Polar bears, butterflies and plants duped into believing the "global warming myth"

[PixelPusher]

...poor, deluded creatures. If only they restricted their media intake to FOX News they wouldn't have to needlessly migrate north.


On the Move to Outrun Climate Change (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/25/AR2006112500877.html)
Self-Preservation Forcing Wild Species, Businesses, Planning Officials to Act

By Blaine Harden and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page A03

SEATTLE -- As the Bush administration debates much of the world about what to do about global warming, butterflies and ski-lift operators, polar bears and hydroelectric planners are on the move.

In their separate ways, wild creatures, business executives and regional planners are responding to climate changes that are rapidly recalibrating their chances for survival, for profit and for effective delivery of public services.

Butterflies are voting with their wings, abandoning southern Europe and flying north to the more amenable climes of Finland. Ski-lift operators in the West are lobbying for leases on federal land higher up in the Rockies, trying to outclimb snowlines that creep steadily upward.

Polar bears along Hudson Bay are losing weight and declining in number as the ice shelf melts and their feeding season shrinks. Power planners in the Pacific Northwest, which gets three-quarters of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, are meeting in brainstorming sessions and making contingency plans for early snow melts, increased wintertime rainfall, lower summertime river flows and electricity shortfalls during hotter, drier summers.

With the issue of a warming planet shifting rapidly from scientific projection to on-the-ground reality, animals and plants are being compelled, along with businesses and bureaucracies, to take action aimed at self-preservation. They are doing so even as the Bush administration eschews regulations, laws or international treaties that would require limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists say are the main cause of global warming.

A newly published synthesis of 866 peer-reviewed studies of the effect of climate change on wild plants and animals has found what its author, Camille Parmesan, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, describes as a "clear, globally coherent conclusion."

Flora and fauna are migrating north or climbing to higher ground if they can, said Parmesan, whose paper appears in the December issue of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. If they cannot move, she said, their numbers are often declining, their health is getting worse, and some are disappearing altogether.

"Wild species don't care who is in the White House," Parmesan said. "It is very obvious they are desperately trying to move to respond to the changing climate. Some are succeeding. But for the ones that are already at the mountaintop or at the poles, there is no place for them to go. They are the ones that are going extinct."

Among the most affected species, Parmesan said, are highland amphibians in the tropics. She said more than two-thirds of 110 species of harlequin frogs, which occupy mountain cloud forests in Central America, have become extinct in the past 35 years.

Meanwhile, many pest species -- including roaches, fleas, ticks and tree-killing beetles -- are surviving warming winters in increasing numbers. "We are seeing throughout the Northern Hemisphere that pests are able to have more generations per year, which allows them to increase their numbers without being killed off by cold winter temperatures," said Parmesan.

Federal scientists say that the first six months of this year were the warmest on record in the United States and that the five warmest years over the past century have occurred since 1998. In her review of studies measuring the impact of climate change on wild plants and animals, Parmesan said this "sudden increase" in temperatures appears to have been a tipping point, triggering substantial responses from a broad range of species.

"The magnitude of impacts is so overwhelming that many biologists are now calling this the single most important problem they need to work on," said Parmesan. "You can save all the habitat you want, but if it is not any good climatically, what is the point?"

Though President Bush has said that human activity has contributed to climate change, he has consistently rejected the idea of imposing mandatory curbs on carbon dioxide emissions.

In an interview shortly after this month's congressional elections, James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the country would be better off setting a voluntary goal -- such as increasing the use of renewable fuels -- than dictating industrial greenhouse-gas emission levels.

"Setting a reasonably ambitious target and then exceeding it is a good way to make reasonable progress," Connaughton said.

The Bush administration has outlined a strategic plan that calls for developing technology that would reduce carbon dioxide pollution. It now spends $3 billion a year on energy research and development. But when adjusted for inflation, this money is a fraction of what the federal government spent in the past. Researchers such as Reuel Shinnar and Francesco Citro, two chemical engineers at the Clean Fuels Institute at the City College of New York, estimate the country would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to make the transition to a carbon-free society.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest, the effects of global warming -- along with the responses of animals, people, businesses and bureaucracies -- are being woven into the fabric of everyday life.

On Cape Sable, on the far southwestern edge of Florida, boaters, sportsmen and scientists have watched as a rising sea level has transformed a freshwater marsh into a portion of the sea.

Where there had been saw grass, the distinctive vegetation of the Everglades, there are now mangrove trees, which thrive in salt water and open water. Redfish inhabit areas that once had been wetland. The endangered bird named after the area, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, has fled northward.

Using historic photos and tidal gauge records, University of Miami professor Harold Wanless, chairman of the geology department, has studied the changes. Between the sinking of the land and the rise of the seas since the 1930s, the relative water level has risen nine inches, he said.

"Freshwater marshes on Cape Sable are now evolving into more or less open marine waters," he said. "We're not talking about global warming as something that will happen in the future. Its happening right now. All the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put Cape Sable together again."

