‘Years of Living Dangerously’ shouts climate fire! But, data says their shouting is simply noise
By Jim Steele* | Watts Up With That? | April 25, 2014
Yelling “fire” in a crowded room is the iconic example used to distinguish free speech from license. Falsely claiming there was a fire in a crowded room would be punishable license because it could cause a panicked stampede resulting in injury. Episode 2 of Years of Living Dangerously treads dangerously close to license, as the producers present a completely one-sided biased view of forest fires purposely trying to incite climate panic. Those of us who have studied forest ecology for the past few decades have understood that bigger more destructive fires have been the result of fire suppression and a growing population. As the USA added 100 million people since 1970, more and more people moved into more forested areas and changes in fire frequency are skewed by the number of fires ignited by humans.
For example the Arbor Day Foundation reports that more than 83% of forest fires in 2006 were started by human activities, accounting for the burning of nearly 4.4 million acres. In 2004, wildfires in Alaska burned more than 5 million acres, the worst year for Alaskan fires. However 426 fires were started by humans and only 275 were natural fires ignited by lightning. In 2003 California’s “Fire Siege” the first of several fires was set during military artillery practice. The biggest fire, the Cedar Fire, happened when a signal fire got out of control.
While using movie stars to bludgeon us with the idea that all bad things must be due CO2 climate change, “Years of Living Dangerously” committed huge sins of omission.
There is a wealth of scientific research regards the effects of fire suppression and natural cycles. Instead Arnold Schwarzenegger yuks it up with firefighters on the front-line.
The episode then exploits human tragedy by highlighting the recent death of a “hot shot” crew. And Arnold (scientist?) then marries the tragedies by telling us CO2 climate change is making fires bigger, more frequent, and more dangerous.
But Arnold never tells us forests that naturally experienced fires every 5 to 40 years, had built up dangerously high fuel loads. During the 20th century era of fire suppression the US Forest Service’s “10 AM rule” dominated, and every attempt was made to extinguish all small fires by 10 AM the next day. Normally those small fires would burn longer and spread further and create a mosaic of forest patches. The remaining forest patches were then buffered from any new fires that started in a neighboring patch and large catastrophic fires are very rare in mosaic habitats. A patchy forest also prevents widespread beetle infestations.1 Until the media’s recent attempts to promote climate fear, forest ecologists had always complained fire suppression was promoting larger beetle infestations. A list of research on the effects of logging, fire suppression and natural cycles on beetle infestations can be found here. Yet “Years of Living Dangerously” simply blames climate change.
In 1996 one of the fire experts interviewed in “Years of Living Dangerously”, Thomas Swetnam wrote:
“The paradox of fire management in conifer forests is that, if in the short term we are effective at reducing fire occurrence below a certain level, then sooner or later catastrophically destructive wildfires will occur. Even the most efficient and technologically advanced fire fighting efforts can only forestall this inevitable result. It is clear from many years of study and published works that the thinning action of pre-settlement surface fires maintained open stand conditions and thereby prevented the historically anomalous occurrence of catastrophic crown fires that we are experiencing in today’s Southwestern forests”2
[emphasis added]
However there are other forests at higher elevation that naturally burn every 100 to 300 years. Over that time fuel loads naturally build to dangerous levels. When those forests burn it is usually catastrophic. So Swetnam also co-authored a paper with Westerling, suggesting the increase in fires since 1970s is likely do climate change and that paper became the “scientific basis” for this episode of “Years of Living Dangerously”. They cited warm temperatures and dry weather associated with those large catastrophic fires but they confused weather for climate and their paper only diagnosed 3 decades of trends and only the largest fires (see graph below). However the authors did admit, “Whether the changes observed in western hydro-climate and wildfire are the result of greenhouse gas–induced global warming or only an unusual natural fluctuation is beyond the scope of this work.” [emphasis added] Nonetheless instead of providing a greater historical framework to critique natural cycles that last 60 to 200 years, they promoted untested speculation and simply reported that all the models predict more fires due to CO2 warming in the future.
Figure from Westerling 2006
But all catastrophic fires for the past several centuries have been associated with warm dry conditions. Months of dry weather accelerated the biggest fires in written history. Swetnam himself had published papers showing southwest forest fires were far larger and far more frequent between 1700 and 1900 as seen in his published graph (Fig.5 below) Other authors echoed the same findings. Estimated from early journalists’ accounts of fire throughout the Rocky Mountain region, modern fires burn less than one-fourth of the land that had burned historically. Fire ecologists debating how great an area needs to be burned to restore the natural fire regimes reported a “comprehensive assessment of burning in the contiguous United States and estimated that approximately 3 to 6 times more area must be burned to restore historical fire regimes.”1 The Westerling paper shows a peak in 1988, driven largely by the Yellowstone fires that burnt about 800,000 acres. In comparison The Great Fire of 1910 was a wildfire that burned about three million acres (approximately the size of Connecticut) in northeast Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana. From a historical point of view, the Yellowstone fire was modest.
The Peshtigo Fire of 1871 (in and around Peshtigo, Wisconsin) caused an estimated 1,500 deaths possibly as many as 2,500. It consumed about 1.5 million acres, an area approximately twice the size of Rhode Island. The combination of wind, topography and fire that created the firestorm that is now known as the Peshtigo Paradigm. Those elements that created the fire were studied and recreated by the American and British military during World War II for the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities. Nonetheless the Peshtigo fire happened the same time as the Great Chicago Fire, so it did not get a lot of media attention. However the combination of those catastrophic fires prompted a fearful public to speculate that comets, meteorites or aliens were behind those firestorms, and one must wonder if blaming CO2 for recent fires is driven by the same lack of scientific understanding.
