Geriatric wheat caused by climate change

30 January, 2012 by

She's only 21. Damn you AGW.

Naturally, all the solar schmolar stuff discussed here earlier today is completely ignored by Your ABC, which instead picks on an alarmist research paper about premature ageing in wheat:

Extreme heat can cause wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, a US-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world warms.

Scientists and farmers have long known that high heat can hurt some crops. Now a study led by Stanford University reveals how the damage is done by tracking rates of wheat ageing, or senescence.

Depending on the sowing date, the grain losses from rapid senescence could reach up to 20 per cent, the scientists found in the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change [abstract here].

Lead author David Lobell and his colleagues studied nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth from northern India, tracking the impact of exposure to temperatures greater than 34°C to measure rates of senescence.

They detected a significant acceleration of ageing that reduced the grain-filling period. The onset of senescence imposes a limit on the time for the plant to fill the grain head.

“What’s new here is better understanding of one particular mechanism that causes heat to hurt yields,” says Lobell. He says that while there had been some experiments showing accelerated ageing above 34°C, relatively few studies considered temperatures this high.

“We decided to see if these senescence effects are actually occurring in farmers’ fields, and if so whether they are big enough to matter. On both counts, the answer is yes.”

Climate scientists say that episodes of extreme heat are becoming more frequent and more prevalent across the globe, presenting huge challenges for growing crops. (source)

Lobell has been reported frequently in the past on the same subject of decline in wheat yields arising from climate change, and not everyone is convinced by the link Lobell claims:

While the paper [an earlier paper covering similar ground in Science in May 2011] is “an interesting contribution to the discussion,” says John Reilly, an agricultural and energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, its conclusions are “not compelling.” Many caveats and uncontrollable factors—including the price of crops, the latitude at which they are planted, and specific advances in technology—could contribute to the changes in trend that the authors see, weakening their link between yields and warming. “It’s a careful set of work, but it’s just a hard area to work in,” Reilly says.

Reilly points out that IPCC predicts an increase, not a decrease, in global crop production, as more CO2 in the atmosphere is beneficial for plant growth. But Lobell says his analysis suggests that any advantage this CO2boost confers is already being pushed to its limit, because warming itself harms crops. (source)

More research needed, perhaps?

UPDATE: The ABC does cover a couple of climate stories today, interestingly the Wall Street Journal letter reported here. The ABC firstly smears the WSJ as “Murdoch-owned” just to set the scene, and after interviewing William Kininmonth (a meteorologist) wheels out who else but Tim Flannery (a mammalogist) to complain that the letter is signed by some who aren’t climate scientists. Oh the irony. Flannery flannels on about Republicans and fails to address any of the substantive issues. Read the transcript here.

And just in case that was a little too “sceptic-friendly” Auntie then rolls on, without pausing for breath, into a decent Green-friendly alarmist story here. The transcript fails to mention that the dominant cause of the issue in question is changes in wind patterns arising from loss of ozone, but the ABC and CSIRO pin it firmly on man-made greenhouse gases. How convenient. I have an email in to the authors of this study asking for some clarifications. I wonder if I’ll get an answer…

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Activist website targets sceptical US TV weathermen

24 January, 2012 by

Forecast the propaganda

This says more about the website’s creators, seeking yet again to demonise and silence anyone who dares question the global warming consensus, than it does about the TV weathermen speaking their opinions. From the site, forecastthefacts.org:

Intense droughts, fierce storms, increased flooding. Scientists have been predicting for years that human-induced climate change would lead to a future of increasingly dangerous extreme weather events. That future is now upon us.

But when most Americans tune into their local weather report, they won’t hear a peep about climate change. Why? Because the majority of TV meteorologists don’t believe in it. That’s right: the professionals most responsible for informing the public about the weather are systematically missing the most important weather story of our lifetime.

With over 1,000 TV meteorologists across the country, the level of denial varies widely. Some TV meteorologists spout outright falsehoods on air–like the idea that the earth is actually cooling, or that global warming is caused by sunspots (not Co2 and other greenhouse gasses.) In other cases, they cover increasingly extreme weather events like droughts, wild fires, flooding, and winter storms, without ever mentioning the scientific consensus that climate change is making these events more likely and more intense. It’s the equivalent of a news anchor reporting on a string of murders without saying that there is a suspect in custody. (source)

LOL! Where’s the evidence that we’re seeing more extreme weather events again?

