Forest, Wildlife, and Climate News

More ‘Climate Change” Ripoffs

Researchers study link between climate, wildfire

The Associated Press, Oregonian, September 01, 2010 [here]

Scientists from universities in Montana, Colorado and Idaho announced today the start of a 5-year, $3.85 million research project into how a changing climate will influence wildfires.

The project is being pursued in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and researchers in Australia and New Zealand. The goal is to identify how human activities and climate change drive fires.

“One thing is clear: The frequency and severity of fires have increased around and world and this is considered to be one of the signs of global climate change,” Montana State University professor Cathy Whitlock, the lead investigator for the project, said in a statement. … [more]

Note: The temperature data for 1983-2009 from the National Climatic Data Center [here] for the West North Central Region (Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming).

Note that there has been no significant warming for the last 20 years. If there has been no warming, how can warming be the cause of anything????

Giving tax money to hoaxers is a phenomenal waste of resources.

Chicago Climate Exchange drops 50%, new record low

by Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That, August 31, 2010 [here]

The only lower price than today’s closing price on a ton of carbon is ZERO

Perhaps reacting to the news yesterday about the IPCC getting taken to the woodshed [here], the growing number of stories in the MSM about the IPCC failure, and the recent layoffs at CCX [here], carbon trading has once again been devalued by the market. …

The CCX [Chicago Climate Exchange] end of day table really says it all, 50% off, from a dime to a nickel [per ton] in a day. …

Charcoal briquettes and coal have more value than a ton of CCX carbon instruments these days. [By the way, the spot price for Central Appalachia 12,500 Btu, 1.2 SO2 coal this week was $69.50 per ton. Compare that 5 cents per ton for fiat "market" carbon futures.]

Unless CCX starts making adjustments in single cents, the next downward adjustment is zero. The latest CCX advisory says they will be closed for labor day, and will reopen for trading September 7th. One wonders.

See also: The $10 Trillion Climate Fraud [here]

ICE buying Climate Exchange for over $600 million [here]

Seattle Climate in 40 Years to Be Like LA’s Today

Seattle will become an even ‘hotter’ destination

By Matthew E. Kahn, Guest Column, Seattle Times, August 27, 2010 [here]

IN fall 2050, Pete Carroll will be entering his 41st season as the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. As he walks the streets, he will notice that the outdoor summer temperature reminds him of his days at USC.

Due to climate change, Seattle’s future average temperature will look a lot more like Los Angeles’ today. King County’s average July temperature over the years 1968 to 2002 was 65 degrees. One climate-change model (with the catchy name CCSM) predicts that Seattle’s average July temperature will be 71 degrees in the year 2070. Winter average temperatures will remain roughly what they are now. … [more Alarmist BS here]

Matthew E. Kahn is the author of “Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future” and a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

Note 1: Matthew Kahn would be much more skeptical of this climate-change model if he had seen the NOAA National Climatic Data Center data indicating that Washington’s annual temperatures have actually been trending downward at a rate of 0.33 degrees F per decade in the 20 years since 1990 and trending downward even more rapidly at a rate of 0.86 degrees F per decade in the last 10 years, all during a period of “ever-rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse-gas emissions”. — Ken Schlichte

Note 2: Yes, Matt, Warmer Is Better. Kudos for noticing. Unfortunately, the Earth is cooling, not warming. — Admin

The Greening of Godzilla

by Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, August 28, 2010 [here]

Watching the colossal and implosive decline of the once mighty green movement to stop global warming has been an educational experience. It’s rare to see so many smart, idealistic and dedicated people look so clueless and fail so completely. From the anti-climax of the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held, the movement has gone from one catastrophic failure to the next.

A year ago giddy environmentalists were on top of the world. The greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson; the most powerful leaders in the world were elbowing each other for places on the agenda at the Copenhagen conference on climate.

It all came to naught. The continued stalemates and failures of the UN treaty process have fallen off the front pages; as the Kyoto Protocol sinks ineffectually into oblivion, no new global treaty will take its place. The most Democratic Congress in a generation will not pass significant climate legislation before the midterms pull Congress to the right, and there will be no US law on carbon caps or anything close in President Obama’s first term, and there is less public faith in or concern about climate change today than at any time in the last fifteen years.

Has any public pressure group ever spent so much direct mail and foundation money for such pathetic results?