The USA embarked on an era of fire suppression as early as 1886 when the U.S. Army began to patrol the newly created National Parks. But fire suppression to preserve natural resources had unintended consequences. The consensus among fire experts is “Fires generally become less frequent and more severe with active suppression on the landscape” “Modern wildfires on late seral landscapes tend to be larger, more intense, and more severe because of high biomass loadings, multilayer stand structures, and the high connectivity of the biomass at the stand and landscape level.” “The end result of fire exclusion in fire-prone forests is increasingly synchronous landscapes dominated by large, catastrophic disturbance regimes.”1
The Westerling paper argued that the greatest absolute increase in large wildfires occurred in Northern Rockies forests where fire exclusion has had little impact on natural fire regimes because those forest had only burned every 100 to 300 years and the era of fire suppression was too short to play a significant role. So they suggested that earlier springs due to climate change had caused the increase in catastrophic fires in that region. However a study by the US Forest service concluded fire suppression has played a major role in the Rocky Mountains.1 A picture near the Yellowstone River from 1871 shows a landscape dominated by grasslands and a mosaic of forest patches (Figure 1C below). After a century of suppression, a photograph of the same area from 1981 (Figure 1D below) shows a vast expanse of interconnected forest with a high fuel load now dominating landscape and primed for a huge fire. Until that landscape recovered from the 1800s fires, large catastrophic fires would impossible.
Large fires have always been a natural occurrence in these regions. What is unprecedented in recent decades are tremendous swathes of dense forest. (Also notice contrary to global warming theory, trees confined to the higher elevations had migrated to lower elevations.) Furthermore the sudden uptick in recent forest fires beginning in the 1970s correlates with a change in forest management. Land managers now recognized the importance of natural fires and the mosaic the prevented devastating fires and promoted biodiversity. The “10 AM” rule was dropped and small fires were allowed to burn. The 3 decades of fire suppression simply delayed the inevitable as forests recovered. Catastrophic fires in Yellowstone were the result of small fires that were now allowed to burn.6
The American West also experiences decades of drought driven by natural ocean cycles. Most extreme climate events occur when a La Niña and a cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase coincide, or when an EL Niño and a warm PDO phase coincide. When a La Niña and a cold PDO coincide, the southwestern United States experiences its severest droughts and heightened fire danger. For example, each phase of the PDO persists for about 20-30 years, but cycles of El Niño and La Niña alternate every two to seven years. Thus the coincidence of both a La Niña and the cool phase of the PDO has only occurred about 29% of the time. However since the 1700s that 29% coincided with 70% of all major fires in Rocky Mountain National Park. Colorado’s 2012 wildfire season was no exception.5 Snow fall and the timing of Spring’s arrival is als0 largely driven the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.6 Informing the public about those natural cycles would help them prepare better for the weather it brings, but this episode prefer fear mongering.
“Years of Living Dangerously” justifies yelling fire and promoting climate fear based on Westerling paper that reports all the models show rising CO2 will cause warmer and drier weather in some places (but wetter elsewhere). However those models have failed horribly in replicating natural ocean cycles. Several researchers have shown that the warmth and drought predicted by CO2 driven models may have mistakenly modeled the climate effects of ocean cycles but blamed the results on CO2. One study from climate experts at Los Alamos National Laboratories explored the climate impacts of the PDO and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation on the American Southwest.
They concluded,
“The late twentieth century warming was about equally influenced by increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a positive phase of the AMO [Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation].” “A strong warming and severe drought predicted on the basis of the ensemble mean of the CMIP climate models simulations is supported by our regression analysis only in a very unlikely case of the continually increasing AMO at a rate similar to its 1970–2010 increase”7
The 17 year hiatus global warming is likewise being attributed to those same ocean cycles, and ardent advocates of CO2 climate change like Kevin Trenberth now admit, “The IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.”
“Years of Living Dangerously” takes great liberties with the truth about forest fires. Such a one-sided presentation attempting to incite climate fear borders on license. It is also the second episode in which they discuss lost rainforests that were burned for Palm Oil. Yet despite Harrison Ford’s expose on corrupt government officials, the episode has still failed to mention the European Union alone has provided $11 billion dollars in biofuel subsidies and the bulk of that has subsidized palm oil for the biodiesel industry .
Is such distorted truth liberty or license? I suppose if no one is listening the question is moot.
Literature Cited
1. Keane, et al (2002) Cascading Effects of Fire Exclusion in
Rocky Mountain Ecosystems:A Literature Review. USDA Forest Service RMRS GTR-91.
2. Swetnam, T. W.; Baisan, C. H. 1996. Historical fire regime patterns
in the Southwestern United States since AD 1700
3. Westerling et al (2006) Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity Science, vol. 313
4. Schoennagel, T., (2005) ENSO and PDO Variability Affect Drought‑induced Fire Occurrence in Rocky Mountain Subalpine Forests. Ecological Applications, vol. 15, pp. 2000-2014
5. McCabe, G., et al., (2011) Influences of the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation on the timing of the North American spring. International Journal of Climatology, doi:10.1002/joc.3400
6. Romme (1989) Historical Perspective on the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 Bioscienc, vol. 39
7. Chylek et al (2013) Imprint of the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation and Pacific decadal oscillation on southwestern US climate: past, present, and future Climate Dynamics DOI 10.1007/s00382-013-1933-3
* Jim Steele is a Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Dana Nuccitelli’s lie of omission in the Guardian
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | April 22, 2014
In Bjørn Lomborg’s latest oped: Global Warming’s Upside-Down Narrative Lomborg points out the following:
- The IPCC says unmitigated climate change will cost 0.2-2% GDP/year in 2070.
