Climate Change Study Of Scientific Consensus

[Guest Sundancefisher]

From The Times March 2, 2010

 

Prof Phil Jones, climate scientist, admits sending ‘awful’ e-mails

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

 

 

The integrity of climate change research is in doubt after the disclosure of e-mails that attempt to suppress data, a leading scientific institute has said.

 

The Institute of Physics said that e-mails sent by Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had broken “honourable scientific traditions” about disclosing raw data and methods and allowing them to be checked by critics.

 

Professor Jones admitted to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee yesterday that he had “written some very awful e-mails”, including one in which he rejected a request for information on the ground that the person receiving it might criticise his work.

 

In a written submission to the committee, the institute said that, assuming the e-mails were genuine, “worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context”.

 

The e-mails contained “prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, it added.

 

The institute said that it was concerned by suggestions in the e-mails that Professor Jones and other scientists had worked together to prevent alternative views on global warming from being published. It said: “The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers.”

 

The institute said that doubts about the veracity of climate science could be overcome if scientists were required to make all their data “electronically accessible for all at the time of publication [of their reports]”.

 

Professor Jones stood down from his post during an independent inquiry into allegations that he manipulated data and attempted to evade legitimate requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

 

The committee did not ask him about several of the most damaging e-mails he had sent, including one in which he asked a colleague to delete information that had been requested. The committee had been asked not to press him too closely because he was close to a nervous breakdown.

 

Professor Jones denied that he had tried to prevent alternative views being published by influencing the process of peer review under which scientific papers are scrutinised.

 

He said: “I don’t think there is anything in those e-mails that supports any view that I have been trying to pervert the peer review process . . .” He added that it “hasn’t been standard practice” in climate science for all data to be disclosed.

 

Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Conservative Chancellor and a leading climate sceptic, said that those who wanted to check the university’s research should not have been forced to resort to making requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

 

He said: “Proper scientists, scientists of integrity, wish to reveal all of their data and all of their methods. They don’t need freedom of information requests to force it out of them.”

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7046036.ece

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

From The Times March 2, 2010

 

Climate scientists know how to stay calm when in eye of the storm

Anne Treneman

 

Talk about freak weather conditions. The main characters in “Climategate”, the global harming global warming row, really are the strangest bunch.

 

First up before MPs yesterday was the mini-hurricane that is Lord Lawson of Blaby, father of Nigella and, incidentally, former Chancellor.

 

He is now on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation which means, of course, that he doesn’t believe in global warming. He calls those who do “climate alarmists”.

 

But Hurricane Nigel was rather alarming too. He said some climate data revolved around one pine tree that has been around since 1421: “It’s more than it can bear.” The key to the truth, about the lonesome pine tree and all else, is “full and transparent” disclosure of data and methodology from scientists at University of East Anglia.

 

But then MPs demanded to know who was funding his foundation. Lord Lawson’s rosebud lips pursed. “In football this is called playing the man and not the ball and you get a yellow card!”

 

He glared at MPs, irritation swirling, and refused to say. Next was Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of it all, who seemed eerily calm. He was with the excitable (in weather terms, we are talking hailstones) vice-chancellor of UEA, Professor Edward Acton.

 

Forget men in ivory towers, these two have their heads in the stratosphere. When asked why data hadn’t been made public, Professor Acton said he needed permission from the country whose weather it was: “Canada and Poland are among those who have said no. Also Sweden. Russia is very hesitant!”

 

Professor Jones’s face was immobile, eyes steady behind wire specs. He seemed, like a dead calm sea, almost glassy. And, like ships in the Bermuda Triangle, questions that got near him just seemed to disappear.

 

He kept insisting that most of the raw data was public. But, said MPs, what about his method, the codes he’d used. Was that public?

 

“That is not the case,” he said.

 

Graham Stringer, a Labour MP, asked why. “Because it hasn’t been standard practice to do that.”

 

Well, protested Mr Stringer, how could science be tested?

 

Professor Jones didn’t have much of an answer for that, or much else. Only once did he admit to anything and that was about an e-mail. “Uh. Yes. I have obviously written some very awful e-mails,” he murmured.

 

Oh dear. It seems the planet is in more trouble than I thought.

 

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/poli...icle7046005.ece

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

 

Near as I can tell this study did not take into account the latest information. Specifically concerns over African rainfall (there is no anticipated starvation predicted now) also a latest study showed atmospheric moisture rising with increasing temperatures followed by falling which has caused the last 15 years of no warming.

 

I would expect advocacy groups to be trying to flood the press with more doom and gloom stories and also recycling old stories that the public believes...even today to probably be true.

 

Still...I wish the media would put in links. Solar sun spot cycles are not discussed here but the article does say the sun has been cooling for 50 years. First I heard of that but where is the study? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation we are in a lull for sun spots and our temperature is dropping. Whe sun spot cycle was active we were warming. That is one theory put forth regarding Earth's temperature cycles. Not sure which theory they are trying to prove with this one?

 

I also believe there is an increasing concern with believing what the MET office is saying as they are extremely closely tied to the CRU problems and climategate in general. Many theories come from the base work done by Jones et. al. which is in doubt.

 

Over all...like most stories in the media this one has a lot of conjecture and assumptions unfortunately.

 

 

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Climate scientists fightback: Mankind IS to blame for global warming, say researchers

By David Derbyshire Environment Editor

Last updated at 10:51 AM on 05th March 2010

 

 

Climate scientists hit back at sceptics yesterday with a new study which concluded the evidence for man-made global warming was "stronger than ever".

After analysing more than 100 scientific papers published in the last few years, the team of British researchers say there is an "increasingly remote possibility" that the world is warming up because of natural variations in climate..

Instead, man-made global warming - triggered by the burning of fossil fuels - is making its mark on every continent and ocean, they say.

The paper follows growing public scepticism about the global warming , fuelled in part by the Climategate email scandal and the coldest British winter for 30 years.

 

Dr Peter Stott, from the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, who co-led the study, said the evidence for manmade climate change was stronger than ever.

"What we've shown is that the fingerprint of human influence has been detected in many different aspects of climate change," he said.

"We've seen it in temperature, and increases in atmospheric humidity, we've seen it in salinity changes. We've seen it in reductions in Arctic sea ice and changing rainfall patterns.

"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."

The study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, pulled together findings from 110 scientific papers on climate selected by Dr Stott and colleagues.

More...Head of 'Climategate' research unit admits sending 'pretty awful emails' to hide data

Why it WAS an asteroid smashing into Earth that wiped out the dinosaurs

 

Most were published since the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's last major review in 2007.

The studies used computer models to see whether changes in air temperature, sea ice, sea temperature, humidity, rainfall and ocean saltiness recorded in the last 50 years could be explained by nature.

Since 1980, the average global temperature has increased by around 0.5C, they found. The same warming pattern was also found deep in the world's oceans.Natural forces such as volcanic eruptions and cyclical changes in the brightness of the sun could not explain what was happening to the world's climate, Dr Stott said.

 

The sun's output had actually fallen over the last 50 years, he said.

Even if the sun had got warmer over the last few decades - as some sceptics claim - both the upper and lower layers of the atmosphere should have got hotter.

However, in the last 50 years the lower atmosphere has warmed while the upper atmosphere has actually cooled, Dr Stott said.

Drier parts of there world are getting drier, while wetter regions are getting more rain - a finding consistent with manmade climate change, the report found.

And the amount of mid summer sea ice in the Arctic is also declining over time - despite the natural yearly fluctuations, the study found.

The study comes amid growing public scepticism about climate change.

Scientists have found themselves under attack after hundreds of leaked emails appeared to show climate scientists at the University of East Anglia manipulating figures and blocking Freedom of Information requests from sceptics.

Sceptics have also highlighted flaws in the 2007 IPCC report which wrongly claimed Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 30 years.

Dr Stott said he began the study a year ago - long before Climategate.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/art...scientists.html

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

The global warming alarmists

 

Glacial melting, rainforest and crop failures, extreme weather, rising seas: 'Isolated' events that together comprise the 'warmist' message

 

By Christopher Booker, Daily TelegraphMarch 6, 2010 3:09 AM

 

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm -- after three months when the IPCC and Dr. Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

 

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that there were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. Okay, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent, that sea levels were rising dangerously and that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled," the "consensus" is intact.

 

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heat waves all becoming more frequent.

 

What's not happening

 

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heat waves.

 

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless -- because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

 

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all -- the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account, see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my book, The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

 

Speedy unravelling

 

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

 

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling -- assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by the scandal in which e-mails and computer codes leaked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

 

Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and U.S. scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, an analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

 

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr. Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC.

 

In his interview, Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmist faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the medieval warm period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that, before any rise in CO2 levels, temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

 

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated.

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

 

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/glo...9497/story.html

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Gorrie: For 'climategate' scientist, nuance is the enemy

Comment on this story »

Published On Sat Mar 06 2010

 

 

For two decades, Phil Jones was a household name only at home and among perhaps a couple of thousand scientists studying climate change.

