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It’s silly season: Aliens and global warming “fun” paper picked up by the Guardian and others and the co-author apologises

August 20, 2011

It’s August and the silly season is on us.

Global warming >> detection by advanced aliens >> humanity exterminated

Even a science fiction author would have qualms.

The Guardian carried a headline: Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists saying Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report. They had picked up on a “fun” paper which was a couple of months old. It was attributed – now admitted by a co-author – quite wrongly to NASA.

Though the Guardian actually does say that one of the authors is a “NASA affiliated scientist” and does not explicitly say NASA was behind the paper the report does imply that this was a “formal” NASA paper. This was of course picked up by a number of other media outlets – Svenska Dagbladet among them – which merely carried the Guardian report headline and all. Not one of the journalists who reported the Guardian silly season story actually bothered to read the original paper which is here:

Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129. Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis by Seth D. Baum-1, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra-2 & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman-3

1. Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University.
2. Department of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University
3. NASA Planetary Science Division

The third author, Shawn Goldman, who happens to work at NASA organising conferences and workshops, has been forced to explain and clarify that this was just a “fun” scenario done in his spare time and has nothing to do with NASA.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman is currently a postdoc at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. For 3-4 days a week he works in the astrobiology program office, organizing conferences and workshops. The other 1-2 days are dedicated to research focused on exoplanet characterization lessons from the “pale orange dot” that was the Archean Earth.

(Archean Earth was similar to but somewhat warmer than today, existed some 3800 – 2500 million years ago and is thought to have contained no free Oxygen. Bacteria were around. I suppose if you can get your mind around imagining the Archean Earth then imagining aliens picking up on global warming and emissions signals and destroying humanity is child’s play).

Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman

Alien expert?: Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman

He writes:

Yes, I work at NASA. It’s also true that I work at NASA Headquarters. But I am not a civil servant… just a lowly postdoc. More importantly, this paper has nothing to do with my work there. I wasn’t funded for it, nor did I spend any of my time at work or any resources provided to me by NASA to participate in this effort. There are at least a hundred more important and urgent things to be done on any given work day than speculate on the different scenarios for contact with alien civilizations… However, in my free time (what precious little I have), I didn’t mind working on stuff like this every once in a while. Why? Well, because I’m a geek and stuff like this is fun to think about. Unfortunately, there is not enough time for fun. Indeed, I felt guilty at times because this has led to a lack of effort on my part in my interactions with Seth and Jacob. Beyond adding some comments here or there, I did very little for the paper.

But I do admit to making a horrible mistake. It was an honest one, and a naive one… but it was a mistake nonetheless. I should not have listed my affiliation as “NASA Headquarters.” I did so because that is my current academic affiliation. But when I did so I did not realize the full implications that has. …..

One last thing: I stand by the analysis in the paper. Is such a scenario likely? I don’t think so. But it’s one of a myriad of possible (albeit unlikely) scenarios, and the point of the paper was to review them. 

Perhaps the aliens picked up on Archean Earth and actually seeded the progression of the bacteria into humanity.

Oh well! It is August and we are all entitled to be silly – even the Guardian.

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Posted in Alarmism, Non-Science, Trivia | 1 Comment »

Nonsense speculation posing as science

August 17, 2011

Another example of nonsense speculation which gets published and then drives headlines only because they invoke the magic words “climate change”. A case of speculative IPCC model results being used as inputs for another speculative model about fish extermination and coming to a mildly alarmist conclusion.

Not a measurement in sight. But many pages, lots of statistics, 4 tables, 2 figures and 66 references to come to the amazing conclusion and state the obvious that cold water fish may die out if they are forced to live in warm water. 

As my son would put it “Duh”!!

A new paper in PLOS One.

Comparing Climate Change and Species Invasions as Drivers of Coldwater Fish Population Extirpations

 Sharma S, Vander Zanden MJ, Magnuson JJ, Lyons J (2011), PLoS ONE 6(8): e22906. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022906

The “researchers” actually measured nothing. They took a data-base of the conditions in which populations of a particular kind of fish (the cisco) existed. These parameters include air temperature among many others. They then did a statistical regression to infer how the populations might depend upon air temperature. They then took temperature increase assumptions from the climate change scenarios of the IPCC and applied them to the data base to speculate what that might do to the fish populations. They then reach their conclusions that climate change would extirpate a large section of the fish population and that this would be worse than the impact of invasive species.