- The IPCC says climate policies in 2070 will cost more than 3.4% and likely much more than that.
This is why climate mitigation makes no economic sense: the cure costs more than the disease.
But, wait, “Skeptical Science” tank driver Dana Nuccitelli has an op-ed today in the Guardian where he claims the IPCC uses only a select range of measures: the 0.2-2% is expressed in “annual global economic losses”, while the other is expressed “as a slightly slowed global consumption growth”.
He only achieves that by cutting out the actual quote from IPCC report, as you can see in the screen cap helpfully provided by Lomborg in his Twitter feed that compares texts. Note the ellipsis:
Source: [ https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/458628793825890305 ]
And that’s why we label the Dana Nuccitelli/John Cook “skeptical science” enterprise in our blogroll as a category all their own, “Unreliable”.
Nuccitelli eliminated the full text of that section of the third IPCC report so he could bolster his headline claim “preventing global warming is the cheap option”.
Imagine the screaming if any climate skeptic did something like that in an MSM venue.
Meanwhile Lomborg in his op-ed points out what is really worth worrying about, and it isn’t the beloved global warming “crisis” of the Skeptical Science Kids.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
We live in a world where one in six deaths are caused by easily curable infectious diseases; one in eight deaths stem from air pollution, mostly from cooking indoors with dung and twigs; and billions of people live in abject poverty, with no electricity and little food. We ought never to have entertained the notion that the world’s greatest challenge could be to reduce temperature rises in our generation by a fraction of a degree.
Lomborg makes more humanistic sense than Nuccitelli, and he doesn’t have to make lies of omission to get his point across.
Delusions Climactic & Otherwise @ the New York Times
By Donna LaFramboise | April 22, 2014
The New York Times publishes pablum about the IPCC.
The international edition of today’s New York Times is entertaining if you examine pages eight and nine together.
On the right (page nine), there’s an ad for the newspaper, in which it claims to be “the world’s finest journalism” and urges people to purchase a digital subscription that will “ensure” access to “trusted global news coverage and insight.” On the left (page eight) the Times runs a single editorial. Editorials are the official voice of any newspaper.
The sub-headline that accompanies today’s editorial refers to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
In an ominous report, the world’s top scientists say a global energy revolution must begin within 15 years [bold added]
Three paragraphs down, we read that:
The I.P.C.C. is composed of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists… [bold added]
Yes, a newspaper that thinks it’s producing the world’s finest journalism still hasn’t noticed that
- The IPCC provides no proof whatsoever that it is composed of the world’s top scientists. In fact, it declines to make public the CVs of its personnel.
- Certain IPCC lead authors and chapter leaders have historically been graduate students a decade or more away from earning their PhD (see here and here)
- Other IPCC lead authors are poorly qualified individuals from obscure nations, who were selected to give the report an international flavour.
- 60% of the people who helped produce this latest report have never worked with the IPCC before (see the bottom of p. 3 of this PDF). Was there really a 60% turnover rate in the world’s top scientists since the last IPCC report appeared in 2007?
- IPCC personnel have so little power, they aren’t able to alter their chapter title by a single word. In reality, these people are mere cogs in a large, bureaucratic, UN machine.
- Many IPCC personnel are not “scientists” in the way that term is normally understood. They are, instead, economists, geographers, policy wonks, UN employees, and activists.
The New York Times is demonstrably not offering what it claims to be offering: trustworthy news and insight.
Whoever wrote and approved today’s editorial is years out-of-date. There’s no meaty analysis here, just mindless parroting of the IPCC party line.
Times readers deserve better than this.
Holdren Is Wrong – Cold Winters Are Not Getting More Common
By Paul Homewood | Watts Up With That? | April 18, 2014
As WUWT points out, John Holdren is one of many who have tried to link the cold winter in the USA this year to global warming.
In his White House video in January, he had this to say:
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues….
We also know that this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer, on average, because of greenhouse-gas pollution.”
But is there any evidence that extreme cold winters are becoming more common, or, for that matter, more extreme?
First, let’s check the temperature trends for the CONUS in winter.
Clearly, on a national basis, recent winters have not been unusually cold. In the last 10 years, only three winters have been colder than the 1901-2000 mean. Moreover, no winters in recent years have come anywhere near to being as cold as some of the winters in the 1970’s, for instance, or earlier.
But this graph only tells half the story. As it covers the whole country, it could cover up regional extremes. As we know, this winter has seen particularly cold weather in Mid West and East, but warmer conditions out West. The result is that, to some extent, they cancel each other out.
So, is there a way we can isolate the warm from the cold, and see whether cold winters are becoming more extreme in just parts of the country?
There is actually a very simple method, and that is to use NOAA’s own Climate Extremes Index. This provides the percentage of the country which have had extreme temperatures (or precipitation, drought etc) during the year. As both above average and below average temperatures are shown separately, we can look at extreme cold weather on its own.
The graphs below cover the Winter months (Dec to Feb) only, with the first using mean monthly maximum temperatures, and the second minimums. The results seem pretty similar.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/1/12-02
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/2/12-02
It is abundantly clear that much less of the country has been affected by extreme cold this winter, and indeed other recent ones, when compared with the 20thC. There is also no trend towards cold winters becoming more common.
What is also interesting is that there does not seem to be much of a trend towards milder winters taking over. Only the winter of 2011/12 stands out in this respect, and there have been plenty of similar years previously.
