Aletho News

Settled science: Can everyplace really be warming much faster than everyplace else?

Tom Nelson | July 24, 2010

July 25, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Info commissioner finds saintly CRU crew guilty

By Andrew Orlowski • The Register • 8th July 2010

Climatic Research Unit director Phil Jones was being whisked back to his desk at the University of East Anglia by the University’s Russell enquiry yesterday.

But with exquisite timing, the Information Commissioner’s office chose the same day to confirm that CRU had twice broken the Freedom of Information regulations – once by ignoring the request, and twice by refusing the actual data. The breaches carry a civil penalty.

More is to come, as this was one of four complaints by David Holland under consideration by the ICO, which adjudicates on both FOI requests and EIRs, or Environmental Information Regulations. Other bodies include the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Met Office.

Bodies involved in the IPCC’s procedures are obliged to “ensure that the assessment was undertaken on a comprehensive objective open and transparent basis; … ensure that all written expert and government review comments were retained in an open archive for a period of at least 5 years, and ensure that Review Editors who supervised the assessment submitted a ‘written report’ – by the IPCC’s own rules.

The Met Office initially responded to Holland by claiming that it had destroyed the data – it had kept no working papers and no correspondence. Then the Met changed its excuse. It said it hadn’t destroyed the data – but that its Director of Climate Science John Mitchell OBE (who has since left the Met) was conducting his work as Review Editor for the IPCC in a personal capacity, and so it wouldn’t say what he was doing.

When it emerged that the taxpayer had paid for Mitchell to perform his work for the IPCC (the Met even met his expenses), the excuse for refusal changed once more, claming it wasn’t in the public interest.

Holland tried again, under EIR Regulation 11, hoping for a speedier result than the prevarication with which public bodies meet FOI requests. Under FOI they can stall until they are no longer obliged to disclose the information. CRU refused to provide the reviewers’ comments outright.

The Met stalled, at first refusing to consider the request under EIR rules, then claiming a loophole, regulation 2(1) that “These archiving and contribution procedures, instructions and correspondence are administrative information and not environmental information”

The UEA claimed the same loophole as the Met. In yesterday’s ruling, the ICO reminded UEA that the 2(1) could not be interpreted so narrowly, and that public bodies had to interpret it as widely as possible. His notes are here.

The damning archive of emails, source code and station data was called FOIA.ZIP, and is believed to have been to have been compiled by an insider.

In January, the ICO said it had prima facie evidence that CRU academics had broken the law – repeatedly promising to evade requests and asking colleagues to remove data that Holland had requested. The evasion began in 2005, long before the trickle of polite requests became a deluge last year. In one case, Jones even requested Briffa to delete data the very day after one of Holland’s requests.

Remarkably, the Russell inquiry did not ask Jones whether he deleted any email. Russell’s report cites two of the most damning deletion requests, then declares: “There seems clear incitement to delete emails, although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a request already made.”

One of the inquiry team, Lancet editor Richard Horton declared in a newspaper article that this would be the “final inquiry”. He’s either being hasty, or optimistic. MP Graham Stringer described the Russell inquiry as inadequate and called for Parliament to re-open an investigation.

®

July 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Bad News For Holland

By Steve Goddard | July 12, 2010

The World Cup was bad news for Holland, but that isn’t what I am talking about.

The world’s preeminent climatologist Dr. James Hansen (who is well known for quiet understatement) has forecast that Holland will drown in the next century. Looks like East Anglia is doomed too. Is that a bad thing?

If that isn’t bad enough, NASA’s Cape Canaveral, Key West, and Miami are toast!

Dr. Hansen says :

I find it almost inconceivable that “business as usual” climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century.

According to the University of Colorado, sea level has been rising at 3.2 mm/yr since 1994, and has generally been slowing down over the last five years (except for the El Niño spike.)