The front page splash asks:

“Do you believe there is solid evidence the earth is warming?” Yes or No

If yes, then you’re a goody two-shoes. If no, you’re a filthy denier. The question is ridiculous of course, because most climate rationalists, including myself, would answer yes when faced with such simplistic options. But that seems to be the puerile level of the whole exercise, setting up straw men to bravely blow them over. The site’s authors obviously have so little understanding of the real issues that they have demonstrated themselves, on the front page, incapable of even asking a vaguely sensible question about climate change.

One of the site’s partners is the extreme environmental advocacy group 350.org, which believes that there is a mythical level of CO2 below which the planet will be safe:

Three years ago, after leading climatologists observed rapid ice melt in the Arctic and other frightening signs of climate change, they issued a series of studies showing that the planet faced both human and natural disaster if atmospheric concentrations of CO2remained above 350 parts per million. Everyone from Al Gore to the U.N.’s top climate scientist [by which I guess they must mean railway engineer Pachauri – Ed] has now embraced this goal as necessary for stabilizing the planet and preventing complete disaster.

Don’t anyone tell them that there were floods, hurricanes, tornados and plenty of other weather-related disasters when CO2 was way below 350ppm. Any organisation associated with transparent nonsense like that has immediately lost any credibility it may have had. Furthermore, Watts Up With That claims to have found alleged shady funding links, and since Watts himself was once a TV weatherman, he lets rip at these cheap tactics (see more here).

And even the Washington Post is embarrassed by the schoolyard bully tactics:

“… a sincere effort to respectfully make science-based arguments and carry on a dialogue sure beats the tactic of denigrating those who disagree with you.” (source)

The warmist desperation grows apace. Maybe you’d like to send them a tip: tips@forecastthefacts.org.

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Arctic freshening not due to sea ice melt

7 January, 2012 by

Pure fiction then, and still is now

From The Science is Settled Department. Environmental activists and climate scientists on the AGW gravy train are so desperate to keep the scare afloat that they will find evidence of climate-induced changes in our planet wherever they look.

Everything can be attributed to climate change – it is the unfalsifiable hypothesis to end all unfalsifiable hypotheses. Once our scientist finds a plausible explanation that links a particular phenomenon (freshening of the Arctic waters, for example) to a man-made cause (melting sea ice caused by global warming, for example), he/she can stop looking for any other.

Especially when the consequences are potentially so dramatic – changes in salinity are thought to affect a major ocean current, the North Atlantic Conveyor, which, if interrupted, could “flip” the climate past a “tipping point” into a new Ice Age. They even made a film about it, The Day After Tomorrow, in which the special effects team went completely overboard to create the most terrifying images of what “might” happen if you keep driving your SUV and Australia doesn’t pass the carbon tax legislation:

Faced with such a possibility, who in their right mind could possibly disagree with taking urgent and drastic action to “tackle climate change”? Once the AGW box is ticked, job done.

Except that if our scientist had behaved as a proper scientist should, he/she may have looked deeper, and found that there might be other, more likely or convincing explanations. But taking that path runs the risk of missing out on the AGW angle, which would be a disaster for PR and funding. So that job is put on hold. For a while. Until the day after tomorrow, perhaps.

At least someone was brave enough to do it, however:

A new NASA and University of Washington study allays concerns that melting Arctic sea ice could be increasing the amount of freshwater in the Arctic enough to have an impact on the global “ocean conveyor belt” that redistributes heat around our planet. 

Lead author and oceanographer Jamie Morison of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle, and his team, detected a previously unknown redistribution of freshwater during the past decade from the Eurasian half of the Arctic Ocean to the Canadian half. Yet despite the redistribution, they found no change in the net amount of freshwater in the Arctic that might signal a change in the conveyor belt.

The team attributes the redistribution to an eastward shift in the path of Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean, which is tied to an increase in the strength of the Northern Hemisphere’s west-to-east atmospheric circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation. The resulting counterclockwise winds changed the direction of ocean circulation, diverting upper-ocean freshwater from Russian rivers away from the Arctic’s Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, to the Beaufort Sea in the Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. The stronger Arctic Oscillation is associated with two decades of reduced atmospheric pressure over the Russian side of the Arctic. Results of the NASA- and National Science Foundation-funded study are published Jan. 5 in the journal Nature.

…

“Changes in the volume and extent of Arctic sea ice in recent years have focused attention on melting ice,” said co-author and senior research scientist Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages Grace for NASA. “The Grace and ICESat data allow us to now examine the impacts of widespread changes in ocean circulation.”

