Global Warming Roundup of Insanity, & Some Frogs

We must all die I say:

Having determined that nearly every feature of modern human existence is bad for the environment — driving, eating meat, turning on the lights, having children, exhaling — the greens have followed the argument to its logical limit. The problem is human existence.

That, at least, is the message of this summer’s surprise eco-hit, "The World Without Us." Science writer Alan Weisman explores how nature would respond if Homo sapiens abruptly went extinct. Though the book continues to climb the bestseller lists, it isn’t exactly beach reading.

Cities and towns in a few decades would be reclaimed by wilderness. Our dogs will be killed off quickly by natural predators, but without pesticides the new world will be good for mosquitoes. For the most part, Mr. Weisman intends to show the enduring harm of, well, us.

On Hurricanes:

On September 28, 1955, a Category 5 hurricane named Janet slammed into Chetumal, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing over 600 people.

Hurricane Dean, another Category 5, and the third-strongest storm ever measured at landfall, hit in exactly the same place earlier this week (Tuesday, August 21,2007) and killed no one. Maximum winds in both storms were indistinguishable. The hurricane-hunter pilot who flew through the eyewall of the storm Tuesday reported severe turbulence, which is a temporary loss of aircraft control. Probably for the first time in human history, a Category 5 storm hit a populated area and everyone lived.

On "the consensus":

David Miliband, the Environment Minister of the United Kingdom, was greeted by cries of “Rubbish!” when he told a conference on climate change at the Holy See in the spring of 2007 that the science of climate and carbon dioxide was simple and settled. Yet Miliband was merely reciting a mantra that has been widely peddled by politicians such as Al Gore and political news media such as the BBC, which has long since abandoned its constitutional obligation of objectivity on this as on most political subjects, and has adopted a policy of not allowing equal air-time to opponents of the imagined “consensus”.

The claim of “consensus” rests almost entirely on an inaccurate and now-outdated single-page comment in the journal Science entitled The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Oreskes, 2004). In this less than impressive “head-count” essay, Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science with no qualifications in climatology, defined the “consensus” in a very limited sense, quoting as follows from IPCC (2001) –

“Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Oreskes’ definition of “consensus” falls into two parts. First, she states that humankind is altering the composition of the atmosphere. This statement is uncontroversial: for measurement has established that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen over the past 250 years to such an extent that CO2 now constitutes almost 0.01 per cent more of the atmosphere than in the pre-industrial era. However, on the question whether that alteration has any detrimental climatic significance, there is no consensus, and Oreskes does not state that there is.

The second part of Oreskes’ definition of the “consensus” is likewise limited in its scope. Since global temperatures have risen by about 0.4C in the past 50 years, humankind – according to Oreskes’ definition of “consensus” – may have accounted for more than 0.2C.

Applying that rate of increase over the present century, and raising it by half to allow for the impact of fast-polluting developing countries such as China, temperature may rise by 0.6C in the present century, much as it did in the past century, always provided that the unprecedented (and now-declining) solar activity of the past 70 years ceases to decline and instead continues at its recent record level.

There is indeed a consensus that humankind is putting large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; that some warming has resulted; and that some further warming can be expected. However, there is less of a consensus about whether most of the past half-century’s warming is anthropogenic, which is why, rightly, Oreskes is cautious enough to circumscribe her definition of the “consensus” about the anthropogenic contribution to warming over the past half-century with the qualifying adjective “likely”.

There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps – if any – we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.

A good article on the GISS mistake:

Trumpets were blaring at the Washington Post when, on the front page of the January 10th, 2007 edition of the paper, they proclaimed “Climate Experts Worry as 2006 is Hottest year on record in U.S.” The Post was relying on temperature data supplied to them from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

In a subsequent reanalysis of their U.S. temperature dataset, NCDC determined that, in actuality, 2006 was only the second warmest year on record in the U.S., falling 0.08ºF short of the mark set in 1998, and a mere 0.02ºF above the value for 1934. Did the Post fire up its headline maker again? “2006 no longer the hottest year ever!” Not a chance. Buried down in a July 25th, 2007 AP story that the Post carried on-line and titled “Study: Nevada Has Big Temperature Gains,” was the following: “According to the National Climatic Data Center, the 2006 summer and 2006 overall were the second warmest on record for the lower 48 states.”

So much for the January fanfare. Apparently only alarmist events are newsworthy; ignored if later proven wrong.

A similar reanalysis has just taken place within a different compilation of historical U.S. temperatures—this time it is with the dataset of U.S. temperature maintained by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is the dataset that Jim Hansen and colleagues produce, and is a favorite of fellow climate fundamentalists like Al Gore and Naomi Oreskes.

Until earlier this week, GISS ranked 1998 as the warmest year on record (since 1880) for the United States in a tie with 1934. Last year came in as the third warmest on record, a hundredth of a degree behind 1998 and 1934. Further, five of the top ten all-time warmest years were during the last 10 (1998, 2006, 2005, 1999, 2001).

But last week, a problem popped up. Researchers Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts noticed that there seemed to be an unusual discontinuity—a step upwards—in the temperature records from many of the individual stations that went into the GISS U.S. national aggregate.

Upon carefully documenting this apparent discontinuity and inquiring to the record keepers at GISS about it, it was determined that GISS had accidentally incorporated a data error in their routines aimed at updating and compiling individual station histories as well as the U.S. national temperatures.

After adjusting their procedure to account for this problem, NASA GISS has now made available a new and improved temperature history of the United States. In this more accurate record, the year 2006 now drops to the 4th warmest year of all-time, a full 0.12ºC behind the new sole record-holder, 1934. In the new dataset, only three of the past 10 years are included among the top-10 warmest years of all-time in the United States.

The newly corrected record also makes it apparent that no uniform global warming trend exists such as is predicted by the IPCC’s computer models. Rather, the data reinforce a phenomenon known from many other studies, which is that temperature change exhibits a warming-cooling oscillatory character through time, with an apparent periodicity of about 65 years.

And finally some news that the world is looking for some carpenters to build an ark…..for frogs?

A worldwide effort to save frog populations from a mysterious killer fungus calls for 500 frogs of 500 species to be held in biosecure facilities.

Next week, members of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums will meet in Hungary to discuss the effort, called Amphibian Ark, and the initial $US50 million ($A61.92 million) needed to avert the crisis.

"Protective custody has got to happen now, or within a year or two. Otherwise, it’ll be too late. Extinction is forever," said Jeffrey Bonner, chairman of the Amphibian Ark initiative, who also heads the Saint Louis Zoo.

The deadly fungus, which causes them to suffocate, is wiping out frog populations around the globe, and scientists have a plan to isolate hundreds of frogs at zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens until they can be released in the wild safely.

50 million to send some frogs to isolation.  Just beautiful.

Curt

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