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_sm.jpg

That means it will only take 312 years to rise one metre. Which is not far off from what it has been doing for the last century.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/thumb/0/0f/Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png/700px-Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png

It is imperative that we make plans to protect Holland. First step is to hire Hansen to put his finger in the dike. Second step is to teach their strikers how to kick the ball somewhere besides straight to the goalkeeper.

At least they didn’t lose a penalty shootout this year.

July 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Amazongate: At last we reach the source

By Christopher Booker | The Telegraph | July 10, 2010

Last week, after six months of evasions, obfuscation, denials and retractions, a story which has preoccupied this column on and off since January came to a startling conclusion. It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

The ramifications of this discovery stretch in many directions. First, it seems to show that the IPCC – whose reports governments rely on to justify presenting mankind with the largest bill in history – has been in serious breach of its own rules.

Second, it raises hefty question marks over the credibility of the world’s richest and most powerful environmental pressure group, the WWF, credited by the IPCC as the source of its unsupported claim.

And third, it focuses attention once more on a bizarre scheme, backed by the UN and promoted by the World Bank, whereby the WWF has been hoping to share in profits estimated at $60 billion, paid for by firms all over the developed world.

“Amazongate”, it may be recalled, was one of the rash of scandals which rocked the authority of the IPCC last winter, when it was revealed that many of the more alarmist statements in its 2007 report originated not from peer-reviewed science but from papers written by environmental pressure groups. One which aroused particular controversy was a warning that climate change was putting at risk up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. Chapter 13 of the IPCC’s Working Group II report on “climate impacts” specifically claimed that “up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. It went on to say that this would cause such chaos in local climate systems that the forest could rapidly revert to savannah.

The only source cited for this claim was the Global Review of Forest Fires, a paper written for WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2000, the lead author of which was an environmental activist and freelance journalist. This in turn appeared to cite a paper published in 1999 by a team led by Dr Daniel Nepstad, “senior scientist” with another advocacy group closely linked to the WWF, the Woods Hole Research Center. However, Nepstad’s paper was primarily concerned not with climate change but with the impact of logging and fires.

When this created a storm last January, the WWF quickly issued a “clarification”, stating that its own paper “does not say that 40 per cent of the Amazon forest is at risk from climate change”. But it went on to say that the real source of the claim quoted by the IPCC was a document, Fire in the Amazon, published by the “respected Instituto de Pesquiza Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM)”. Headed by Nepstad, IPAM is a Brazilian advocacy group, also closely linked with the Woods Hole Research Center.

The document cited by the WWF, which it later described, after a full internal inquiry, as a “report”, proved remarkably difficult to track down. Since then, both the WWF and Dr Nepstad have cited other papers in support of their claim – but none of these provided any support for the specific claim about the impact of climate change made by the IPCC.

Only now, after I was able to confront them with evidence from an internet archive, has the WWF finally admitted the precise origin of the IPCC’s much-quoted claim. Fire in the Amazon, it turns out, was not a “report” or a scientific paper but, as the WWF now acknowledges, a “text published by IPAM… on its website in 1999”. It was merely a brief, anonymous and unreferenced note on the exposure of the forest to fire risks, posted in February 1999 and taken down four years later. Here, at last, is the sole source for the statement later published by the IPCC.

The original read: “Probably 30-40 per cent of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon are sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall.” This was hyped up in the final drafting of the IPCC report, to claim that “up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. “Brazilian Amazon” – only around half the total rainforest area – was changed to include the entire forest. The word “sensitive” was changed to “react drastically”. And the original IPAM note had made no mention at all of climate change.

To begin with, this would seem to justify a formal complaint to the IPCC that it was acting in breach of its own rules. Annex 2 of its rules of procedure lays down that non-peer-reviewed material should only be cited when it has been subjected to rigorous critical appraisal and that “each chapter team should review the quality and validity of each source before including results from the source into an IPCC report”.

Last week I put it to the IPCC that it should at least acknowledge this blatant breach of its rules and withdraw the passage, as it did last winter when it was revealed that it had no scientific basis for claiming that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. To date I have had no reply.