 

He crunched numbers at Britain's University of East Anglia – charting Earth's temperature – and became director of the university's world renowned Climatic Research Unit.

 

Things were fine in his world, except that he was accumulating evidence of what he considered a looming global catastrophe and faced increasing harassment from those who insist climate change isn't a problem or, if it is, humans aren't the cause.

 

This quiet, relatively obscure life ended last fall, when someone hacked 1,073 emails from the Unit's computers, launching the brainlessly named "climategate."

 

As I've written before, the deniers claimed the messages between Jones and colleagues prove he'd manipulated data and suppressed opposing views.

 

The Associated Press had five reporters read every message. Their conclusion: The emails showed the "scientists are guilty of anger toward global warming skeptics, but they do not support claims that climate change is a vast conspiracy."

 

The deniers immediately added the news service to their list of conspirators. More important, they succeeded in making "climategate" the cover for distortions and outright lies that have become widely accepted wisdom.

 

In a recent BBC interview, Jones – who stepped down as director pending an investigation and says he has received death threats and contemplated suicide – attempted to rebut the deniers. The result illustrates the sorry state of what now passes for discussion of climate change.

 

Jones spoke the careful language of career scientists out in public. Perhaps naïvely, he made himself his own worst enemy.

 

Circumspection in his main message opened the door for deniers: "I'm 100 per cent confident that the climate has warmed (and) there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity." That's evidence, not proof.

 

Jones was asked about average global temperatures since 1860: In general – including the period 1975 to 2009 – they've increased about 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade, he explained. Those measurements cover enough years, and the increase is large enough, to meet technical criteria for statistical significance. Over the past 15 years, the measured increase was 0.12 Celsius per decade. The shorter time and smaller change don't quite pass the test.

 

Deniers spun this detailed, cautious clarification into an admission of error. Typically, the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente wrote: "... he dropped a bombshell. He acknowledged there's been no statistically significant warming since 1995." No matter that Earth's temperature is rising – this past January was the warmest on record.

 

The pattern repeated when Jones answered the question: "When scientists say `the debate on climate change is over,' what exactly do they mean?"

 

"I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this," he replied in part. "This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties."

 

To the likes of Lorne Gunter in the National Post this was a "dramatically" changed tone from the "alarmist" Jones; a "new willingness to concede doubt."

 

But Jones' comment wasn't news: Doubt is inherent in true science. Put beside his main message, this is the scientist sensibly saying we don't yet know everything, but suggesting the evidence makes action prudent.

 

Climate scientists stand accused of being advocates with their own agenda. The real problem is, though, that blaring opponents overwhelm those who stick to scientific principles and qualifiers.

 

Jones won't enter the fray on others' terms. He sputtered, "I don't feel this question merits an answer," when asked why, if he had confidence in his science, he didn't "come out fighting."

 

He'd be damned if he did, as he is when he doesn't.

 

peter.gorrie@simpatico.ca

 

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/articl...ce-is-the-enemy

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

This is now common place for the media to post stories about problems in past scientific findings as they get reviewed and tested by others. The best way it seems for the scientists in question to get out of this ops is to say ..."Yes, we agree that we were wrong about it starting already...but...but...but we are SURE it will happen in the future. We are at a tipping point where any second a flood of terror will begin. We can agree the terror has not started...but be careful...it will start soon if we do not stop our current behavior. Problem with this tact is that it has no scientific foundation, no way to test it, no way to prove it, such that it just becomes part of the religion of YOU MUST BELIEVE OR DIE... In the past if you theory was proven wrong it was back to the drawing board. Not just saying "we are wrong but we eventually will be right so you just have to wait?

 

This will work in the meanwhile but in the long run it will not.

 

Funny thing is it appears that the majority of people that believed before still believe now. They believe any proof the scientists were wrong about anything is a plot by denier such that even after reading an article it still falls on deaf ears.

 

I truly believe that the so called denier group is a wasted effort. Until the UN and IPCC come out and specifically say.."hold the horses...we were wrong" and politicians hear the message will anything change. There is nothing we as individuals or as a group can do to change the status quo. It still behooves us to pay attention however and know what we are paying for.

 

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Rise in UK carbon emissions disputed by report

 

Soil deposits of CO2 'not fuelling global warming yet – but will in future'

 

Juliette Jowit

The Observer

Sunday 7 March 2010

 

A major study for the UK government has cast doubt over claims that rising temperatures are causing soil to pump greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fuelling global warming.

 

In 2005 it was reported in the science journal Nature that over the past 25 years 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide had been released by the soil of England and Wales. The figure cancelled out all emissions cuts in the UK since 1990.

 

However, a national survey of the soils of Great Britain, funded by the department for environment food and rural affairs, claims to have found no net loss of carbon over approximately the same period.

 

Scientists have now proposed that a special study group, with an independent statistical expert, should examine why the reports differ and which result is more likely to be correct.

 

The latest questions follow weeks of claims that predictions about the impacts of climate change have been overstated or miscalculated, including the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and separate allegations of bias based on leaked emails from scientists at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia.

 

The author of the latest report, Professor Bridget Emmett of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), warned that finding there had been no loss of carbon so far should not be taken to mean the absence of a threat. In the long term, scientists predict a "tipping point" when the faster activity of microbes in warmer soils starts to generate more CO2 than can be absorbed by plants.

 

"That's when you start losing carbon as a whole," said Emmett. "Most of the models say that will be later this century."

 

The 2005 report in Nature was based on the National Soil Inventory, carried out initially between 1978 and 1983, and again from 1994 to 2003, by the National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. That study said that from 1978 to 2003 there had been an estimated loss of 4m tonnes of carbon a year from the soils of England and Wales, and the researchers estimated that, because of the higher carbon content of Scotland's peaty soils, the annual loss from the UK as a whole was 13m tonnes a year. The fact that the losses occurred across all types of land use suggested a link to climate change, said the team.

 

At that time, one of the research team, Professor Guy Kirk of Cranfield University, told a conference: "It had been reckoned that the CO2 fertilisation effect was offsetting about 25% of the direct human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. It was reckoned that the soil temperature emission effect would catch up in maybe 10 to 50 years' time. We are showing that it seems to be happening rather faster than that."

 

The latest report by the CEH, just released as part of the ongoing analysis of the 2007 Countryside Survey of Great Britain, compared studies between 1978 and 2007. It found carbon concentration in the top 15cm of soil increased over the first two decades, and decreased between 1998 and 2007. The only exception was arable land, where there was a net loss of carbon, probably because of disruption by ploughing.

 

"Overall there was no change in carbon concentration ... and [we] cannot confirm the loss reported by the National Soil Inventory," states the report.

 

Kirk told the Guardian that the Cranfield team were still "confident in our results [that] there was a net loss of carbon". But he said subsequent studies had suggested that "at best" 10% of the loss of carbon was due to climate change, and the rest was due to changes in land use and management, such as conversion of grassland to crops.

 

Reasons being examined for the difference in results include where and how samples were chosen and analysed and how the data was compiled.

 

"The amount of carbon in topsoils across England and Wales is about 2bn tonnes, so detecting a change of even 4m tonnes per year is very challenging," said Emmett. "Small differences in methods between the two surveys can therefore have a large effect."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010...al-warming-soil

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

This guy is only speaking of 40 years of history...his lifetime. Snowfall in a localized place. He is in no position to comment scientifically on global warming. He is even less qualified as his mind is clearly made up and he is supposedly a journalist. Still I fully guarantee his right to his opinion and also his write to print what he thinks will sell.

 

Clearly however he totally missed the influence on ocean currents on our weather here in Alberta. Also he plays straight into the fanatical band wagon of blaming all warming on the oil industry.

 

Peachy.

 

Sun

 

 

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Global warming is real

 

 

By Richard Wagamese, For The Calgary Herald

March 7, 2010 5:03 AM

 

 

There is no snow in the mountains. It's worrisome because it means a dry spring and a relentlessly parched summer. It means that the threat of wildfire will be high. Further, it means that none of us will be able to get comfortable and enjoy the feeling of the land here and being under its spell. That spell has been broken by the change in weather patterns evidenced by this profound lack of snow.

 

There are those around here who say that global warming is a myth. Or else they claim that our carbon footprint is insufficient to warrant the dire claims that scientists and environmentalists put forward. For the most part, these are people employed by resource companies who still gain from depleting resources. Or else they're old-school believers insistent on the whole deal being a natural cycle too long in its sweep for any of us to recall. They're firm in their beliefs. The funny thing is though, that they're as nervous as the rest of us.

 

"Ice is thin," they say when the day's fishing is cancelled. Or they'll say, "We haven't run the Arctic Cat since Christmas." When you look at their faces, the pinched look around their eyes reveals their worry.

 

"Well pump's running slow. Water table's way down." I've heard that a dozen times at the dump when we gather to gossip after making our run. This from men who have spent 30 years living rurally where relationship with the land becomes as trusted as the motors in the old trucks they drive. Expectation. Reward. Predictability. The logarithm of living with nature.

