Recipe for a climate scare story

26 May, 2010 by

Is the IPCC a corrupt political alarmist machine? Do polar bears shit in the Arctic?

OK folks, hope you’re all ready to put on your chef’s hats and venture to the kitchen to concoct a climate scare story. Firstly, we must have the right ingredients:

  • cuddly furry creature (in this case, a polar bear will do nicely)
  • a large serving of climate change hysteria
  • a tipping point or two (to taste)
  • a half-baked computer model
  • generous helping of hyperbole

Mix them all together, et voilà! Now feed to a desperate mainstream media organisation (the BBC) which will swallow anything.

Climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears, a new study has concluded.

The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival.

Based on what is known of polar bear physiology, behaviour and ecology, it predicts pregnancy rates will fall and fewer bears will survive fasting during longer ice-free seasons.

These changes will happen suddenly as bears pass a ‘tipping point’. [Do not pass Go, do not collect $200]

…

Dr [Peter] Molnar, Professor Andrew Derocher and colleagues from the University of Alberta and York University, Toronto focused on the physiology, behaviour and ecology of polar bears, and how these might change as temperatures increase.

“We developed a model for the mating ecology of polar bears. The model estimates how many females in a population will be able to find a mate during the mating season, and thus get impregnated.”

…

“In both cases, the expected changes in reproduction and survival were non-linear,” explains Dr Molnar.

“That is, as the climate warms, we may not see any substantial effect on polar bear reproduction and survival for a while, up until some threshold is passed, at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly.”

<sarc> I wonder if these computer models are as good as the IPCC’s climate models? </sarc>

Read the rest here, although to be honest, I really wouldn’t bother. (h/t WUWT)

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"Global warming" makes Everest harder to climb

26 May, 2010 by

So hard even a 13-year-old can do it

Note how, that without a pause for breath, the media return to the term “global warming” when it suits? Even though global warming virtually stopped in 2001? But they need to make the link between “warming” and melting ice for this story:

Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to a Nepalese Sherpa who has conquered the world’s highest summit 20 times.

Rising temperatures have melted much of the ice on the steep trail to the summit and climbers are struggling to get traction on the exposed rock surface, according to the 49-year-old Sherpa, known only as Apa.

The melting ice has also exposed deep crevasses which climbers could fall into, and experts have warned that people scaling the mountain risk being swept away by “outburst floods” from rising volumes of glacial meltwater.

Could this possibly be the same Apa who, just four days ago, dedicated his climb with 13 year old American Jordan Romero to the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, a fact not even mentioned in the Telegraph report? Obviously an impartial assessment, then. Add it to the warmlist.

Read it here.

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Government climate adviser compares sceptics to "flat-earthers"

25 May, 2010 by

Censorship the next step?

See? We literally haven’t moved on one inch in this debate. Will Steffen, alarmist-in-chief to the Rudd government, wails that the climate debate is “infantile” – and his comments then perfectly make his point for him. Flat Earth Alert:

Speaking at a Melbourne summit on the green economy, Professor Will Steffen criticised the media for treating climate change science as a political issue in which two sides should be given a voice. [That’s the obvious next step of course – censorship of dissenting views – and to seriously think that the sceptics currently get a fair hearing in the MSM? Laughable]

While there were uncertainties about the pace and impact of change, he said, the core of climate science – that the world was warming and the primary cause since the middle of the last century had been industrial greenhouse gas emissions – should be accepted with the same confidence as the laws of gravity and relativity.

“Right now, this almost infantile debate about whether ‘is it real or isn’t it real?’, it’s like saying, ‘Is the Earth round or is it flat?’ [Climate change] is a hugely important question and yet we are not having a rational discourse in the media in Australia on this question. That is my biggest frustration.” He called on the media to focus on areas where there was not a consensus, including the link between climate change and the south-east Australian drought and how rapidly sea levels would rise. [Yet more calls for manipulation of the media to his own agenda]

This is the kind of crap that climate scientists are reduced to? Setting up pathetic straw men to then blow them over? We all agree on the basic science, that CO2 warms the atmosphere. What we disagree on is the complex science, like feedbacks and how much of the current warming is natural (which the IPCC doesn’t even consider), which neither you, nor your alarmist friends, nor your computer models have any clue about.

And to compare climate science to gravity or relativity or whether the earth is round or flat? I mean, really, you sure are scraping the barrel. Sorry, but the desperation is palpable.

Read it here.

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2010 could be "hottest year on record"

24 May, 2010 by

Throw some more snags on the barbie, mate

So screams the headline in The Times, conveniently forgetting to mention that “on record” means since about 1880, but “hottest year since 1880” doesn’t sound anywhere near as scary. But anyway, it’s a great opportunity to wheel out über-alarmist James Hansen:

CLIMATE scientists have warned that 2010 could turn out to be the warmest year in recorded history [since 1880].

