SOS Forests

Global Warming, Forest Fires, and SOS Forests

by Mike Dubrasich, Exec. Dir. W.I.S.E.

2010 the warmest year on record!

Or so the Warmistas claim. The drumbeat started back at least as far as last May [here]. And again in July [here]. And in September [here]. And in October [here]. And not surprisingly, this month [here, here, here, etc.] even though all year record cold waves pounded the U.S., Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia.

Let’s accept that premise for the moment. Boy, was it ever hot! Somewhere, not here, but somewhere.

Another premise that has gained huge air play is that forest fires are linked to global warming. It’s a no-brainer, right? It has been so hot that the woods catch fire and burn like there’s no tomorrow.

Or say the pundits. One paper that made a big splash and is cited in every USFS fire study, and every USFWS endangered species lawsuit, and has been anointed as canonical theology by all the High Priests of Ecology is:

A. L. Westerling, H. G. Hidalgo, D. R. Cayan, and T. W. Swetnam (2006) Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity. Science 18 August 2006:
Vol. 313 no. 5789 pp. 940-943 [here]

The authors state:

Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.

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Musings From the Corner of the Round Barn

Or, Man Oh Manatee!

by bear bait

More than 60 years ago there were a lot of barns in Western Oregon. A series of events since then have reduced the number of old barns to remaining few. We had some hellacious snow falls, such as Winter 1948-49, and those broke barn backs. Some notable wind storms, contributed, including the Columbus Day blow in 1962. And then the Christmas Flood of 1964. Big snow with rain on it, the last one was in 1969 if memory serves me, with 3 feet on the flat from YewGene to Po’tland, and deeper in the Coast Range.

At least twenty cow dairies lost their barns in those weather events, and the 1969 snowstorm was the final the impetus for the consolidation of all the cheese plants along the coast into the Tillamook and Bandon cheese brands. A lot of loggers no longer had to get up real early to milk some cows alongside their children and wives.

Among those barns were a few round ones, an idea of long ago efficiency and ease of moving livestock. They all had a scaffolded ramp up which the hired man or the oldest kid after school pushed a wheelbarrow of cow flop and bedding to its conical resting place away from the barn, the pile from which the tractor with the bucket on it would fill the “turd hearse” [manure spreader] with the composted remains of such pile early every summer. That was after someone drove the team or a tractor across the pastures “turd tipping” so grass could grow in more places. A tractor or a team would drag the turd hearse around the pasture, and the ground driven mechanism would hurl bits and pieces of cow manure, the specific gravity of which would eventually determine the place to which the material would fall to ground, or else down the tractor driver’s neck. Even the flies would have flies on them by early summer. I digress. On to the round barns.

My old Dane grandpa, never missing a chance to kick a Swede in the nether regions, metaphorically, pointed out a round barn to me on one of our trips to the beach to fish for flounder. He told me that a Swede hired man had run himself to death in that round barn right there. I asked how. Grandpa said he was trying to find a corner to pee in. It took me a minute, but I caught the joke and we had a belly laugh about a breathless Swede run to death because he couldn’t find a corner to pee in.

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Should we be worried, very worried?

by Gordon J. Fulks

From near record high to near record low temperatures this November in the Pacific Northwest, from relatively warm ocean conditions and ‘dead zones’ to relatively cold ocean conditions and fabulous salmon runs off our Pacific Coast, from an unusually cold winter to an unusually hot summer in Russia, from near record low Arctic sea ice to near record high Antarctic sea ice, our climate displays wide variability.

But an army of psychologists, journalists, and even scientists make sure that the warm swings they deem alarming get the greatest attention. These propagandists know that the selling of Global Warming is all about perception not reality.

If the data will not support their storyline for another UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, an army of data manipulators stand ready. They rework averages to show continued warming during the last decade when honest assessments show flat or slightly declining temperatures. Some can be relied upon to say that 2010 was the warmest year “ever,” when honest scientists say that the El Nino this year was very similar to 1998. Also, the recent warm period was not as warm as the previous Medieval Warm Period, something Alarmists deny ever existed.

The simple truth is that there is nothing unusual going on today, let alone anything related to human carbon dioxide emissions. Climate variations are expected on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in complete equilibrium. Climate variations are expected with a Sun that varies slightly in total solar irradiance, varies more in x-ray and ultraviolet output, and varies substantially in magnetic irregularities which modulate galactic cosmic rays. Climate variations are also expected in a solar system with large planets like Jupiter that alter the earth’s orbit and produce the huge climate variations called Ice Ages.

But how is someone who never studied science going to figure out who is telling the truth? Science is not what I say, just because I have a good education and long experience. It is all about honesty, logic, and evidence.

The simplest solution is to look out the window. The British Met Office used its new $50 million super computer to predict a mild winter in Britain, 3.4 F warmer than last year. So far, the reality is record breaking cold, heavy snow, and paralyzing ice!

But what if the New York Times (NYT), President Obama, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), Yale University, and the Oregonian all say you should be worried, very worried?