And this is considered peer-reviewed science!!!!

They write in their paper:

Coldwater fishes, such as cisco [Corgeonus artedii] require cold water temperatures, high dissolved oxygen concentrations, and oligotrophic conditions, and thereby are sensitive indicators of environmental change. In Wisconsin, cisco are close to the southern edge of their range and are listed as a species of special concern. Cisco live in larger and deeper inland lakes with cold, well-oxygenated deep waters. Under climate change scenarios, as air temperatures increase, epilimnion and hypolimnion water temperatures are expected to increase. As water temperatures increase, the duration of the lake stratification period is expected to increase, isolating the deep waters from exchanges with the atmosphere, making it more likely that metabolic activity will reduce dissolved oxygen concentrations in the hypolimnion to stressful or lethal levels. The combination of warmer water temperatures and lower dissolved oxygen concentrations under climate change scenarios in larger, deeper lakes typically suitable for coldwater fishes could result in their extirpation.

Cisco are sensitive to the introduction of non-native rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax). Rainbow smelt is native to the northeastern coast of North America and was introduced to the Laurentian Great Lakes in the 1920s. In Wisconsin, rainbow smelt have been introduced into lakes deliberately by anglers for sport fishing purposes. Furthermore, fertilized eggs of rainbow smelt may have been unintentionally introduced into lakes by residents cleaning smelt on their piers. When rainbow smelt invade a system, they negatively interact with native species through predation and competition. Invasion of rainbow smelt has been linked directly to changes in zooplankton community composition, decline in recruitment of walleye (Sander vitreus), and extirpation of cisco and yellow perch (Perca flavescens) . For example in Sparkling Lake, Wisconsin, the cisco population was extirpated through predation-induced recruitment within eight years of detection of rainbow smelt. …… 

Geo-referenced lake-specific data were collected for 13,052 lakes in Wisconsin from a variety of sources including the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research (NTL-LTER) program, Wisconsin GAP (Geographic Approach to Planning for Biological Diversity) database, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources databases, refereed publications, government reports, and dissertations. From the aforementioned databases, a suite of variables describing lake morphology, water chemistry, physical habitat, and fish species occurrence were compiled. Environmental variables retained in the final dataset were: surface area (hectares), maximum depth (metres), perimeter (kilometres), Secchi depth (metres), pH, conductivity (µS/cm), and mean annual air temperatures (°C). For water chemistry variables, annual averages were used in the dataset. 

Current air temperatures and scenarios of future mean annual air temperatures were obtained from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) Climate Working Group. Mean annual air temperatures were statistically downscaled for Wisconsin on a 0.1° latitude ×0.1° longitude grid. Climate data were summarised for three time periods: 1961–2000, 2046–2065, and 2081–2100 and averaged over these three sets of years as suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to reduce temporal variation in climate. Then, projected air temperatures from 15 general circulation models and the IPCCs A1, A2 and B1 scenarios (although not all general circulation models incorporated all three scenarios) totalling 78 climate change scenarios were used to develop future projections of cisco occurrence. The A1, A2 and B1 scenarios incorporate a range of variation in greenhouse gas emissions inferred for various time periods in the 21st century. The A1 scenario is the most extreme and assumes the highest greenhouse gas concentrations, followed by the A2 and B1 scenarios. …….

Our results highlight the threats to coldwater fish species. The probability of cisco extirpations could be reduced in Wisconsin through three interventions. First, the mitigation of climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could significantly reduce the worst case losses of cisco. ….

Oh dear!!

Needless to say this non-science – since it uses the magic phrase “climate change” and has an alarmist theme – has no difficulty in being published and generating nonsense headlines in Science Daily:

Climate Change Could Drive Native Fish out of Wisconsin Waters 

ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2011) — The cisco, a key forage fish found in Wisconsin’s deepest and coldest bodies of water, could become a climate change casualty and disappear from most of the Wisconsin lakes it now inhabits by the year 2100, according to a new study. In a report published online in the journal Public Library of Science One, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources project a gloomy fate for the fish — an important food for many of Wisconsin’s iconic game species — as climate warms and pressure from invasive species grows. ………

In addition to the ecological change that would be prompted by a warmer Wisconsin climate, Sharma notes, the impoverishment of aquatic ecosystems will have potential socio-economic implications, especially in a setting like Wisconsin where recreational fishing is an iconic pastime, not to mention an important industry.