Neither WWF nor Woods Hole come well out of this story. In seeking to justify their part in the IPCC’s statement, they have cited other studies which they claim support it – but neither, until now, has been honest enough to admit that it was based on an unsubstantiated website claim.

This curious episode may also point to another reason why WWF and Woods Hole have been so active in recent years to promote concern over the danger of global warming for the Amazon rainforest. As I revealed here on March 20, they have been closely allied in support of a scheme known as REDD (Reduction in Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Tropical Forests). Its aim is to turn the CO2 in forest trees into “carbon credits”, saleable on the world market to allow firms to continue emitting CO2. Backed by $80 million from the World Bank, WWF, Woods Hole and IPAM are partners in a consortium, supported by the Brazilian government, to protect and manage a vast area of forest in the Tumucumaque region, in return for which they would have the right to sell its carbon credits. In 2007 Dr Nepstad published a formula which would allow the carbon contained in the entire forest to be valued at $60 billion.

Although the REDD scheme was approved in principle at December’s UN Copenhagen conference, two serious snags remain. First, it has yet to be approved in detail (although they still hope to achieve this in Cancun later this year). Second, the US Senate still hasn’t passed its cap and trade bill, which would open up a lucrative new market for anyone involved in carbon trading, such as those with a stake in REDD.

Finally, we may recall, another newspaper recently published a prominent “correction” to its earlier report on Amazongate – accepting that “the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence” and that this was “based on research by the respected IPAM which did relate to the impact of climate change”. Since neither of these statements seems to be true, perhaps we can look forward to a retraction of the retraction?

Equally unhappy may be all those global warming enthusiasts who took this climbdown as licence to crow shamelessly over those of us who, last January, helped to expose Amazongate as a major IPCC system failure. The IPCC, they chorused, had been totally vindicated, the climate change sceptics had been utterly routed. Today, I fear, it is they who have been put to rout and we who have been vindicated.

July 11, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Climategate report: CRU enquiry

By Andrew Orlowski • The Register • 7th July 2010

The University of East Anglia’s enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct – but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.

The CRU played an important role in writing the UN’s IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the team’s work.

Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics’ own making, stating that they were “united in defence against criticism”. Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to “redefine” the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their “rigour” and “honesty” were beyond question.

Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. The subjects of their criticism were not invited, not were climate scientists critical of their behaviour. For example, in their capacity as IPCC gatekeepers, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a “consistence of view” with earlier work. The earlier work here was in fact produced the academics under scrutiny. So, having compared the CRU academics’ work against their previous work, and found it to be consistent, they are cleared of malpractice.

Despite the gentlemanly and clubbable tone, the report nevertheless has deep systemic criticism of the institution and the team’s processes. UEA “fell badly short of its scientific and public obligations”, according to one review panel member, Lancet editor Richard Horton.

It criticises the team’s decision to curtail a temperature reconstruction at 1960, and splice on an instrumental temperature record, without explanation, noting:

“The figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data.”

There’s a selective approach to criticism of scientific techniques – officially, Muir Russell says it doesn’t examine the validity of scientific arguments. But as you can see, in places, it does. On the issue of the Yamal reconstruction, CRU is cleared but the related issues of basing the reconstruction on a limited sample of proxies, and using techniques which exaggerate and validate outliers (basically, one tree) is not addressed.

FOIA

On compliance with Freedom of Information requests, the inquiry found the CRU team evasive, and “found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer”. They also found “a clear incitement to delete e-mails, although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a request already made”. (Jones had told a US academic that “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and requesting deletions from other staff.)

The defensiveness “set the stage”, says Russell, for the barrage of FOIA requests last year, but “clear and early action would likely have prevented much subsequent grief”. It adds that “CRU helped create the conditions for this campaign by being unhelpful in its earlier responses”.

The institution itself had failed to anticipate the new FOIA regime, and let the academics run amok. Strangely it calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence.

On information handling, the report “highlighted significant problems in the areas of: imbalance of authority; lack of effective challenge at appeal; over dependence on single individuals; inadequate escalation processes and limited strategic oversight.”