In the high country of western Montana, ski resort manager Tom Maclay is trying to outrun climate change by persuading the U.S. Forest Service to lease 12,000 acres across Carlton Ridge and Lolo Peak. The land, which lies above property he owns, would allow his resort to reach a top elevation of 9,100 feet.

Maclay is well aware how climate change is transforming his business and how nearby resorts have suffered from a lack of snow in recent years. At nearby Glacier National Park, the U.S. Geological Survey quantifies the change, noting that there has been a 73 percent decline since 1850 in the area of the park covered by glaciers. Many smaller glaciers are now gone, it says, and larger ones have shrunk by about two-thirds.

Maclay and his resort's chief executive, Jim Gill, are negotiating with snowmaking manufacturers who are asking for tens of millions of dollars for their services.

"Now with the snowline creeping up the hill, it's tougher and tougher for the areas that are struggling at the margins to keep their base areas full of snow," Gill said. "If you don't have a good snowmaking operation, you're not going to be able to compete."

In the Pacific Northwest, which depends far more on hydroelectricity than any region of the country, research findings on global warming from the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group have prompted utilities, federal agencies and regional planning groups to convene brainstorming sessions in the past year.

They are looking at possible ways of mitigating power shortages as the summer flows of the region's rivers decline -- a result of less snow in the mountains and early melt.

For decades, the Pacific Northwest has had a surplus of power to send south to California during hot summer months. But if Northwest rivers run low as summers get hotter, the region could end up competing with California for power, said John Fazio, a senior power systems analyst for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a regional planning group.

"More and more, global warming is becoming a serious part of the planning process," said Fazio.

Eilperin reported from Missoula, Mont. Staff writer Peter Whoriskey in Miami contributed to this report.

[boutons_]

The Repugs are not stupid, they know what's going on, but they the 50-cent whores of the corps, and will never really give anything but lip service to oil conservation and the environment. Repugs' lips are too firmly attached to the corps' dicks to bother with the real world.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Not to mention the trees.

Studies all over the world have found that tree habitats are migrating northward, and that they are flowering earlier.

The science is all there, now if only someone with a spine would act on it...

[smeagol]

But the Earth was become colder and warmer many times in the past [/stupid Necon]

[scott]

Its a lot cooler here than it was a few months ago. Where is the Al Gore documentary on Global Cooling?

[jochhejaam]

Its a lot cooler here than it was a few months ago. Where is the Al Gore documentary on Global Cooling?
Since you brought up Gore:
Gore's prediction
Gore's 'Truth' splits hurricane scientists
By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 29, 2006


Al Gore's new movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," opens with scenes from Hurricane Katrina slamming into New Orleans. The former vice president says unequivocally that because of global warming, it is all but certain that future hurricanes will be more violent and destructive than those in the past.
Inconvenient or not, the nation's top hurricane scientists are divided on whether it's the truth.
With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy. The first tropical storm of this season showered light rain yesterday on Acapulco, a Mexican Pacific resort, but forecasters said the weather could worsen. Tropical storm Aletta was stalled 135 miles from Acapulco, with maximum winds of 45 mph, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, which said the storm could move toward land today.
The 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons broke many records, and as forecasters predict 15 named storms, nine or 10 making it to hurricane strength and four or five of those major, 2006 is shaping up as another bad one.
The top names and brightest minds in hurricane science are divided, writing papers and publishing rebuttals regarding the nature and causes of the current "active period" that began in 1995 and is expected to run at least another 10 to 15 years. They study the same facts, but draw opposite conclusions.
Scientists disagree
In one corner, subscribing to the theory that the Atlantic Basin is in a busy cycle that occurs naturally every 25 to 40 years, are Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, and William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University, who pioneered much of modern hurricane-prediction theory.
"There has been no change in the number and intensity of Category 4 or Category 5 hurricanes around the world in the last 15 years," Mr. Landsea said, in a telephone interview from Miami.
On the other side are Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected hurricane scientists in the world, a team of meteorologists from Georgia Tech led by Peter Webster, an MIT-educated monsoon specialist, and Greg Holland, who earned his doctorate at Colorado State under Mr. Gray.
"You cannot blame any single storm or even a single season on global warming. ... Gore's statement in the movie is that we can expect more storms like Katrina in a greenhouse-warmed world. I would agree with this," said Judith Curry. She is chairwoman of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and is co-author, with Mr. Webster, Mr. Holland and H.R. Chang, of a paper titled "Changes in Tropical Cyclones," in the Sept. 16 issue of Science, a weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20060529-124851-7254r.htm

Gore was dead wrong:
Hurricane Predictions Off Track As Tranquil Season Wafts Away
By NEIL JOHNSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: Nov 27, 2006

It was not the hurricane season we expected, thank you.

With cataclysmic predictions that hurricanes would swarm from the tropics like termites, no one thought 2006 would be the most tranquil season in a decade.

Barring a last-second surprise from the tropics, the season will end Thursday with nine named storms, and only five of those hurricanes. This year is the first season since 1997 that only one storm nudged its way into the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, Florida was hit by two tropical storms, Alberto and Ernesto. But after the pummeling of the previous two years, the storms barely registered on the public's radar.