Kwok said on [the] whole, Arctic Ocean salinity is similar to what it was in the past, but the Eurasian Basin has become more saline, and the Canada Basin has freshened. In the Beaufort Sea, the water is the freshest it’s been in 50 years of record keeping, with only a tiny fraction of that freshwater originating from melting ice and the vast majority coming from Russian river water. 

…

“To better understand climate-related changes in sea ice and the Arctic overall, climate models need to more accurately represent the Arctic Oscillation’s low pressure and counterclockwise circulation on the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean,” Morison added. (source)

You’re saying the models aren’t perfect? Who’d have thought.

Link to Nature abstract here.

(h/t The Register)

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Geologist: Plimer a "cherry-picking contrarian"

31 December, 2011 by

No agenda?

UPDATE: View the letters in response to Sandiford’s article here (thanks to reader Bruce in the comments).

Writing in The Australian Mike Sandiford takes a pop at Ian Plimer. Just by way of background, Sandiford:

  • approvingly quotes Naomi Oreskes, whose book, Merchants of Doubt, lumps in climate sceptics with those who deny the link between smoking and cancer
  • claims last year was the hottest “on record” (don’t forget, he’s a geologist)
  • writes for “The Conversation” (link) alongside such infamous names as David Karoly, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ian Enting, Ross Garnaut and  Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
  • is a signatory to an open letter from Australian warmists: “Climate change is real” (link)
  • writes alarmist articles for the Silly Moaning Herald (link)

so I will leave you to draw your own conclusions. Looks like Sandiford has had a problem with Ian Plimer for a while – another article in The Aus covering similar ground is here.

GINA Rinehart notoriously claims she has never met a geologist who believes “adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate”.

To listen to prominent “contrarian” geologists such as Ian Plimer, you might imagine she never could.

But, despite the bluster, our contrarian geologists are out of kilter with their own community and seem deeply confused about the way the greenhouse effect – by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, for example – has shaped both the past and the present.

All geology students learn of the importance of the greenhouse effect. It’s simply impossible to understand the geological record without it. [Read more…]

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Aussie Nobel laureate plugs alarmist line

22 December, 2011 by

Disappointing, yet again

I was very disappointed to read this article last night:

An Australian Nobel Laureate has urged climate-sceptic MPs to get a scientific opinion on global warming.

Astronomer Professor Brian Schmidt spoke during a visit to the Sydney Observatory on Wednesday. He was there with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to endorse a $2 million coalition pledge to restore a Howard government science in primary schools program which Labor axed.

The 2011 Nobel Prize winner for physics had words of advice for politicians who doubted the science of climate change.

“I would encourage anyone who has questions about climate change, especially in politics, to come and talk to the Australian Academy of Science,” the astronomer with the Australian National University told reporters.

“I accept that climate change is inevitable when you add Co2 to the atmosphere. I certainly believe it is something we have to worry about.” (source)

Apart from the fact that the Australian Academy of Science sold out to climate alarmism long ago, and that no-one disputes that adding CO2 will cause some warming, Schmidt seems to have little concern for the lack of integrity in the alarmist community, fails to appreciate the significance of Climategate, the corruption and political motivation of the IPCC, the conflicts of interest arising from massive government funding of alarmist research, or any of the myriad other serious concerns with the consensus science.

Wouldn’t it have been refreshing to hear someone like Schmidt uphold scientific integrity rather than plugging the usual politically correct alarmist line?

The irony of the story is that Schmidt’s fellow laureate in Chemistry, Dan Shechtman, challenged an established consensus, was mocked and ridiculed by his colleagues, but eventually proved correct.

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Ban Ki-moon

7 December, 2011 by

Moon(-bat)

The UN Moonbat is on cracking form today in Durban, trying to scare world leaders (most of whom are preoccupied with keeping their economies solvent) into taking utterly futile and eye-wateringly expensive action on climate change. Fortunately, there is little chance of that:

“It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of this moment,” Mr Ban said overnight at the start of a four-day meeting of the world’s environment ministers.

But somehow, Moonbat succeeds:

“Without exaggeration, we can say: the future of our planet is at stake – people’s lives, the health of the global economy, the very survival of some nations.“

Without exaggeration, that’s bullish*t. I humbly suggest that Mr Ban take a cold shower and read the Climategate 2.0 emails. He might learn something.

Source.

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Attenborough: "irrelevant" whether climate change is man-made

4 December, 2011 by

Sold out

UPDATE: Attenborough is bankrolled by the BBC, so it’s hardly surprising that he toes the alarmist line. As a commenter pointed out, look what happened to David Bellamy when he dared speak his mind.

