“Write it down, then ask yourself ‘Would it make sense to my Grandmother’?” – Ken Dixon expounding his “Grandmother Test”.

A Stanford University study has concluded that domes of increased carbon dioxide concentrations – discovered to form above cities more than a decade ago – cause local temperature increases that in turn increase the amounts of local air pollutants, raising concentrations of health-damaging ground-level ozone, as well as particles in urban air.  The overall conclusion is that CO2 domes in US cities are responsible for an increase in premature mortality of 50 to 100 deaths per year in California , and even more,  300 to 1,000 more premature deaths in the contiguous 48 states.

How is this established?  By data-evaluated numerical computer modeling of CO2 feedbacks and health impacts for the contiguous 48 states, for California and for the Los Angeles area, to determine the increase in the death rate from air pollution for all three regions compared to what the rate would be if no local carbon dioxide were being emitted (See Appendix below).

That’s it – no hard data.  Nothing testable.  They built a complex model predicting heating impacts, made assumptions about the health consequences of that heating, and then made recommendations about carbon taxes based on the model’s estimates.  So CO2 causes the urban heat islands (UHI)!  Not concentrations of people and services and central heating and power and motor vehicles and concrete and stone, but CO2!  Come on – cities are hotter than the countryside simply because they are cities.

But no -we gotta blame CO2.  Carbon taxes are depending on it.

Pity the scientists didn’t try explaining it to their grandmothers.  Or failing that, to an eight-year-old.  They might have realised just how ludicrous their “study” really is.

References:

pdf of the Stanford study:  http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/CO2loc0709EST.pdf

WUWT Post on the story:  http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/16/stanford-urban-co2-domes-mean-more-death/

Appendix:

This is what they claim to have real-world modelled to a standard of certainty sufficient to predict the urban death-rate due to CO2:

Example CO2 feedbacks treated include those to heating  rates, thus temperatures, which affected

• (a) local temperature and pressure gradients, stability, wind speeds, and gas/particle transport
• (b) water evaporation rates
• (c) the relative humidity and particle swelling
• (d) temperature-dependent natural emissions, air chemistry, and particle microphysics.
• (e) photosynthesis and respiration rates
• (f) dissolution and evaporation rates of CO2 into the ocean
• (g) weathering rates
• (h) ocean pH and chemical composition
• (i) sea spray pH and composition
• (j) and rainwater pH and composition. Changes in sea spray composition, in turn, affected sea spray radiative properties, thus heating rates.

The entire study depends on the assumption that the IPCC climate models are comprehensive and correct in their predictions of twenty-first century climate change.  These models include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings of climate forcing tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (they are very approximate, and then only while the earth is warming) 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 call this modelling technique “optimal detection”.  That is the technique that Ptolemy used in his geocentric model of the universe, which made very accurate predictions of the motions of the moon, planets and stars.  It took more than a thousand years for later scientists to discover the truth,  That is understandable – the relative predictive accuracy of Ptolemy’s model left little reason to suppose that it might be wrong.  So until Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, astronomers fully accepted the geocentric model.

Similarly, the Potsdam people take AGW and the IPCC-sponsored models as fact.  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.  Written history that documents the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warm Period.  The IPCC claim that the recent warming is unprecedented is false.  So are the models.

There has been a fifteen-year hiatus in the warming, against the model predictions.  Even Phil Jones of the CRU agrees that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.  And in spite of the present warmth, all indications are that the PDO is now turning negative, and that in five-to-ten years the AMO will also turn negative.  The earth is in for 20 – 30 years of cooling, while CO2 continues to rise, fed by the economic growth in China and India.  The IPCC models did not predict the flat temperature since 1995, and they do not predict the forthcoming cooling.

Greenhouse gases did not cause the twentieth-century warming, or the earlier MWP and still earlier Roman warming.  When cooling sets in, it will not be because greenhouse gases are reduced, or because we are saved by a quiescent sun.  It will be a result of the natural cycles.

Reference:

Discovery News Article    http://news.discovery.com/space/the-sun-cant-save-us-from-global-warming.html

Potsdam Press Release:   http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/weakening-sun-would-hardly-slow-global-warming

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.

The UK Institute of Physicists submitted a strongly worded thirteen-point memorandum to the UK Parliament commission of enquiry into the CRU.  Leading scientists promptly attacked the submission in emotive terms, without addressing any of the points in the memorandum.  The I.O.P. response to the attacks is strangely meek.  It looks suspiciously like they are backing off, and I wonder why.