There has been nothing unusual or unprecedented about this winter. And, as cold winters have become less frequent in the last couple of decades, there is absolutely no evidence to support Holdren’s claim that “this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer”.
Technical Stuff
NOAA give this definition for the (maximum temperature) index:
The U.S. CEI is the arithmetic average of the following five or six# indicators of the percentage of the conterminous U.S. area:
- The sum of (a) percentage of the United States with maximum temperatures much below normal and (b) percentage of the United States with maximum temperatures much above normal.
And their definition for “much above normal”:
In each case, we define much above (below) normal or extreme conditions as those falling in the upper (lower) tenth percentile of the local, period of record. In any given year, each of the five indicators has an expected value of 20%, in that 10% of all observed values should fall, in the long-term average, in each tenth percentile, and there are two such sets in each indicator
The Climate Extremes Index can be accessed at the link below. It covers temperatures, drought, rainfall and hurricanes, and can used on a seasonal or annual basis. There is also a regional section.
Remember Tamiflu? Big Profits for Roche, but Little Help for Users
By Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | April 11, 2014
Governments spent heavily on Tamiflu starting last decade when public health officials warned of deadly influenzas. But the billion-dollar investment produced only healthy outcomes for the balance sheets of the drug’s manufacturer, Roche.
This conclusion was reached by British researchers who said they could not substantiate claims by Roche and GlaxoSmithKline (which makes a rival flu drug) Relenza, that their products helped people fight off flu effects.
The British government—anticipating the potential death of 750,000 of its citizens in the event of a bird flu outbreak—spent more than $700 million stockpiling 40 million doses of Tamiflu, while the U.S. government forked out $1.3 billion on a massive antiviral reserve that includes the drug. Tamiflu is also listed by the World Health Organization as an “essential medicine.” Yet the researchers found few if any benefits from the two drugs and, in fact, discovered that they produce negative side effects (“psychiatric…renal…and metabolic adverse events”) which were previously dismissed or never acknowledged.
All the money spent by governments around the world on those stockpiles “have been thrown down the drain,” Carl Heneghan, a lead investigator of the study and a professor of evidence-based medicine at Britain’s Oxford University, told Reuters. This is because accurate data about the drugs has long been withheld from government regulators, the medical community and the public.
Five years ago, Tamiflu sales reached nearly $3 billion, in large part because of the H1N1 flu pandemic scare. The Cochrane Collaboration and the British Medical Journal fought for four years to gain access to Roche’s Tamiflu data. Once they succeeded, they conducted a joint analysis.
Roche officials dismissed the researchers’ findings, saying the drug firm “fundamentally disagrees with the overall conclusions” of the study.
“We firmly stand by the quality and integrity of our data, reflected in decisions reached by 100 regulators across the world and subsequent real-world evidence demonstrating that Tamiflu is an effective medicine in the treatment and prevention of influenza,” the company said in a prepared statement.
“Remember, the idea of a drug is that the benefits should exceed the harms,” noted Heneghan. “So if you can’t find any benefits, that accentuates the harms.”
“Why did no-one else demand this level of scrutiny before spending such huge sums on one drug?” Journal editor Fiona Godlee said to Reuters. “The whole story gives an extraordinary picture of the entrenched flaws in the current system of drug regulation and drug evaluation.”
To Learn More:
Researchers, Regulators and Roche row over Stockpiled Drug Tamiflu (by Kate Kelland, Reuters)
Tamiflu: Millions Wasted on Flu Drug, Claims Major Report (by James Gallagher, BBC News)
Neuraminidase Inhibitors for Preventing and Treating Influenza in Healthy Adults and Children (by Tom Jefferson, Mark A. Jones, Peter Doshi, Chris B. Del Mar, Rokuro Hama, Matthew J. Thompson, Elizabeth A. Spencer, Igho Onakpoya, Kamal R. Mahtani, David Nunan, Jeremy Howick, and Carl J. Heneghan; Cochrane Review) (abstract)
Swine Flu Stirred Profits, but Fewer Deaths than Predicted (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Profiting from Swine Flu (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
10 Facts About Fluoride
Attorney Michael Connett summarizes 10 basic facts about fluoride that should be considered in any discussion about whether to fluoridate water. To download the flyer that accompanies this video, visit: http://www.fluoridealert.org/uploads/…. To watch Michael debate two advocates of fluoridation, see: http://www.wpsu.org/conversationslive….
LA Times’ Tony Barboza gets caught fear mongering the IPCC report
Facts that don’t agree with claims
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | April 1, 2014
This sentence…
“One of the panel’s most striking new conclusions is that rising temperatures are already depressing crop yields, including those of corn and wheat.”
… is in this LA Times story by babout the latest IPCC report which has so much gloom and doom in it, one of the lead authors, Dr. Richard Tol, asked his name to be taken off of it for that very reason.
Problem is, the agricultural data doesn’t match the LATimes/IPCC claim, see for yourself:
Source: USDA data at http://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/ plotted by Dr. Roy Spencer.
Not only is the LATimes/IPCC claim about agriculture false for the world, but also the USA:
Source: USDA Data here compiled by Dr. Mark J. Perry at the Carpe Diem blog.
In fact, U.S. Corn Yields Have Increased Six Times Since the 1930s and Are Estimated to Double By 2030 according to Perry.
Note that temperatures in the US Corn belt aren’t rising, but models are, and as we know, the IPCC prefers model output over reality.
Source: USHCN data from NOAA, CMIP5 model data plotted by Dr. Roy Spencer
Why is it that checking such simple facts are left to bloggers and independent thinkers like Roy Spencer, instead of “professional” journalists like ?