Perhaps you should question their expertise. Thomas Freidman of the NYT frequently calls for action on climate change, but has no expertise and relies on a notorious propagandist. President Obama relies on scientists whom he funds to give him the answers he wants. The NAS is run to support government programs by an electrical engineer. He discovered that Global Warming is far more lucrative than electrical engineering. The UNIPCC is run by a railroad engineer who writes romance novels. Yale University promoters are really psychologists who want you to believe that they are climate experts when their real expertise is propaganda. The Oregonian relies on all the above. The interlocking relationships are highly incestuous, with vast conflicts of interest and/or little scientific expertise.

Among scientists, belief in Global Warming comes down to cold cash. Those who benefit most from government largesse (about $100 billion to date) are typically true believers, while independent scientists easily spot the scam. This creates a split based on age and experience. Young scientists like Juliane Fry of Reed College, who professed her belief in an Oregonian Op-Ed, are eager for fame, funding, and tenure, all of which are more likely if they support Global Warming. Older scientists like Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the greatest meteorologist alive today, oppose climate hysteria. They built their fame on an approach now considered quaint: the Scientific Method.

Among Global Warming advocates there is occasional candor about their real goals. Christiana Figueres, the new executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said of the UN climate efforts: “This is the greatest societal and economic transformation that the world has ever seen.”

Global Warming is about politics not legitimate science. Ms. Figueres calls herself a “global climate change analyst.” Her formal education in climate science consists of Al Gore’s training program to promote “An Inconvenient Truth.” That should worry everyone!

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Bundle Up For the Next Ten Million Years

The following science report came through the digital grapevine today:

Mummified forest offers glimpse of a warmer Arctic

Melting glaciers on Ellesmere Island reveal branches and trunks from millions of years ago, when the North was a temperate zone

By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News, Montreal Gazette, December 17, 2010 [here]

A research team probing a melting glacier near Canada’s northernmost point of land has discovered a “mummified” forest that’s at least two million years old, with “perfectly preserved” tree trunks, branches and leaves from a time when the Arctic was transforming from a temperate environment into the ecological ice box it’s been for millennia.

The present-day thaw at the north end of Ellesmere Island — another sign of the widespread warming now taking hold of Canada’s polar frontier — has served up intact spruce and birch trees believed to have been buried in a landslide during the Neogene period of Earth history between two million and eight million years ago.

The U.S. scientists studying the ancient forest, who say the liberation of the long-frozen relics will offer a unique window on a lost world, are also warning that pent-up carbon released from such sites across the Arctic could worsen the modern-day climate change being driven by human activity. … [more]

Reality check: The paleo boreotemperate forest (with boreotropical elements) was extant for ~100 million years, or as long as modern “trees” have been in existence. In fact, paleobotanists have to go back ~250 million years to the Permian-Triassic boundary to find conditions similar to today — it has only been for the last 2 million years that the Earth has been locked in a similar deep freeze.

Despite 250 million years of warmth, the seas did not boil away into outer space, life on Earth did not come to a screeching halt, the continents were not submerged, there were no searing deserts, and the atmosphere did not burst into flame.

That’s right, sports fans. Despite all the hysterical Thermageddon sky-is-burning raging paranoia trumpeted by mega-crooks and their bug-eyed dimwit followers, it turns out that a warmer Earth was a more abundant, diverse, life-giving planet. For hundreds of millions of years.

The scientists who made the discovery noted above found nothing that hasn’t been thoroughly investigated already. See: Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic History of North American Vegetation by Alan Graham (1999) Oxford Univ. Press.

But they did feel compelled to issue a WARNING. Hold on to your pants, the Earth might get warm again someday.

Probably not for 10 million years, though, which is time it is estimated that it will take for Antarctica to tectonically drift away from the South Pole. You see, the presence of a continent on a pole is what causes Snowball Earth.

All this is well-known to the researchers above, but they have to toe the party line, no matter how glaringly unscientific that party line might be, in order to keep their jobs as government-funded scientists.

Government-funding of science is killing science. Humanity gets stupider every day because politicians, the most knuckle-dragging throwbacks of our species, hold the purse strings of science.

Any gummit-funded science-schmuck who wants a steady paycheck has to totally bend, subvert, and/or deny his/her scientific findings until they match the Lunacy of the Overseers.

But so what? Who needs science anyway? Better to huddle, starving, in the cold and dark than to free the mind, explore Creation, and otherwise advance knowledge. Remain stupid, serve your masters, and keep your eyes, ears, and mouth shut. Reality bites. Be delusional. It is your feudal duty as a serf.

From Nopenhagen to Yes We Cancun

Note: the Viscount of Brenchly has no peers when it comes to the rhetorical arts. Please enjoy.

by Christopher Monckton, SPPI, December 6th, 2010 [here]

Thanks to Wikileaks, everyone here in the Mañana Republic of Mexico now knows just how much bullying and arm-twisting the administration of Barack Obama in the United States applied to various countries around the world so that they would (and did) sign up to the Copenhagen climate accord.

Without that pressure, nothing at all would have happened at Copenhagen this time last year, and “the Process” – the interminable round of flatulent annual climate conferences in exotic locations at taxpayers’ expense – would have tipped into the gulch forever.

The hard Left has learned the hard way that democracies do not welcome it and, in the end, will reject it. So the climate extremists have abandoned last year’s attempt, in the now-defunct September 15 Copenhagen Treaty draft, to install overnight an unelected world government consisting only of themselves, with unlimited powers of taxation, economic and environmental regulation without representation, as well as control of all formerly free markets worldwide, all in the name of Saving The Planet (which, of course, was triumphantly Saved 2000 years ago and does not need to be Saved again).

