developments than high rises, New Urbanism claims to have fixed the problems of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Yet New Urbanism shares many features with Pruitt-Igoe, including the large communal areas and permeability that Newman found caused so many problems.
The authors of SafeScape were familiar with Newman's work, but they chose to misrepresent it. "Newman took the `eyes on the street' concept," Zelinka and Brennan wrote, and "argued that the reason `eyes on the street' provide safety in urban, mixed commercial and residential areas is because there is a visible link between residents and the street." In fact, Newman specifically criticized what he called "the unsupported hypotheses of Jane Jacobs." Newman's work showed that mixed-use development led to significantly higher crime, while he couldn't find any evidence that "eyes on the street" would reduce that crime. "`Natural surveillance' is not automatically created by high-density environments," he wrote, "unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families."
One New Urbanist concept built into SafeScape is the idea of maximizing common areas to create "a sense of community." While one of SafeScape's principles is "stewardship and ownership," the authors don't want private areas so much as they want to give people a "sense of ownership" in community property. To that end, say the authors, "Communities should include places that support the coming together of people," such as shops, pedestrian paths, parks, and community gardens. While these things are fine if people want them, when planners impose them on neighborhoods, the results are often disastrous.
Newman took exactly the opposite approach. "The larger the number of people who share a communal space," he found, "the more difficult it is for people to identify it as being in any way theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it." To solve this problem, "`Defensible Space' operates by subdividing large portions of public spaces and assigning them to individuals and small groups to use and control as their own private areas."
Mixed uses vs. separate uses: "Mixed land-use patterns contribute to a safer, more vital public realm," say Zelinka and Brennan. In contrast, Newman found, mixed uses "generate high crime and vandalism rates," and housing units next to commercial areas "suffer proportionally higher crime rates." More recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.
More here
SENSE GETTING THROUGH IN CANADA?
Scientists who oppose the prevailing views on climate change have been shut out of debate on the Kyoto protocol, the Commons environment committee was told Thursday.
The result is that Canada may be wasting billions of dollars trying to curb emissions of carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant, said Charles Simpson, president of a Calgary-based group called Friends of Science. "The Canadian government has refused to listen to our government's leading experts in the field," said Simpson, a retired oil industry employee. He was accompanied Carleton University geologist Tim Patterson, one of a handful of scientists across Canada who have become known as outspoken critics of the Kyoto protocol. "It is the first time to my knowledge that an independent climate scientist has addressed a committee such as this," Simpson said before introducing Patterson, whose specialty is paleoclimatology - the study of past climate.
Patterson said rising temperatures in the past century are due to natural changes in the energy of the sun, not to pollution. He mocked the view that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. "It's plant food, it's a natural part of the atmosphere." Much of the science accepted when the Kyoto treaty was negotiated in 1997 has since been disproved, he added. "If during the mid-1990s we knew what we knew today there would be no Kyoto protocol because it would have been considered unnecessary."
Environment Canada scientist Henry Hengeveld said Patterson is commenting on matters outside his field. "If he were to argue with other paleoclimatologists I would say fine, and he may be a leading scientist in that field, but he's talking about the whole gamut - climate modelling and everything else. "That's like a dermatologist commenting on the diagnosis of a neurologist. I think this is an example of someone outside his field of expertise, not having read all the literature out there . . . and really being out of his depth."
Hengeveld said climate science is a complex area with thousands of papers being produced, and it is easy to "cherry-pick" the papers that support a particular view.
Patterson's comments were welcomed by Conservative environment critic Bob Mills, who has long maintained that the Kyoto protocol is a farce. "I'm always amazed when most environmental groups seem to think that most Canadians would like to live in a cave instead of the modern economy that we have," Mills said.
Stephen Guilbeault of Greenpeace said the Kyoto protocol was based on an assessment of the latest research by approximately 1,000 leading experts from around the world, and that assessment is continually updated. Guilbeault said he did not want to live in a cave, but rather to achieve greater efficiency in the use of resources.
Source
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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.
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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Saturday, February 12, 2005
ABOUT FLAMING TIME! Endangered Species Act reform
Four leading GOP House members and senators announced a joint effort Thursday to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to toughen up habitat and scientific provisions. Environmentalists immediately criticized the plan as the latest attempt to gut the landmark law. The lawmakers said it was the first time members of the House and Senate had banded together at the beginning of a congressional session to amend the 1973 act. Previous attempts to change the law have failed, but they said this time they hoped to produce a single Endangered Species Act reauthorization bill that could be introduced in both chambers. "We've been working on this issue for a long time," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif. "And to have the opportunity now to sit down and work across the capital and try to come up with legislation that does move the ball forward and begins to modernize and update the Endangered Species Act is extremely important."