So what happened? Lots.

Storms were starved for fuel after ingesting masses of dry Saharan dust and air over the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists say the storm-snuffing dust was more abundant than usual this year.

In the season's peak, storms were curving right like errant field goals. High pressure that normally hunkers near Bermuda shifted far eastward, and five storms rode the clockwise winds away from Florida.

Finally, a rapidly growing El Nino, a warming of water over the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifted winds high in the atmosphere southward. The winds left developing storms disheveled and unable to become organized.

As they say about the stock market: Past results are no indication of future performance.

This year's uneventful season provides no assurance that next year will be as calm:

•The Atlantic remains in a 20- to 30-year cycle of high hurricane activity that started in 1995. Water temperatures are above normal.

•El Nino probably won't be around to decapitate storms.

•There's no promise that the Saharan dust will be as abundant.

BY THE NUMBERS
9: The number of named storms this year

17: The number of named storms predicted May 31 by a team at Colorado State University led by Professor William Gray

45 mph: The wind speed when Tropical Storm Alberto hit the Florida Panhandle near Adams Beach on June 13, the strongest winds over Florida all season

56 percent: The average homeowner rate increase Citizens Property Insurance Corp. requested even after no hurricanes struck Florida

27 percent: The Citizens rate increase approved to start Jan. 1

$100 million: Estimated damage in the United States from Tropical Storm Ernesto

0: The number of storms that formed in October, the first time since 2002 that no storms formed that month. Also, no Category 4 or 5 storms formed this year for the first time since 1997.

http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBHKNBE0VE.html

Thanks for clarifying the GW issue Gore.
Another thing that bothers me is that the GW extremists first stated that GW would cause devastating hurricanes this season, but when it didn't happen they say GW was the reason that it didn't... <sigh>

[Phenomanul]

MANU Ginobili started global warming one night after eating a bowl of beans....

Oh wait..... wrong thread.


Those who blame GWB for global warming are idiots (yeah, I said it).... global warming started decades ago. GWB is responsible for trying to downplay the impact of the phenomena however, and for presiding over an administration which has failed to address or curb it at all.

[Cant_Be_Faded]

Dr. Parmesan is the shit, i took a class with her. She'd be a good lefty lib liberal poster.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Those who blame GWB for global warming are idiots (yeah, I said it).... global warming started decades ago. GWB is responsible for trying to downplay the impact of the phenomena however, and for presiding over an administration which has failed to address or curb it at all.

Absolutely. Who tried to blame Bush?

I do blame him for the misinformation he has supported ("trying to downplay" is a MASSIVE understatement), for the Bush administration's gagging of eminent scientists on the matter, and the lack of US Federal govt action though, just as I blame our PM Howard, who has done an immense backflip in the last two weeks and now acknowledges the problem.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

jo - the extremists on both sides don't know shit. You know that.

As for the quiet hurricane season, it means nothing in terms of EGW theory, because one season in isolation means very little.

I could have told you this would be a quiet hurricane season - in fact, I think I mentioned it earlier this year. Why? We are in the midst of a strong El Nino, and, surprise, surprise, El Ninos inhibit cyclone formation in the GoM/Carribean/tropical Atlantic:

"However, extreme El Nino events like 1997 may inhibit nearly all cyclone formation at lower latitudes in the Gulf of Mexico and Carribean as well as the tropical Atlantic. During strong EL Nino years there are generally fewer T/H cyclones in Gulf of Mexico and northwest Carribean, however, those that do develop in a westerly shear environment generally unfavorable for pure tropical cyclone development are more likely to be hybrid cyclones, move northeast and affect Florida, and produce significant tornadoes."

http://www.srh.weather.gov/mlb/trop23-p7a13.html

If anyone in the media bothered to do their research, they would've mentioned this before the season so that people wouldn't jump to conclusions like "fewer cyclones=no EGW". :rolleyes

[Guru of Nothing]

Its a lot cooler here than it was a few months ago. Where is the Al Gore documentary on Global Cooling?

What's an Ice Age?

[Phenomanul]

Absolutely. Who tried to blame Bush?

I do blame him for the misinformation he has supported ("trying to downplay" is a MASSIVE understatement), for the Bush administration's gagging of eminent scientists on the matter, and the lack of US Federal govt action though, just as I blame our PM Howard, who has done an immense backflip in the last two weeks and now acknowledges the problem.


boutons_ believes every wrong in the world begins and ends with Bush.

[boutons_]

Phenomanul is dumbfuck with nothing to say, a tiny notch above XZ
(XZ's excuse is his senilty and dumbing down from a miltiary career, what's Phenom excuse?).

Fucking linK where I said dubya caused global warming.

[boutons_]

BBC NEWS

Carbon emissions show sharp rise

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The rise in humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide has accelerated sharply, according to a new analysis.

The Global Carbon Project says that emissions were rising by less than 1% annually up to the year 2000, but are now rising at 2.5% per year.

It says the acceleration comes mainly from a rise in charcoal consumption and a lack of new energy efficiency gains.