 

Where the river snakes through the long valley far below us, there's a full 60 metres of exposed river bottom. At the old ferry crossing, the one that's run for more than 100 years, they're forced to haul cars across a wide flat of mud before they hit current and the operator only shakes his head sadly when asked if he's ever seen that before. He's been at it 40 years. The strangeness of this new phenomenon of warming overwhelms everyone.

 

My people say that there will come a time when the Earth will call out to us. They say that this is less a prophecy than a teaching because our function here is to act as stewards and we should know the voice of the planet if we're doing what's expected of us. That teaching is being revealed because that time is now. The voice of our planet is choked and dry and cracked because we've forgotten about stewardship and allowed greed and fear of lack to drive us.

 

My people also say that Creator is loving energy. There are a lot of religions and belief systems around the globe that embrace the same philosophy and the funny thing in that is that with loving energy there can be no lack. Love provides. It's that simple. As a species we have learned fear because we've come to believe in judgment. Strangely enough, loving energy does not judge either.

 

It means we're left with us. We're left with the grace of self-examination and as a human family we absolutely need to look at our relationship with our Mother. There is no snow in the mountains. We haven't seen a gravel truck in weeks and down in the valley, people eye the widening gravel bed where the river's supposed to flow with the hard squint that comes with seeing the familiar alter right before your eyes.

 

Global warming is no myth. It's no natural cycle. It's not a conspiracy theory nor is it a deniable glitch that will fix itself. It is a genuine threat to the continuation of our planet and ourselves as a species, as animals as dependent on her life force as newborns at her belly. That's just the stark truth of it.

 

So we need to look at our relationship with our Mother. We live on a planet and it's amazing how many people wander about incognizant of that. The planet is our Mother and she calls to us now with a voice grown feeble by our lack of attention to her needs. She only wants what's best for us like any mother would. In the end, what's best for us is to pay attention to her needs.

 

There's no snow in these mountains. There's nothing we can do about that now except pray to be spared from wildfire. But we can change the way we relate to the threat and a prayerful, mindful way is a good beginning. It gives our actions strength and we need to act now in any way we can. As a species we can't afford to be dragged across the mud before we find the current.

© Copyright © The Calgary Herald

 

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Global+warmin...0735/story.html

 

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Thank God we are warming than it was 716.5 million years ago. They certainly appreciated the pending "global warming".

 

 

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Snowball Earth: New Evidence Hints at Global Glaciation 716.5 Million Years Ago

 

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2010) — Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time.

 

Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work in the journal Science. The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

 

"This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a 'snowball Earth' event," says lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. "Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years."

 

The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

 

Even in a snowball Earth, Macdonald says, there would be temperature gradients on Earth and it is likely that ice would be dynamic: flowing, thinning, and forming local patches of open water, providing refuge for life.

 

"The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation," Macdonald says. "The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Moreover, did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?"

 

"From an evolutionary perspective," he adds, "it's not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress."

 

The rocks Macdonald and his colleagues analyzed in Canada's Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice rafted debris, and deformation of soft sediments. The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago they were located at sea level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude.

 

"Because of the high albedo of ice, climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over," Macdonald says. "So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation."

 

Scientists don't know exactly what caused this glaciation or what ended it, but Macdonald says its age of 716.5 million years closely matches the age of a large igneous province stretching more than 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) from Alaska to Ellesmere Island in far northeastern Canada. This coincidence could mean the glaciation was either precipitated or terminated by volcanic activity.

 

Macdonald's co-authors on the Science paper are Phoebe A. Cohen, David T. Johnston, and Daniel P. Schrag at Harvard; Mark D. Schmitz and James L. Crowley of Boise State University; Charles F. Roots of the Geological Survey of Canada; David S. Jones of Washington University in St. Louis; Adam C. Maloof of Princeton University; and Justin V. Strauss.

 

This work was supported by the Polar Continental Shelf Project and the National Science Foundation's Geobiology and Environmental Geochemistry Program.

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00304142228.htm

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Without some background information this article would seem reasonable.

 

However Jones has in fact stated to the British inquiry that:

 

1) There has been no statistical warming in the last 15 years.

 

2) There is no statistical difference between this warming cycle and past warming cycles...that in fact we have seen very similar trends in the past.

 

It does not appear this journalist is paying attention. However...interestingly enough this article or similar written interpretations have been circulated heavily in North America.

 

Also all studies proving global warming to date are based upon speculation of future rises in temperatures...which in the last 15 years...never materialized.

 

Now this article tries to blame oil and gas and also see to say that everyone that does not believe is a tobacco lobbyist. Hopefully the smart reporters will realize when we stop decenting opinion we stop good science...when all independent thinking stops...Journalists are the first to die in the ensuing dictatorship or fascist state.

 

 

He also misses all the other ops...

 

Like

soilgate

Datagate

Sealevelgate

climategate

glaciergate

africagate

Australianfiregate

Froggygate

Watervapourgate

 

What this tells me is that there is no consensus but rather money is not being allocated fairly for research. Those ideologically in favor of global warming gets first crack...then some studies trickle out without being somehow controlled. This makes sense since this last study on Africagate was proven false then instantly the IPCC is saying ...but wait...I found something else for the media. When the Glaciergate blew up they did not announce the following study showing increased soot may be in blame to a large degree. I see this as a forever changing dynamic and fluid scientific debate and one that is certainly not settled by any shape of the imagination. When the hockey stick graph was proven scientifically incorrect and invalid the IPCC never issued the retraction that they are being forced to today. While still strongly automous...they are feeling the pinch. Still people I know that "believe" think even a link to an IPCC mistake is a trick...they just don't believe it. I don't think anything will change their mind...it is a fast moving snowball going downhill fast.

 

So what is left? Scare people that the tobacco industry is out to get us through carbon dioxide? Scare people into believing an earthquake will kill us due to global warming? Scare people into believing a hurricane will still kill us or a drought or a rain storm or a snow storm? Blame global warming on the lack of snow this year at the Olympics but ignore that tons of snow they had the year before? Blame global warming on the need to raise taxes in BC but ignore the record cold in Great Britian?

 

In the article below they offset the Amazongate scandal by saying "could react drastically to even slight reductions in precipitation " no matter how you slice it they can't prove or say with any confidence that the rainforest would receive less rain. They just can't predict the weather period. If we could be certain with any confidence that in 30 years the Amazon will have less rain storms...why can't they predict our precipitation accurately 3 days out? Because these sorts of studies are "what if" studies. Assumption based studies that says..."if next week is walking along and reached a street corner...what happens if the person goes left one block or right one block"? There is no certainty if that person will do that or will do that at that block or which direction they will go. Variables in this scenario are far, far fewer than those that go into global warming simulations/models. That is why they are never correct and always being revised and re-run.

 

Then linking not sure about global warming to being on the tobacco side? Ludicrious. A scientist can introduce the carinogen into an animal...cancer forms. This study is repeated by many scientists...in many countries...results...cancer forms. Therefore we believe cancer forms. In the global warming model...a scientist says we introduce CO2...warming occurs. Others say it is true...warming occurs...the main scientist (Jones) says we have been pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere every year. in the last 15 years...there has been no statistal warming. He then says also there have been similar warming trends in the past...with no significant differences to past warming cycles than to today. More science says should warming happen...this or that will occur...bad stuff...scary stuff. What about the basic science...carcinogens cause cancer...proven. CO2 causes global warming...not so proven according to the own words of Jones. what is going on here folks?

 

I like how the guy says the climategate emails were "stolen"...like this is different than any other whistle blower example. Clearly improprieties occurred. What the ramifications are is yet to be determined.

 

We are definitely on a tipping point and not with global warming...but with allowing fanatics from either side to control our lives. IMHO

**********************************************

 

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

 

Global warming theories are as valid as ever

By: The Los Angeles Times

 

8/03/2010 1:00 AM

 

In its 2007 report on the effects of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that glaciers could vanish from the Himalayas by 2035. As has since been widely reported, with ill-disguised glee by many blogs and right-wing news outlets, this was a blunder. The prediction didn't come from a peer-reviewed scientific study but from a prominent Indian glacier expert who was quoted in a British popular science magazine -- and who now claims he never gave such a date.

This wasn't the only error in the report, which has been a key justification of international efforts to fight climate change. It also claimed that 55 per cent of the Netherlands is below sea level; actually, it's only 26 per cent (the number came from the Dutch government, which has acknowledged its error). Other mistakes have been alleged, and it would be surprising if more weren't found, given that the report runs to 3,000 pages and attempts to summarize peer-reviewed studies and other complex evidence submitted by thousands of scientists around the world.

 

Except for the glaring glacier mistake, most of the alleged errors are minor, and some may not be errors at all. A controversial claim that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even slight reductions in precipitation apparently came from a World Wildlife Fund report rather than a peer-reviewed study, but a leading Amazon researcher has since affirmed that the number is correct. Still, the fact that reports from popular science magazines and environmental advocacy groups could have found their way into a document of such magnitude suggests the IPCC isn't living up to its own standards. So we applaud the panel's announcement that it is appointing an independent committee to investigate the matter and ensure adherence to scientific procedures.