Every one of the numbered thirteen points in the “Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)” is valid. There is no need for them to publicly apologise or, cap in hand, to stress that the I.O.P. “has long had a “clear” position on global warming, namely that “there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.  That “no doubt” sounds more like a recital of a creed than a scientific position.

For goodness sake, the IOP made submissions about disclosure of climate data, the implications for the integrity of scientific research, and appropriate terms of reference for the UEA independnt review. Valid submissions. So why is it subjected to attacks unsupported by any specific rebuttals of any of its points of submission?  Here they are:

John Houghton: “I consider it not only inappropriate but highly irresponsible for a body like the IOP to appear to presume a judgment on what is clearly not a simple issue without having the full facts and without presumably knowing the full context,”

Stefan Rahmstorf: “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says.  “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.”

Arnold Wolfendale: ‘the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and ‘the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”.’

These generalised and emotive attacks are totally inaccurate as criticisms of the IOP submissions, but ironically, would be accurate if applied to the IPCC reports.  But for some reason the IOP does not call on the critics to be specific about their problems with the submission.  Instead, it rolls over, apologises and and quietly surrenders.

That is truly sad. The forces supporting AGW are mighty indeed if a body like the Institute of Physics is compelled to recant like Galileo. Are we returning to the dark ages?

References:

I.O.P. Memorandum:  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm

WUWT Report: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/13/iop-fires-back-over-criticism-of-their-submission-to-parliament/

AGW Religion:  http://www.herkinderkin.com/2010/01/anthropogenic-global-warming-as-organised-religion/

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

No surprises here – the US is coming out of a dinny-hazer of a winter, with record snowfalls and frosts even in Florida.  Even though weather is not climate, it is not surprising that many would say, through chattering teeth, “What b-b-b-bloody global warming?”  The news of the unscientific behaviour of some of the principal climate scientists, and of the IPCC’s outrageous exaggerations, is also beginning to get through, even when unreported or played down by politically-compliant media.

However, after all that, less than half (48%) believe the warming to be greatly exaggerated. That means 52% either believe it is not exaggerated or are unsure (the number of “don’t knows” is unclear in that 52%).  50% still believe global warming is anthropogenic, 46% say it is not (4% seemingly don’t know).  So I am not celebrating, for two main reasons:

First, consensus one way or the other has no bearing on the truth (think about Ptolemy’s geocentric universe).

Second, these numbers are nowhere near high enough to make politicians of both right and left stop viewing this issue as a tailor-made justification for increasing taxes.  In the UK and in New Zealand, Tories are just as enthusiastic about carbon taxes as the Labour parties.  Not just CO2, but methane as well.  Carbon taxes give savvy politicians the means to deliver promises of income tax cuts without losing revenue – they can just set the carbon levies at the appropriate level – for environmental reasons, of course.

Of course?  Not.  At the global and national political level, the AGW argument is not about science.

It’s about revenue.

Reference:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-Continue-Drop.aspx

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

The Monteverde golden toad disappeared from Costa Rica Pacific coastal forest in the late 1980s, killed by the chytrid fungus.   Many researchers have linked outbreaks of the deadly fungus to climate change.

In a 2006 paper in Nature, a team of U.S. and Latin American scientists linked rising tropical temperatures to the disappearance of 64 amphibian species in Central and South America.  “Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger,” the lead author of the Nature study and a research scientist at the Monteverde reserve, J. Alan Pounds, said at the time.

A new study by Kevin J Anchukaitis of Columbia University and Michael N Evans of the University of Maryland, says it was El Nino, not climate change or global warming, that caused the fungus to thrive, killing the golden toad. “El Niño pulled the trigger,” said Anchukaitis.  El Nino always dries up the area in which the toads lived, which maked them congregate closely together in the few pools that remain.  So all were exposed to the fungus, which wiped them out completely.

This latest study shows that El Nino is the cause of the extinction of the golden toads.  It shows conclusively that there was no discernible long-term trend visible in the circumstances of that event.  At a time when the IPCC is making dire predictions of mass extinctions caused by global warming, and cites events like the extinction of the golden toad as evidence that it is already happening, that is refreshing.  And that should be that.  The earlier study was yet another of the many climate change studies that have blamed global warming for every possible disaster, and predicted more catastrophes to come if we don’t take firm action to stop it.

But wait.  Anchukaitis and Evans then talk about what their study definitely did not show.