The standard rap on the greens is that they failed because they were too environmentalist. Their pure and naive ideals were no match for the evil, ugly forces of real world politics. Beautiful losers, they dared to dream a dream too gossamer winged, too delicate for the harsh light of day. Bambi, meet Godzilla; the butterfly was broken on the wheel.

Even in defeat, the greens can’t get it right. The greens didn’t fail because they were too loyal to their ideals; they failed because lost touch with the core impetus and values of the environmental movement. Bambi wasn’t crushed by Godzilla; Bambi turned into Godzilla, and the same kind of public skepticism and populism that once fueled environmentalism have turned against it. … [more]

More Alarmist Tripe from Steve Running

Playing Fair With Climate Science

By Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Aug. 24, 2010 [here]

A few weeks ago I wrote about a Nature article that suggested we were in the middle of a long-term decline in the volume of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans. I had a bit of email back-and-forth with Stuart Staniford about whether the results in the paper were really robust, but the upshot was unclear and the paper was, after all, in Nature, not some C-list journal. What’s more, the decline was pretty substantial. It was probably real.

But now comes another climate-related piece of research, this time in the equally respected Science, and this time Stuart’s skepticism is on much firmer ground. For the last decade scientists have been collecting information on terrestrial vegetation coverage using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite. Their conclusion*: vegetation coverage is down, which means plants are pulling less carbon out of the air, which means we have yet another positive feedback loop causing an increase in atmospheric carbon levels.

* Maosheng Zhao and Steven W. Running. 2010. Drought-Induced Reduction in Global
Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009. Science 329, 940 (2010)

The problem is that there are only ten annual data points so far, and they bounce around like a pogo stick. The trend over the past decade is slightly down, but the variance is so large that it’s almost impossible to tell if this is just normal noise or a real decline. …

Stuart is unhappy:

Ok. So here we have a statistically non-robust result, that the authors are well aware is not statistically robust, being published because it’s of “high policy significance”. However, and critically, the authors included no discussion whatsoever of the statistical limitations of the evidence. The “-0.55″ in the abstract is not “-0.55 +/- 1.1″ or something like that to give the reader a heads up that there is a lot of uncertainty here. There is no calculation of the “p-value” of that trend (how likely it was to occur by chance), even though the rest of the paper is littered with p-values of subsidiary results. They know perfectly well how to calculate this, they know it’s not statistically significant, but they chose to put their readers in a position where we have to take the data off the graph and do our own statistical analysis to realize what’s really going on.

And the refereeing and editorial process at Science allowed the paper to be published like that.

I think that sucks. … [more]

Note: Neither Zhao nor Running are climate scientists. The “data” used were satellite camera pixels distorted by cloud cover (”cloudy” data). The pixels in no way record terrestrial net productivity. What was “measured” is not even a decent proxy for net productivity. The Science article is full of bizarre assumptions and conclusions. And, as pointed out above, the author’s own analysis is statistically deficient. They found no significant trend in their ersatz data, but report a calamity anyway. Pure Alarmist tripe.

Climate Realism: Not to Be Denied Any Longer

by S. T. Karnick, The American Culture, 27 May 2010 [here]

Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis.

Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring.

The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade.

Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming from those proven to be wrong, because they are shameless. … [more]

Note: an excellent essay.

Sea Ice News #18

By Steve Goddard, Watts Up With That, August 15, 2010 [here]

Summer has come to a premature and frosty end at Santa’s workshop.

It has been the coldest summer on record north of 80N, and temperatures have dropped below freezing ahead of the average date.

The entire ice covered region is now below freezing. It also appears that the summer melt season will be the shortest on record. The maximum was reached very late in March, and it appears likely that we are headed for an early minimum. …

The South Pole will almost certainly set a record for most sea ice this season. It is almost there, and there are still several months of growth remaining. …

The “long term trend” (30 years) in Arctic ice continues to be downwards, and would be even if the ice minimum was a record high this summer. But the three year trend shows strong growth of extent, thickness and age. Meanwhile, Antarctic ice is blowing away the record books. Yet the press continues to spread massive disinformation about the state of ice at both poles. … [more]

Note: Arctic sea ice is NOT disappearing, nor is sea level rising at a rapid rate, nor is Greenland melting, nor is the Amazon drying up, nor is the earth warming, …

Global Cooling Blamed for Increase in Rabid Vampire Bat Attacks

Peru battles rabid vampire bats after 500 people bitten

BBC, 13 August 2010 [here]

Peru’s health ministry has sent emergency teams to a remote Amazon region to battle an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats.