They have collated global surface temperature measurements showing that the world has experienced near-record highs between January and April.

Researchers working independently at the Met Office and Nasa are soon to publish data that reveal the trend is likely to continue for the rest of the year. [Hmm, that’s odd, given that El Niño is fading fast, we’re heading towards La Niña conditions, and sea surface temperatures are heading south rapidly, but if the models say that then it must be true, surely?]

James Hansen [round of applause please], director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), a world centre for climate monitoring, said: “Global temperatures, averaged over the past 12 months, were the warmest for 130 years. [Big freaking deal]

“December to February was also the second-warmest of any such period [since 1880].”

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “It was a cold winter in Europe but, globally, January to March was one of the seven warmest starts to the year on record [since 1880].

“This year has more than a 50% chance of being the warmest on record [since 1880].”

None of this proves anything about a link to man-made emissions. The planet is recovering from the Little Ice Age, so is it any wonder that this decade is warmer than last? And there’s been a strong El Niño, so is it any wonder that the start of this year is warmer than the end of last? Not really. At least there’s a bit of sanity at the end:

John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was cautious about predicting record temperatures for 2010, pointing out that the global datasets for temperature had flaws that could lead to rises being overstated [that’s a polite way of saying “they’re fudged” – Ed]. He said: “Be wary of climate forecasts — Mother Nature always seems to have a trick up her sleeve.”

Yeah, remember her, James Hansen? Mother Nature?

Read it here.

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Transperth advert calls CO2 "poisonous"

23 May, 2010 by

This is the level or ignorance we have reached, where Transperth, the government department in Western Australia responsible for public transport, broadcasts a television advert that refers to “poisonous CO2”. In the few hundred parts per million it is in the atmosphere, it is completely harmless, and (cue junior school biology lesson) is essential for life on earth. But hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of a scary story.

Idiotic.

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UN: Biodiversity crisis worse than climate change

23 May, 2010 by

Hysteria Co., Inc.

As I predicted here, the UN can see what it thought was its free ticket to global government (climate change) disappearing before its very eyes, so it is now on the lookout for another cause through which to regulate, tax and generally interfere in the lives of ordinary people – and here it is:

The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.

The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN’s biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

Read it here.

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ABC: sea temperature alarmism

21 May, 2010 by

Nothing alarmist here

They can bore us with as much evidence of warming as they like – the point is, it still doesn’t make the link to human emissions. But Radio Australia hits pay dirt with John Lyman, an interviewee who gives them all the alarmism they need in a piece about sea temperatures:

JOHN LYMAN: We can see with that uncertainty that there has definitely been significant warming, that warming as a signal is six times larger than the uncertainty we measured.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: John Lyman says oceanic warming is in the order of 0.16 of a degree Celsius. He says that might not sound like much but it’s actually very significant.

JOHN LYMAN: Five-hundred 100-watt light bulbs per person on earth burning continuously – that would be the trend we’ve seen over the last 16 years just being sucked up by the ocean.

But I like to think of it in units of bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and that would be over about 16 years two billion of those bombs. So it’s a heroic job the ocean does sucking up that signal at the top of the atmosphere. (source)

Gee, sounds scary. But now for some sanity from Dr Roy Spencer:

Being a believer in natural, internal cycles in the climate system, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that global-average SSTs will plunge over the next couple of months. Based upon past experience, it will take a month or two for our (UAH) tropospheric temperatures to then follow suit.

SSTs heading south as El Nino fades

Read it here.

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Garbage squared: Global warming to "kill a fifth of all lizards"

14 May, 2010 by

It is an ex-lizard, it has ceased to be

This is the kind of nonsense you get when you pile one computer model on top of another (hopeless) computer model. So our diligent researchers took the outputs from the IPCC’s models (which drastically overstate the climate sensitivity and hence response to CO2) which predict catastrophic warming, and plugged those numbers into an extinction model for lizards. So we have Garbage In, followed by Garbage Out, which becomes the next Garbage In and finally Garbage Out again. In other words, we have “garbage squared”.

Global warming could kill off as many as a fifth of the world’s lizards by 2080, with potentially devastating consequences for ecosystems around the world, according to a new study.

Researchers who conducted a major survey of lizard populations worldwide, which appears today in the journal Science, say lizards appear to be especially sensitive to the effects of climate change and are dying off at an alarming rate.

The loss of the lizard populations could wreak havoc with ecosystems in which they are a crucial part of the food chain, since they are important prey for many birds, snakes, and voracious predators of insects.

The biologists in the study ruled out factors other than global warming as being responsible for the rapid decrease in the lizard population.