In their Q&A section of the study, the authors say “Both the rate and magnitude of ongoing and future climate change are very likely to put additional stresses on ecosystems. In combination with land use change, introduced pathogens, pollution, and other related ecological changes, anthropogenic climate change will undoubtedly play a role in future extinctions.”  And Evans says “extinctions happen for reasons that are independent of human-caused climate change, but that does not mean human-caused climate change can’t cause extinctions”.

No part of their study supports those statements.  So why do they depart from the legitimate findings of their study when they are supposedly discussing the study?

Because their sources of present or future funding expect warnings about global warming to be communicated with the findings.  Even when the study conclusions in no way support those warnings.  Them’s the rules.  That’s the tune the men with the money expect the pipers to play.

By the way, their results in the new study are only the latest challenge to the theory that climate change is driving the deadly chytrid outbreaks in the Americas. In a 2008 paper in the journal PLoS Biology, University of Maryland biologist Karen Lips mapped the loss of harlequin frogs from Costa Rica to Panama.  She found that their decline followed the step-by-step pattern of an emerging infectious disease, affecting frogs in the mountains but not the lowlands.  Had the outbreak been climate-induced, she said, the decline should have moved up and down the mountains over time.

References:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/25/0908572107

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~kja/monteverde/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/06/global-warming-not-blamed-for-toad-extinction/

“The researchers found that no other possible natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in the activity of the sun, could explain the significant warming of the planet over the past half century as recorded on every continent including Antarctica.”  It goes on:  “It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century.”

How did they arrive at this conclusion?  Well, they matched computer models of possible causes of climate change, both human-led and otherwise, to measured changes in factors such as air and sea temperature, Arctic sea ice cover and global rainfall patterns.  They call the technique “optimal detection”, and claim that it showed clear fingerprints of human-induced global warming.  Richard Lindzen has this to say about their application of “optimal detection”:

“they take models that can not reasonably simulate known patterns (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models accurately depict natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that the models could not replicate the warming episodes… to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man”.

Well put.  As Lindzen also points out, their argument constitutes a rejection of scientific logic that makes arguments for Intelligent Design seem rigorous by comparison.  It boils down to argument from ignorance.  They have created 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 it to a warming world, and shouted “Eureka!” when it sort-of matched expectations (nothing is said about the fifteen-year hiatus in warming from 1995).

To return to Dr Peter Stott, in his review: “”What we see here are observations consistent with a warming world. This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors.”

Bunkum.  Stott’s “wealth of evidence” has no more significance than the Iraqi buildings.  There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  And the endless list of the consequences of Global Warming does not show that we humans are causing it, or that it is catastrophic.  There is no need to go to war.

References:

NZ Herald Article on the Review:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10630087

Aust Age Article on Guardian report:  http://www.theage.com.au/world/climate-change-review-stresses-human-factor-20100305-pouc.html

Richard Lindzen on AGW  http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-richard-lindzens-talk-at-fermilab.html

This is the very first sentence of the abstract of the paper in Science:  “Remobilization to the atmosphere of only a small fraction of the methane held in East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

Not bad as an attention-getter.  They go on to say that the methane leaking into the atmosphere from the East Siberian Arctic shelf is on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire world ocean.  They estimate that the region is producing 8 to ten million tons of methane into the atmosphere every year, because warming ocean water is thawing permafrost, allowing methane trapped underneath to escape.

The Scientific American article notes that “Methane is regarded as 20 to 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”  It also points out that it’s “a relatively small slice of the 440 million metric tons of methane emitted worldwide each year from a combination of human activities and natural sources like rotting plants in wetlands, termites and wildfires.”

The lead author of the study, Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, says that scientists had not thought subsea permafrost would begin to thaw and release the gas. She said more research is needed to figure out whether the methane leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is an ongoing, steady phenomenon, or whether it suggests a new source of the gas is emerging as seafloor permafrost thaws.  It seems that every piece of climate related research carries a recommendation for more research.

Here’s what neither the article nor the study tell us about the atmospheric content of greenhouse gases:

• Water Vapour, 40,000 parts per million.  Water vapour is the most powerful greenhouse gas.
• CO2,  360 parts per million
• Methane, 1.7 parts per million.

Yes, that’s right.  1.7 parts per million!

But then, why would they point that out?  They want to do more research, and for that they need funding.  The billions available from the IPCC and its affiliates can best be assured by showing that your work supports Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

References:

Scientific American Article:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=methane-siberia-climate-change

Science Publication: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5970/1246

Table of Atmospheric Gases:  http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7a.html