The global research network released its latest analysis at a scientific meeting in Australia.

Dr Mike Rapauch of the Australian government's research organisation CSIRO, who co-chairs the Global Carbon Project, told delegates that 7.9 billion tonnes (gigatonnes, Gt) of carbon passed into the atmosphere last year. In 2000, the figure was 6.8Gt.

"From 2000 to 2005, the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions was more than 2.5% per year, whereas in the 1990s it was less than 1% per year," he said.

The finding parallels figures released earlier this month by the World Meteorological Organization showing that the rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had accelerated in the last few years.

Intense findings

The Global Carbon Project draws its data from a wide range of sources, including measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and studies on fossil fuel use.

From that data, researchers have extracted two trends which they believe explain the sharp upturn found around the year 2000.

"There has been a change in the trend regarding fossil fuel intensity, which is basically the amount of carbon you need to burn for a given unit of wealth," explained Corinne Le Quere, a Global Carbon Project member who holds posts at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey.

"From about 1970 the intensity decreased - we became more efficient at using energy - but we've been getting slightly worse since the year 2000," she told the BBC News website.

"The other trend is that as oil becomes more expensive, we're seeing a switch from oil burning to charcoal which is more polluting in terms of carbon."

The Project does not have data on precisely where this is happening, but there is anecdotal evidence of increases in charcoal burning in parts of Asia and Africa.

There have been suggestions that as temperatures rise, carbon sinks - natural systems which absorb carbon dioxide - may become less efficient; but Professor Le Quere said there was no evidence that this is happening systematically.

"The land sink has been very much affected by recent droughts, especially in the Northern Hemisphere," she said, "but the ocean sink looks relatively stable and it doesn't seem there is a global trend."

Upper limits

How emissions will change over time is one of the factors considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body responsible for collating and analysing climate data for the global community.

"At these rates, it certainly sounds like we'll end up towards the high end of the emission scenarios considered by the IPCC," commented Myles Allen from Oxford University, one of Britain's leading climate modellers.

The "high end" of IPCC projections implies a rise in global temperature approaching 5.8C between 1990 and the end of this century.

"We need to think about radical alternatives to the belt-tightening approach," said Professor Allen.

"At the moment, the assumption is we will solve the problem by controlling demand; but regulating at the point of use is clearly not working."

At the recent United Nations climate summit in Nairobi, a number of delegations, including those of Britain, Australia and the US, pointed out that they had managed to grow their economies without significant increases in carbon emissions.

But, said Corinne Le Quere, the latest data showed this approach would not be enough to curb emissions in the future.

"Improvements that have been made in the last 30 years appear to be stalling," she said. "We are going to need a real decrease in emissions."

[email protected]

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6189600.stm

Published: 2006/11/27 21:14:08 GMT

© BBC MMVI

[Phenomanul]

Phenomanul is dumbfuck with nothing to say, a tiny notch above XZ
(XZ's excuse is his senilty and dumbing down from a miltiary career, what's Phenom excuse?).

Fucking linK where I said dubya caused global warming.

:lmao :lmao :lmao :lmao
Your insults do nothing to sway reality...
If my intellect is where you claim it to be.... your own would then be relegated to non-existence.

And no, I'm not going to link every single post you ooze. "Repugs this, Dubya that..." frankly I'm tired of your crap. We get it, you're a hater.... Man up and actually do something for your world instead of just living in a futile rant... How does that old phrase go??? Oh yeah.... "If you're not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem." What solution(s) have you mustered up? What is your role in preventing global warming? How do you personally contribute in diminishing our crime rates? In diminishing the extent of poverty in our world? In taking care of the needy? Or what solution did you offer on dealing with terrorists who don't want a truce with America at all and only seek our destruction? You really don't have the answers, but delight in all your sneering.... that to me is the most telling thing of all.

As you can see I got plently to say... and I can back it up. Except I absolutely hate getting caught up defending positions that serve no real benefit to my time or others. So I just avoid these topics.... You, however, have not changed from the first time I read your posts.... you remain that bitter, wretched fool who claims to be an activist but does absolutely nothing to change his environment.... all you do is complain....

[Yonivore]

As for the quiet hurricane season, it means nothing in terms of EGW theory, because one season in isolation means very little.
Well, what does it mean when the United Nations finds it necessary to lie about data and completely erases climate information in order to boldly claim temperatures are the warmest they've been in a thousand years?

Climate chaos? Don't believe it (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml)
The United Nations, which has issued a widely quoted report on global warming, "abolished the medieval warm period — the global warming at the end of the First Millennium A.D.," according to Monckton.

A U.N. report in 1996 "showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today," Monckton writes in Britain's Sunday Telegraph.

"But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years . . .

"Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to [5 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than now.

"Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole — a Chinese naval squadron sailed right around the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

See all the references here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf;jsessionid=GGANNFQ0L2WDXQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWI V0).

[101A]

Well, what does it mean when the United Nations finds it necessary to lie about data and completely erases climate information in order to boldly claim temperatures are the warmest they've been in a thousand years?