 

That's not enough for global warming deniers, of course. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) asserts that the IPCC mistakes, combined with emails stolen from a British climate research centre suggesting some scientists let their political views compromise their objectivity, prove his contention that climate change theory is a hoax.

 

Nonsense. Although the IPCC errors have cast some light on the problems that arise when policymakers' demands for hard numbers conflict with the uncertainties of climate forecasting, they have done nothing to shake bedrock conclusions that the world is warming and that greenhouse gases generated by humans are the cause.

 

Inhofe and others are waging a calculated misinformation campaign, seizing on every error or gap in scientific knowledge to cast doubt on research findings and portray scientists as villains. An identical strategy succeeded in delaying government action against tobacco companies for years despite overwhelming evidence of the hazards of cigarettes; this time, more than our lungs are at stake.

 

 

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 8, 2010 A10

 

 

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/e...r-86811972.html

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

E-mail leaks that clouded climate issue

By Fiona Harvey

 

Published: March 8 2010 19:34 | Last updated: March 8 2010 19:34

 

Every night, Anthony Watts blogs on developments in a climate change scandal that he helped uncover. The routine has made the Californian meteorologist one of the most followed global warming sceptics in the world.

 

“It’s busier than ever – it’s hard to keep up,” says Mr Watts, a TV weatherman for 25 years who now sells weather equipment. “I’ve been blogging every day and some days I wish I could take a vacation.”

 

Mr Watts is at the centre of a loose network of internet sites where sceptics criticise climate change science. His life changed last November when he was sent e-mails that became known as “climategate” and showed climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the UK refusing to release information and allegedly distorting data.

 

After posting the e-mails on wattsupwiththat.com, his website, traffic tripled, recently topping 37m hits since it was set up. He now receives about 3.5m visitors a month.

 

Sceptics have had much to celebrate in recent weeks, with “climategate” allowing them to challenge scientific findings as well as growing evidence they are swaying public opinion.

 

“Climategate is a very big scandal and it is only going to get bigger,” says Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. “I don’t think the climate alarmists can ever recover from this.”

 

The e-mails were followed by revelations of flaws in the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, chiefly a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

 

Among people who doubt the world is warming as the result of human activity, the claims are greeted with glee. “It’s clear that [these scientists] make a lot of this stuff up,” says Mr Ebell. “They are primarily interested in the political impact of what they do, rather than being good scientists.”

 

The issue has brought to the fore thousands of amateur scientists and political bloggers who have toiled for years to point out what they regard as falsehoods by climate academics.

 

Julian Morris of the International Policy Network, a UK think-tank, says sceptic bloggers have been key in challenging the consensus view. “This was largely amateur scientists investigating claims that were made by supposedly professional scientists, then having discussions about it on the internet,” he says.

 

There are also a few well funded sceptic groups, such as the US-based Heartland Institute, supported to the tune of $5.2m in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available.

 

These blogs have also seen a sudden surge in traffic. Marc Morano, who runs ClimateDepot.com, says: “No one believes [the mainstream scientists] as they have overreached themselves and brought in politics. It became a silly game where they were trying to scare people.”

 

In the UK, “climategate” has become a political issue. MPs on an influential committee grilled climate scientists and sceptics last week in parliament’s first hearing into the scandal.

 

For mainstream scientists, the surge in sceptic popularity is frustrating. They say only a handful of flaws has been found in the IPCC’s work and it does not affect the main conclusions, forged by thousands of scientists through decades of research, that human activity is warming the climate.

 

Nevertheless, public opinion is being swayed: in the UK, an Ipsos poll of 1,043 people found the number describing climate change as a reality was down from 44 per cent last year to 31 per cent.

 

There are signs people view climate research less as a science than as a belief system. Robert Spicer, professor at the UK’s Open University, says: “I am often asked if I ‘believe’ in global warming as if [it] were a religion. It is not a case of belief [but] evaluating evidence – and the evidence is overwhelming.”

 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a6c0411c-2adf-11...144feabdc0.html

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Global Warming: Gore Vs. Gunter

 

There's no crisis -- the only thing heating up is the debate

 

By Lorne Gunter, National Post

March 8, 2010

 

 

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly surges up to very high speeds, then runs out of gas, it may be true that the first 100 metres after the tank goes dry are the fastest 100 metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though, that the car is still accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

 

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change cause, environmentalists -- such as former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose defence of the climate-change theory appears opposite -- have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest decade since modern records have been kept."

 

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and manipulations recently uncovered in the work of the UN and leading climate scientist, but rather "that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged."

 

To both claims, I say, "So what?" Since 1998, we haven't seen things heating up. One of the four main sources of worldwide temperatures (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was hotter -- slightly-- than 1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12 years been roughly flat. The earth is not getting warmer, at least not significantly. Global warming has paused.

 

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose rapidly from 1979. Yet after 1998, the climb seems to have run out of gas. It's been warm since, but it is no longer getting warmer rapidly, if at all.

 

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began being kept 150 years ago? That could just be a hangover from the warming between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Before our speeding sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good clip, too, despite having no more fuel.

 

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among scientists continues to support his alarmist view of future climate, it bears remembering that scientific truth is never determined by a show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth, which would be flat.

 

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus has cracks in it that were not there before the release last November of thousands of damning emails and computer files from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain and the discovery since December of more than a score of embarrassing misstatements in the 2007 assessment report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the holy book of the current global-warming religion.

 

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at the heart of the "Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had been no significant

 

warming since 1995. He insisted the warming since then had been almost significant. And he added that the warming from 1979 to today had been statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. But the important admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has been only a slight warming, within the margin of statistical error.

 

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on hiatus, would you have been as worried about climate change as you were? Would you have supported politicians promising to make elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous warming?

 

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory, also conceded that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to 1300 may have been warmer than today. While this may sound like hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if there was a time before SUVs and coal-fired power plants and carbon footprints that was warmer than today, that makes the rise of temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

 

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

 

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to deny the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known as the Medieval Optimal before it became politically incorrect to think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern England. Norse settlers established farms in Greenland. And the plagues and territorial wars driven by scarcity that marked the Late Middle Ages were centuries in the future -centuries notable for their coldness during the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

 

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led

 

to the infamous "hockey stick" graph that is so central to the UN's claims that our current warm period is to be feared. Scientists such as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other warm era in the past 1,000 years -- if global temperatures were mild and stable for the first 900 years and only shot up in the past 100 years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased -- then industrialization can be blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse and the UN (and smart, activist scientists such as those at the CRU and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save the planet by directing us all how to live.

 

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they may be. But they were long and deep in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, too. And one thing that era had in common with this one was a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum. Perhaps solar calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with droughts.

 

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global warming will lead to more intense storms -hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and so on -even though the links between severe storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon deforestation, sea-level rise, African crop declines and Arctic ice melt, have been debunked, or at the very least called into doubt.

 

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last month had the fewest tornadoes (one weak one in California) of any February since records have been kept. Last August was the first month in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one major hurricane (Category 4 or higher) to hit the U.S. Indeed, there are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the 1960s.

 

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming , was predicted by the computer models the UN relies on for its forecasts of devastating future climate change which calls into question the ability of these models -in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith -to predict climate changes, good or bad, over the next century.

 

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying off because of a tiny mite that has plagued hives for decades. Polar bears aren't dying off for lack of food to eat or ice to cling to. They aren't dying off, period.

 

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did not melt "in place." According to a recent study by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wind pushed more Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it melted simply because that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not because the Arctic is warming rapidly.

 

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But it just as easily could have other, natural causes.

 

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science. There never has been. By flinging names like "deniers" at skeptical scientists, barring them from IPCC deliberations, preventing them from seeing the warmers' raw climate data and keeping them from having their papers peer reviewed, activists like Mr. Gore and the scientists who agree with them have created an artificial consensus.

 

While that may be good politics, it is very bad science.

 

lgunter@shaw.ca

 

© Copyright © National Post

 

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Gl...3334/story.html

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

From The Times

March 10, 2010

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

 

 

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

 

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

 

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

 

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

 

The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

 

It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

 

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

 

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. Last month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

 

The Met Office, which produces the global temperature record used by the IPCC in its reports, has proposed a separate review of its data after admitting that public confidence in its findings had been undermined.

 

The Met Office relies on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is under investigation over allegations that its director manipulated raw data and tried to hide it from critics.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle7055999.ece

 

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Is it any coincidence that for years and years the IPCC never put out any reports identifying the little ice ages medieval warming periods and stuck with the smoothed models of Jones? Now that Jones admitted there were cold and warm periods not unlike we have today.

 

So now we start getting reports out in the media that says ...Yes we know it happened...but warming is way to bad to help. Did they not also read where he said there has been no significant warming in 15 years?