Four children in the Awajun indigenous tribe died after being bitten by the bloodsucking mammals.

Health workers have given rabies vaccine to more than 500 people who have also been attacked. …

The rabies outbreak is focused on the community of Urakusa in the north-eastern Peruvian Amazon, close to the border with Ecuador.

The indigenous community appealed for help after being unable to explain the illness that had killed the children.

The health ministry said it had sent three medical teams to treat and vaccinate people who had been bitten. …

[Experts] have suggested this latest outbreak of attacks may be linked to the unusually low temperatures the Peruvian Amazon in recent years. … [more]

US Government in Massive New Global Warming Scandal – NOAA Disgraced

by John O’Sullivan, special to Climate Change Fraud, 09 August 2010 [here]

Global warming data apparently cooked by U.S. government-funded body shows astounding temperature fraud with increases averaging 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

The taxpayer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has become mired in fresh global warming data scandal involving numbers for the Great Lakes region that substantially ramp up averages.

A beleaguered federal agency appears to be implicated in the most blatant and extreme case of climate data fraud yet seen. Official records have been confirmed as evidence that a handful of temperature records for the Great Lakes region have been hiked up by literally hundreds of degrees to substantially inflate the average temperature range for the northeastern United States. …

Under a scheme called ‘Sea Grant’ NOAA collaborates with national universities to compile an official federal temperature record. In this instance, the partnership is with Michigan University’s ‘Coastal Watch.’

Together the two institutions show temperature maps for northern Lake Michigan registering an absurd 430 degrees Fahrenheit — yes, you read it right –- that’s four hundred and thirty degrees — and this is by no means the highest temperature recorded on the charts.

In the heated debate about Earth’s ever-changing climate you certainly don’t need to be scientist to figure out that the Great Lakes would have boiled away at a mere 212 degrees, so something has seriously gone awry inside this well-funded program. …

Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, really got cooking this July 4th around 9:59AM, according to NOAA and Coast Watch. It was there, at the bottom left row of the temperature data points, that the records reveal on that day a phenomenally furnace-like 600 degrees Fahrenheit! … [more]

Global Warming Is a Pseudo Science

by Tony Elliott, Climate Realists, August 8th 2010 [here]

The latest news is most countries in the world are backing out of the pseudo scientists’ wishes for limits on greenhouse gases and global warming legislation. Most industrial countries realize it is too expensive an endeavor to partake in at a time when the world’s economy is teetering on collapse, since over two hundred billion dollars would be needed from wealthy countries to help poor countries conform to proposed climate change rules. Poor countries also do not need any more restrictions on industrialization than they now have which would limit what little growth they may have.

The actual quote of money needed from industrial countries is one hundred billion dollars, but all realize that the cost is expected to double or even triple in the coming years if all were to get on board. Such fantastic amounts of money have to come mostly from the American taxpayers in the form of double gasoline prices, tax amounts equal to energy use amounts of all energy bills, higher prices for all goods and services and across the board tax State and Federal tax hikes for all Americans.

In this time of having the worst economy since the Great Depression with most people just scraping by from day to day and some not making it at all, it is insane for any rational individual to even consider anything which would lessen what economy we have.

The whole premise of this pseudo science movement relies on the pretext of cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 isn’t even a pollutant, but a natural gas existing in the atmosphere. …

We would be in essence accepting taxation on a deliberately invented problem which cannot be resolved other than eliminating half of the world’s population. … [more]

Popsicle®’s Ten Things To Do To Save the Planet

Popsicle® will donate $25,000 to the National Geographic Polar Fund to support research and exploration of the polar ice caps and global warming issues. What can you do to help fight global warming? [here]

1. Take a reusable bag to the store instead of one made out of paper or plastic.

2. Create a lending library. Share items such as books, DVDs or video games with your friends and neighbors.

3. Set the thermostat to no lower than 78° F in the summer and no higher than 68° F in the winter.

4. Choose locally grown food. Transporting food long distances wastes fuel and creates extra CO2.

5. Plug electronics into a power strip and flip off the switch when the gadgets aren’t in use. (Make sure this won’t mess up clocks and recordings.)