Maybe he’s just too lazy to check facts like this? Or, is it belief mixed with incompetence?
How “Extreme Levels” of Roundup in Food Became the Industry Norm
By Thomas Bøhn and Marek Cuhra | Independent Science News | March 24, 2014
Food and feed quality are crucial to human and animal health. Quality can be defined as sufficiency of appropriate minerals, vitamins and fats, etc. but it also includes the absence of toxins, whether man-made or from other sources. Surprisingly, almost no data exist in the scientific literature on herbicide residues in herbicide tolerant genetically modified (GM) plants, even after nearly 20 years on the market.
In research recently published by our laboratory (Bøhn et al. 2014) we collected soybean samples grown under three typical agricultural conditions: organic, GM, and conventional (but non-GM). The GM soybeans were resistant to the herbicide Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate.
We tested these samples for nutrients and other compounds as well as relevant pesticides, including glyphosate and its principal breakdown product, Aminomethylphosponic acid (AMPA). All of the individual samples of GM-soy contained residues of both glyphosate and AMPA, on average 9.0 mg/kg. This amount is greater than is typical for many vitamins. In contrast, no sample from the conventional or the organic soybeans showed residues of these chemicals (Fig. 1).
This demonstrates that Roundup Ready GM-soybeans sprayed during the growing season take up and accumulate glyphosate and AMPA. Further, what has been considered a working hypothesis for herbicide tolerant crops, i.e. that, as resistant weeds have spread:
“there is a theoretical possibility that also the level of residues of the herbicide and its metabolites may have increased” (Kleter et al. 2011) is now shown to be actually happening.
Monsanto (manufacturer of glyphosate) has claimed that residues of glyphosate in GM soy are lower than in conventional soybeans, where glyphosate residues have been measured up to 16-17 mg/kg (Monsanto 1999). These residues, found in non-GM plants, likely must have been due to the practice of spraying before harvest (for desiccation). Another claim of Monsanto’s has been that residue levels of up to 5.6 mg/kg in GM-soy represent “… extreme levels, and far higher than those typically found” (Monsanto 1999).
Figure 1. Residues of glyphosate and AMPA in individual soybean samples (n=31).
For organic and conventional soybeans, glyphosate residues were below the detection limit.
Seven out of the 10 GM-soy samples we tested, however, surpassed this “extreme level” (of glyphosate + AMPA), indicating a trend towards higher residue levels. The increasing use of glyphosate on US Roundup Ready soybeans has been documented (Benbrook 2012). The explanation for this increase is the appearance of glyphosate-tolerant weeds (Shaner et al. 2012) to which farmers are responding with increased doses and more applications.
Maximum residue levels (MRLs) of glyphosate in food and feed
Globally, glyphosate-tolerant GM soy is the number one GM crop plant and glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide, with a global production of 620 000 tons in 2008 (Pollak 2011). The world soybean production in 2011 was 251.5 million metric tons, with the United States (33%), Brazil (29%), Argentina (19%), China (5%) and India (4%) as the main producing countries (American Soybean Association 2013).
In 2011-2012, soybeans were planted on about 30 million hectares in the USA, with Roundup Ready GM soy contributing 93-94 % of the production (USDA 2013). Globally, Roundup Ready GM soybeans contributed to 75 % of the production in 2011 (James 2012).
The legally acceptable level of glyphosate contamination in food and feed, i.e. the maximum residue level (MRL) has been increased by authorities in countries where Roundup-Ready GM crops are produced, or where such commodities are imported. In Brazil, the MRL in soybean was increased from 0.2 mg/kg to 10 mg/kg in 2004: a 50-fold increase, but only for GM-soy. The MRL for glyphosate in soybeans has been increased also in the US and Europe. In Europe, it was raised from 0.1 mg/kg to 20 mg/kg (a 200-fold increase) in 1999, and the same MRL of 20 mg/kg was adopted by the US. In all of these cases, MRL values appear to have been adjusted, not based on new scientific evidence, but pragmatically in response to actual observed increases in the content of residues in glyphosate-tolerant GM soybeans.
Has the toxicity of Roundup been greatly underestimated?
When regulatory agencies assess pesticides for safety they invariably test only the claimed active ingredient.
Nevertheless, these do not necessarily represent realistic conditions since in practice it is the full, formulated herbicide (there are many Roundup formulations) that is used in the field. Thus, it is relevant to consider, not only the active ingredient, in this case glyphosate and its breakdown product AMPA, but also the other compounds present in the herbicide formulation since these enhance toxicity. For example, formulations of glyphosate commonly contain adjuvants and surfactants to stabilize and facilitate penetration into the plant tissue. Polyoxyethylene amine (POEA) and polyethoxylated tallowamine (POE-15) are common ingredients in Roundup formulations and have been shown to contribute significantly to toxicity (Moore et al. 2012).
Our own recent study in the model organism Daphnia magna demonstrated that chronic exposure to glyphosate and a commercial formulation of Roundup resulted in negative effects on several life-history traits, in particular reproductive aberrations like reduced fecundity and increased abortion rate, at environmental concentrations of 0.45-1.35 mg/liter (active ingredient), i.e. below accepted environmental tolerance limits set in the US (0.7 mg/liter) (Cuhra et al. 2013). A reduced body size of juveniles was even observed at an exposure to Roundup at 0.05 mg/liter.