Climate chaos? Don't believe it (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml)
The United Nations, which has issued a widely quoted report on global warming, "abolished the medieval warm period — the global warming at the end of the First Millennium A.D.," according to Monckton.

A U.N. report in 1996 "showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today," Monckton writes in Britain's Sunday Telegraph.

"But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years . . .

"Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to [5 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than now.

"Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole — a Chinese naval squadron sailed right around the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

See all the references here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf;jsessionid=GGANNFQ0L2WDXQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWI V0).


Cue RuffNReady

Good find, Yoni.

[xrayzebra]

Yoni, Yoni. You know you aren't suppose to say stuff like that. You ruin the
whole concept of thinking with one mind. You know that the only way we can
stop global warming is to stop the United States from progressing and give all
their money to other third world countries, so their dictator's can build more
monuments to whatever.......

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Wooo-hooo, Mr Monckton has debunked it all! Let's forget the whole stupid idea!

Isn't that interesting, I read the Monckton article yesterday. It simply repeats the same fallacies used by Steven Milloy on junkscience.

C'mon guys, attacks on the hockey stick have been going on for 5 years now. It was a unwisely used heuristic device. Here's a debunking of the sceptical reaction to the hockey stick from climatologists (go to the bottom of the link for references and a debate):


4 Dec 2004
Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick"
Filed under: Paleoclimate— mike @ 5:15 pm
Numerous myths regarding the so-called "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperatures, can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites, internet newsgroups and other non-scientific venues. The most widespread of these myths are debunked below:


MYTH #0: Evidence for modern human influence on climate rests entirely upon the "Hockey Stick" Reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures indicating anomalous late 20th century warmth.


This peculiar suggestion is sometimes found in op-ed pieces and other dubious propaganda, despite its transparant absurdity. Paleoclimate evidence is simply one in a number of independent lines of evidence indicating the strong likelihood that human influences on climate play a dominant role in the observed 20th century warming of the earth's surface. Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence in support of this conclusion is the evidence from so-called "Detection and Attribution Studies". Such studies demonstrate that the pattern of 20th century climate change closely matches that predicted by state-of-the-art models of the climate system in response to 20th century anthropogenic forcing (due to the combined influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations and industrial aerosol increases).

MYTH #1: The "Hockey Stick" Reconstruction is based solely on two publications by climate scientist Michael Mann and colleagues (Mann et al, 1998;1999).


This is patently false. Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context (see Figures 1 and 2 in "Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called 'Hockey Stick'").

Some proxy-based reconstructions suggest greater variability than others. This greater variability may be attributable to different emphases in seasonal and spatial emphasis (see Jones and Mann, 2004; Rutherford et al, 2004; Cook et al, 2004). However, even for those reconstructions which suggest a colder "Little Ice Age" and greater variability in general in past centuries, such as that of Esper et al (2002), late 20th century hemispheric warmth is still found to be anomalous in the context of the reconstruction (see Cook et al, 2004).

MYTH #2: Regional proxy evidence of warm or anomalous (wet or dry) conditions in past centuries contradicts the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric mean warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context.

Such claims reflect a lack of awareness of the distinction between regional and large-scale climate change. Similar such claims were recently made in two articles by astronomer Willie Soon and co-authors (Soon and Baliunas, 2003; Soon et al, 2003). These claims were subsequently rebutted by a group of more than a dozen leading climate scientists in an article in the journal "Eos" of the American Geophysical Union (Mann et al, ‘Eos‘, 2003). The rebuttal raised, among other points, the following two key points:


(1) In drawing conclusions regarding past regional temperature changes from proxy records, it is essential to assess proxy data for actual sensitivity to past temperature variability. In some cases (Soon and Baliunas, 2003, Soon et al, 2003) a global 'warm anomaly' has been defined for any period during which various regions appear to indicate climate anomalies that can be classified as being either 'warm', 'wet', or 'dry' relative to '20th century' conditions. Such a criterion could be used to define any period of climate as 'warm' or 'cold', and thus cannot meaningfully characterize past large-scale surface temperature changes.

(2) It is essential to distinguish (e.g. by compositing or otherwise assimilating different proxy information in a consistent manner—e.g., Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998, 1999; Briffa et al., 2001) between regional temperature changes and changes in global or hemispheric mean temperature. Specific periods of cold and warmth differ from region to region over the globe (see Jones and Mann, 2004), as changes in atmospheric circulation over time exhibit a wave-like character, ensuring that certain regions tend to warm (due, for example, to a southerly flow in the Northern Hemisphere winter mid-latitudes) when other regions cool (due to the corresponding northerly flow that must occur elsewhere). Truly representative estimates of global or hemispheric average temperature must therefore average temperature changes over a sufficiently large number of distinct regions to average out such offsetting regional changes. The specification of a warm period, therefore requires that warm anomalies in different regions should be truly synchronous and not merely required to occur within a very broad interval in time, such as AD 800-1300 (as in Soon et al, 2003; Soon and Baliunas, 2003).

MYTH #3: The "Hockey Stick" studies claim that the 20th century on the whole is the warmest period of the past 1000 years.