Instead, the Martini Marxists dancing the night away doing the Cancun Can-Can with the 25 pneumatic bunny girls in the newly-opened Playboy Casino on the ocean-front strip in Cancun have decided to copy the bureaucrats of the European Union, whose crafty, crabwise coup d’etat over the last three or four decades has transferred all real political power, little by little, treaty by treaty, to the dismal dictatorship of Brussels.

Though there is a toothless democratic fig-leaf in the shape of the European “Parliament”, all decisions in the EU are in fact taken by a couple of dozen faceless, overpaid Kommissars (that is the official German mot juste for them) – faceless because they meet behind closed doors and then emerge to promulgate their “Directives”: on average, one every three hours, day and night, Sundays and holidays included, 365 days a year, 366 days on leap-years.

In Europe, democracy has gone. Perma-Socialism has quietly supplanted it. If demolishing democracy worked there, the enviro-zombs’ reasoning goes, it will work on a worldwide scale, if only the crumbling pretext for global tyranny – the supposed need to prevent catastrophic “global warming” – can be kept going for long enough even though most ordinary voters (in those nations lucky enough to have them) have seen through the scam long since.

The Process works like this. A multitude of long, inspissate, obfuscatory, obnubilating, obscurantist draft agreements are circulated, always a day or two late for delegates to find out what they have actually agreed to. The daily timetables for the various “working” sessions of the conference are never available until breakfast-time on the day, allowing no scope for planning the day. By these means, most delegates are kept permanently and completely in the dark. … [more]

Three More Decades of a Cooling Planet

Note: the latest Arctic Blast is setting low temperature records across the Pacific Northwest. The findings below indicate that we better get used to it.

by Ken Schlichte

Dr. Jorge Sanchez-Sesma’s Technical Note, Multi-Centennial Scale Analysis and Synthesis of an Ensemble Mean Response of ENSO to Solar and Volcanic Forcings [here] includes the following Abstract:

Abstract

The response of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to solar and volcanic radiative forcings over the past millennium is reanalyzed and extrapolated based on historical data and numerical experiments employing the Zebiak–Cane (ZC) model of the tropical Pacific coupled ocean–atmosphere system. The results suggest a self-similarity of the centennial scale component of the reconstructed ENSO record with a shift in frequencies around 1700 AD when the frequencies almost double. This shift of regime puts forward the non-linearity of ENSO climate with a possible centennial scale forecast, suggesting an ENSO trend toward La Niña conditions for the next three decades.

We are now experiencing the effects of the current La Nina and it is worth noting that Dr. Sanchez-Sesma has presented data suggesting an ENSO trend toward La Nina conditions for the next three decades.

Note: see also Don J. Easterbrook. 2008. Global Cooling Is Here! Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling For the Next Three Decades [here].

Environmental Issues: What’s real and what’s nonsense?

Presentation to the Lake Oswego Lions Club, Nov 17, 2010

by Gordon J. Fulks, PhD Physics

Full text [here]

The story of environmentalism is generally portrayed as one of citizens triumphing over evil corporate polluters, of public awareness, science, and affluence working together to solve pressing problems. There is no problem so huge or so abstract that we cannot solve it if we put our minds to it. And solving these problems yields all sorts of positive side-effects and no drawbacks.

While that may be the perception, it is far from the fact. Public awareness is easily swayed by media campaigns that are little more than propaganda and supported by a press that would rather take sides than present balanced reports. Science is largely bought and paid for by politicians who control the agenda and the outcome. And our affluence, or what is left of it, is viewed as an inexhaustible source of revenue for whatever fantastic ideas the political class can dream up. …

We are perpetually told that we are poisoning the planet with everything from pesticides to carbon dioxide, such that our world is rapidly becoming unlivable. This feeds our enormous egos that tell us we are far more important to this planet than we really are. …
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President Václav Klaus: Inaugural Annual GWPF Lecture

Global Warming Policy Foundation, 21 October 2010 [here]

The Climate Change Doctrine is Part of Environmentalism, Not of Science

It is a great honor for me to be here tonight, getting a chance to deliver the inaugural lecture of the Global Warming Policy Foundation to such a distinguished audience.

Even though it may seem that there is a whole range of institutions both here and overseas which bring together and support those who openly express doubts about the currently prevailing dogma of man-made global warming and who dare to criticize it, it apparently is still not enough. We are subject to a heavily biased and carefully organized propaganda and a serious and highly qualified forum here, on this side of the Atlantic, that would stand for rationality, objectivity and fairness in public policy discussion is more than needed. That is why I consider the launching of the foundation an important step in the right direction.