 

****************************************************************

Sun won't stop global warming if dims as in 1600s

Wed Mar 10, 2010 9:42pm IST

 

 

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

 

OSLO (Reuters) - A dimming of the sun to match conditions in the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century would only slightly slow global warming, a study indicated on Wednesday.

 

A weakening of solar activity in recent years, linked to fewer sunspots, would cut at most 0.3 degree Celsius (0.5 F) from a projected rise in temperatures by 2100 if it becomes a long-lasting "Grand Minimum" of brightness, they said.

 

"The notion that we are heading for a new Little Ice Age if the sun actually entered a Grand Minimum is wrong," Georg Feulner, lead author of the study at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement.

 

World temperatures are likely to rise by between 3.7 and 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions keep building up -- far more than the impact of known shifts in solar output, the study showed.

 

The sun has gone through four Grand Minima since the 13th century, including the Maunder Minimum from 1645-1715 that overlapped with the Little Ice Age. The Thames River froze in London, for instance, during a "Great Frost" of 1683-84.

 

World temperatures have risen 0.7 Celsius since the Industrial Revolution led to increasing use of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases when burned, according to the U.N. panel of climate scientists.

 

DIM SUN

 

"Current temperature data also confirm that the effect of low solar activity on the climate is very small," said Stefan Rahmstorf, also of the Potsdam Institute, of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

 

Despite a deep winter chill in parts of Europe and North America, January 2010 was the equal second warmest January worldwide since records began in the 19th century, according to NASA data. The warmest January was in 2007.

 

Feulner told Reuters that some who doubted that human activity was to blame for global warming had wrongly suggested that a prolonged solar slowdown "might rescue us from global warming."

 

Sunspots, dark dots caused by shifts in the sun's magnetic field, go through an 11-year cycle. Periods with few sunspots paradoxically indicate weaker solar output.

 

"We have experienced a low and long solar minimum on its current 11-year cycle. Some solar scientists have suggested that it might indicate a the start of a type of Maunder Minimum," Feulner said.

 

Feulner said temperatures fell by a few tenths of a degree Celsius in past Grand Minima.

 

The Little Ice Age had the strongest cooling effect in parts of the northern hemisphere -- perhaps because an increase in Arctic sea ice reflected heat back into space, or because of shifts in winds or ocean currents.

 

http://in.reuters.com/article/environmentN...lBrandChannel=0

 

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

California global warming law may lead to job losses, report says

 

The state's nonpartisan legislative analyst's office says the losses could occur in the short term. State Sen. David Cogdill uses the report to criticize climate regulation.

 

By Margot Roosevelt

 

March 10, 2010

 

 

Debate over the economic effects of California's first-in-the-nation global warming law flared this week, with a report saying short-term job losses can be expected.

 

The state's nonpartisan legislative analyst's office examined 2008 economic modeling by the California Air Resources Board and concluded that it "may overstate the number of jobs" attributable to future implementation of the 2006 climate law.

 

While acknowledging the uncertainty of such projections, the report said, "On balance, however, we believe that the aggregate net jobs impact in the near term is likely to be negative, even after recognizing that many of the . . . programs phase in over time."

 

The report comes at a politically charged moment, when polls show employment to be Americans' top concern. Signature gathering began last week on a November ballot initiative that would delay the law, known as AB 32, until unemployment drops to 5.5% for at least a year. California joblessness is over 12% today.

 

The report came in response to a query from Sen. Dave Cogdill (R-Modesto), a critic of the law. Released by Cogdill on Monday, the report emphasized that job effects are "difficult to accurately predict . . . with gains in some occupations (including so-called green jobs) and losses in others (primarily involving fossil fuel-related energy production)."

 

Long term, any effect on jobs "will likely be modest in comparison to the overall size of the state's economy," the analysis concluded.

 

Cogdill used the report Monday to blast the state's climate regulation. "It's time to put the brakes on this failed environmental policy," he said. "It's obvious that the quest for 'green' jobs will only take more cold hard green cash from Californians' wallets."

 

Industry groups have sharply criticized the air board's economic analysis of its mixture of regulations and incentives to slash the state's greenhouse gas emissions. The board found that on balance, the plan would create 120,000 jobs by 2020 (a 0.7% gain), boost the state's expected $2.6-trillion gross product by $4 billion and increase per capita income by $200.

 

The analysis, based on broad economic models, drew criticism from some academics, including Harvard economist Robert Stavins.

 

As a result, last May, Secretary of Environmental Protection Linda Adams appointed a 17-member committee to help revise the analysis. Their report is due this month.

 

Asked about the legislative analyst report, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cited new solar facilities and biofuel plants in the state and said, "I'm absolutely convinced that AB 32 will create more jobs than kill jobs."

 

By pushing the state into renewable energy, AB 32 is expected to boost the clean-tech sector, which is particularly strong in California.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cl...0,2046614.story

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Inter-ministerial climate change panel on the anvil

Body to be formed in May, to collect inputs for India’s greenhouse gas inventory report to be submitted to the UN

Jacob P. Koshy

 

 

New Delhi: The government plans to create an inter-ministerial body to resolve contentious scientific issues on the impact of global warming on India.

 

This body will complement the efforts of the environment ministry, but concentrate on sorting out differences of opinion between experts on the actual impact of climate change on India’s monsoon, forests and farming systems, said an official familiar with the development, who did not want to be identified.

 

This is critical because such differences could weaken India’s position in global climate change talks.

 

A recent controversy surrounding the melting Himalayan glaciers saw R.K. Pachauri, an adviser to the Prime Minister on climate change, and chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), publicly lock horns with environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

 

“This body will see that whatever input we present internationally will be unanimous,” the official added.

 

The inter-ministerial group will be coordinated by the climate change division at the department of science and technology. This division was the result of India’s eight-point national action plan on climate change, directed by the Prime Minister, and is expected to fund and assess research that will constitute strategic knowledge on climate change.

 

Among the tasks of the group that is likely to come into being this May is the collation of scientific inputs for India’s periodic greenhouse gas inventory report that is to be submitted to the United Nations.

 

India has only made one such submission, in 1994, and several organizations are working on the second, which is due later this decade.

 

A second official familiar with the creation of the group and who too declined to be identified agreed that it could “avoid situations such as the IPCC controversy”.

 

A draft of IPCC’s report, published in 2007 and circulated to governments across the world, said the total area of Himalayan glaciers would shrink from the present 500,000 sq. km to 100,000 sq. km by the 2035. IPCC retracted this statement subsequently. However, Pachauri was hard-pressed, at least for a while, to defend the very scientific basis of climate change.

 

It didn’t help that Ramesh was critical of IPCC. “My problem was...with the alarmist position of the IPCC,” Ramesh had said at the time of the glacier controversy. “Secondly, the report made sweeping statements, which were not backed by scientific facts.”

 

India shifted its stance on climate change policy—from refusing to take on any emission reduction measures to accepting caps on the intensity of its emissions—within a calendar year, dividing policymakers in government. Experts say deeper divisions were expected to emerge in the future, which in turn could affect policy.

 

“The policy only comes in after scientific consensus. The big debates of the future will concentrate on the regional impact of climate change on different parts of the country and that would be even more fractious, simply because more people are going to be studying climate change impacts using all kinds of models,” said K. Krishna Kumar of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and a contributor to IPCC reports.

 

A government expert on the subject who is involved with climate change negotiations and who did not want to be identified said some of the differences could also arise from India’s evolving position: “From emissions intensity I wouldn’t be surprised if India takes on emission cuts. Then different states would haggle over their responsibilities and all this could have a bearing at international tables.”

 

http://www.livemint.com/2010/03/10215601/I...imate-chan.html

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Polar Bears...both sides of the story

 

***********************************

 

Canada's growing polar bear population 'becoming a problem,' locals say

January 8, 7:29 PM

Seminole County Environmental News Examiner

Kirk Myers

 

 

Polar bears, the lumbering carnivores of the arctic, continue to be the poster bear – er, child – for global warmers everywhere who are convinced the baby seal munchers are being driven to extinction by man’s irresponsible release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

 

Next to whales, the cuddly fur balls enjoy a special place on the “Animals to Love” list. Grown-ups adore them (provided it’s from a safe distance), and grade-school kids who can’t find Greenland or Manitoba on a map raid their penny jars to save them.

 

But are the denizens of the deep north facing extinction? Are they in desperate need of saving? It depends on who you ask.

 

According to the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG), the polar bear population is on shaky ground – actually, ice – because of warmer temperatures and shrinking ice floe in the Arctic triggered by the favorite bad-guy of the green movement – anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

 

In a news release issued after its conference last July, the PBSG concluded that only one of 19 total polar bear subpopulations is currently increasing, three are stable and eight are declining. Data was insufficient to determine numbers for the remaining seven subpopulations. The group estimated that the total number of polar bears is somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000. (Estimates of the population during the 1950s and 1960s, before harvest quotas were enacted, range from 5,000 to 10,000.)