We still have to do something about it, apparently. Another icon of my youth, David Attenborough, sells out to the Dark Side and reveals himself as a climate alarmist. Like the Natural History Museum and the BBC, these institutions have sullied their reputations by abandoning impartiality and embracing alarmist hysteria.

Attenborough’s latest pronouncements on the climate make interesting reading, because he seems to suggest that we should take action on climate change irrespective of whether, or to what extent, it is caused by man. I actually heard this in the wee small hours on ABC News Radio and thought I was having a bad dream:

“I don’t think anyone can seriously deny it is happening,” he said. “What the controversy is about is whether mankind has been a factor in that. I personally think we have and it would be surprising if we hadn’t given what we have been doing for the last 125 years.”

We’re all with you so far. Man has had some effect on the climate. Continue.

“But in the way it is irrelevant given temperatures are increasing and we know that is potentially doing a lot of damage and if we can we should try and stop that happening. Whether it is caused by us or not, we can bring down carbon emissions and that could stop temperatures rising.” (source)

Just run that past me again… “whether it is caused by us or not, we can bring down carbon emissions and that could stop temperatures rising.” Right, so you’re not sure whether man-made carbon emissions have caused the recent warming, but cutting those emissions will stop it somehow? Sorry, not following that logic at all, I’m afraid. In fact, it’s complete and utter nonsense.

Not surprising, because this isn’t an argument based on logic, it’s an argument based on an environmental ideology. Thankfully we have Nigel Lawson to put the more rational perspective:

Sir David Attenborough is one of this country’s finest journalists, and a great expert on animal life. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to global warming he seems to prefer sensation to objectivity.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that, while satellite observations do indeed confirm that the extent of arctic sea ice has been declining over the past 30 years, the same satellite observations show that, overall, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that the polar bear population has not been falling, but rising.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have mentioned that recent research findings show that the increased evaporation from the Arctic ocean, as a result of warming, will cause there to be more cloud cover, thus counteracting the adverse effect he is so concerned about.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have noted that, while there was indeed a modest increase in mean global temperature (of about half a degree Centigrade) during the last quarter of the 20th century, so far this century both the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Office confirm that there has been no further global warming at all.

What will happen in the future is inevitably unclear. But two things are clear. First, that Sir David’s alarmism is sheer speculation. Second, that if there is a resumption of warming, the only rational course is to adapt to it, rather than to try (happily a lost cause) to persuade the world to impoverish itself by moving from relatively cheap carbon-based energy to much more expensive non-carbon energy. (source)

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Alarmist scientist found guilty of smearing journalist

2 December, 2011 by

Rahmstorf - smeared journalist

Again, standard operating procedure for alarmist scientists on the climate change funding bandwagon: smear your critics. Except this time the journalist didn’t stand idly by and do nothing, she took legal action – and won. From No Tricks Zone:

Der Spiegel today has a story on IPCC bigwig and ultra-alarmist Stefan Rahmstorf, who is also a lead scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and elite member of the Hockey Team. For those of you who may not recall, Rahmstorf is the outlier oceanographer that projects a sea level rise of about 1.4 meters, even when the rest the world, including real observations, all point to something that is about 1/7 of that.

It’s a bit late at night here and so the main points only. Der Spiegel starts:

“Renown climate scientist and German government advisor Stefan Rahmstorf was found guilty of a blog attack against a journalist.  According to the opinion of a state court, he made untruthful assertions. Also the ‘Frankfurter Rundschau’ has come under fire.”

A State Court says he’s guilty of making untruthful assertions. Interpret that how you wish. The Frankfurter Rundschau is a sort of daily that former East German comrades lean towards. On the Rahmstorf ruling by the court, we reported about it here.

To make a long story short, journalist Irene Meichsner wrote a critical report about the IPCC, which appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau daily, to which Rahmstorf reacted quite nastily. He asserted at his blog that the journalist had been dishonest, sloppy, had never read the IPCC report, and that she even lifted text from another source (Richard North and Jonathan Leake). For a journalist, such accusations are of course career threatening and thus deadly serious.

Meichsner didn’t stand for it, took the case to court, and won. (source)

Telling the truth about the IPCC is so uncomfortable for those involved that in desperation they resort to this kind of action. Maybe those promoting “the cause” should be a little more careful of smearing their opponents in future. Play the ball, not the man (or in this case, woman).

See here for an earlier story on the alarmism of the Potsdam Institute.