We should keep saying very loudly that the current debate about global warming –and I agree with the Australian paleoclimatologist Prof. Carter that we should always speak about “dangerous human caused global warming” because it is not “warming per se that we are concerned with”[1] – is in its substance not part of the scientific discourse about the relative role of a myriad of factors influencing swings in global temperature but part of public policy debate about man and society. As R. M. Carter stresses in his recent book, “the global warming issue long ago ceased being a scientific problem.”[2]

The current debate is a public policy debate with enormous implications.[3] It is no longer about climate. It is about the government, the politicians, their scribes and the lobbyists who want to get more decision making and power for themselves. It seems to me that the widespread acceptance of the global warming dogma has become one of the main, most costly and most undemocratic public policy mistakes in generations. The previous one was communism. …

It is not a new doctrine.[16] It has existed under various headings and in various forms and manifestations for centuries, always based on the idea that the starting point of our thinking should be the Earth, the Planet, or Nature, not Man or Mankind.[17] It has always been accompanied by the plan that we have to come back to the original state of the Earth, unspoiled by us, humans.[18] The adherents of this doctrine have always considered us, the people, a foreign element.[19] They forget that it doesn’t make sense to speak about the world without people because there would be no one to speak. In my book, I noted that “if we take the reasoning of the environmentalists seriously, we find that theirs is an anti-human ideology” … [more]

Alaska Not Warming

by Ken Schlichte

A recent article in the Tacoma News Tribune quotes an ecologist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks as saying Alaska temperatures will increase by 11 degrees F by 2100 and turn interior Alaska into prairie.

Warming Could Turn Interior Into Prairie, UAF Scientist Says

AP, Tacoma News Tribune, 09/18/2010 [here]

“The projected warming of the planet could give Fairbanks the same weather as the midwestern Canadian prairies, according to a University of Alaska Fairbanks professor.

Rich Boone, an ecosystem ecologist at the College of Natural Science and Mathematics, used the climate around Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, as an example of what might be in store for Alaska’s Interior, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.

Fairbanks faces a roughly 11-degree temperature increase by 2100 if moderate climate-change models are used, Boone said during a talk Wednesday.

If that happens, the Interior no longer will be characterized by permafrost and boreal forests, he said.

“That’s very realistic,” Boone said. “We’d be in a zone that would potentially be prairie.”

Models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict worldwide temperatures will increase by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century. Arctic regions have been warming at roughly twice the rate of other parts of the globe, Boone said.

Based on indicators that include ice cores, tree rings and other data, Boone said the only other known period of such rapid change was the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.

Earth’s climate has been remarkably stable during the past 1,000 years, he said, allowing humans to develop reliable agriculture and the civilization that accompanies it.”

The UAF professor suggests that Fairbanks faces a roughly 11-degree temperature increase by 2100, but the Alaska Climate Research Center figure (below) and their discussion of it indicates that Alaska had a large temperature increase in 1976 due to a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska.

Mean Annual temperatures departure from “normal” for Alaska, 1949-2009

Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index, 1925-2010

From the Alaska Climate Research Center:

Considering just a linear trend can mask some important variability characteristics in the time series. The figure at right [1st figure above] shows clearly that this trend is non-linear: a linear trend might have been expected from the fairly steady observed increase of CO2 during this time period. The figure shows the temperature departure from the long-term mean (1949-2009) for all stations. It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976. The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase. Synoptic conditions with the positive phase tend to consist of increased southerly flow and warm air advection into Alaska during the winter, resulting in positive temperature anomalies.

The professor’s statement that the earth’s climate has been remarkably stable during the last 1,000 years also conflicts with the significant temperature decreases that occurred between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and the significant temperature increases that have occurred since the Little Ice Age.

Note: It should also be considered that prairies are not wholly the result of temperature in that they occur across a wide range of climatic zones. There are prairies in Amazonia, for instance. Prairies result from very frequent fire in low rainfall regions. And sometimes high rainfall regions. There are remnant prairies in coastal Washington, for instance, where it rains buckets (see [here]). Much study has revealed that anthropogenic (human-set) fires have driven prairie formation and maintenance worldwide during the Holocene. - Mike Dubrasich

Garbled Warming

USA Today today reports that the 2010 Fire Season has been a mild one, due to the weather, not “climate change” of course.

USA catches a break this year with mild wildfire season

Both in terms of total number of wildfires as well as acres burned, 2010 is the least active year of the past decade.

By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY, September 8, 2010 [here]

The USA is enjoying an unusually quiet year for wildfires, the least fiery of the past 10 years, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

Both in terms of total number of wildfires as well as acres burned, 2010 is the least active year of the past decade.

Weather conditions have been ideal this year for a calm wildfire season, particularly in the fire-prone West.

“It’s been a combination of rain at the right time of year in the right place,” says Robyn Heffernan, assistant fire weather program manager of the fire center.

“The weakening of El Nino (and eventual transition to La Nina) brought abundant spring rain to the Northwest and kept a persistent West Coast trough of low pressure throughout the summer,” she adds. “This kept (wildfire) fuels moist in the Northwest quarter of the country into the summer fire season.

“It was the perfect combination for little fire activity in the lower 48.”

As of Sept. 3, 43,470 fires had burned in the USA, slightly less than the 45,152 that burned in 2003, according to the fire center. This amount is 71% of the average of 61,219 fires.

The total acres burned across the USA has been less than half of an average year. So far in 2010, 2.6 million acres have burned nationally; in a typical year, 5.7 million have been scorched, to date.

Also thanks to El Nino, the spring was very wet in the Southern tier of states, reports Heffernan, which is typically that region’s most active season.