 

However, the PBSG quickly acknowledged that “the mixed quality of information on the different subpopulations means there is much room for error in establishing” the numbers, and “the potential for error, given the ongoing and projected changes in habitats and other potential stresses, is cause for concern.”

 

Despite those problems, the PBSG said it is optimistic that “humans can mitigate the effects of global warming and other threats to the polar bears.”

 

Not so fast. According to a U.S. Senate and Public Works Committee report, the “alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. Those predictions are being “challenged by scientists and forecasting experts,” said the report.

 

Those challenges, supported by facts on the ground, including observations from Inuit hunters in the region, haven’t stopped climate fear-mongers at the U.S. Geological Survey from proclaiming that future sea ice conditions “will result in the loss of approximately two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century.”

 

Such sky-is-falling rhetoric brings smiles to the Inuit population of Canada’s Nunavut Territory. They, too, know how to count, and they claim the bear population is stable or on the rise in their own backyard. Polar bears may be on the decline in some areas, but during their frequent visits to Inuit towns and outposts they rarely decline an easy meal from the local dump or a poorly secured garbage can.

 

Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board in the capital of Iqaluit, says the polar bear population in the region, along the Davis Strait, has doubled during the past 10 years. He questions the official figures, which are based to a large extent on helicopter surveys.

 

“Scientists do a quick study one to two weeks in a helicopter, and don’t see all the polar bears. We’re getting totally different stories [about the bear numbers] on a daily basis from hunters and harvesters on the ground,” he says.

 

Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a biologist who has been researching polar bear populations in Canada’s Nunavut Territory for 35 years, seems to agree. “The study estimates from the Iqaluit area agree with those of local hunters, although the accuracy of the counts is doubtful in some areas,” he says.

 

Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc., is another doubter who questions the accuracy of helicopter surveys. “Helicopters have many limitations, including fuel capacity. They can’t go far out into the open water,” he says. But hunters crisscrossing the area by dog team, snowmobile or boat “are seeing polar bears where scientists and helicopters are not traveling.”

 

Forty years ago, old-timers living in the area around Hudson Bay were lucky to see a polar bear, Nirlungayuk says. “Now there are bears living as far south as James Bay.”

 

The growing population has become “a real problem,” especially over the last 10 years, he says. During the summer and fall, families enjoying outdoor activities must be on the look-out for bears. Many locals invite along other hunters for protection.

 

Last year, in Pelly Bay, all the bears that were captured were caught in town, Nirlungayuk says. “You now have polar bears coming into towns, getting into cabins, breaking property and just creating havoc for people up here,” he says.

 

In the Western Hudson Bay area, where harvest quotas were reduced by 80 percent four years ago, communities are complaining about the number of polar bears. “Now people can look out the window and see as many as 20 polar bears at the ice-flow edge,” Flaherty says.

 

During a public hearing last September focusing on the polar bear population in the Baffin Bay region, hunters reported more sightings of females with three cubs. The normal litter is one or two. Flaherty, himself a serious hunter, says the abundant food supply – primarily baby ring seals – in the area is responsible for the bigger litters.

 

The on-the-ground reports, if accurate, seem to contradict the official story of the beleaguered polar bear. According to the standard theory, warmer temperatures (caused by human CO2 emissions) are shrinking the ice floe, the polar bear’s main hunting ground, forcing populations to compete for a diminishing food supply. Warmer temperatures also are to blame for the loss of thicker “multi-year ice.”

 

Flaherty and many others disagree with the official story. “We are aware there are changes in the weather, but it is not affecting the daily life of the animals,” he says. “Polar bears hunt in the floe-edge areas, on newly formed ice, and in the fiords in search of baby seals. They don’t hunt in the glaciers [areas of multi-year ice].

 

“We’re not seeing negative effects on the polar bear population from so-called climate change and receding ice,” he says. He is convinced that some scientists are deliberately “using the polar bear issue to scare people” about global warming, a view widely shared by many Nunavut locals.

 

It has warmed in the region and, as Taylor confirms, the summer sea-ice boundary has been slowly contracting for the last 30 years and experienced a big decline in 2007 – an event that was widely reported as evidence of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

 

However, the shrinking sea ice does not affect polar bear numbers uniformly, he emphasizes. “Even in adjacent sub-populations, the impact may vary,” he says. “Every population is ecologically different. Some populations may actually benefit from less sea ice.”

 

Taylor downplays the theory that CO2 is the culprit responsible for warmer Arctic temperatures. Other factors, including wind-driven ice movement, shifting ocean currents, reduced albedo effect (less snow-cover resulting in less heat reflection) and increased water vapor (the major greenhouse gas) from a growing expanse of ice-free water, leading to warmer air temperatures, may be influencing the local climate, he says.

 

“Arctic warming is real, but just because it’s warmer doesn’t mean it’s caused by carbon dioxide. I don’t think CO2 is the main factor causing it.”

 

He notes that the current model forecasts, which show elevated CO2 levels triggering global temperature increases, don’t agree with the contemporary temperature record. “When predictions don’t match the observations, scientists should say ‘there is something wrong here.’”

 

The IPCC models, he claims, are “multiplying the effect of CO2 to obtain the temperature increases they predict,” a criticism shared by others in the scientific community who have openly accused modelers of data manipulation.

 

“The idea that these models can make predictions 50 to 100 years into the future seems, frankly, absurd to me.”

 

Both Nirlungayuk and Flaherty ridicule media claims that the polar bear is threatened or on the verge of extinction.

 

“Polar bears are very intelligent . . . they have adapted through many climate changes for thousands of years. They are not going to wait around for the ice to freeze to start hunting. They live on more than just seals,” says Nirlungayuk.

 

Adds Flaherty: “At the end of the day, the King of the North will always be here. When we hear that polar bears are headed towards extinction, we just kind of smile at ourselves.”

 

http://www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-C...blem-locals-say

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Friday, 12 March 2010

 

Climate change 'makes birds shrink' in North America

By Matt Walker

Editor, Earth News

 

 

Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause.

 

A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings.

 

This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures.

 

However, there is little evidence that the change is harmful to the birds.

 

Details of the discovery are published in the journal Oikos.

 

In biology, there is a general rule of thumb that animals tend to become smaller in warmer climates: an idea known as Bergman's Rule.

 

Usually this trend can be seen among animal species that live over a range of latitude or altitude, with individuals living at more northern latitudes or higher up cooler mountains being slightly larger than those below, for example.

 

Quite why this happens is not clear, but it prompted one group of scientists to ask the question: would animals respond in the same way to climate change?

 

To find out, Dr Josh Van Buskirk of the University of Zurich, Switzerland and colleagues Mr Robert Mulvihill and Mr Robert Leberman of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Rector, Pennsylvania, US decided to evaluate the sizes of hundreds of thousands of birds that pass through the Carnegie Museum's Powdermill ringing station, also in Pennsylvania.

 

They examined the records of 486,000 individual birds that had been caught and measured at the ringing station from 1961 to 2007.

 

These birds belonged to 102 species, arriving over different seasons. Each was weighed. It also had the length of its wings measured, recorded as wing cord length, or the distance between the bird's wrist to the tip of the longest primary feather.

 

Their sample included local resident bird species, overwintering species, and even long distance migrants arriving from the Neotropics.

 

What they found was striking.

 

Of 83 species caught during spring migration, 60 have become smaller over the 46 year study period, weighing less and having shorter wings.

 

Of the 75 species migrating in autumn, 66 have become smaller.

 

In summer, 51 of 65 breeding species have similarly reduced in size, as have 20 out of 26 wintering species.

 

The differences in size are not big.

 

"On average, the decline in mass of spring migrants over the 46 year study was just 1.3%," says Dr Buskirk.

 

"For a 10g warbler that's a loss of just 130mg."

 

But some species are losing more weight.

 

For example, the rose-breasted grosbeak has declined in mass by about 4%, while the Kentucky warbler has dropped 3.3% in weight and the scarlet tanager 2.3%.

 

The trend is particularly noticeable among those birds that winter in the New World tropics of the Caribbean, Central America and South America.

 

"The headline finding is that the body sizes of many species of North American birds, mostly songbirds, are gradually becoming smaller," says Dr Buskirk.

 

However, their populations are not dwindling.

 

"So many of these species are apparently doing just fine, but the individual birds are becoming gradually smaller nonetheless," says Dr Buskirk.

 

That suggests that bird species in North America are obeying Berman's rule, by evolving into a smaller size as temperatures increase.

 

Though this change appears quick, it has taken place over at least 20 generations of birds.

 

"There are plenty examples of rapid contemporary evolution over much shorter time periods," says Dr Buskirk.

 

Whether the trend will cause the birds any long-term consequences is unclear.

 

"In one obvious sense, the consequences are positive," says Dr Buskirk.

 

"That is, as temperatures become warmer, the optimal body size is becoming smaller."

 

However, even though the species appear to be adapting to the new climatic conditions, it could still be that their average "fitness" in evolutionary terms, is going down.

 

"Evidence from other studies is that some species will benefit and others will be harmed, and it's not always the species we like that will be harmed," says Dr Buskirk.