“We did a lot of work on the ground to validate the model and show that the extinctions are the result of climate change,” says Dr Barry Sinervo, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“None of these are due to habitat loss. These sites are not disturbed in any way, and most of them are in national parks or other protected areas,” he says.

The scientists worked up models based on predicted probabilities of local extinction showing the likelihood of species extinction was estimated to be 6% by 2050 and 20% by 2080.

Read it here.

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UN: The fount of all hysteria

11 May, 2010 by

Hysteria Co., Inc

If it’s not climate it will be something else. The UN is watching its plan for world government through climate alarmism disappear in smoke, as the public realise that there are more important things to worry about, like erupting volcanoes and Greek financial crises and Islamic terrorism. So it’s now looking elsewhere for some other “cause” via which to regulate, tax and control the globe. This time it’s the extinction of species. As you read this report, just notice how often they have simply taken the climate alarmists’ dictionary, and applied it to extinctions:

  • “Business as usual no longer an option”
  • World needs a “new vision”
  • “Sustainable future”
  • “Tipping points”
  • “Irreversible” damage to the planet unless we “act now”

As the Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reports:

KEY natural processes that sustain human life, such as crop production and clean water, face a high risk of ”rapid degradation and collapse” because of the record rate of extinction of animal and plant species.

That is the key finding of a major United Nations report, the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook.

The executive-secretary of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said: ”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1000 times higher than the historical background rate.

”Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”

The Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed a ”new vision for biological diversity for a healthy planet and a sustainable future for humankind”.

The outlook finds extinction rates of plant and animal species will continue and potentially accelerate far above the natural rate across this century. Threatened species are on average moving closer to extinction due to the impact of humans and climate change. Coral and amphibians are under the most stress.

The report states that if the rate of species extinction hits crucial ”tipping points,” not yet identified, there is a high risk that natural systems that help crops grow and keep water clean could be damaged irreversibly. (source)

Just replace the word “extinction” with “climate change” and we’ve heard it all before. So the next logical steps will be:

  • develop computer models that predict that species extinctions will rapidly get out of hand (just ask Michael Mann for his cast offs)
  • tweak those models to demonstrate that extinctions are directly related to something easily regulated, such as land use
  • ensure that the models play down all other factors, especially those that are natural in origin
  • organise regular conferences to decide that the world needs to “urgently tackle extinctions”
  • describe extinctions as “the greatest moral challenge of our time”
  • require countries to sign a treaty promising not to expand land use, unless they pay a new “land tax”
  • companies can trade permits to build on undeveloped land in a Land Trading Scheme
  • in no time at all, fraudsters will account for 90% of all trading on the Land Permit exchanges

and we’re back to square one.

Think I’m kidding? Just you wait!

UPDATE: And of course the Greens can’t wait to jump on any passing bandwagon. Cue Bob Brown:

Humanity is sealing its own fate by rapidly destroying the planet’s ecological diversity, the Australian Greens have warned.

“It’s not going to change while we have governments who don’t care and governments who are making things worse,” [Brown] told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“It is a prescription for our own fate if we don’t stop to consider the value, of least to ourselves, of wildlife and biodiversity.” (source)

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SMH: Temperatures to rise "12 degrees by 2300"

11 May, 2010 by

Throw some more snags on the barbie, mate

Another day, another desperate plea from the warmist camp. Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to the alarmism of the Sydney Morning Herald? Every day, its readers are barraged with acres of doom and gloom from some hysterical climate research, its authors desperate to get a headline and keep the funding going – and the Moonbat duly obliges. The headline screams “Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction“:

HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.

New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies.

The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions [of course – Ed], average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300. [Let’s skate over the idiocy of measuring temperature rises in percentages, which only an ignorant non-scientific writer would ever do – Ed]

”Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100,” said Professor Tony McMichael, from the Australian National University, in an accompanying paper published in the journal.

”But climate change will not stop in 2100 [Duh – Ed] and, under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more.”

Professor McMichael said that if this were to happen, then current worries about sea level rises, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties would ”pale into insignificance” compared to the global impacts.

Not content with this, the article goes yet further:

There was also a real possibility that much of the existing climate modelling had underestimated the rate of global temperature rise, they said.

Dr [Keith] Dear [also of ANU] said scientific authorities on the issue, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had struck a cautious tone in forecasting future temperature rise and its impact.

Please stop, my sides are about to split… Ridicule is the only response that this kind of rubbish deserves. Every single word of this is based on flaky and inadequate computer models, which are hopelessly incomplete, and which are skewed to exaggerate the effect of CO2 and suppress the effects of everything else. They must think we were born yesterday…

Read it here.

P.S. As the warmists are all over sceptics’ qualifications like a rash, I think it only fair just to point out that both authors are not climate scientists, but specialise in epidemiology and population health. Just sayin’. (see here)

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