Tag Archives: bullshit

Conservation and Climate Change – The State of the Birds

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Posted by JJ on March 14, 2010 – 1:38 pm
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On March 14 2010, Sciam (Scientific American) tweeted a report called “Climate Change – State of the Birds 2010 Report”.  A link is in the Reference section at the end of this post.

My wife and I are a lifelong conservationists with a special place in our hearts for birds.  In our home country, New Zealand, we gardened organically, without pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and planted native trees in the garden of every house we have owned, to attract, feed and encourage the NZ and exotic birds back into our lives.  People change landscapes, and we feel strongly that we should provide the means for the native wildlife to survive those changes.  So we do just that, and are rewarded by the tuis, wood pigeons, fantails, wax-eyes, goldfinches, starlings, sparrows and other birds that swarm in our garden.  They are so comfortable with us that they pick for food at our feet when we sit on the garden deck.  They will do so again when we return.

Here during our sojourn in the Netherlands, our greatest delight is the splendid variety of birds that grace the trees in our tiny lane in Haarlem, and fill the polders, reserves and wetlands.  We put out seeds, nuts, fat balls and insect blocks this winter, because it has been the harshest for forty years.  No doubt we have assisted the great tits, blue tits, jays, tree-creepers and robins that are outside the window, ten feet from me, right now.  And now that spring quickens the trees and the temperature is finally back above zero, we shall once more roam the cycle lanes in the reserves, among the swans, ducks, herons and magpies.

So how does a Grumpy Old Conservationist react to the report?  By grumping – it is shameless advocacy.  A load of self-serving twaddle riding the coat-tails of the highly exaggerated predictions of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  Prediction after prediction in the IPCC report is being exposed as nonsense.  Himalayan glaciers, African crop yields, Amazon rain-forest health are three examples.  These are not small errors – they are critical for the IPCC’s advocacy.  It will not be long before their predicted six-degree Celsius global temperature rise for the twenty-first century is similarly nailed, and nailed conclusively.  Already, scientific analyses of the various bases on which that prediction was based are showing them to be doubtful at best, and suggest that some of them have been shamelessly manipulated.  The leaked emails of the Climategate incident add weight to that suggestion.

Audubon and the other conservation agencies have done a great conservation job of maintaining, recovering and protecting wildlife populations, and will continue to do so.  It is important work, mitigating the environmental consequences of the actions of humankind.  It enriches all of life.  They should keep it up.

It saddens me to see that work, and the agencies who perform it, hooked up in the advocacy of the AGW group.  The predictions of the AGW camp will be shown to be about as accurate as the Jehovah’s Witnesses predictions of the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.  IPCC and all of those who have promoted AGW will be utterly discredited.  An angry world may well discredit all conservationist groups along with them.

That would be a very great shame.

References:

2010 State of the Birds:  http://www.stateofthebirds.org/habitats

Postscript: Scientific American is diminished.  It used to be great magazine that reported science.  Now it is an avenue for advocacy.

Skeptics are NOT arguing against Global Warming

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Posted by JJ on March 12, 2010 – 5:37 pm
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In a post in the SFGate blog, Dr Peter Gleick sets out to counter AGW skepticism by painting skeptics as deniers and bar-room brawlers.

He starts by stating that there is no argument against global warming, ignoring the fact that skeptics do not argue that global warming is not happening.  That’s the first mistake.  There are red-necked fools who deny that the earth warmed from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, certainly.  But they are not the skeptics.

Then he says: “in this world, no alternative explanation for climate change has ever come close to doing a better job than the science produced by the climate community and represented by the IPCC“.  There are two big things wrong with that statement.

Firstly, the IPCC and all the scientists who are funded by the AGW group have never provided any evidence that the recent warming is unprecedented.  It is clear that the Medieval Roman warm periods were at least as warm as the present, and some studies indicate they may have been much warmer.

Secondly, the “scientific” explanations of the IPCC themselves do not come close to explaining the warming.  All they have is models that include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (and they are very approximate) the climate change scientists conclude that they have proved their estimate of the climate forcing due to man-made CO2, and that their forecasts of temperature rises to come in the twenty-first century must therefore be correct.  They give this technique a fancy name – they call it “optimal detection”.  The very notion that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and that in inter-glacial periods like the present, there are mini-cycles of warm periods between little ice-ages is dismissed as unscientific wishful thinking.  It is nothing of the kind.  It’s simple observation.  And within the last two thousand years, we have written history to draw upon.