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Durban alarmism: permafrost – again

1 December, 2011 by

It's all over, pal

Funny, isn’t it, that when a stack of emails is released just before a climate conference, revealing climate scientists behaving badly, it’s regarded as malicious, whereas those very same climate scientists are perfectly happy to release alarmist research in an attempt to bolster that very same climate conference. Oops, I forgot for a minute – this is the mainstream media, where double standards are simply par for the course.

Today’s dose of alarmism, courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald (currently battling it out with the ABC for top spot in the climate hysteria stakes):

The threat to climate change posed by thawing permafrost, which could release stocks of stored carbon, is greater than estimated, a group of scientists say.

By 2100, the amount of carbon released by permafrost loss could be “1.7-5.2 times larger than those reported”, depending on how swiftly Earth’s surface warms, they said.

In volume terms, this is about the same as the amount of greenhouse gases released today from deforestation, they say.

But the impact on climate could be 2.5 times greater, as much of the gas will be methane, which is 25 times more efficient at trapping solar heat than carbon dioxide (CO2), they say.

Deforestation today accounts for up to 20 per cent of total greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The study, published in the British journal Nature, coincides with a 12-day UN conference on climate change, unfolding in Durban, South Africa.

It touches on one of the biggest sources of concern, but also a major area of uncertainty, in climate science.

Permanently iced land covers around a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere.

In essence, it is a carbon store, holding in icy stasis the organic remains of plants and animals that died millions of years ago.

The worry is that as temperatures rise, the soils defrost, microbes decompose the ancient carbon and release methane and CO2 to the atmosphere. (source)

This is obviously a dumb question, but why didn’t this happen in any of the recent phases of the climate that were warmer than today? And if it did, well, we’re still here aren’t we? That’s the obvious logical flaw in all of these tipping point arguments – if the planet is balanced so precariously on a knife edge, fearful of even the tiniest nudge, how come the climate system hasn’t toppled over and spiralled towards either permanent snowball or permanent hot-house in the last few million years, from which recovery was impossible? Answers on a postcard (from Durban).

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CSIRO scientist: zero emissions ain't enough

21 November, 2011 by

A synthetic tree...

Yet more climate nonsense to spoil my day. It won’t be sufficient to halt dangerous climate change “merely” to reduce CO2 emissions to zero, according to a report on ABC’s AM programme this morning. We need to go further (beyond zero, if you will excuse the pun), and start sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere (no, really):

MIKE RAUPACH: There is very little wiggle room left, perhaps none at this stage and the issue of course is that a large fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere stays there for a very long time and that means that what we do now has a long-term future shadow. 

SIMON LAUDER: Dr Raupach is part of an international team which used mathematical models to see what will happen to the climate in the long term under various scenarios. He says if emissions aren’t rapidly reduced to zero, future efforts will have to go further and remove CO2 from the atmosphere to prevent warming of more than two degrees. 

MIKE RAUPACH: If we do reduce emissions rapidly then zero emissions will do but even a small leakage in the long term like over a hundred years from now, of about 10 per cent of current emissions, is enough to keep temperatures slowly rising. (source)

“Zero emissions will do”!! Phew, that’s OK then. For as we all know, reducing emissions to zero is the easy bit. You only have to look at global energy consumption to see that we’re really, really close to a fully renewable energy budget (the renewables component of the chart is that wafer thin segment on the right, just in case you can’t quite see it):

Only 90-odd percent to go…

So once we’ve done that, and we’re all living in the cold and the dark, with no cars, buses, planes and electricity, we can then use whatever energy is left over (which won’t be much) to power synthetic trees (like those pictured above) to remove the CO2 out of the atmosphere. It will be an environmentalist’s dream – a landscape littered with useless windmills and fake trees, with no humanity and no prosperity. Just what Bob Brown wants for Australia. And the climate will continue to do exactly what the hell it wants, because that’s what the climate does.

And Lauder gets full marks for conducting, to the letter, the standard ABC interview of a climate alarmist, where the alarmist is allowed to talk as much nonsense as he/she likes completely unchallenged, and without having to account for any of the ridiculous assertions he/she makes. At no point does Lauder challenge the scientific basis of the UN’s 2 degree target, or the reliability of the “mathematical models” of which he is obviously so in awe, or whether adaptation strategies might provide better value for money than mitigation, or whether the release of this story is simply clever timing a few days before yet another pointless climate gab-fest in Durban.

But that would be asking too much of the “groupthink-infested” ABC, wouldn’t it?

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