 

The jury is still out as to why any species responds to warmer temperatures by becoming smaller.

 

Originally, biologists proposed that having a larger body surface to volume might help in warmer climates.

 

But more recent ideas suggest that animals might actually be responding instead to something else that correlates with temperature, such as the availability of food, or metabolic rate.

 

"It looks like it might take a while before we know," says Dr Buskirk.

 

His team says much more data is now needed to confirm this trend and to see if it is happening in animals other than birds.

 

For example, it took an avalanche of data before people became convinced that climate change is already altering when birds start migrating.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/...000/8560694.stm

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Terence Corcoran: Remember Amazongate?

Posted: March 12, 2010, 7:55 PM by NP Editor

Terence Corcoran, IPCC, climate change

 

New research shows no evidence of Amazon devastation

 

By Terence Corcoran

 

Climate scientists attached to the rickety Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change structure raise two key interchangeable arguments in their defense. The first is to deny that anything of significance has been found in the various IPCC scandals. Climategate? Nothing there but a few emails that display intemperate behaviour and typical charmless chat among scientists doing their jobs.

 

“Scientists are not public relations experts,” say the apologists. Glaciergate and the melting Himalayan ice? Insignificant — barely a footnote in the official IPCC reports, and a minor mistake in any case; there’s nothing here to cast doubt on the thousands of pages of good work by thousands of scientists. “Regrettably, there were a very small number of errors,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday after announcing the appointment of a review panel to investigate those tiny little errors, produce a report and move on, preferably by August before the next round of panic-ridden climate talks.

 

The second official line of defense is to attempt to deny the very existence of any mistakes, errors or butchered science. Denial, in fact, is often the first strategy deployed when any criticism surfaces. Then, if the story of scientific error is proven true, the mistakes are then dismissed and trivialized as of no consequence.

 

If this strategy of denial, diminishment, trivialization and dismissal succeeds it will only be because most people will not pay close enough attention to the issues. The Climategate emails, thousands of exchanges among scientists working on temperature records and forecasts, are dense and unintelligible to all but the most intrepid and diligent. You may even have to be half crazy to try to work through the emails and piece together the story lines and threads.

 

One of the Climategate story lines involves attempts by the biggest names in climate science, Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann, of Pennsylvanian State University, to suppress revelations of scientific fraud in production of key temperature data. Using libel threats, even though they knew the fraud charge might be true, they tried to intimidate journal editors and attempted to conceal the fraud. That story is told in FP Comment by Benny Peiser, one of the editors who in 2007 engaged Mr. Jones in the fraud debate. Readers can decided for themselves on the significance of this Climategate episode and whether it is just a trivial anecdote.

 

Another deny-and-trivialize science issue is Amazongate. In January, Daily Telegraph writer James Delingpole described how a key alarmist section of the IPPC’s 2007 science report was another bit of dubious research from the World Wildlife Fund. It claimed that “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation.” The expert citation for this was a bit of non-peer-reviewed research by WWF activists.

 

The Sunday Times of London called the IPCC Amazon statement to be a “bogus rainforest claim.” Soon, however, the denial machine swung into action. The Times will be in hot water over this, they said. While the original IPCC report was based on WWF research, there was other science that supported the idea that the Amazon could be decimated by climate change.

 

The author of that other science, Daniel Nepstad, of the Woods Hole Research Center, said that while the WWF version of his paper got things wrong, the IPCC was correct — up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reduction in the amount of rainfall. Mr. Nepstad based his conclusion on assessments of the Amazon rainforest’s behaviour during the 1998 El Nino period. Other research in 2004 and 2007 also seemed to support the idea that the Amazon would be decimated by global warming.

 

But this week new research supports the original Amazongate version of the science. The Amazon may not be at risk from climate change. Researchers at Boston University, headed by Ranga B. Myneni, professor of geography and environment, found that satellite readings used by other scientists were based on contaminated data. In a paper published by Geophysical Research Letters, Prof. Myneni and associates say they found no evidence that the Amazon suffers extreme tree mortality, excessive forest greening or other trauma under extreme climate conditions.

 

The Myneni paper examined the impact on the Amazon of a major 2005 drought. Some scientists have argued that the 2005 drought caused significant rainforest disturbances. But Prof. Myneni says that science is based on satellite data that cannot be reproduced because much of it is “atmosphere corrupted.” Once the corrupted data is removed, a new assessment is possible, The Boston research shows that much of the speculation around the Amazon either greening up or browning under extreme conditions to be false. During the 2005 drought, Prof. Myneni reports, the Amazon behaved no differently than it did during 2003 and 2004, when there was no drought.

 

Prof. Myneni supports the basic IPCC climate science theory. But he said in an interview yesterday that the IPCC was being “alarmist” when it took the WWF research and produced a report that projected that 40% of the Amazon could be devastated and reformed by even a slight reduction in rainfall.

 

As it turns out, he says, the experience of 2005 shows that there is no evidence for the WWF claim and the evidence used in later research is faulty.

None of this resolves the Amazongate issue. What it does show, however, is what all the of the IPCC science problems show: The science isn’t settled.

 

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/f...amazongate.aspx

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

You can so easily tell what ideology these people fall under. Is it too critical to say a bunch of these left wing green nut jobs are communists? What is the definition of communism.

 

"Communism is a social structure in which, theoretically, classes are abolished and property is commonly controlled, as well as a political philosophy and social movement that advocates and aims to create such a society.[1]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

 

To say we should advocate making a business stop being an business and go into covering the Sahara with mirrors (without any regard to when the WWF stops construction of that project due to the immeasurable harm to the natural ecosystem including plants, animals and insects) without any care nor mention of the fact said company would go bankrupt in the process or be killed in tribal fights or have Amnesty International protesting the backing of dictatorships...

 

Please give us all a break. 250 billion is absolutely nothing in the scheme of the 100 years they figure it will take to develop this resource. McDonald's restaurants alone are slated to hit the $5 billion in sales soon. That is just one fast food restaurant. When talking about a large world class resource there will be costs to develop but they are also creating wealth.

 

If these people are so sure of their intensions then they should stop all their use of fossil fuels...completely...end of story. Prove it is cheap and easy to do. They make a mockery of ideology when they demand everyone do as they are told yet shoot around the world in jets, rent cars where they travel, eat at nice restaurant, wear trendy cloths etc. Advocates of this green communist revolution are advocating the transfer of wealth from "rich" nations to "poor" nations. That was made clear at Copenhaugen.

 

It all comes down to communism. Maybe guised as green communism but still communism all the same.

 

This is our ideology...you must live it...don't second guess us...and yes...we will still have fun while you suffer cause we are in power here to help run your lives. (p.s. Pleae don't check our communist data to closely)

 

What a crock.

 

Sun

 

 

********************************************************************************

******

Money spent on tar sands projects could decarbonise western economies• Production from tar sands will rise to 4m barrels a day by 2025

 

Terry Macalister

The Guardian, Monday 15 March 2010

 

 

The £250bn cost of developing Canada's controversial tar sands between now and 2025 could be used to decarbonise the western economy by funding ambitious solar power schemes in the Sahara or a European wide shift to electric vehicles, according to a new report released today.

 

The same amount of investment would also help the world to hit half of the Millenium Development Goals in the 50 least-developed countries, says the research from The Co-operative and conservation group, WWF, which is released to coincide with a new film, Dirty Oil, being premiered in 25 cinemas around the UK today. It is a hard-hitting documentary narrated by Canadian actor, Neve Campbell.

 

The moves are all part of a concerted effort to put shareholder and public pressure on BP and Shell which are at the forefront of extracting oil from the carbon-intensive tar sands of Alberta.

 

The Co-op claims its task has gained urgency by BP unveiling plans last week to speed up new tar sands projects through a tie-up with Devon Energy.

 

"The sums of money being invested in tar sands developments are enormous and difficult for the average person to grasp," says Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-op.

 

"This report (The Opportunity of the Tar Sands) puts things into perspective and demonstrates not only the scale of the problem, which could take us to the brink of runaway climate change, but also the opportunity being lost. It is literally a matter of life and death that these enormous oil titans are re-steered to much more sustainable paths," he adds.

 

The production of tar sands is estimated by critics to emit three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil production. It is estimated that tar sands production will increase from its 1.3m barrels a day to at least 4m barrels by 2025.

 

A resolution has been put down by the Co-op and other shareholders to be taken at the BP annual general meeting next month alongside a similar one for Shell asking for a review of the economics and environmental impact of tar sands.

 

The Co-op and WWF say the combined cost of all tar sands – £250bn – could be used for clean power projects such as the Desertec scheme linking solar plants in North Africa to a "supergrid" which could produce 15% of Europe's electricity by 2050.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/ma...ds-green-energy

 

[Ricinus]

The Co-op is Commie?? The sneaky bastages disgiused as a retail store. What about the UFA?

Just think it all started in Alberta in the 30's with the CCF

 

Regards Mike

[Guest Sundancefisher]

The Co-op is Commie?? The sneaky bastages disgiused as a retail store. What about the UFA?