This is a mis-characterization of the actual scientific conclusions. Numerous studies suggest that hemispheric mean warmth for the late 20th century (that is, the past few decades) appears to exceed the warmth of any comparable length period over the past thousand years or longer, taking into account the uncertainties in the estimates (see Figure 1 in "Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called 'Hockey Stick'"). On the other hand, in the context of the long-term reconstructions, the early 20th century appears to have been a relatively cold period while the mid 20th century was comparable in warmth, by most estimates, to peak Medieval warmth (i.e., the so-called "Medieval Warm Period"). It is not the average 20th century warmth, but the magnitude of warming during the 20th century, and the level of warmth observed during the past few decades, which appear to be anomalous in a long-term context. Studies such as those of Soon and associates (Soon and Baliunas, 2003; Soon et al, 2003) that consider only ‘20th century’ conditions, or interpret past temperature changes using evidence incapable of resolving trends in recent decades , cannot meaningfully address the question of whether late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term and large-scale context.

MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.


This statement embraces at least two distinct falsehoods. The first falsehood holds that the "Hockey Stick" is the result of one analysis or the analysis of one group of researchers (i.e., that of Mann et al, 1998 and Mann et al, 1999). However, as discussed in the response to Myth #1 above, the basic conclusions of Mann et al (1998,1999) are affirmed in multiple independent studies. Thus, even if there were errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, numerous other studies independently support the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth.

The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the "hockey stick" shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.

False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist). The false claims were first made in an article (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003) published in a non-scientific (social science) journal "Energy and Environment" and later, in a separate "Communications Arising" comment that was rejected by Nature based on negative appraisals by reviewers and editor [as a side note, we find it peculiar that the authors have argued elsewhere that their submission was rejected due to 'lack of space'. Nature makes their policy on such submissions quite clear: "The Brief Communications editor will decide how to proceed on the basis of whether the central conclusion of the earlier paper is brought into question; of the length of time since the original publication; and of whether a comment or exchange of views is likely to seem of interest to nonspecialist readers. Because Nature receives so many comments, those that do not meet these criteria are referred to the specialist literature." Since Nature chose to send the comment out for review in the first place, the "time since the original publication" was clearly not deemed a problematic factor. One is logically left to conclude that the grounds for rejection were the deficiencies in the authors' arguments explicitly noted by the reviewers]. The rejected criticism has nonetheless been posted on the internet by the authors, and promoted in certain other non-peer-reviewed venues (see this nice discussion by science journalist David Appell of a scurrilous parroting of their claims by Richard Muller in an on-line opinion piece).

The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, which hold that the "Hockey-Stick" shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis ("PCA"), are readily seen to be false , as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.

The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, "Journal of Climate" by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) [and by yet another paper by an independent set of authors that is currently "under review" and thus cannot yet be cited--more on this soon!]. Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all.



http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11

And follow-up to the recent "Hockeystick hearings":

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/08/followup-to-the-hockeystick-hearings/

If you guys are actually interested in what climatologists have to say, why don't you try realclimate.org and read their articles. It'll take time, because each article also includes a back-and-forth between readers (including sceptics) and scientists to clarify any unclear points. Here is an explanation of Monckton's sleight of hand:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/cuckoo-science/

Explanation of the "Medieval warm period":

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/werent-temperatures-warmer-during-the-medieval-warm-period-than-they-are-today/

Here's an interesting article and back-and-forth about the question "how much CO2 is too much?" If you scroll down to the discussion of the article, they discuss Monckton on and off:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/how-much-co2-emission-is-too-much/

And here's a lovely piece about Medieval wine grape growing in the UK and what a poor proxy it is for climate:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/

Finally, here's the index of articles concerning just about any climate topic you'd care to educate yourselves on, each with a debate attached. The tricks used by Monckton/Milloy etc. are clearly explained by climatologists and openly debated:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/index/#ClimateSensitivity

I know that none of you sceptics will bother to actually go and read the science because it would distrub your world view and I'm sure you don't have time for that. However, all the tools to actually properly understand the science have been laid out for you over the past 6 months.

I love how you cite these chumps like Monckton and Milloy and put their non-scientific parlour tricks above the published science of the world's climatologists. :rolleyes

Oh, and that link actually discusses science, which may be a little above some of you sceptic's heads since you far prefer to regurgitate the simplified version of the planet favoured by the fossil fuel lobbyists. Unfortunately, the world is a complex system, and the science that reports on it is complex and often difficult to understand.

Try again.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Yoni, Yoni. You know you aren't suppose to say stuff like that. You ruin the
whole concept of thinking with one mind. You know that the only way we can
stop global warming is to stop the United States from progressing and give all
their money to other third world countries, so their dictator's can build more
monuments to whatever.......

Ray, I've already demonstrated how this absurd view of yours is a complete fallacy about 6 times. This is not some grand conspiracy to screw the US. Capping and trading carbon will make money for developed nations. Why do you insist upon repeating it over and over???

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Oh, and as for you 101A, damn right cue me!