“This could very well impact the fishing experiences we have,” avers the Wisconsin researcher.

But rather than make me concerned about climate change this nonsense report based on idle – but fashionable – speculation makes me much more concerned about the predominance of modelling over measurement and what passes in some quarters for for science.

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One EU Carbon trading scam comes to trial: €5 billion just in lost taxes

August 16, 2011

The amounts of money sloshing around in the EU in carbon trading scams is mind-boggling and puts even drug money into the shade. The EU emissions trading scheme has been one of the major drivers of corruption in the last few years. The latest scam to come to trial is in Germany where just the tax evasion amounts to €5 billion ($7 billion). The total value of the carbon trades involved in this particular fraud probably exceed €50 billion. The frauds revealed so far are just a tiny fraction of all the succesful frauds that have been perpetrated – and all with the undoubted help (and connivance) of EU politicians.

It would not be surprising if the total cost of the EU emissions trading schemes (assuming  a conservative 80:20 principle) exceeded €250 billion. Eventually, the cost of all these carbon trades will have to be borne by EU taxpayers and electricity consumers.

Reuters reports:

A 5 billion euro tax fraud returned to haunt European Union’s emissions trading scheme on Monday as six individuals faced tax evasion charges at a trial which starts in Frankfurt. The case will haul the market’s multiple scandals back into the spotlight but is unlikely to implicate investment banks following a similar case against small firms in Britain.

In an activity which peaked in May 2009, traders bought carbon emissions permits in one country and sold them in another, charging for and then keeping the value-added tax (VAT) which they should have handed to tax authorities.

  • The total value of the fraud was at least 5 billion euros ($7.1 bln) in lost tax receipts, according to Europol
  • Charges have been brought against individuals at small firms. Europol said the fraud was linked to criminal networks operating outside the EU including the Middle East
  • The biggest swoop, initiated by Germany in early 2010, saw more than 2,500 officers involved across European and other countries
  • In Germany, prosecutors said in March that in addition to the six individuals charged, a further 170 suspects including seven Deutsche Bank employees were still under investigation and could be charged later
  • In Britain, the first trial of seven suspects risked delay as the investigation unearthed new evidence
  • It was easier to open an account on the carbon market registry than to open a bank account, allowing less reputable characters to participate.
  • As a new market, tax authorities in EU member states were slower to spot the fraud opportunity
  • The fraud was carried out on an unregulated spot market. Participants in such markets do not have to register with financial authorities, unlike in futures markets
  • As well as making it easier for fraudsters to gain entry, unregulated markets do not force strict know-your-client (KYC) rules on law-abiding participants meaning criminals escaped detection more easily
  • Officials at Paris-based Bluenext have not denied that their spot exchange was used by tax evaders but have maintained that they acted to stop the practice
  • French tax authorities are demanding 355 million euros ($505 million) from Bluenext, owned by NYSE Euronext, in unpaid VAT related to trades that occurred on the exchange
  • The EU’s head of tax, Algirdas Semeta, and of climate change, Connie Hedegaard, in June sent letters to EU states urging them to apply reverse tax charges which would remove the opportunity to buy EUAs VAT-free and then pocket the tax
  • The carbon market has suffered scandals besides VAT fraud, including a phishing attack, the circulation of used emissions permits and cyber theft of EUAs
  • The market has seen near-record low prices in recent weeks as the threat of a new downturn widens a glut in permits

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Arctic Ice: “Rapture” of an ice free Arctic now postponed till 2030

August 9, 2011

The ice free Arctic which was to have happened in 2008 according to Mark Serreze of the doomsday crowd has now been postponed till 2030 while scientists find that current concerns over a tipping point in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice may be misplaced.

From WUWT’s Quote of the week:

WUWT

We all cringed, then laughed when Dr. Mark Serreze of NSIDC first said it, then marveled about it as it got a life of its own, being the buzzphrase for every alarmist who wanted to shriek about declining Arctic sea ice.

In 2007 we heard him say:

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado.

So far, the “screaming” hasn’t kept anyone awake at night, and we have not returned to the low of 2007 in the last three melt seasons.

In 2008 Serreze made the  bold claim:

The ice is in a “death spiral” and may disappear in the summers within a couple of decades, according to Mark Serreze, an Arctic climate expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

And in 2008 we had the forecast from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze of an “ice free north pole”.  As we know, that didn’t even come close to being true. Summer 2008 had more arctic ice than summer 2007, and summer 2007 was not “ice free” by any measure.

With those failed predictions behind him,  in an interview in The Age just a few weeks ago, Serreze pulled a Harold Camping, and changed his prediction date. Now he’s saying the new date for an ice free summer is 2030.

”There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.”

And in the meantime research reveals that ice levels in the Arctic were about half the present levels some 5000 years ago and had no problems in recovering.

Scientists say current concerns over a tipping point in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice may be misplaced. 


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UK Financial Regulator warns against carbon credit trading scams

August 8, 2011

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is the regulator of the financial services industry in the UK and has issued a warning against carbon credit trading scams.

The vast sums of money expended on misguided carbon schemes based itself on the misguided attempts to reduce carbon emissions (to what end?) have of course ended up in a few pockets.

I’m tempted to just say “I told you so!!”

FSA Warning 

The Guardian – an ardent supporter of the AGW doctrine – writes:

Carbon credit trading schemes are set to take over from landbanking as a major scam hitting unwary investors. This week the Financial Services Authority issued its first consumer alert on the schemes following an unprecedented 10-fold surge in complaints and queries in July. The watchdog warns that the schemes are unregulated, so anyone can sell them, and UK authorities have no way of controlling their quality or validity.

Investors risk ending up with an overpriced credit which is virtually unsellable – just like the almost worthless agricultural acreage that landbankers push with the promise of planning permission in the near future.

At least one company that was selling land has moved its business model from persuading investors that land will soar in value to concentrating on carbon schemes. 

Jonathan Phelan, head of the unauthorised business department at the FSA, says: “Since June, we’ve seen a significant rise in consumers reporting carbon credit trading schemes to the FSA. While carbon credit trading schemes don’t automatically amount to investment schemes that require FSA authorisation, we are concerned that the majority of the firms being reported to us are using high pressure sales tactics and targeting vulnerable consumers with little or no knowledge of commodities and derivatives trading.

“We suspect that many of these firms are essentially overseas boiler rooms or landbanking firms simply selling a highly dubious new investment product and jumping upon the green/eco-friendly bandwagon. We strongly recommend that consumers seek advice from an FSA-authorised independent financial adviser before getting involved in the carbon credit trading market.”

Well, I told you so.

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Carbon dioxide follows temperature – what else?

August 6, 2011

The lecture given by  at the Sydney Institute is causing waves and he has a new paper in the works. Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professor at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto and has been deputed to the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.

Jo Nova reports that Salby was once an IPCC reviewer, and he comments, damningly, that if these results had been available in 2007, “the IPCC could not have drawn the conclusion that it did.” After speaking in carefully selected phrases, he  finished his presentation saying that “anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic, is in fantasia”.

His talk is available here:  “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources”

“It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels”.

article image

CO2 variations do not correlate with man-made emissions. Peaks and falls correlate with hot years (e.g. 1998) and cold years (1991-92). No graphs are available from Salby's speech or paper yet. This graph comes from Tom Quirk's related work.: image via joannenova.com.au

Jo Nova posts a comprehensive report.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science | 2 Comments »

Global Warming has “paused” and climate change forecasts are “flawed”

August 6, 2011

The Times They Are a-changin’

1. The UK Met Office is an ardent follower of the Global Warming Doctrine but even they have had to now admit that global warming has “paused”.

“Two research papers shed new light on why the upper layers of the world’s oceans have seen a recent pause in warming despite continued increases in greenhouse gases.”

But the religion of global warming need not worry. The pause is – conveniently – only due to “natural variability”. The Met Office does however admit that the science is a long way from being settled and that with more measurements (and perhaps with a little less slavish acceptance of model results) “it would be possible to account for movement of heat within the ocean and do a better job of monitoring future climate change”.  One can hope that they may be returning to a science based on observations leading to models leading to further measurements to validate the models , but religions are not cast aside so easily! 

The independent studies from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the Met Office show how natural climate variability can temporarily mask longer-term trends in upper ocean heat content and sea surface temperature.

The upper 700 metres of the global ocean has seen a rise in temperature since reliable records began in the late 1960s. However, there has been a pause in this warming during the period from 2003 to 2010. The papers published this week offer explanations for this.

Climate model simulations from KNMI show that such pauses in upper ocean warming occur regularly as part of the climate system’s natural variability. … A different set of model simulations from the Met Office supports the idea of heat moving to the deeper ocean explaining the recent pause in upper ocean warming.

The same research also suggests that with deeper ocean observations it would be possible to account for movement of heat within the ocean and do a better job of monitoring future climate change.

GRL website (KNMI paper)(Katsman, C.A. and G.J. van Oldenborgh)

GRL website (Met Office paper) (Palmer, M. D., D. J. McNeall, and N. J. Dunstone)

2. In the meantime a study at Lancaster University charges that “inaccurate climate forecasts costs the world considerable money” and “the overwhelming focus on limiting green house gases alone may well be mis-guided”.

​Climate change forecasts used to set policy and billions of pounds in investment are flawed, according to new research from Lancaster University Management School (LUMS).

Complex climate models have been used by scientists to reach a consensus (through the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC) of global warming of 0.2 °C per decade. But this fundamental finding for governments and the global population continues to be fiercely contested by sceptics of the role of human activity in climate change. The competing interest groups involved have led to a decline in confidence generally in the wake of claims of manipulated data from the University of East Anglia, and incorrect projections – such as Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 .

The new study by Robert Fildes and Nikolaos Kourentzes at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting applies the latest thinking on forecasting to the work of climate change scientists, in a bid to make 10 and 20 year ahead climate predictions more accurate and trustworthy for policy-makers, and help address growing doubts over the realities of climate change. Such decadal forecasts have the most relevance to current thinking and policy plans and if they are to be credible and useful, they need to demonstrate their accuracy.  But the forecasts produced by the current models do not achieve this.

The authors set out a new basis for ‘decadal’ forecasting which is to be a major component of the next IPCC assessment report. Using a combination of models, with statistical  benchmarking as checks,  current forecasts prove almost certainly less accurate than they could be. Inaccurate climate forecasts costs the world considerable money. The implication is that the climate modelling community needs to open up its research agenda. As yet it has not demonstrated that it can produce better forecasts than simpler statistical methods. A consequence of this, explored by Fildes and Kourentzes, is that the overwhelming focus on limiting green house gases alone may well be mis-guided. The hydrologist Keith Beven’s work on modelling carried out in the Lancaster Environment Centre leads to the same conclusion. In short, eclectic forecasting methods and a wide range of policy responses are what is needed if we are to overcome the problems of emerging warming. 


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Politics of hate create strange bedfellows

July 31, 2011

The massacre in Norway by Anders Behring Brevik has created a dilemma for many of the extremist parties in Europe whose “ideology” he had adopted. They must now – at least publicly – distance themselves from his actions but without abandoning their politics which he ardently supported and which led to his actions. Many of the islamophobic, anti-immigration, nationalistic parties in Europe today have their roots in fascism or neo-nazism or racial hatred. Upto about 10 years ago their objects of hate were usually blacks, Jews, Asians, Turks, socialists, “big government” and communists. In the last decade or so all of these “hates” have been maintained but have manifested themselves increasingly under the convenient and opportunistic umbrella of islamophobism.

But for these so-called “right-wing, nationalist” parties, I think it is wrong to attribute anything other than “hate” as their ideology. As times change the object of their hate evolves and changes to whatever they consider is currently popular to fear and to hate. Their political strategy seems to be fundamentally based on the marshalling of the fears of the “common man” – by providing the objects of hate which can feed those fears.

Almost every country in Europe now has its version of a “hate” party: the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, the Vlaams Blok (VB) in Belgium, the Danish Peoples Party (DPP) in Denmark, True Finns (PS) in Finland, the National Front (FN) in France, the Republican party (REP), German People’s Union (DVU) and National Democratic party (NPD) all in Germany, the Hellenic Front (HF) in Greece, Liga Nord (LN) and the Futuro e Libertà (FLI) in Italy, Pim Fortuyn’s List (LPF) in the Netherlands, the Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) in Norway, Partido Popular (CDS-PP) in Portugal, Sweden Democrats (SD) in Sweden, Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) in Switzerland and the British National party (BNP) in the UK.

They are now finding common cause with some strange partners in Israel and India and the US. They include Likud and the settlers in Israel, the fanatics of the RSS and Hindutva nationalists and even the extreme right wing of the Tea Party movement in the US. It is only a short step to move onto the hate parties of Japan (the Uyoku dantai groups), in Australia (United Australia Party) and those that are forming in the Balkans and in eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia). The juxtaposition of ideologies can – on the surface – seem strange (neo-nazis together with Jewish settlers or anti-Asian together with Hindu nationalism) but the common factor is always that there is somebody in common to hate.

Der Spiegel:

The Likud Connection:

Islamophobic parties in Europe have established a tight network, stretching from Italy to Finland. But recently, they have extended their feelers to Israeli conservatives, enjoying a warm reception from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Some in Israel believe that the populists are Europe’s future.

Anders Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto is nothing if not thorough. Pages and pages of text outline in excruciating detail the ideological underpinnings of his worldview — one which led him to kill 76 people in two terrible attacks in Norway last week. 

It is a document which has led many to question Breivik’s sanity. But it has also, due to its myriad citations and significant borrowing from several anti-immigration, Islamophobic blogs, highlighted the deeply entwined network of right-wing populist groups and parties across Europe — from the Front National in France to Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ).

But recently it has become clear that Europe’s populist parties aren’t merely content to establish a network on the Continent. They are also looking further east. And have begun establishing tight relations with several conservative politicians in Israel — first and foremost with Ayoob Kara, a parliamentarian with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party who is also deputy minister for development of the Negev and Galilee districts.

The reason for the growing focus on Israel is not difficult to divine. “On the one hand,” Strache told SPIEGEL ONLINE in a recent interview, “we are seeing great revolutions taking place in the Middle East. But one can’t be totally sure that other interests aren’t behind them and that, in the end, we might see Islamist theocracies surrounding Israel and in Europe’s backyard.”

In other words, in the battle against what right-wing populists see as the creeping Islamization of Europe, Israel is on the front line. ….. 

At first glance, the European populists’ relationship with Israel would hardly appear to be a marriage built on love. Many see the FPÖ as being just one tiny step away from classic neo-Nazi groups and the same holds true for their partners throughout Europe.  …… And Kara was blasted in the Israeli press for a recent meeting in Berlin he held with Patrick Brinkmann, a German right-wing populist. “Deputy Minister Meets Neo-Nazi Millionaire,” read a headline in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth earlier this month, noting that Brinkmann, while now insistent that he is not anti-Semitic, once had close ties with the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). ….

Read article:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,777175,00.html

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Politics | 1 Comment »

What population problem? More brains and hands could well cater for the extra mouths to feed

July 30, 2011

Malthus’ ideas haven’t quite been discredited but his alarmism certainly has. As world population increases from the current 6 billion and approaches around 9 to 10 billion by 2100 studies suggest that population growth can have economic and environmental benefits.

A new article in  Science 29 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6042 pp. 544-546

DOI: 10.1126/science.333.6042.544

Are More People Necessarily a Problem?

by David Malakoff

In 1937, A bureaucrat serving in the British Empire’s Kenya Colony penned an alarming memo to his bosses about conditions in the Machakos Reserve, a hilly, drought-prone farming region 50 kilo meters south of Nairobi. “Benevolent British rule” had encouraged the explosive “multiplication” of the “natives,” he reported, leading to massive environmental degradation. “Every phase of misuse of land is vividly and poignantly displayed in this Reserve, the inhabitants of which are rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parching desert of rocks, stones and sand.” The apocalyptic warning came as the region’s population approached 250,000.

Today, more than 1.5 million people call Machakos home. Rather than a cautionary example of the perils of overpopulation, however, for some experts Machakos has become a symbol of something very different: the idea that rapid human population growth, even in some of Earth’s driest, most challenging environments, is not necessarily a recipe for disaster—and can even bring benefits. They argue that, over the past 75 years, population growth in Machakos and nearby Nairobi has triggered social and economic shifts that have made it possible for residents to regreen once-barren hillsides, reinvigorate failing soils, reduce birth rates, and increase crop production and incomes. “A landscape that was once declared good for nothing is now like a garden when the rain falls,” says Michael Mortimore, a geographer with Drylands Research, a United Kingdom–based nonprofit organization, who helped document the turnaround in More People, Less Erosion, a 1994 study that is still influential—and controversial—today. “Too many people still have the simplistic notion that too many people is a problem,” he says. “What happened in Machakos challenges that pessimism.”…..

 ……. Many see crisis looming in those numbers for people and the environment. Others, however, see some hope for a transition to more sustainable livelihoods and cite Ester Boserup, a Danish economist who died in 1999, as one source of their optimism. In 1965, the then-little-known Boserup, who spent most of her career consulting for international development institutions, published a slim volume titled The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. (pdf Boserup1965) It examined the history of subsistence farming and offered a theory that essentially turned Malthus upside down. Instead of rising population density leading to barren fields and starvation, Boserup suggested it could naturally trigger “intensification”: the use of new technologies and more labor to get bigger harvests from less land.

“The idea was that people weren’t just mouths to feed but also brains that could think and hands and legs that could work very hard”.

….. In some parts of Africa, meanwhile, researchers are documenting a notable, Machakos-like “regreening” of arid areas with fast-growing populations. …. There’s some evidence that the extra greenery is helping to make poor farm communities more resilient to droughts and economic setbacks, but the long-term outlook remains at best unclear.

In the forest frontiers of South and Central America, researchers have found both Malthusian and Boserupian forces at work in deforestation. Depending on local circumstances, families faced with growing population densities have responded by both migrating to clear new farms in forested areas, the agricultural “extensification” predicted by Malthus, and intensified land use à la Boserup, a team led by David Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported in a 2009 study in Population and Development. Paradoxically, the result is that areas with relatively low population densities can have much higher deforestation rates than those with higher densities.

Read the whole article 

Related:

 Sustainable growth in Machakos by Francis Gichuki , Mary Tiffen , Michael Mortimore, ILEIA Newsletter • 9 nº 4 • December 1993

More People, Less Erosion, Overseas Development Institute UK, 1994

 

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Posted in Agriculture, Alarmism, Demographics, Development | 1 Comment »

Al Gore’s polar bear scientist suspended, being investigated for scientific misconduct

July 28, 2011
Polar bear under water

Polar bear under water: Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE 2! It seems that the famous dead-bear photograph may have been photo-shopped. 

UPDATE! Extracts from a transcript of the Inspector General’s interview with Charles Monnet is available at WUWT.

Monnet comes across as a blithering idiot. Let alone algebra (and let’s not include statistics), Monnet’s arithmetic leaves a lot to be desired!! And he disbursed 50 million $!!! Fraud may not have been the intention – even if that was the result, but this was not science.

Scientific misconduct together with political opportunism is a heady combination.

No further comment needed.

Fed Polar Bear Defender Placed on Leave

A federal wildlife biologist who sounded the alarm about drowning polar bears in the midst of global warming has been placed on leave pending the outcome of a scientific misconduct probe. Charles Monnett is being investigated for unspecified “integrity issues” apparently linked to his report that polar bears could face an increased threat of death if they’re forced to swim farther as Arctic ice recedes, reports AP. ……

Monnett is in charge of monitoring some $50 million in studies from his Anchorage office of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement. He and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason spotted four dead polar bears in the Arctic sea during an aerial survey following a 2004 storm in the first known sighting of bears floating offshore and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances. They theorized that bears’ “drowning-related deaths may increase if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.” Monnett’s conclusions helped galvanize the movement to stem global warming, and the drowned polar bears were cited by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gleason was asked by an “integrity” investigator his thoughts on the bear citation in the Gore film, according to transcripts. Gleason responded by saying that none of the polar bear papers he has written or co-authored has said “anything really” about global warming.

According to The Blaze

Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.” 

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Ethics, Politics, scientific misconduct, Wildlife | 5 Comments »

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