“Last winter was under the influence of an El Nino, which gave the Southern tier of states moist conditions going into the spring fire season,” Heffernan says.

Many of the wildfires this year have been in Alaska. “They were busy in their peak of fire season, which is in June,” she adds.

Alaska burned around 150% of its normal number of fires and in excess of 200% of normal acreage.

“If you took those fires out, the lower 48 total would be significantly lower.” …

That’s not to say that there haven’t been devastating fires. Thousands of acres of spotted owl forests have been incinerated in various Let It Burn fires, and homes destroyed in numerous others.

Note: the worst of this year’s home-destroying wildfires is burning right now west of Boulder, CO. The Four Mile Canyon Fire [here] has burned more than 50 homes so far. The West Fire [here] and Bull Fire [here] in Kern County, CA burned 30+ residences in July. And the typical fall wildfire season in Southern California has not kicked in yet.

But the numbers don’t lie; this year has been a relatively mild fire season to-date.

The “conventional” wisdom has been that the globe is heating up like a frog in a microwave oven, though. The “models” are off the charts. Some “experts” like NASA’s James “Venus Syndrome” Hansen believe the seas are going to boil away into outer space if we don’t stop driving SUV’s [here].

It has been a popular alarmist refrain that early snowmelt and increased spring and summer temperatures have occurred and are driving increases in wildfire acreage. A single speculative paper is most often cited: Westerling, A.L.; Hidalgo, H.G.; Cayan, D.R.; Swetnam, T.W. 2006. Warming and earlier spring increase Western U.S. forest wildfire activity. Science, Vol. 313: 940-843 [here] for this dire report.

Of course, one unchallenged study using uncertainty-laden computer models does not equal truth. That hasn’t impeded AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmists from trumpeting it, however. The Draft Cohesive Strategy [here], for instance, was written by Westerling et al. true believers.

The problem with the alarmist theories is that the weather won’t cooperate with the climate models. Despite the overwhelming consensus of People Without a Clue [here, here, here, for instance], colder-than-usual weather keeps contradicting the Incredible Warming Models.

Even the President and Chief Alarmist Barky Obama had to concede last winter that Snowmageddon had arrived [here]. Al “Sex Poodle” Gore bought a mansion on the beach, indicating his money doesn’t go where his mouth does [here]. Record salmon runs have filled western rivers [here], in response to the PDO shift [here] to colder waters. And despite their best efforts, the Nation’s Interagency and Interdepartmental Wildland Fire Management Community has not been able to burn as many acres as they had hoped for. $Billions in FLAME Act funds are not getting spent, much to everyone’s chagrin.

Our cold, wet Spring and the Shortest Summer On Record have pretty much shot the Incredible Warming Models full of holes. Which was also predicted [here]. It’s that darn weather. It just won’t cooperate.

World Governments are doing all they can to raise taxes and inflict economy busting regulations, and they need evidence to justify their Luddititude. But the evidence keeps undermining the Alarmist wonkies. The seas won’t boil, the fires won’t burn, and the weather won’t do what the models tell it to do.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody seems to be able to make it do what they want.

But not to worry. The Lame Ducks will quack things up. Get out your check books, or sell your kids if you have to. The Largest Tax Hikes in History are coming. They’ll cure what ails the weather, or my name isn’t Quetzalcoatl.

Climate Change Foils Fire Nazis

As the unusual August rain today pours down on dozens of Let Burn Fires across the West, the best laid plans of the holocauster forest destroyer “community” have been washed away.

Even napalm won’t work when the humidity is this high and the temperatures this low.

The climate change that has altered the Pacific Northwest is due to the shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which has taken place over the last 3 years or so. Colder water is upwelling in the northern eastern Pacific, a condition absent over the last 30 years, but now back for a 3-decade term.

Add to that the growing La Nina in the central Pacific (more cooling of the water off our shores), and a cold wet spell has engulfed us.

Last winter was the coldest and wettest on record, summer was two months late, and now fall is a month early. As the saying goes, summer was the nicest day we had this year.

Great plans were afoot to burn umpteen million acres of America’s priceless heritage forests this summer, and the fire nazis did their best. Not only were numerous wildfires unfought, but arsonistic sub-functionaries attempted to torch off more and more acres — using drip torches and ping pong balls filled with gasoline, dropped from helicopters.

Before the fire season started, various fire pundits predicted a monstrous burning summer. The cold, wet winter and spring had spurred more than the average growth, you see, and all that excess biomass was going to fuel the fires of their dreams.

No mention was made of the biomass that had been building up for 100 years or more. Just this year’s early growth was all that mattered to the pundits. They also tore their hair out over the “early snowmelt” and “late fall” and “extended burning season” indicated by their funk-tastic models. Don’t measure anything — real data aren’t necessary — just plug fantasy into creative equations and voila!, garbage spews out.

But their models were wrong, completely wrong, utterly wrong. Bang the Gong Show gong. Summer was late and fall has come early, just the opposite of the predictions of the chrome domes.

The Alarmist consensus turned out to be a confederacy of dunces. Cue the clown music…

Far be it from me to rub it in, but I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!

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Big Whoosh

The cold front is blowing by right now here in the Willamette Valley. Trees are swaying, the wind chimes are ringing, and the temperature has dropped 15 degrees. This place is protected by topography from most of the wind, but clouds are winging eastward at high speed, indicating that winds aloft are quite strong.