Maybe I'm a spoilsport, but I just hate to let your misinformed little circle-jerk come to climax without interjecting some factual evidence from the people who really know what they're talking about, namely climatologists.

Wanker.

[boutons_]

November 29, 2006

Supreme Court Takes Up Global Warming Case

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 12:04 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court stepped gingerly into the national debate over global warming on Wednesday, asking how much harm would occur if the Environmental Protection Agency continues its refusal to regulate greenhouse gases from new vehicles.

In the first case about global warming to reach the high court, a lawyer for 12 states and 13 environmental groups pressed the justices to make the government act, saying the country faces grave environmental harm.

Inaction is like lighting ''a fuse on a bomb,'' said James Milkey, an assistant attorney general for the state of Massachusetts.

Opening up an hour of arguments, Justice Antonin Scalia asked, ''When is the predicted cataclysm?''

( :lol ya gotta love little, hairy troll Scalia, making Catholics proud everywhere. Always Fair and Balanced. His mind is made up, I'm not surprised. Figure the other Repug justices have already decided, too. )

It's not cataclysmic, but rather ''ongoing harm,'' Milkey replied.

Deputy Solicitor General Gregory Garre, representing the Bush administration, cautioned justices that EPA regulation could have a significant economic impact on the United States since 85 percent of the U.S. economy is tied to sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

( Come on, Greg, you know that $1M/year bastards like yourself have enough money to insulate themselve from environmental problems )

Garre also argued that EPA was right not to act given ''the substantial scientific uncertainty surrounding global climate change.''

Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that regulating carbon dioxide emissions from new vehicles addresses just one aspect of an issue of global dimensions.

( ... as I was saying above. Roberts' mind is made up )

The argument by those pushing for EPA action on vehicle emissions might or might not be valid, but it ''assumes everything else is going to remain constant,'' Roberts observed.

Several justices questioned whether the states and environmental groups have met their legal burden to show they will be harmed by continued EPA inaction. Petitioners to courts must meet that threshold before the merits of a case may be addressed.

''We own property, 200 miles of coastline, that we're losing,'' Milkey said, trying to allay justices' concerns.

But Justice Samuel Alito, who with Roberts seemed most skeptical of the states' position, said that even in the best of circumstances, the reduction in greenhouse gases would be relatively small.

Milkey replied that even small reductions would be meaningful, pointing out that very small rises in the sea level would inundate significant portions of low-lying coastal land.

The Bush administration argued in court papers that the EPA lacks the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Even if it had such authority, the EPA still would not use it at this point because of uncertainty surrounding the issue of global warming, the administration said.

Global climate change is ''a controversial phenomenon that is far from fully understood or defined,'' trade associations for car and truck makers and automobile dealers said in a court filing signed by former Solicitors General Theodore Olson and Kenneth Starr. They backed the administration position.

( so let's the corps err on the side of catastrophe, along with all the other corps that fuck up the environment and consumers )

Twelve states, mainly along the nation's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, three cities, a U.S. territory and 13 environmental groups are arguing that the EPA ignored the clear language of the Clean Air Act. Under the 1970 law, carbon dioxide is an air pollutant that threatens public health and the EPA must regulate it, they said.

Michigan, home of the U.S. auto industry, and eight other states are backing the EPA.

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas are burned. It is the principal ''greenhouse'' gas that many scientists believe is flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, leading to a warming of the Earth and widespread ecological changes. One way to reduce those emissions is to have more fuel-efficient cars.

A federal appeals court in Washington, in a fractured decision in 2005, upheld the administration's position. The Supreme Court is expected to rule before July 2007.

A separate case involving the EPA's claim that the Clean Air Act similarly does not give it authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants also is making its way through the federal courts.

Together, U.S. power plants and vehicles account for 15 percent of the world output of greenhouse gases, said David Doniger, counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group involved in the Supreme Court case.

An association of electric utilities, the Utility Air Regulatory Group, opposes greenhouse gas regulation. But two individual power companies, Calpine Corp. and Entergy Corp., are on the other side.

Entergy said it has to be able to make plans 25 years in advance and that the EPA's current rules will not ''stand the test of time.''

The case is Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 05-1120.

[Yonivore]

Oh, and as for you 101A, damn right cue me!

Maybe I'm a spoilsport, but I just hate to let your misinformed little circle-jerk come to climax without interjecting some factual evidence from the people who really know what they're talking about, namely climatologists.

Wanker.
Decades ago Bill Cosby recorded a short comedy routine about Seattle. In the opening minute he noted that in Seattle, “It rains AT LEAST 365 days a year. When the sun comes out the natives look up nervously, asking, ‘what did we DO?’”

Waitin in line at theater a few weeks ago I listened to a young man (Maybe it was RuffnReady) trying to impress his date by telling her that the scientific consensus on Global Warming was, “unanimous.” Good place for a fantastical claim.

This is the Global Warming crowd. Ignorant of the weather – which no one really understands, including the head of the Climatology Department at MIT, author of a recent Op-Ed in which he debunked most of the Global Warming crowd’s theories while admitting that no one really knows but the evidence is contrary to the current popular mythology.