Joining Pombo were Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.; Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. Chafee, among the Senate's most moderate Republicans, is a newcomer to the issue who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's subcommittee on fisheries, wildlife and water. The lawmakers said they had no specific legislative language yet, but listed goals including increased involvement by states, more incentives for private landowners, and strengthening scientific reviews before species are listed or critical habitat is designated. They contended the law now creates unreasonable regulatory hurdles for property owners while failing to help many species. "Overall we believe that the Endangered Species Act can be less contentious and more effective," Crapo said.
But environmentalists said the act works as written. "For 30 years the Endangered Species Act has been serving as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction, and there can be absolutely no doubt the act is working, and it's one of the most popular laws in the land," said Susan Holmes, senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. "I think if you look at the efforts that we have seen so far from U.S. Rep. Pombo, from Greg Walden, these efforts have been all-out attacks on the Endangered Species Act," Holmes said.
More here
MERCURY: LOUDMOUTHED GREENIE IGNORANCE FROM HOLLYWOOD
"An American television actress is blasting the U.S. news media for failing to report that "endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper." "I think there is a dummy-down bias (in the media) frankly," said Daphne Zuniga, who starred in the television series "Melrose Place." "The press is reporting things that are absolutely irrelevant to any of our lives and they are sensationalistic and it is damaging," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service. She made the comments Wednesday night at the Washington Press Club Foundation's 61st annual congressional dinner, which she attended as a guest of Congressional Quarterly. "We start to think that these things are important, like [the rape trial of NBA star] Kobe Bryant and [the molestation trial of] Michael Jackson and yada, yada, and meanwhile, you know, endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper, you know, sequoias -- whatever it is," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service.
Zuniga is a member of the Creative Coalition, a social and political advocacy organization with roots in the entertainment industry. Other Coalition members at the press dinner included actor Ron Silver of the "The West Wing," actress Fran Drescher from the television series "The Nanny," and Joey Pantoliano of HBO's "The Sopranos." "I met a congressperson today and I am getting interested in coming to the hill to express my issues, which are environmental mostly, but also [First] Amendment," Zuniga said. She said mercury emissions were her key environmental concern.
According to Zuniga, "One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism -- there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath," Zuniga said. "Maybe it's not interesting, but it is definitely newsworthy...unless we have to wait for everyone to be drastically sick so we can sensationalize it," she added.
When asked about a series of new scientific studies showing that U.S. coal-fired power plants emit less than one percent of the world's mercury output, Zuniga responded, "That is false, it is not one percent. "We (the U.S.) have a large percentage of the pollution...We have to be more responsible, we have more resources, and we use more and more," she added. But as Cybercast News Service reported last week, several new studies show that if all U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut down -- resulting in zero mercury emissions -- worldwide levels of mercury would be only slightly affected.
The studies by the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP) also revealed that mercury emissions from Yellowstone National Park and other natural sources are significantly higher than the amount coming from the 1,100 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. In addition, mercury levels in the atmosphere may have been higher before the advent of coal fired power plants. "This hypothesis appears supported by the presence of higher levels of mercury in 550-year-old Alaskan mummies than levels in a recent sample of pregnant native Alaskan women," said Robert Ferguson, in an interview with Cybercast News Service . Ferguson is the executive director of the CSPP, a public policy research group based in Washington, D.C.
More here
Jolly hockey sticks....
Post lifted from Envirospin, noting that several recently published scientific papers have shown that the earth has a history of NATURAL rises and falls in temperature
Published this week:
Moberg, Anders, Wibjorn Karlen et al., 2005. 'Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.' Nature 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, February 10, 2005:
Precisely. And this excellent work comes after these:
McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2005. 'Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significnace.' Geophysical Research Letters (in press);
Loehle, Craig, 2004a. 'Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data.' Ecological Modelling 171, No. 4, pp. 433-450, February 1, 2004;
Loehle, Craig, 2004b. 'Using Historical climate data to evaluate climate trends: issues of statistical inference.' Energy & Environment 15, No. 1, pp. 1-10, 2004;
McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2003. 'Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) 'Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series.'' Energy & Environment 14, No. 6, pp. 751-771, October 28, 2003;
Soon, Willie and Baliunas, Sallie, 2003a. 'Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years.' Climate Research 23, pp.89-110, January 31, 2003;
Soon, Willie, Sallie Baliunas, Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso and David R. Legates, 2003b. 'Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 Years: a reappraisal.' Energy & Environment 14, Nos 2 & 3, pp. 233-289, April 11, 2003.
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Four leading GOP House members and senators announced a joint effort Thursday to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to toughen up habitat and scientific provisions. Environmentalists immediately criticized the plan as the latest attempt to gut the landmark law. The lawmakers said it was the first time members of the House and Senate had banded together at the beginning of a congressional session to amend the 1973 act. Previous attempts to change the law have failed, but they said this time they hoped to produce a single Endangered Species Act reauthorization bill that could be introduced in both chambers. "We've been working on this issue for a long time," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif. "And to have the opportunity now to sit down and work across the capital and try to come up with legislation that does move the ball forward and begins to modernize and update the Endangered Species Act is extremely important."