This is in sharp contrast to world-wide regulatory assumptions in general, which we have found to be strongly influenced by early industry studies and in the case of aquatic ecotoxicity assessment, to be based on 1978 and 1981 studies presented by Monsanto claiming that glyphosate is virtually non-toxic in D. magna (McAllister & Forbis, 1978; Forbis & Boudreau, 1981).
Thus a worrisome outlook for health and the environment can be found in the combination of i) the vast increase in use of glyphosate-based herbicides, in particular due to glyphosate-tolerant GM plants, and ii) new findings of higher toxicity of both glyphosate as an active ingredient (Cuhra et al., 2013) and increased toxicity due to contributions from chemical adjuvants in commercial formulations (Annett et al. 2014).
A similar situation can be found for other pesticides. Mesnage et al. (2014) found that 8 out of 9 tested pesticides were more toxic than their declared active principles.
This means that the Accepted Daily Intake (ADI) for humans, i.e. what society finds “admissible” regarding pesticide residues may have been set too high, even before potential combinatorial effects of different chemical exposures are taken into account.
For glyphosate formulations (Roundup), realistic exposure scenarios in the aquatic environment may harm non-target biodiversity from microorganisms, invertebrates, amphibians and fish, (reviewed in Annett et al. 2014) indicating that the environmental consequences of these agrochemicals need to be re-assessed.
Other compositional differences between GM, non-GM, and organic
Figure 2. Discriminant analysis for GM, conventional and organic soy samples based on 35 variables. Data was standardized (mean = 0 and SD = 1).
Our research also demonstrated that different agricultural practices lead to markedly different end products. Data on other measured compositional characteristics could be used to discriminate statistically all individual soy samples (without exception) into their respective agricultural practice background (Fig. 2).
Organic soybeans showed the healthiest nutritional profile with more glucose, fructose, sucrose and maltose, significantly more total protein, zinc and less fiber, compared with both conventional and GM-soy. Organic soybeans contained less total saturated fat and total omega-6 fatty acids than both conventional and GM-soy.
Conclusion
Roundup Ready GM-soy accumulates residues of glyphosate and AMPA, and also differs markedly in nutritional composition compared to soybeans from other agricultural practices. Organic soybean samples also showed a more healthy nutritional profile (e.g. higher in protein and lower in saturated fatty acids) than both industrial conventional and GM soybeans.
Lack of data on pesticide residues in major crop plants is a serious gap of knowledge with potential consequences for human and animal health. How is the public to trust a risk assessment system that has overlooked the most obvious risk factor for herbicide tolerant GM crops, i.e. high residue levels of herbicides, for nearly 20 years? If it has been due to lack of understanding, it would be bad. If it is the result of the producer’s power to influence the risk assessment system, it would be worse.
References
American Soy Association, Soystats. 2013. 16-5-2013.
Annett, R., Habibi, H. R. and Hontela, A. 2014. Impact of glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides on the freshwater environment. – Journal of Applied Toxicology DOI 10.1002/jat.2997.
Aumaitre, L. A. 2002. New feeds from genetically modified plants: substantial equivalence, nutritional equivalence and safety for animals and animal products. – Productions Animales 15: 97-108.
Benbrook, C. M. 2012. Impacts of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use in the U.S. – the first sixteen years. – Environmental Science Europe 24:24.
Binimelis, R., Pengue, W. and Monterroso, I. 2009. “Transgenic treadmill”: Responses to the emergence and spread of glyphosate-resistant johnsongrass in Argentina. – Geoforum 40: 623-633.
Bøhn, T., Cuhra, M., Traavik, T., Sanden, M., Fagan, J. and Primicerio, R. 2014. Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. – Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.
Cuhra, M., Traavik, T. and Bøhn, T. 2013. Clone- and age-dependent toxicity of a glyphosate commercial formulation and its active ingredient in Daphnia magna. – Ecotoxicology 22: 251-262 (open access). DOI 10.1007/s10646-012-1021-1.
Duke, S. O., Rimando, A. M., Pace, P. F., Reddy, K. N. and Smeda, R. J. 2003. Isoflavone, glyphosate, and aminomethylphosphonic acid levels in seeds of glyphosate-treated, glyphosate-resistant soybean. – Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 51: 340-344.
EC . Review report for the active substance glyphosate. 6511/VI/99-final, 1-56. 2002. European Commission. Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General.
Forbis, A.D., Boudreau, P. 1981. Acute toxicity of MON0139 (Lot LURT 12011)(AB-81-074) To Daphnia magna: Static acute bio- assay report no. 27203. Unpublished study document from US EPA library
Harrigan, G. G., Ridley, G., Riordan, S. G., Nemeth, M. A., Sorbet, R., Trujillo, W. A., Breeze, M. L. and Schneider, R. W. 2007. Chemical composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean 40–3-2 grown in Europe remains equivalent with that of conventional soybean (Glycine max L.). – Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 55: 6160-6168.
James, C. Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2012. ISAAA Brief No. 44. 2012. ISAAA: Ithaca, NY.
Kleter, G. A., Unsworth, J. B. and Harris, C. A. 2011. The impact of altered herbicide residues in transgenic herbicide-resistant crops on standard setting for herbicide residues. – Pest Management Science 67: 1193-1210.
McAllister, W., Forbis A. 1978. Acute toxicity of technical glyphosate (AB–78–201) to Daphnia magna. Study reviewed and approved 8–30–85 by EEB/HED
Mesnage, R., Defarge, N., Vendômois, J. S. and Seralini, G. E. 2014. Major pesticides are more toxic to human cells than their declared active principles. – BioMed Research International http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/179691.
Monsanto . Residues in Roundup Ready soya lower than conventional soy. http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/99/june99/220699_residue.html . 1999.