From the National Weather Service this morning:

URGENT - FIRE WEATHER MESSAGE - NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

RED FLAG WARNING IN EFFECT FOR NW CALIFORNIA, EASTERN OREGON, EASTERN WASHINGTON, NORTHERN NEVADA, IDAHO, MONTANA, WESTERN WYOMING

LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITIES AND STRONG SOUTHWEST WINDS WILL CREATE CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS

A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EITHER OCCURRING NOW…OR WILL SHORTLY. THESE CONDITIONS WILL CREATE THE POTENTIAL FOR EXPLOSIVE FIRE GROWTH.

Current Red Flag Warning Products [here]

The cold front will pick up speed as it surmounts the Cascades and sweeps across the Columbia Plateau. When it reaches Idaho, ground winds will gust up to 50 mph or more. There the winds will encounter a number of Let It Burn fires — Federal fires that should have been contained weeks ago but instead have been allowed to grow and incinerate America’s priceless heritage forests.

Current Large Incidents Map (click for larger image)

Fires currently burning (some of which are not on the map) include:

Larkins Let It Burn Complex Fires (ID); Clearwater NF; Size: 749 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Scott Mountain Let It Burn Fire (OR); Willamette NF (OR); Size: 935 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Gravel Let It Burn Fire (WY); Bridger-Teton NF; Size: 433 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Hurd Fire (ID); Boise NF; Size: 506 acres; Percent Contained: 15% [here]

Alder Creek Fire (ID); Lolo NF; Size: 425 acres; Percent Contained: 5% [here]

Fire 264 Let It Burn Complex (OR); Mt. Hood NF; Size: 500+ acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Banner Let It Burn Fire (ID); Salmon-Challis NF; Size: 2,077 acres; Percent Contained: 18% [here]

White Lightning Fire (OR); Warm Springs Reservation; Size: 33,016 acres; Percent Contained: 40% [here]

Eight Mile Lake Let It Burn Fire (WA); Okanogan-Wenatchee NF; Size: 119 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Arthur 2 Let It Burn Fire (WY); Yellowstone National Park; Size: 200 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Vernon Let It Burn Fire (CA); Yosemite National Park; Size: 160 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Thunder Let It Burn Fire (WA); Okanogan-Wenatchee NF; Size: 125 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Oak Flat “Appropriate Response” Fire (OR); Rogue River-Siskiyou NF; Size: 4,760 acres; Percent Contained: 75% (allegedly) [here]

Sheep Let It Burn Fire (CA); Kings Canyon National Park; Size: 2,425 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Hopper Let It Burn Fire (WA); Olympic National Park; Size: 385 acres; Percent Contained: 15% (not by firefighters) [here]

Little Beaver Complex Let It Burn Fire (ID); Boise NF; Size: 5,350 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Bighorn Let It Burn Fire (ID); Salmon-Challis NF; Size: 1,128 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Bull Let It Burn Fire (WY); Bridger-Teton NF; Size: 3,539 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

Twitchell Canyon Let It Burn Fire (UT); Fishlake NF; Size: 4,482 acres; Percent Contained: 0% [here]

This is the centennial year of the Great Fires of 1910, and much discussion has taken place about megafires and why, how, and when they arise [here].

From old SOS Forests, the archived version [here]

Palousers

July 24th, 2007

… Today the wind shifted, and a cold, dry front is blowing through right now as I type. The clouds have cleared, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, it’s 60 degrees in the shade at 10 AM, and the wind is from northwest at 15 to 20 mph. That’s what a cold front in July looks and feels like around here.

Whereas the weather here in western Oregon is balmy, across the Cascades to the east something else is happening. The same fronts are blowing across the continental plateau between the Cascades and the Rockies, but with a magnified effect. When southwesterly warm fronts swap places with northwesterly cold and dry fronts over the continent, big winds are generated.

A 15 mph wind in western Oregon can turn into a 50 mph wind on the high deserts of eastern Oregon and Washington, and then it can slam into Idaho and Montana and go sweeping down the other side of the Rockies into Wyoming and the Dakotas at gale force.

These summer westerly wind storms are known as Palousers because they seem to arise in the rolling loess hills of the Palouse.

Palousers happen every summer, in pulses, as warm and cold fronts passing over the PNW interact. Most summers they are mild to strong. Some summers Palousers arise that are near hurricane force.

The windstorm of August 20-21, 1910, blew smoldering fires in the Northern Rockies into a firestorm that incinerated 3 million acres in 48 hours, killed at least 85 people, completely destroyed five towns, and partially destroyed two others, at a time when the region was sparsely populated.

That was a Palouser.

From Pyne, Stephen J., Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910. 2001 Viking Press:

The old-timer was right. The fate of the fire season resided in the swirling dice rolls of the wind. The usual pattern was for cold fronts to ripple across the region every three to five days. In advance of each front, winds would freshen from the southwest, then shift to the northwest after passage. The frontal waves became a vast, slow bellows, drawing in warm, moist air from the south before driving it out with cooler dry air from the north. …The train of fronts that rattled through the Northwest beginning in early July captured this arc of moist air, gulping it in, then exhaling it out. The rhythm of the fronts set the rhythm of the burning.