Joining Pombo were Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.; Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. Chafee, among the Senate's most moderate Republicans, is a newcomer to the issue who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's subcommittee on fisheries, wildlife and water. The lawmakers said they had no specific legislative language yet, but listed goals including increased involvement by states, more incentives for private landowners, and strengthening scientific reviews before species are listed or critical habitat is designated. They contended the law now creates unreasonable regulatory hurdles for property owners while failing to help many species. "Overall we believe that the Endangered Species Act can be less contentious and more effective," Crapo said.
But environmentalists said the act works as written. "For 30 years the Endangered Species Act has been serving as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction, and there can be absolutely no doubt the act is working, and it's one of the most popular laws in the land," said Susan Holmes, senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. "I think if you look at the efforts that we have seen so far from U.S. Rep. Pombo, from Greg Walden, these efforts have been all-out attacks on the Endangered Species Act," Holmes said.
More here
MERCURY: LOUDMOUTHED GREENIE IGNORANCE FROM HOLLYWOOD
"An American television actress is blasting the U.S. news media for failing to report that "endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper." "I think there is a dummy-down bias (in the media) frankly," said Daphne Zuniga, who starred in the television series "Melrose Place." "The press is reporting things that are absolutely irrelevant to any of our lives and they are sensationalistic and it is damaging," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service. She made the comments Wednesday night at the Washington Press Club Foundation's 61st annual congressional dinner, which she attended as a guest of Congressional Quarterly. "We start to think that these things are important, like [the rape trial of NBA star] Kobe Bryant and [the molestation trial of] Michael Jackson and yada, yada, and meanwhile, you know, endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper, you know, sequoias -- whatever it is," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service.
Zuniga is a member of the Creative Coalition, a social and political advocacy organization with roots in the entertainment industry. Other Coalition members at the press dinner included actor Ron Silver of the "The West Wing," actress Fran Drescher from the television series "The Nanny," and Joey Pantoliano of HBO's "The Sopranos." "I met a congressperson today and I am getting interested in coming to the hill to express my issues, which are environmental mostly, but also [First] Amendment," Zuniga said. She said mercury emissions were her key environmental concern.
According to Zuniga, "One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism -- there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath," Zuniga said. "Maybe it's not interesting, but it is definitely newsworthy...unless we have to wait for everyone to be drastically sick so we can sensationalize it," she added.
When asked about a series of new scientific studies showing that U.S. coal-fired power plants emit less than one percent of the world's mercury output, Zuniga responded, "That is false, it is not one percent. "We (the U.S.) have a large percentage of the pollution...We have to be more responsible, we have more resources, and we use more and more," she added. But as Cybercast News Service reported last week, several new studies show that if all U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut down -- resulting in zero mercury emissions -- worldwide levels of mercury would be only slightly affected.
The studies by the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP) also revealed that mercury emissions from Yellowstone National Park and other natural sources are significantly higher than the amount coming from the 1,100 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. In addition, mercury levels in the atmosphere may have been higher before the advent of coal fired power plants. "This hypothesis appears supported by the presence of higher levels of mercury in 550-year-old Alaskan mummies than levels in a recent sample of pregnant native Alaskan women," said Robert Ferguson, in an interview with Cybercast News Service . Ferguson is the executive director of the CSPP, a public policy research group based in Washington, D.C.
More here
Jolly hockey sticks....
Post lifted from Envirospin, noting that several recently published scientific papers have shown that the earth has a history of NATURAL rises and falls in temperature
Published this week:
Moberg, Anders, Wibjorn Karlen et al., 2005. 'Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.' Nature 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, February 10, 2005:
"A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing. These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data. Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data. Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model. According to our reconstruction, high temperatures-similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990-occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7 K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue." [my italic]
Precisely. And this excellent work comes after these:
McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2005. 'Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significnace.' Geophysical Research Letters (in press);
Loehle, Craig, 2004a. 'Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data.' Ecological Modelling 171, No. 4, pp. 433-450, February 1, 2004;
Loehle, Craig, 2004b. 'Using Historical climate data to evaluate climate trends: issues of statistical inference.' Energy & Environment 15, No. 1, pp. 1-10, 2004;
McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2003. 'Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) 'Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series.'' Energy & Environment 14, No. 6, pp. 751-771, October 28, 2003;
Soon, Willie and Baliunas, Sallie, 2003a. 'Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years.' Climate Research 23, pp.89-110, January 31, 2003;
Soon, Willie, Sallie Baliunas, Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso and David R. Legates, 2003b. 'Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 Years: a reappraisal.' Energy & Environment 14, Nos 2 & 3, pp. 233-289, April 11, 2003.
***************************************
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.
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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Jim Hansen and his twin