And the GW crowd, like the denizens of Cosby’s Seattle, walk around, looking at perfectly normal weather – hurricanes, storms, hot summers and cold winters – look up at the sky and say, “what did we DO?”

The knee-jerk response of these brainwashed masses? Sign a treaty to drop the overall global temperature 0.4 degrees C over the next century and pretend it’ll fix what they think is a problem.

Never mind that these same liberals are the ones yammering about wages for the poor and that complying with this treaty will cost the economy of the world trillions of dollars, making the poor even poorer.

Never mind that a technology that can limit whatever warming exists, technology from which their favorite nation, France, gets about 78% of its power, that is, nuclear power plants, is prevented from being exploited by this same crowd.

And, like the pre-scientific society of Cosby’s Seattle looking for an explanation, and blaming everything they don’t like on the current President, the fact of the US not signing the Kyoto Treaty somehow is the fault of President Bush.

The intelligent people in the debate remember that the language of the Kyoto treaty was submitted to the US Senate for a vote when Gore was the President of the Senate and Clinton the President of the country, and an advisory vote taken. Before the American delegation to Kyoto left the US.

The result of that August, 1997 vote? 95-0 against the treaty. All Democrats joined all Republicans in rejecting the treaty.

How this has morphed into Bush’s fault, how we have gotten to the point at which the popular wisdom is that Democrats would have passed it and saved the world, is a remarkable comment on the media and the education system of the US, both in thrall to mythology, neither taking advantage of current science or knowledge.

For to believe that Bush is the reason we don’t have Kyoto is to be ignorant of recent history, too stupid to Google the issue, and too in thrall to the Luddite mythology of the Democrats to realize what is going on in the real world.

These willfully uninformed liberals ought to go read a book, educate themselves on the issues of the day, or go home and stop talking, writing and – most of all - voting. For they are not moving the society forward.

They are looking up at the sky and asking, in their total ignorance, “What did we DO?”

[xrayzebra]

It doesn't matter anymore according to one scientist. We are doomed. So just
sit back and relax and enjoy your last days.

Controversial scientist predicts planetary wipeout
28.11.06




Controversial scientist James Lovelock

Billions of people could be wiped out over the next century because of climate change, a leading expert said.

Professor James Lovelock, who pioneered the idea of the Earth as a living organism, said as the planet heats up humans will find it increasingly hard to survive.


He warned that as conditions worsen, the global population which is currently around 6.5 billion, may sink as low as 500 million.

Prof Lovelock also claims that any attempts to tackle climate change will not be able to solve the problem, merely buy us time.

Given the dire situation we face, he urged people to drop the phrase "global warming," which has cosy connotations, and instead start to think of it as "global heating."

Prof Lovelock, is an independent scientist who first proposed the Gaia Theory, which argues that the Earth, like a body, is a complex and intricately balanced system which all works together to allow life to continue as we know it.

However he fears that as carbon dioxide emissions from man and the planet itself soar, the Earth will heat up causing water shortages, destroying life in much of the planet's oceans and making it impossible for plants to grow.

Prof Lovelock, who last night gave the 5th John Collier Lecture to the Institution of Chemical Engineers in London, said: "There is very good evidence of what happened 55 million years ago when as much carbon dioxide was put into the atmosphere by geology as is being done by us now.

"Temperatures zoomed up by 8 degrees and stayed there for 200,000 years then came back to normal."

He fears something similar may happen again, and warned: "if it does it is going to make this an exceedingly difficult century."

However Prof Lovelock said mankind has managed to survive previous climatic disasters of the past.

"There have been at least seven of these major climate changes before and we have to adapt," he said.

"It is going to be tough and there will be some evolution of humans during it.

"The survivors will be those humans that can make their way to refuges or Arctic places and survive there.

"I think an awful lot of people will die but I don't see the human species dying out.

"I would think a hot earth could not support much over 500 million."

He warned there are no simple solutions to global heating and there is nothing we can do now to "save the earth."

"People will try to do things but the way to really look at them is they are a bit like when your kidneys fail you can on dialysis - and who would refuse dialysis if death is the alternative?" he said.

"But we have to remember that all they are doing is buying us time. The problems will go on.

"Trying to take the job on of regulating the earth is about as crazy as you can get.

"It is something quiet beyond humans at this stage in their evolution."

Despite this people should do what they can to reduce their impact on the planet.

"There is no point driving around in a Chelsea tractor when you can drive a small car but it does not escape the fact that changes are underway," he warned.

Prof Lovelock's dire forecast for the future of the human race is far more pessimistic than the Government's own assessment of global warming.

Tony Blair told European leaders at a summit in Finland last month that it was not too late to reverse the effects global warming.

In an open letter to delegates he said there was a window of "10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points."

This echoes the findings of Sir Nicholas Stern in his influential report on climate change.

In it he says there is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change if countries co-operate internationally.

================================================== ==========

Well at least RNR has someone else that considers earth a living being. But
not capable of taking care of itself. Like most liberals they think government
is only capable of taking care of everything, including living earth.