Each surge of air would stir up old flames and trigger dry lightning storms that kindled new fires. …In the Northern Rockies the approaching fronts drew the winds from the arid Columbia Plains and loess-capped Palouse–thus the Palousers of which the old-timer warned Morris. This was an ancient rhythm. But in 1910 the drought was worse, the storms held more lightning and less rain, the organization sagged from fatigue. The mid-July fire bust strained the Forest Service to its limits. Yet there was no real pause; climax followed climax; the big breakout of 23 July; the flare-ups of 1-2 August, 11-12 August, and 16-17 August; the Big Blowup of 20-21 August. Each built on the last, each fanned little fires into big ones and big ones into conflagrations, until at last a dusting of cold and wet began to dampen them out on 24 August. …

That post was sadly prophetic. The cold front of July 24, 2007, fanned a dozen Let It Burn fires in Idaho and led to the incineration of much of the Payette and Boise National Forests. Over 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles) of forested watersheds were fried [here, here].

What we wrote then still applies:

Big winds plus active fires can lead to regional firestorms. It has happened before. Conditions today are very similar to those in the Summer of 1910, except perhaps that the fuel loadings are much greater, and of course, a few million people live in Idaho and Montana now, with all their homes and stuff.

A regional firestorm today would be one of the most terrible disasters ever to strike in American history. Whatever we can do to avoid it, like putting the fires out [instead of allowing them to burn] and pre-treating the forests and ranges (too late for that this summer), we ought to do.

Greenland Glacial Calving and Sea Level

SOSF Note: Special thanks to Joe D’Aleo of ICECAP [here] for his stalwart efforts to debunk global warming hysteria.

by Nils-Axel Mörner, ICECAP, Aug 13, 2010 [here]

ICECAP Note:

Last week another alarmist story appeared in the [UK] Guardian quoting Richard Alley, professor at the once great Penn State University in which it reported on the natural calving of a large chink of the Petermann glacier in Greenland. They noted “Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

We asked a real expert on sea level, Nils-Axel Morner to comment. Here is what he had to say:

No ”huge rise in sea level” to foresee: Observation rules out modeling

Recently, “a panel of leading geoscientists told the US Congress” that sea level is likely to rise by 7 metres within this century. What nonsense, we must say. Not only, is this against observational facts, it is also against physics.

At the Last Ice, the huge ice caps over Europe and North America had their southern margins way down at mid latitudes (at Hamburg in Europe and at New York in North America). When climate changed, the ice melted at a very rapid rate. At Stockholm, for example, the ice margin was displaced northwards at a rate of about 300 m per year. Indeed, an enormous speed. Still, global sea level did not rise more than about 10 mm per year or 1 metre in a century. This rate sets the absolutely ultimate physically frame of any possible sea level rise today. Any claim exceeding this value must be classified as shear nonsense. It is as simple as that.

The Greenland Ice Cap did not melt during the postglacial hypsithermal (some 5000 to 8000 years ago), when temperature was about 2.5 degC higher than today. Nor did it melt during the Last Interglacial when temperature was about 4 degC higher than today. As to time, it would take more than a millennium (with full thermal forcing) to melt the ice masses stored there.

The panel also talk about a possible “tipping point”. Well, the only event of that type we can be fairly sure about, seems to be the approaching turn from a Solar Maximum (just passed) to a Solar Minimum (calculated at around 2040).

The view presented by the panel is another sad expression of IPCC propaganda. What they say is not founded in geoscientific knowledge and physical laws. The World is far too full of real problems that call for immediate consideration to waste time on wild exaggerations.

Nils-Axel Mörner, (Sea level specialist from Sweden)
Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics

ICECAP Note: In actual fact, Alley’s own chart should tell you we do not have a problem in Greenland. In fact, if anything, the data may be suggesting a movement towards a new ice age.

Climate Change in Oregon Is Nil

If you are an AGW Kool Aid drinker in Oregon, please don’t read the following. It will blow your mind, and we don’t want that to happen.

Observed Climate Change and the Negligible Global Effect of Greenhouse-gas Emission Limits in the State of Oregon

Written by the Science and Public Policy Institute, 26 July 2010 [here]

Full text [here] (1.1 MB)

SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKERS

In this report, we review the long-term climate history of Oregon and find little in the way of evidence that the greenhouse gas build-up in the atmosphere has done much to alter Oregon’s climate. While temperatures have generally appeared to have risen slightly across the state over the past 100 years, they have in fact fallen a bit during the past 20 years. The state’s precipitation and drought histories are marked by annual and decadal variability rather than long-term change. Variations in the state’s climate are significantly influenced by natural variations and cycles driven in part by decadal variations in the Pacific atmosphere/ocean system. Future sea level rise will be muted by Oregon’s geologic processes which generally act in opposition to rising oceans by raising the level of the state’s coastlines. Further, scares of increasing tropical diseases are easily shown to be misapplication of the true facts.

Along with the observed climate history of Oregon, we analyze what the future impacts on the climate will be if Oregon ceased all of its greenhouse gas emissions, now and forever. What we find is eye-opening. Even a complete cessation of greenhouse emissions from Oregon will likely slow the future rate of global warming by less than one thousandths (<0.001) of a ºC per century. The impact of sea level will be an equally meager one hundredths of an inch. These changes are scientifically and realistically meaningless.