6. Turn off the car instead of letting it idle while you’re waiting.

7. Reuse creatively! For instance, use empty yogurt containers as paint cups or plant pots.

8. Keep those fans buzzing in summer instead of turning on the air conditioner.

9. Wash only full loads in the washing machine and dishwasher.

10. Replace incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent ones. They last up to ten times longer and can use a quarter of the energy.

Note: in addition -

Don’t use, or else reuse, toilet paper

Never take a shower

Eat your pets

Turn off your critical thinking capacity, if you have any.

Don’t purchase products that come with wooden handles, like Popsicle®s for instance

Don’t subscribe to un-recyclable, heavy clay-coat, glossy magazines with huge carbon footprints, like National Geographic for instance

The World Drills On

There’s no ban in Norway, Brazil, Australia, Canada …

Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2010 [here]

With reason to hope that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is being brought under control, it’s time to start thinking into the future. The Obama Administration is sticking by its ruinous deepwater drilling moratorium, when it would be better to take a hint from the rest of the world’s oil-producers. Their response to the Gulf disaster? Learn from it, and drill on.

Norway, run by the very model of modern environmentalists, announced a deep-water drilling halt until the spill is done. However, its ban applies only to new drilling, unlike the Obama Administration’s total ban. … [more]

Five reasons to rethink wind power

by Paul Wornham, Examiner.com, August 8, 2010 [here]

Wind power is high on the priority list for governments looking for ways to meet commitments to reduce CO2 emissions. As a renewable source of power, wind appears to fit the bill as a natural source of energy that can both provide power and be kind to the environment, but there is a down side to wind energy that may make the option less green than you might suspect.

Here are five reasons to rethink wind power as a green option:

Wind turbines need online back-up capacity …

Carbon cost of construction …

Wildlife …

Landscape blight …

Health …

[more]

6 Million Dead in Bolivian Ecological Disaster

(3 Aug. 2010 - Update: The number of dead fish and other water-dependent wildlife has increased to about 6 million.)

BoliviaBella,com [here]

Over 1 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles, dolphins and other river wildlife are floating dead in numerous Bolivian rivers in the three eastern/southern departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Tarija. The extreme cold front that hit Bolivia in mid-July caused water temperatures to dip below the minimum temperatures river life can tolerate. As a consequence, rivers, lakes, lagoons and fisheries are brimming with decomposing fish and other creatures.

Unprecedented: Nothing like this has ever been seen in this magnitude in Bolivia. Inhabitants of riverside communities report the smell is nauseating and can be detected as far as a kilometer away from river banks. River communities, whose livelihoods depend on fishing, fear they’ll run out of food and will have nothing to sell. Authorities are concerned there will be a shortage of fish in markets and are more concerned by possible threats to public health, especially in communities that also use river water for bathing and drinking, but also fear contaminated or decaying fish may end up in market stalls. They’ve begun a campaign to ensure market vendors and the public know how to tell the difference between fresh and unhealthy fish.

In university fish ponds and commercial fisheries the losses are also catastrophic.

Note: Global cooling kills aquatic life. Dolphins, turtles, and other charismatic fauna. Global cooling. Whoda thunk it?

Climate change: Behold, the gospel according to the UN

The Methodist Church is adopting the IPCC’s report on global warming as holy writ

by Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph, August 7th 2010 [here]

Anyone who has observed the way the belief in man-made global warming has become for many a new religion might be intrigued by a lengthy document published by the Methodist Church, in the hope that next year it will become official Methodist policy.

Entitled Our Hope in God’s Future, it kicks off by proclaiming that “the theological task is to reflect on modern scientific accounts of the threats posed by climate change in the context of affirming the triune God as creator and redeemer of the universe”. “What is required of God’s people,” it goes on, “is repentance.” The first step must be “confessing our complicity in the sinful structures which have caused the problem”.

The document makes it clear that all good Methodists must take as their new Bible the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with the famous report by Lord Stern. Inspired by this holy writ, like any Old Testament prophet it reels off all those familiar apocalyptic warnings of the catastrophes sinful mankind is bringing on the planet – floods, droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting ice caps, sea levels rising by 20 feet (although they did get that one from the prophet Gore). … [more]

Note: AGW is a religion, and the Methodists are pimps for anything that looks religious. Next they’ll be worshiping Baal Obama.