The panel avoided examining the scientific work of the CRU Team – as have the two other reviews of the leaked archive by Lord Oxburgh, and the Commons Select Committee on science. If the academics had used bats’ wings or tea leaves to create temperature reconstructions, that wasn’t a matter for any of the panels to judge. And this is undoubtedly a shortcoming. The voter is entitled to see the evidence and understand the arguments that may answer the question: “Is this climate thing anything to worry about?”

It’s worth taking a step back from the details of Climategate to understand the background to the enquiries. By understanding what the CRU academics do, we can judge how important the criticism of them may be – or not.

What did the CRU crew do?

The Climatic Research Unit is one part of the picture, an important one, but not at the heart of climate theory. They’re not physicists, and they don’t do the physics upon which competing explanations of how the climate works stand or fall, once measured against observation. So in that sense, ‘Climategate’ isn’t a ‘Climategate’ – it isn’t a Scopes Trial of the global warming theory.

But CRU does two important things that shape our understanding of the present and the past. CRU is one of a small number of bodies that calculates global temperature readings (of where we are today), and is probably the pre-eminent body that performs historical temperature reconstructions, quite literally writing or re-writing history. And its importance is magnified since the leading academics are also lead authors of the UN’s IPCC reports – the vast volumes policy makers like to cite as their scientific justification, but rarely read.

In the absence of a strong physics story, this temperature work became hotly contested. The biggest bone of contention is whether modern, post-1850 warming is anomalous. If it is, then the likelihood that we were in strange and uncharted territory is much greater. If it isn’t, then consequently, the need for “urgent political action” – involving sweeping changes to industrial policy and social policy – became weaker.

The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1990 the historical temperature record looked like this.

Lamb’s temperature graph, featured in the first IPCC report in 1990

By 2001, it looked like this.

Without the error bars (grey), the Medieval Warm Period disappears Source: IPCC TAR 2001

What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.

Unfortunately, none of the three ‘independent’ reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn’t, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away. But it takes the issue back onto the blackboard, back into realms of the potential threats. It certainly removes much of the impetus for a sweeping and urgent political program of mitigation.

Yet in the academics’ own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.

One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote that:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter…

“For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn’t statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record – such as 1860 to 1880.

The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don’t dispute there’s an effect, but maintain that once it’s worked itself out, the effect is small.

Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various ‘fingerprints’ which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This “missing heat” has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” adding that “we can’t definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That’s a travesty!”

For Trenberth, if we had better instruments, we’d find the heat. For skeptics, the heat might not be there.

By the mid-2000s the issue had become so politicised the academics were acting like a “priesthood”, in the words of environmental writer Fred Pearce, no friend of the skeptics. As Jones wrote in an email: “Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them.”

In a sense the CRU team are carrying the can for the physicists’ failure to do the science. ®

July 8, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Waxman Malarkey 4: Impact Zone Ireland

July 1, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach

In part 4 of this series, I take a look at the Waxman Markey claims about the Emerald Isle, Impact Zone Ireland. My previous analyses of the same site were Waxman Malarkey: Impact Zone US Northeast, Australia, and Alaska.

Having run short of other scares, the W/M folks want to convince us that Ireland is facing a simultaneous drought and flood … it’s the alarmist’s dream, the universal disaster:

Figure 1. Our future according to Waxman-Markey

How does that work?

Here’s their claim:

THE MISTY ISLAND DRIES OUT

Irish citizens have access to 5 times as much fresh water as the average European. High measures of annual rainfall and low evaporation rates have left a legacy of short coastal streams on peat covered hills and a maze of bogs and lakes along flood-prone inland rivers. However, this legacy may be broken as climate change could yield too much water in some places at some times and too little of it in other places at the same time. Scientists predict that by 2050 winter rainfall will increase by 12 percent and summer rainfall will decline by the same percentage.