Moore, L. J., Fuentes, L., Rodgers, J. H., Bowerman, W. W., Yarrow, G. K., Chao, W. Y. and Bridges, W. C. 2012. Relative toxicity of the components of the original formulation of Roundup (R) to five North American anurans. – Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 78: 128-133.
Pollak, P. 2011. Fine chemicals: the industry and the business. – Wiley.
Shaner, D. L., Lindenmeyer, R. B. and Ostlie, M. H. 2012. What have the mechanisms of resistance to glyphosate taught us? – Pest Management Science 68: 3-9.
USDA . National Agricultural Statistics Service. 2013. 16-5-2013.
The Authors:
Thomas Bøhn
GenØk – Centre for Biosafety, Tromsø, Norway
Professor of Gene Ecology, Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Marek Cuhra
GenØk – Centre for Biosafety, Tromsø, Norway
PhD student, Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Hide the decline deja vu? Mann’s ‘little white line’ as ‘False Hope’ may actually be false hype
Watts Up With That? | March 24, 2014
Foreword by Anthony Watts
An essay by Monckton of Brenchley follows, but I wanted to bring this graphic from Dr. Mann’s recent Scientific American article to attention first. In the infamous “hide the decline” episode revealed by Climategate surrounding the modern day ending portion of the “hockey stick”, Mann has been accused of using “Mike’s Nature Trick” to hide the decline in modern (proxy) temperatures by adding on the surface record. In this case, the little white line from his SciAm graphic shows how “the pause” is labeled a “faux pause”, (a little play on words) and how the pause is elevated above past surface temperatures.
![earth-will-cross-the-climate-danger-threshold-by-2036_large[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/earth-will-cross-the-climate-danger-threshold-by-2036_large1.jpg)
Looking at the SciAm graphic (see zoom at right), something didn’t seem right, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any citation given for what the temperature dataset used was. And oddly, the graphic shows Mann’s little white line peaking significantly warmer that the 1998 super El Niño, and showing the current temperature equal to 1998, which doesn’t make any sense.
So, over the weekend I asked Willis Eschenbach to use his “graph digitizer” tool (which he has used before) to turn Mann’s little white line into numerical data, and he happily obliged.
Here is the result when Mann’s little white line is compared and matched to two well known surface temperature anomaly datasets:
What is most interesting is that Mann’s “white line” shows a notable difference during the “pause” from HadCRUT4 and GISS LOTI. Why would our modern era of “the pause” be the only place where a significant divergence exists? It’s like “hide the decline” deja vu.
The digitized Mann’s white line data is available here: Manns_white_line_digitized.(.xlsx)
As of this writing, we don’t know what dataset was used to create Mann’s white line of surface temperature anomaly, or the base period used. On the SciAm graphic it simply says “Source: Michael E. Mann” on the lower right.
It isn’t GISS land ocean temperature index (LOTI), that starts in 1880. And it doesn’t appear to be HadCRUT4 either. Maybe it is BEST but not using the data going back to 1750? But that isn’t likely either, since BEST pretty much matches the other datasets, and in Mann’s graphic above, which peaks out at above 1°C, none of those hit higher than 0.7°C. What’s up with that? … continue
Related article
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly
It wasn’t just people, animals and trees that were affected by radiation exposure at Chernobyl, but also the decomposers: insects, microbes, and fungi
By Rachel Nuwer | Smithsonian Magazine | March 14, 2014
Nearly 30 years have passed since the Chernobyl plant exploded and caused an unprecedented nuclear disaster. The effects of that catastrophe, however, are still felt today. Although no people live in the extensive exclusion zones around the epicenter, animals and plants still show signs of radiation poisoning.
Birds around Chernobyl have significantly smaller brains that those living in non-radiation poisoned areas; trees there grow slower; and fewer spiders and insects—including bees, butterflies and grasshoppers—live there. Additionally, game animals such as wild boar caught outside of the exclusion zone—including some bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation.
However, there are even more fundamental issues going on in the environment. According to a new study published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.
The team decided to investigate this question in part because of a peculiar field observation. “We have conducted research in Chernobyl since 1991 and have noticed a significant accumulation of litter over time,” the write. Moreover, trees in the infamous Red Forest—an area where all of the pine trees turned a reddish color and then died shortly after the accident—did not seem to be decaying, even 15 to 20 years after the meltdown.
“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.”
Wondering whether that seeming increase in dead leaves on the forest floor and those petrified-looking pine trees were indicative of something larger, Mousseau and his colleagues decided to run some field tests. When they measured leaf litter in different parts of the exclusion zones, they found that the litter layer itself was two to three times thicker in the “hottest” areas of Chernobyl, where radiation poisoning was most intense. But this wasn’t enough to prove that radiation was responsible for this difference.
To confirm their hunch, they created around 600 small mesh bags and stuffed them each with leaves, collected at an uncontaminated site, from one of four different tree species: oak, maple, birch or pine. They took care to ensure that no insects were in the bags at first, and then lined half of them with women’s pantyhose to keep insects from getting in from the outside, unlike the wider mesh-only versions.
Like a decomposer Easter egg hunt, they then scattered the bags in numerous locations throughout the exclusion zone, all of which experienced varying degrees of radiation contamination (including no contamination at all). They left the bags and waited for nearly a year—normally, an ample amount of time for microbes, fungi and insects to make short work of dead organic material, and the pantyhose-lined bags could help them assess whether insects or microbes were mainly responsible for breaking down the leaves.