What’s worse, is that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing so rapidly in China, that new emissions from that country will completely subsume the entirely of Oregon’s hypothetical emissions cessation in less than one month’s time! Clearly, any plan merely calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will fare even poorer. There is simply no climatic gain to be had from emissions reductions in Oregon.

All told, Oregon has been little impacted by global “climate change” and regulations prescribing a reduction in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on future climate change. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the impact of emissions regulations on the state’s economy, which have been projected to be large and negative. As such, state and/or federal plans aimed at limiting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions presents a perfect recipe for an all pain, no gain outcome for Oregon’s citizenry.

Bio Irony, Warmer Is Better Dept.

The new thing is biodiversity.

Globalists recognize the growing collapse of gloooobal waaaarming alarmism as a tool to advance One World Authoritarian government, so they have revived the U.N. Agenda 21 scare over allegedly declining biodiversity — to accomplish the same goal [here, here].

But, and here’s the irony, warmer climates have greater biodiversity. The warmer it is, the more biodiversity, and the cooler it is, the less.

Technically, biodiversity means the number of plant and animal species per unit area. In the tropics (warm climates) there are sometimes thousands of species per acre. In boreal and/or tundra regions (cold climates), there may be less than a dozen species per acre.

The definition is important. The U.N. defines “biodiversity” in a squishy fashion [here]:

Biodiversity is an all encompassing term to describe the variety of all life and natural processes on Earth.

The Convention on Biological Diversity defines biodiversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources [...] this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems” (Article 2, CBD).

But technically, biologists measure biodiversity using indices such as Simpson’s diversity index [here], the Shannon index [here], or species richness [here].

Those indices all express some variant of number of species per unit area. And measurements of biodiversity all indicate the same general condition: Equatorial latitudes have high biodiversity, and polar latitudes have low biodiversity (Antarctica has the lowest biodiversity on the planet).

A new study from Harvard hypothesizes that seasonality impacts biodiversity [here]. The authors note that during the Eocene (54.8-33.7 mya) [here], biodiversity was at its highest point in the history of the Earth. The authors conjecture that the onset of seasons, with wide temperature swings between summer and winter, were the primary cause of subsequent biodiversity loss.

But overall temperature appears to be a more important factor. Global temperatures reached their highest post-Cretaceous levels at about the Paleocene-Eocene transition, and they have been falling ever since. At least five major extinction events occurred in the Eocene alone:

The Lutetian-Bartonian event (41 mya)

The Bartonian-Priabonian event (37 mya)

The Late Priabonian event (35 mya)

The Terminal Eocene event (33.5 mya)

The Late Rupelian event (30.5 mya)

All these extinction events were associated with reductions in global temperature, thinning CO2, declining rainfall, and falling sea levels.

Seasonality has always been a phenomenon of our planet, and is due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, also known as obliquity [here]. The tilt is nothing new. The Earth has been tilted for billions of years.

However, seasonality did become more pronounced as the Eocene gave way to the Oligocene (35.4-29.3 mya) [here] and even more so during the Miocene (29.3-6.7 mya). Then the Ices Ages ensued, and seasonality grew even stronger. But it was not the difference between the seasons that was so damaging to biodiversity — it was the fact that the climate across much of the globe dropped below freezing.

When the temperature is so cold that water turns to ice, life in general perishes. Living things are liquid water-based. We die if the water in our bodies turns to solid ice.

Some plants and animals have evolved defenses against sub-freezing temperatures, such as thick fur, internal body heat regulation, and dormancy. The Order of Mammals arose during the Eocene but really expanded as the climate grew colder. Deciduousness (winter dormancy in trees) also arose in the Eocene, first in response to six-month dark periods above the Arctic Circle. Trees that expressed winter dormancy migrated south during the Oligocene and Miocene, where their resilience to freezing conditions gave them competitive advantage.

The article about the Harvard paper states:

At the time [the Eocene] the McAbee fossils were created, Earth’s climate was far less seasonal at all latitudes, allowing tropical species, such as palm trees and crocodiles, to live in what is now the high Arctic.

But as must be obvious to everyone, lack of seasonality was not the thing that allowed crocodiles to bask under palm trees in the Arctic. Warmth was. Crocodiles and palm trees today live where seasons come and go, but they do not live where it’s cold.

The article continues:

When the Arctic was warm in the past, like the rest of the planet, it had a high degree of biodiversity, like the tropics do today.

That statement is more acceptable. Note that it says nothing about seasons.

When the earth was warmer than today, such as in the Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene, there was much greater biodiversity.

If significant global warming occurs in the future (which is very doubtful), it will be good for biodiversity.

The U.N. is working at cross-purposes with itself. It wants to chill the planet but also wishes to increase biodiversity. Those are mutually exclusive goals.

The U.N. also desires One World Authoritarian government, but as must be obvious to everyone, One World Authoritarian government would not improve anything. We would still have nutzo leaders who work at cross-purposes with themselves, much to the detriment of humanity as well as to the environment.

One Worlders are not your friends. Nor are they friends of the environment. But that is restating the obvious.