…

Most of the current primary crops in Ireland are already showing evidence of decline. The potato in particular is highly dependant on adequate water supply so it may cease being a commercially viable crop. It is difficult to comprehend that the potato, a part of the landscape so intertwined in Ireland’s culture and history, may not feature strongly in its future.

With hotter, drier summers reducing the summer water supply in inland areas, water accessibility, which currently isn’t necessary for the majority of Irish farming, may necessitate the development of new irrigation systems, which will compete with industrial and residential water demands.

Let me take these claims one at a time. First:

Irish citizens have access to 5 times as much fresh water as the average European.

The citation to this is a site called “Irish Climate”. I do not find any support for the “5 times as much fresh water” claim there … or anywhere. But then “Irish Climate” is a strange site, chock full of unverified claims and alarmist scenarios. In addition, their advertising scheme is to drop ads for things like “Online Slots” into the text at random. I was particularly taken with this one:

So yeah, too bad that things could maybe kinda change in Ireland…it’s not like in Africa, where they had it sooooo good until global warming and then BAM! Online Slots! Suddenly people were poor and starving and sick and illiterate and slaving under corrupt and brutal gangs posing as governments and religions. All since, like, 2006 or so, when the media and corporate and political world started using hip words like ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ to prove that Things Were Being Done.

I never knew online slot machines could cause so much damage. (I disabled the link in that quotation from the site, to prevent further child deaths). But I digress …

I find no scientific support for the “5 times” claim. Actually, I was surprised when I looked into the famous Irish rain to find that the island only gets about about 1.1 metres (46″) of rain per year. So are they saying that Europeans are only getting a fifth of that (230 mm, or 9″) of rain per year? No way. So what do they mean? The world wonders.

In any case, my investigation of the Irish rain leads me to their second claim, that:

However, this legacy may be broken as climate change could yield too much water in some places at some times and too little of it in other places at the same time. Scientists predict that by 2050 winter rainfall will increase by 12 percent and summer rainfall will decline by the same percentage.

“Scientists predict”? I doubt it. Ireland is a postage stamp sized country, there’s no climate model in the world that claims accuracy at that small a scale. And climate models do very poorly at predicting rainfall in any case. So let’s look at some data. Figure 2 shows two different rainfall datasets, once again from the marvelous KNMI site.

Figure 2. Historical Irish rainfall for summer (March-August) and winter (September-February) for the area bounded by 50°-55°N, 5°-10°W.

As you can see, there is no trend in Irish rainfall, either in the summer or the winter. So once again their claims are nothing but alarmists crying wolf.

Next, let’s look at their claim that:

Most of the current primary crops in Ireland are already showing evidence of decline. The potato in particular is highly dependant on adequate water supply so it may cease being a commercially viable crop. It is difficult to comprehend that the potato, a part of the landscape so intertwined in Ireland’s culture and history, may not feature strongly in its future.

The site for investigating claims like this one is marvelous UN FAOSTAT site.  It contains every agricultural statistic imaginable. It shows that 90% of Ireland’s crop production (by tonnage) is in five crops – barley, oats, wheat, potatoes, and sugar beets. Here is the production of those crops since 1961, the start of the FAO database:

Figure 3. Production of the five main Irish crops. The sugar beet data ends in 2005, with the other datasets going to 2008.

So is potato production dropping as they claim? Most definitely … but not because of any change in the rainfall. It has been dropping since the start of the record. Why? Because farmers plant what they can make the most money on for the least effort and risk. Farmers aren’t fools.

Note also that the total production of the five main crops has not changed in half a century. This shows that, rather than Irish production decreasing because of any change in climate, all that is happening is the farmers are shifting from one crop to another.

There is another way to see if the changes in food production are climate related. This is to look at the yields of the crops. “Yield” is the amount of the foodstuff which is produced per hectare. Figure 4 shows the change in yields over a half century:

Figure 4. Crop yields for the main Irish crops

If changes in the climate were affecting the crops, we would see a reduction in the yields. Instead of seeing that, we see that the yield of every one of the crops has been increasing over the period. So whatever has been convincing the Irish farmers to change their mix of crops, it hasn’t been the climate.