The results were telling. In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight. By comparing the mesh with the panty hose-lined bags, they found that insects play a significant role in getting rid of the leaves, but that the microbes and fungi played a much more important role. Because they had so many bags placed in so many different locations, they were able to statistically control for outside factors such as humidity, temperature and forest and soil type to make sure that there wasn’t anything besides radiation levels impacting the leaves’ decomposition.
“The gist of our results was that the radiation inhibited microbial decomposition of the leaf litter on the top layer of the soil,” Mousseau says. This means that nutrients aren’t being efficiently returned to the soil, he adds, which could be one of the causes behind the slower rates of tree growth surrounding Chernobyl.
Other studies have found that the Chernobyl area is at risk of fire, and 27 years’ worth of leaf litter, Mousseau and his colleagues think, would likely make a good fuel source for such a forest fire. This poses a more worrying problem than just environmental destruction: Fires can potentially redistribute radioactive contaminants to places outside of the exclusion zone, Mousseau says. “There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years,” he says.
Unfortunately, there’s no obvious solution for the problem at hand, besides the need to keep a stringent eye on the exclusion zone to try to quickly snuff out potential fires that breaks out. The researchers are also collaborating with teams in Japan, to determine whether or not Fukushima is suffering from a similar microbial dead zone.
Rachel Nuwer writes for Smart News and is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian.com. She is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.
Lewis and Crok: Climate less sensitive to CO2 than models suggest
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | March 5, 2014
Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok have published a new report on climate sensitivity.
The title of the report is “A sensitive matter: How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming.” The report is published by the GWPF. The long version of the report is found [here]; a short version is found [here].
From the press release issued by the GWPF:
A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation shows that the best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are estimating.
The clues for this and the relevant scientific papers are all referred to in the recently published Fifth Assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report – it is only mentioned as a possibility – and is ignored in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
For over thirty years climate scientists have presented a range for climate sensitivity (ECS) that has hardly changed. It was 1.5-4.5°C in 1979 and this range is still the same today in AR5. The new report suggests that the inclusion of recent evidence, reflected in AR5, justifies a lower observationally-based temperature range of 1.25–3.0°C, with a best estimate of 1.75°C, for a doubling of CO2. By contrast, the climate models used for projections in AR5 indicate a range of 2-4.5°C, with an average of 3.2°C.
This is one of the key findings of the new report Oversensitive: how the IPCC hid the good news on global warming, written by independent UK climate scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. Lewis and Crok were both expert reviewers of the IPCC report, and Lewis was an author of two relevant papers cited in it.
In recent years it has become possible to make good empirical estimates of climate sensitivity from observational data such as temperature and ocean heat records. These estimates, published in leading scientific journals, point to climate sensitivity per doubling of CO2 most likely being under 2°C for long-term warming, with a best estimate of only 1.3-1.4°C for warming over a seventy year period.
“The observational evidence strongly suggest that climate models display too much sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations and in almost all cases exaggerate the likely path of global warming,” says Nic Lewis.
These lower, observationally-based estimates for both long-term climate sensitivity and the seventy-year response suggest that considerably less global warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the 21st century than most climate model projections currently imply.
“We estimate that on the IPCC’s second highest emissions scenario warming would still be around the international target of 2°C in 2081-2100,” Lewis says.
I was asked to review this article prior to publication, and then was subsequently asked to write the foreword. The text of my foreword:
The sensitivity of our climate to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide is at the heart of the scientific debate on anthropogenic climate change, and also the public debate on the appropriate policy response to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate sensitivity and estimates of its uncertainty are key inputs into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.
The complexity and nuances of the issue of climate sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide are not easily discerned from reading the Summary for Policy Makers of the assessment reports undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Further, the more detailed discussion of climate sensitivity in the text of the fullWorking Group I reports lacks context or an explanation that is easily understood by anyone not actively reading the published literature.
This report by Nic Lewis andMarcel Crok addresses this gap between the IPCC assessments and the primary scientific literature, providing an overview of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a historical perspective on IPCC’s assessments of climate sensitivity. The report also provides an independent assessment of the different methods for estimating climate sensitivity and a critique of the IPCC AR4 and AR5 assessments of climate sensitivity.
It emphasizes the point that evidence for low climate sensitivity is piling up. I find this report to be a useful contribution to scientific debate on this topic, as well as an important contribution to the public dialogue and debate on the subject of climate change policy.
I agreed to review this report and write this Foreword since I hold both authors of this report in high regard. I have followed with interest Nic Lewis’ emergence as an independent climate scientist and his success in publishing papers in major peer-reviewed journals on the topic of climate sensitivity, and I have endeavored to support and publicize his research. I have interacted with Marcel Crok over the years and appreciate his insightful analyses, most recently as a participant in climatedialogue.org.
The collaboration of these two authors in writing this report has resulted in a technically sound, well-organized and readily comprehensible report on the scientific issues surrounding climate sensitivity and the deliberations of the IPCC on this topic.
While writing this Foreword, I considered the very few options available for publishing a report such as this paper by Lewis and Crok. I am appreciative of the GWPF for publishing and publicizing this report. Public accountability of governmental and intergovernmental climate science and policy analysis is enhanced by independent assessments of their conclusions and arguments.
JC comments: I did think twice about writing a foreword for a GWPF publication. I try to stay away from organizations with political perspectives on global warming. That said, GWPF has done some commendable things, notably pushing for inquiries into the Climategate affair. And there really are very few options for publishing a report like this.
I think it is important to put forward alternative assessments of the key elements of the climate change debate — alternative to reports issued by the IPCC, the UK MetOffice, and the RS/NAS.
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From the Archives
Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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