He then groups opponents as “marginal, discredited climate deniers”, put up by the media.  Hmmm.  He wants us to infer that Spencer, Lindzen, Watts, D’Aleo, McIntyre, Christy, Pielke Sr (and Jr.), Idso, Soon, Loehle, Micheals, Moberg, Singer, Landsea, Plimer, Ball etc are not serious scientists, just deniers.  That is quite some diversion he is attempting in his posting.

The next step he takes is to associate skeptics by implication with the right-wing red-necked ravers, who place hate-filled comments in climate blogs: “… there’s no such thing as global warming, you f!@%$#%@ing idiot and your f!@%$#%@ing colleagues.”  I understand his annoyance with that sort of offensive rubbish.  But such obscene tripe is in no way comparable with skeptical argument, and Peter Gleick knows it.

He finishes with a Simpsons cartoon showing an AGW opponent as a bully.  All-in-all, his posting is not a reasoned essay opposing the skeptical position.  It is a swinging, no-holds-barred, boots-and-all attempt to discredit all skeptics as bar-room brawlers.  He is not arguing logically, not speaking as a scientist.  He is displaying the very bullying behaviour that he accuses skeptics of.

But then, as he himself says, oblivious to the irony: “The world of policy often doesn’t give a hoot for the world of science.”

References:

Peter Gleik’s complaint: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=58962

Vegetarianism and Global Warming – what Next?

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Posted by JJ on March 8, 2010 – 10:07 pm
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Francis Moore Lappe’s daughter Anna has written her own book – “Diet for a Hot Planet”.  Her mother wrote “Diet for a Small Planet”, promoting a vegetarian lifestyle, back in 1971.  Now her daughter is doing her own thing and playing off the title of her mother’s book.  And she is pitching her update of her mother’s original ideas as a measure to combat global warming.

This Anna Lappe is a sad case of one of my pet peeves – someone who degrades what could be a real environmental message by climbing on the global warming bandwagon.  Inevitably, AGW will be exposed for what it is – the biggest scientific scam since Piltdown Man.  The perpetrators of the Piltdown hoax sought to discredit the theory of evolution. While they were misguided creationists, at least they had the saving grace of humour.  AGW is far more sinister – it is a con of biblical proportions that will make its promoters extremely rich, and is intended to provide the religious power base of the UN.

Along comes Anna Lappe, preaching sustainable agriculture.  Nothing wrong with that – factory farming over time destroys the land, sooner or later.  The California dustbowl, land slips in hillsides stripped of trees and over-grazed by sheep and cattle, pollution of streams and rivers with run-off from farms, decline in bird populations, increasing reliance on pesticides that destroy not only the pests but also their natural predators.  And so on.  But climate?

“We hear little about how food affects climate,” she said.  No surprise – because it does not significantly affect global climate (although it clearly can affect local climate – for example, deforestation and excess draw-off from rivers both powerfully affect local climate).

Every human being has a religious standpoint, and vegetarianism, like atheism, monotheism, polytheism, agnosticism, animism, communism, capitalism or any other ism (or AGWarmism), is a form of religion.  Anna Lappe has every right to believe in vegetarianism – and every right to talk about it.  But to claim that meat-eaters contribute to global warming is twaddle.  Even Realclimate says that methane is not a threat to the planet.  And it is becoming more and more evident that CO2 is not the pollutant that the AGW believers say it is.

All the CO2 and methane from farming or any other source has a negligible effect globally.  And contrary to Lappe’s beliefs, livestock rotated through cropping fields enhance the fertility and sustainability of the land with their manure.  Want to destroy land?  Just crop it year after year.  Want to sustain it?  Put everything you don’t eat back into the land as compost.  Plant it in grass every so often, then graze it with cattle or sheep, then let the pigs in, and then the chickens.  Then crop it again.  Small-holding real organic farmers have known that for centuries.

The pity is, when the world backlash rejects AGW, it may also reject all environmental and conservationist theories and initiatives, even the ones that are soundly scientifically based.  They will be tainted by association.

Reference: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030302065.html