Just think it all started in Alberta in the 30's with the CCF

 

Regards Mike

 

 

<--poke--<

 

caught you not reading. LOL. I respect the fact that you did not read this. Whether you believe one side or the other the fact is most pro global warmers don't read anything. Actually they live in this world of a global warming cult. Like any cult they are not allowed to see or hear alternative views. It is dangerous to the cause. They just acquired this vast knowledge of truth through initial osmosis from the news and while eating a watery pea soup 2 times a day in between selling flowers at the airport. Still...I would be a fool to think anything will change insofar as perception. But hopefully we will not all be made fools off through poor science.

 

The Co-op is what they are calling WWF...World Wildlife Fund.

 

"says the research from The Co-operative and conservation group, WWF"

 

For a so called Wildlife Group...they sure have been replaced with a bunch of quality economists....or should I say communists.

 

Their logic defies common sense. Sure we can all take a narrow view point on one side of the spectrum or another but the WWF has done a great job in putting false and unsubstantiated research front and center with the IPCC.

 

Firstly the WWF knows absolutely nothing about the oil sands. They totally ignore that people are using the resource. They should be out in front of schools paint bombing mothers leaving their SUV's idling while waiting to pick up little Suzie and little Johnie.

 

These guys don't believe in putting forth well thought out ideas. I used to actually support them until they became more and more militant and more and more caustic in their attempts to extort money in the guise of charity. But really IMHO it is paying for some ideological whack job to jet around the world protesting and who knows what.

 

Co-op is not referring to Calgary CO-OP.

 

Calgary CO-OP ______________________ WWF Co-op

____________

[Ricinus]

Seeing how it's a British News story, I think it's the Cooperative Party they are referring to. According to Wiki, they have a permanent partnership with the Labour Party. I think Socialist is more descriptive of their policies--you know evil things like Universal Pensions, Universal Health-care, Child Allowances, Unemployment Insurance, Worker's Comp and other Commie things. Sure glad they didn't catch on here.

 

Just teasing.

 

Regards Mike

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Seeing how it's a British News story, I think it's the Cooperative Party they are referring to. According to Wiki, they have a permanent partnership with the Labour Party. I think Socialist is more descriptive of their policies--you know evil things like Universal Pensions, Universal Health-care, Child Allowances, Unemployment Insurance, Worker's Comp and other Commie things. Sure glad they didn't catch on here.

 

Just teasing.

 

Regards Mike

 

I was seeing if you caught the comma in the sentence. Ya... These parties are getting on the bad wagon. Great way to wrestle power from the people. Interesting how they partnered up with WWF. Anytime a charity picks a political affiliation...they should no longer be a charity but rather a lobbyist.

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Trying to artificially make the Earth colder can have way worse consequences to humanity than warmer:huh:. Just the shear amount of energy that will need to be expended to keep people warm will by itself create a nasty feedback loop.

 

At the same time...man if they can increase productivity of the oceans and improve fishing...gezz...I am torn on this one.

 

:evilgrin:

 

********************************************************

 

 

 

Tuesday, 16 March 2010

 

Climate 'fix' could poison sea life

By Richard Black

Environment correspondent, BBC News

 

Fertilising the oceans with iron to absorb carbon dioxide could increase concentrations of a chemical that can kill marine mammals, a study has found.

 

Iron stimulates growth of marine algae that absorb CO2 from the air, and has been touted as a "climate fix".

 

Now researchers have shown that the algae increase production of a nerve poison that can kill mammals and birds.

 

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say this raises "serious concern" over the idea.

 

The toxin - domoic acid - first came to notice in the late 1980s as the cause of amnesiac shellfish poisoning.

 

It is produced by algae of the genus Pseudonitzschia, with concentrations rising rapidly when the algae "bloom".

 

Now, its presence in seawater often requires the suspension of shellfishing operations, and is regularly implicated in deaths of animals such as sealions.

 

Domoic acid poisoning may also lie behind a 1961 incident in which flocks of seabirds appeared to attack the Californian town of Capitola - an event believed to have shaped Alfred Hitchcock's interpretation of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds in his 1963 thriller.

 

Carbon focus

 

Over the last decade, about 10 research projects have investigated iron fertilisation, with mixed results.

 

But only two of them measured domoic acid production, and only then as an afterthought, explained William Cochlan from San Francisco State University, a scientist on the new project.

 

"We had a number of major aims in this work; but one of them was to ask 'do you normally find the species of algae that produce domoic acid, are they producing domoic acid, and will production be enhanced by iron?'," he said.

 

In studies conducted around Ocean Station Papa, a research platform moored in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean, the answers to all three questions turned out to be "yes".

 

Pseudonitzschia algae were present naturally; they were producing domoic acid, and experiments showed that production increased during fertilisation with iron and copper.

 

Also, under iron-rich conditions, the Pseudonitzschia algae bloomed at a rate faster than other types.

 

The levels of domoic acid in iron-enriched water samples were of the same order as those known to cause poisoning in mammals in coastal waters.

 

Ailsa Hall, deputy director of the Sea Mammal Research Institute at St Andrews University in Scotland, said that domoic acid poisoning was already becoming a regular occurrence in some parts of the world.

 

"Ever since 1998 we've seen regular episodes of mass mortality and seizures in sea lions on the US west coast," she said.

 

The toxin accumulates in animals such as fish that are themselves immune.

 

"We've seen it in seals, pelicans and harbour porpoises; it does depend on how much they eat, but if a sea lion or a pelican eats its way through a school of contaminated anchovies, then that would be enough," Dr Hall told BBC News.

 

Domoic acid's effect on other species was unknown, she said, but it would be reasonable to think it would also affect marine mammals such as whales.

 

Whether iron fertilisation ever will be deployed as a "climate fix" is unclear.

 

The last major investigation - last year's Lohafex expedition - found that despite depositing six tonnes of iron in the Southern Ocean, little extra CO2 was drawn from the atmosphere.

 

Nevertheless, one company - Climos - aims eventually to deploy the technique on a commercial basis.

 

A Climos spokesman agreed that further research on domoic acid production was needed.

 

"Moving forward, we need to understand exactly how deep-ocean phytoplankton respond to iron, be it naturally or artificially supplied; whether and in what situations domoic acid is produced, and how the ecosystem is or is not already adapted to this," he said.

 

For William Cochlan's team, the potential impact on sea life is something that regulators and scientists must take into account when deciding whether to allow further studies or deployment.

 

"We saw some literature going around with claims like 'there is no indication of toxicity to sea life' - well, if you don't measure it, of course there's no indication, and we have to keep that kind of legalese out of science," he said.

 

"If the end goal is to use it to fight climate warming, then we have to understand the consequences for marine life."

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8569351.stm

 

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Wind contributing to Arctic sea ice loss, study findsNew research does not question climate change is also melting ice in the Arctic, but finds wind patterns explain steep decline

 

David Adam, environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 March 2010 07.00 GMT

 

 

Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down to the region's swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a new study reveals.

 

Ice blown out of the region by Arctic winds can explain around one-third of the steep downward trend in sea ice extent in the region since 1979, the scientists say.

 

The study does not question that global warming is also melting ice in the Arctic, but it could raise doubts about high-profile claims that the region has passed a climate "tipping point" that could see ice loss sharply accelerate in coming years.

 

The new findings also help to explain the massive loss of Arctic ice seen in the summers of 2007-08, which prompted suggestions that the summertime Arctic Ocean could be ice-free withing a decade. About half of the variation in maximum ice loss each September is down to changes in wind patterns, the study says.

 

Masayo Ogi, a scientist with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, and her colleagues, looked at records of how winds have behaved across the Arctic since satellite measurements of ice extent there began in 1979.

 

They found that changes in wind patterns, such as summertime winds that blow clockwise around the Beaufort Sea, seemed to coincide with years where sea ice loss was highest.

 

Writing in a paper to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists suggest these winds have blown large amounts of Arctic ice south through the Fram Strait, which passes between Greenland and the Norwegian islands of Svalbard, and leads to the warmer waters of the north Atlantic. These winds have increased recently, which could help explain the apparent acceleration in ice loss.

 

"Wind-induced, year-to-year differences in the rate of flow of ice toward and through Fram Strait play an important role in modulating September sea ice extent on a year-to-year basis," the scientists say. "A trend toward an increased wind-induced rate of flow has contributed to the decline in the areal coverage of Arctic summer sea ice."

 

Ogi said this was the first time the Arctic winds have been analysed in such a way.

 

"Both winter and summer winds could blow ice out of the Arctic [through] the Fram Strait during 1979-2009," she said.

 

A number of other factors were also responsible for ice loss, including warming of the air and ocean, she added.

 

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic sea ice "is in a state of ongoing decline". Since 1979, the ice has shrunk by about 10% a decade, or 28,000 square miles each year. The ice reaches its minimum extent each September, when it begins to reform as the freezing Arctic winter takes hold.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010...ice-loss-arctic