Finally, further down on the page, the Waxman Markey site makes the following claim:

The Irish landscape faces many pressures from global warming that will result in visual changes to vegetation and land use. Losses of habitat vital to many species of flora and fauna and the stability of the landscape itself will change due to greater weather extremes.   Arable land in particular regions of the country will continue to grow fields of wheat, barley, and corn as climate changes. In other regions, however, with the emergence of warmer and dryer summers, brown fields of grass during the summer months will become much more common.

The curlew, a beloved Irish bird known for its distinct cry, is endangered by climate change.

But even a rabid AGW carbon control site like the Conservation Volunteers of Northern Ireland doesn’t believe that. They say (emphasis mine):

Threats to the Curlew

There has been a rapid decline in the population of breeding curlew in Northern Ireland over the last 25 years. The most recent survey in 1999 suggested that breeding pairs have declined by 58% since 1988. This rapid decline has been reflected in other parts of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The decline of the curlew is linked to the loss of their wetland habitat mainly through more intense agricultural practices, drainage of wetland areas and overgrazing by livestock. It is thought that curlews are now more vulnerable to predation and this is having a further impact on their population. As the birds nest on the ground, they are vulnerable to recent increases in predators such as foxes and crows. The poor survival rate of young birds is known to be a key factor in the decline of curlew.

In Northern Ireland, the curlew is a legitimate quarry species during the open season, although it is thought that the numbers shot are very small. It is fully protected elsewhere in the UK.

Summary: The claimed future changes in Irish rainfall have no scientific validity. The changes in potato production are unconnected to the climate. Agricultural production is not declining. The drop in numbers of the curlew is due to drainage of wetlands. And once again, the Waxman site contains nothing but malarkey.

July 3, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Waxman Malarkey 3: Impact Zone Alaska

June 30, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach

Once again, I return to that endless font of misinformation, the Waxman Markey website. In this case, I look at their claims about Alaska. This one will be short and sweet. Their claim is that Alaska is roasting, as in the picture below:

Figure 1. The dessert known as “flaming baked Alaska”. Ice cream covered with meringue, doused with brandy, and set on fire. Sweet.

The Waxman Markey website page on Alaska  says:

Over the past 50 years, Alaska has warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, much more than anywhere in the lower 48 states.  This dramatic temperature change is causing the landscape of Alaska to change faster than anywhere else in the United States, threatening infrastructure, wildlife, and Native Alaskan culture.

I fear that these numbers must be from the well-known Government Misinformation Agency.

Figure 2 shows the real numbers:

Figure 2. Alaskan temperatures, as the average of all first-order stations in the state.

There are a few things we can see here. First, Fig. 1 clearly shows the dependence of Alaska temperatures on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is a long-term shift in Pacific sea surface temperatures. The PDO has a warm phase and a cool phase, as shown in Figure 3. It shifts from one phase to the other every thirty years or so.

Figure 3. Cool (positive) and warm (negative) phases of the PDO. IMAGE SOURCE

The PDO shifted to the cool phase in the late 1940s. It went back to the warm phase in 1976-77. And recently, it has gone back to the cool phase. This is clearly visible in the Alaska temperatures. As much as Waxman Markey wants to blame the shift in Alaskan temperatures on “global warming”, the science says otherwise. The changes are due to the shifts in the PDO.

Second, their claim that Alaska has “warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit” is not true. The largest trend to 2009 in the Alaska temperatures is 1954-2009, which is 3.24 degrees.

I also note that they are using a very different period from the one they used in their claims about the US Northeast, where they used the trend from “the 1970′s”. Obviously, they are picking their time period to exaggerate their claims …

The main point here is that because the PDO gives Alaska warm periods and cool periods, it is meaningless to use any trend starting from a cool period and ending in a warm period, or vice versa. Yes, you can get a positive trend from anywhere on the left half of the graph to anywhere on the right side of the graph … but that doesn’t tell us anything about what’s happening.

