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Vicious attack on Dr. Fred Singer by Der Spiegel

October 9, 2010

Der Spiegel likes to keep its many feet in every possible camp.

In May this year they had published  an article:  How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised by Axel Bojanowski.

But clearly they feel the need to show how impartial they are and that they can also be as alarmist as the rest of the media !!!!!!

Yesterday they published The Traveling Salesmen of Climate Skepticism by Cordula Meyer which is a vicious attack on Fred Singer and , in passing, on Gerd Weber. From her previous articles, she does not seem to have any special science credentials and clearly is one of the global warming groupies who believes that consensus science is good science : “According to a US study, 97 percent of all climatologists worldwide assume that greenhouse gases produced by humans are warming the Earth”.

‘Science as the Enemy’

A handful of US scientists have made names for themselves by casting doubt on global warming research. In the past, the same people have also downplayed the dangers of passive smoking, acid rain and the ozone hole. In all cases, the tactics are the same: Spread doubt and claim it’s too soon to take action.

Read the whole article if you have the stomach for it.

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Socio-economic measures can help adapt crops for climate change

October 8, 2010

The headline in the Telegraph is both remarkable and irresponsible.

Climate change threatens UK harvest

The article is about a new paper in Environmental Research Letters:

Increased crop failure due to climate change: assessing adaptation options using models and socio-economic data for wheat in China

Andrew J Challinor, Elisabeth S Simelton, Evan D G Fraser, Debbie Hemming and Mathew Collins Environ. Res. Lett.5 034012  doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034012

This paper deals with simulations of  crop failures due to heat and water stress in North east China, where the simulations are themselves based on climate model output taken from the coupled atmosphere–ocean simulations of the Hadley centre for the period 1990 – 2099. The base-line for climate was for the period 1950-1989.

 

Grain crops China: Xinhua News Agency

 

The authors conclude that based on their simulations

The results from this study suggest that climate change will result in increasing spring wheat crop failure in northeast Chinadue to increasing extremes of both heat and water stress.

But the authors also studied socio-economic adaptation factors. Access to capital and land, increasing fertilizer, per capita investments in agriculture, and falling numbers of rural households all of which reduce vulnerability. They find that “measures to adapt may include institutional policies to support adaptation; schemes to ensure that the requisitecrop varieties are available to farmers; crop insuranceschemes or weather derivatives to aid management ofclimate variability; plant breeding; and building capacity foragricultural extension services to effectively prepare farmers for extreme events”. They go on to conclude that

The simulations show significant potential for adaptation throughboth socio-economic and biophysical measures. The methods used could form part of a methodology to link climate andcrop models, socio-economic analyses and crop variety trialdata. By examining at the regional scale the range of abioticstresses likely to be experienced by crop production systemsin the future, the relative importance of these stresses couldbe determined using a risk-based or probabilistic framework.This work could in turn be used with analyses of current andpotential future germplasm, and socio-economic conditions,in order to prioritize efforts to adapt regional-scale cropproduction to climate change, using a range of measures suchas policy, plant breeding and biotechnology.

But The Telegraph somehow can only see the alarmist side. They also manage to bring the UK Met Office into the story and create a remarkable headline from these simulations of North East China! Louise Gray writes:

Climate change threatens UK harvest

Climate change could push up food prices by causing large-scale crop failures in Britain, the Met Office has warned. Rising temperatures could mean events such as the drought in Russia this summer, which pushed up grain prices, hit countries like the UK.

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Oh dear ! Science in the service of totalitarianism

October 7, 2010

Fred Pearce in the New Scientist is at it again!

The world badly needs an independent carbon police to check the figures and catch the carbon frauds.

Can science deliver?

 

Carbon police?

 

Verifying national emissions requires both “bottom-up” independent oversight of the inventories, and better “top-down” monitoring of the atmosphere, says Matthias Jonas of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenberg, Austria.

A new climate treaty will also need carbon sniffers in tropical forests, especially in countries that sign up to a part of the deal called REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). REDD would offer cash to countries that conserve their forests so they can soak up atmospheric CO2. This means knowing how much carbon is actually being absorbed by the forests. In August, a study of Peruvian forests by Greg Asner of Stanford University, California, found existing estimates of carbon stored and released could be out by as much as 50 per cent.

Enough said!

The Carbon Police mean business. Trees and plants not absorbing their required amount of carbon dioxide will be punished severely.

10:10

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Biodiversity 100 – another 10.10 crisis?

October 4, 2010

The Guardian today (and they have yet to distance themselves from their support for their 10: 10 partners):

Talk has not halted biodiversity loss – now it’s time for action

Guillaume Chapron and George Monbiot: “Help us compile a list of 100 tasks (that’s 10.10 to the rest of us) that G20 governments should undertake to prove their commitment to tackling the biodiversity crisis”.

Lurching from one crisis to the next

This comes a day after such headlines  as:

Oceans could contain 750,000 undiscovered species

The world’s oceans are teeming with far greater diversity of life than was previously thought, according to the first Census of Marine Life.

This plethora of manufactured crises is becoming farcical.

Mr. Monbiot has been silent regarding the 10:10 fiasco.

The Guardian is busy positioning itself for the next crisis when biodiversity becomes less fashionable.

The water footprint


Onwards and upwards.

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BBC balance: 1 PR = 2 x FRS

October 1, 2010

The BBC carries a short article about the Royal Society’s rewritten “Short guide to the science of climate change”.

Professor Anthony Kelly, one of the 43 Fellows who called for the change, says he is reasonably satisfied with the new guidance. “It’s gone a long way to meeting our concerns,” he said. “The previous guidance was discouraging debate rather than encouraging it among knowledgeable people. The new guidance is clearer and a very much better document.”

Professor Kelly is one of two Fellows who are advisers to Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, which says it wants to bring balance to a “seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist” debate about the impact of human activities on the Earth’s climate system.

Having named the GWPF the BBC feels it incumbent for the sake of balance to also mention the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, But to do this they are forced to quote a certain Bob Ward who is the PR hack of the Grantham Institute.

But the BBC which is far from neutral in the climate disruption / change debate, reveals its governing mathematics when it implies that one public relations hack is sufficient to balance two Fellows of the Royal Society:

1 x PR = 2 x FRS

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Walrus and melting ice story was a hoax

September 18, 2010
Large walrus on the ice - Odobenus rosmarus di...

Image via Wikipedia

This post was from 2010. See 2014 post where the gullible media regurgitate the whole story again!

 

There were headlines across the environmental lobbies and the NYT and others just swallowed it.

“Walruses have joined polar bears and other creatures that are acutely affected by the record decline of Arctic sea ice in recent years”

But it was all just nonsense and a hoax.

Walrus landing on the beaches is nothing unusual. Yes, the beaches in Alaska have been invaded by thousands of walrus. But it turns out that this is nothing unusual. The Tucson Citizen reports here that according to the The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service:

The largest concentrations are found near the coasts, between 70 degrees North and Pt. Barrow in the east and between Bering Strait and Wrangel Island in the west. Concentrations, mainly of males, are also found on and near terrestrial haulouts in the Bering Sea in Bristol Bay and the northern Gulf of Anadyr throughout the summer. In October the pack ice develops rapidly in the Chukchi Sea, and large herds begin to move southward. Many come ashore on haulouts in the Bering Strait region. Depending on ice conditions, those haulout sites continue to be occupied through November and into December, but with the continuing development of ice, most of them move south of St. Lawrence Island and the Chukchi Peninsula by early to mid-December.

Why are they early this year? The Tucson Citizen also quotes the Alaska Fish & Game Department, which says that concentrations of walrus on beaches is not unusual.

Best known among the Walrus Islands is Round Island, where each summer large numbers of male walruses haul out on exposed, rocky beaches.” “Walrus return to these haulouts every spring as the ice pack recedes northward, remaining hauled out on the beach for several days between each feeding foray.

Started by environmental groups and spread by a gullible media.

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Climate models don’t need the sun – “Venus is similar to Earth” !!!

August 17, 2010

Japanese Spacecraft Approaches Venus

Venus Climate Orbiter “AKATSUKI”

This from NASA Science News:

[Global view of Venus]

Imamura is the project scientist for Akatsuki, a Japanese mission also called the Venus Climate Orbiter. The spacecraft is approaching Venus and will enter orbit on December 7, 2010. Imamura believes a close-up look at Venus could teach us a lot about our own planet.

“In so many ways, Venus is similar to Earth. It has about the same mass, is approximately the same distance from the sun, and is made of the same basic materials,” says Imamura. “Yet the two worlds ended up so different. We want to know why.”

Considering NASA’s own Venus fact sheet and the fact that Venus is about 41 million km closer to the sun it is – in the kindest interpretation – sloppy to permit a statement that “Venus is similar to earth.. approximately the same distance from the sun”.

“By comparing Venus’s unique meteorology to Earth’s, we’ll learn more about the universal principles of meteorology and improve the climate models we use to predict our planet’s future” says Imamura.

Of course the models will no doubt take into account that solar radiation on Venus is about  2688 J while the Earth receives 1365 J or perhaps the models don’t need the sun and will base everything on the heating effects of carbon dioxide.

I would have thought that it is the differences between Venus and Earth which can be revealing and to consider a distance of 41 million km closer to the sun as being negligible does not inspire confidence in any subsequent climate modelling.

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American gets an Indian heart

August 7, 2010

I wish the recipient a long and useful life.

But the headlines in The Hindu newspaper and the , no doubt justified, pride in the accomplishments of the medical fraternity is a little disturbing.

Nearly 25 years ago, Prathap C. Reddy, a cardiologist set up a hospital in Chennai after he lost a patient who could not afford to go to the United States for surgery. At Apollo Hospitals, things have come full circle since, with a 65-year old American undergoing a heart transplant here.

In the process, two records were also created. The patient was not only the first U.S. citizen to undergo a heart transplant in India, but he was also the oldest person to undergo a heart transplant in the country, Paul Ramesh, primary consultant cardiac surgeon who performed the surgery said.

The recipients heart function was about 28 per cent and in January, doctors back home in Minneapolis told him that he required a heart transplant within a year, failing which he would die, T. Sunder, consultant cardiac surgeon, Apollo Hospitals, explained.

However, the American recounted in a press conference on Thursday, it could have taken him a year and a half to get a heart back home. He had meanwhile, read of the facilities for heart transplant in India, checked with some friends and decided to make the trip to India to get a new heart.

On the night of July 21, the American got really lucky. A brain dead donor’s 36-year old heart was available but there were no other takers. M.R. Girinath, chief cardio vascular surgeon, called up the State co-ordinator for the Cadaver Transplant Programme seeking a go-ahead to use the heart on the foreigner. Once the sanction came, the hospital performed the transplant, working eight hours to put an Indian heart into an American.

But there is a dark side to this kind of “medical tourism”. The transplant and organ donor business in India is already a growing and lucrative business for many medical institutions and practitioners. There is now a thriving “black market” in kidneys for transplantation preying on the poor on India’s slums .  ( After the Tsunami struck this was the only way out for many poor women in some villages in Southern India).

The grapevine tells me that the kidney “donor” is paid around 25,000 Indian Rupees (about $500) while the recipient is charged around 100,000 – 200,000 Indian Rupees (about $2,000 – 4,000) for the kidney and the paperwork to legitimise the organ. A foreign buyer is usually charged more (as much as $30,000) but kidney brokers are available to try and “minimise” the cost. The medical charges for transplantation are of course extra. The organ business is not caused by medical tourism but the money-flows are the key driving force and tourism adds hugely to the money flows.

If the organ trade now targets hearts ………..

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Alarmism: Exaggerations aplenty

August 4, 2010

1. A solar storm yes, but hardly a Tsunami

The headlines were alarmist as usual: NASA scientists braced for ‘solar tsunami’ to hit earth, but reality was a little less alarming. A C3 flare caused a G2 geomagnetic storm  (G1 being the weakest and G5 the strongest) with a Kp value of 6. (Kp of 5 at G1 and 9 at G5).

image:http://solarcycle24.com/

The Northern lights could be particularly spectacular but a moderate G2 storm can be expected to have some relatively minor but significant effects:

  • Power systems: high-latitude power systems may experience voltage alarms, long-duration storms may cause transformer damage.
  • Spacecraft operations: corrective actions to orientation may be required by ground control; possible changes in drag affect orbit predictions.
  • Other systems: HF radio propagation can fade at higher latitudes, and aurora has been seen as low as New York and Idaho (typically 55° geomagnetic lat.).

From http://www.spaceweather.com/ The solar storm of August 1st sent two CMEs toward Earth. The first one arrived yesterday, August 3rd, sparking mild but beautiful Northern Lights over Europe and North America (see below). The second CME is still en route. NOAA forecasters estimate a 35% chance of major geomagnetic storms when the cloud arrives on August 4th or 5th. High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras.

In Solar Cycle 24  sunspot activity continues to undershoot Solar Cycle 5.

2.The media and the environmental community were up in arms about “the worlds worst environmental disaster” and BP has been demonised by the US press but we now learn that 75% of the oil leakage in the Gulf of Mexico has already dispersed and that the Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk.

The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

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Global Warming: The wagons are circling

July 29, 2010

Met Office report: global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable’

A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the “greatest evidence we have ever had” that the world is warming.

Report cover

They protest too much.

Since it is the Met Office “this is powerful evidence – perhaps definitive – that the hysteria is overdone”.

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