Short and sweet.

July 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Waxman-Malarkey: Impact Zone US Northeast

By Willis Eschenbach | June 29, 2010

In the US House of Representatives, there is something curiously yclept the “Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming” despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming. They have a very professionally done website, filled with some of the most outrageous misrepresentations imaginable. It is designed to promote the “Waxman-Markey” cap and trade carbon tax bill by means of the historically tried and tested “Big Lie” method, viz:

All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

I’m going to take the website’s misrepresentations one at a time, as time permits. The first one is from a page entitled “Impact Zone – U.S. New England“, which contains this lovely photograph designed to tug at the heartstrings:

Figure 1. Photo of maple trees in New England, professionally chosen for maximum emotional impact.

The accompanying text says (emphasis mine):

Global Warming in New England: Slushier Slopes and Faded Foliage

Life and economic activity across New England is marked by the seasons – maple sugaring in the spring, trips to the beach in the summer, the riot of color of the fall foliage, and the swoosh of skis and skates in the winter. This familiar cycle is already changing in noticeable ways.

Changing seasons

Since the 1970′s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues, by 2070 summers in Boston will feel like those of South Carolina today. By the end of the century, temperatures could rise up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the region. Cities across New England, which historically experience only one or two days per year above 100 degrees each summer, could average 20 such days per summer, while more southern cities such as Hartford could average nearly 30 days.

The character of the seasons will change significantly. Spring could arrive three weeks earlier, with summer lengthening by about three weeks, autumn becoming warmer and drier, and winter becoming shorter and milder.

So what’s wrong with that?

Well, once we note the conjectures (marked by the weasel words in bold), we see that most of it is nothing but unfounded, un-cited alarmist claims about imaginary future calamities. They have presented only one claim of fact – that winter temperatures in the Northeast Region have risen by more than 4°F.

Now, the USHCN has the data for all of the states, as well as by region. The Northeast Region is the data that starts with “101″ in the first column. Figure 2 shows the temperature record for the four seasons, as well as the annual average temperature, for the Northeast Region:

Figure 2. Annual and seasonal temperatures, US Northeast Region. Photo shows winter surf in New England. PHOTO SOURCE.

As you can see, there has not been much of a change over the last 115 years in any of the seasons. The trend for all of the datasets is not significantly different from zero (winter p=0.06, spring p=0.15, summer p=0.34, fall p=0.68, annual p=0.06).

And more to the point, the winter trend over the last 40 years (1970-2009) is only 2.7°F, not the “more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit” claimed by their website. Such a swing is not surprising in a dataset such as the winter temperatures, which shows a 10 °F swing in one year, from 2001 to 2002.

But wait … there’s more. Because of the short length (40 years) and high variability of the 1970-2009 winter temperatures, the 1970-2009 trend is not significantly different from zero either (p = 0.12, a ways from significant).

SUMMARY: Their web page contains two misrepresentations of fact about US Northeast winters, two implied misrepresentations, and a big lie:

Misrepresentation of fact 1: the 1970-2009 winter temperatures have not “risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit”, they have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no rise of more than 4 °F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.

Misrepresentation of fact 2: the 1970-2009 winter trend is not statistically significant, so we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no trend at all, much less a claimed 4 °F trend.

Implied misrepresentation 1: The US Northeast winters are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the winter record.

Implied misrepresentation 2: The seasonal temperatures in the US Northeast are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the overall record for any season.

THE BIG LIE: When you look at the full record for the US Northeast, there is no statistically significant trend anywhere. Neither spring, summer, winter, fall, nor the full annual average temperatures have any statistically significant trend for the period of the study, 1895-2009. And remember, this is measured by ground stations that contain spurious UHI warming, and there still is no warming trend.

The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.

I will examine more of the malarkey from their web site as time permits, although the statements are so obviously untrue that it’s hardly sporting. It’s like shooting fish, not in a barrel, but in a bucket …

See also:

Waxman Malarkey 2: Impact Zone Australia

July 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment