Posts Tagged ‘environment’

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Another perversion of science: Confirmation bias in the name of global warming dogma is also scientific misconduct

January 25, 2011

A new paper has been published in Ecology Letters

Ran Nathan, Nir Horvitz, Yanping He, Anna Kuparinen, Frank M. Schurr, Gabriel G. Katul. Spread of North American wind-dispersed trees in future environments. Ecology Letters, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01573.

In this paper the authors have assumed that climate change will cause changes to CO2 concentration and wind speed. They have assumed also that increased CO2 will “increase fecundity and advance maturation”. They have then modelled the spread of 12 species as a function of wind speed.

So far so good – they have actually modelled only the effect of wind speed  which they assume will reduce due to climate change.

Their results basically showed no effect of wind speed:

“Future spread is predicted to be faster if atmospheric CO2 enrichment would increase fecundity and advance maturation, irrespective of the projected changes in mean surface windspeed”.

And now comes the perversion!

From their fundamental conclusion that wind speed has no effect and that therefore any CO2 increase resulting from climate change will enhance the spread of the trees, they invoke “expected” effects to deny what they have just shown:

“Yet, for only a few species, predicted wind-driven spread will match future climate changes, conditioned on seed abscission occurring only in strong winds and environmental conditions favouring high survival of the farthest-dispersed seeds. Because such conditions are unlikely, North American wind-dispersed trees are expected to lag behind the projected climate range shift.”

This final conclusion is based on absolutely nothing  and their modelling showed nothing and yet this paper was accepted for publication. I have no problem that a result showing “no effect of wind speed” be published but suspect that it needed the nonsense, speculative conclusion to comply with current dogma.

Science Daily then produces the headline: Climate Change Threatens Many Tree Species

when the reality is

This study Shows No Effect of Wind Speed But Yet We Believe that Climate Change Threatens Many Tree Species

“Our research indicates that the natural wind-driven spread of many species of trees will increase, but will occur at a significantly lower pace than that which will be required to cope with the changes in surface temperature,” said Prof. Nathan. “This will raise extinction risk of many tree populations because they will not be able to track the shift in their natural habitats which currently supply them with favorable conditions for establishment and reproduction. As a result, the composition of different tree species in future forests is expected to change and their areas might be reduced, the goods and services that these forests provide for man might be harmed, and wide-ranging steps will have to be taken to ensure seed dispersal in a controlled, directed manner.”

Whether the perversion is by the authors themselves anticipating what is needed to get a paper published or whether it is due to pressure from the Journal Ecology Letters or by their referees is unclear.

Abstract:

Despite ample research, understanding plant spread and predicting their ability to track projected climate changes remain a formidable challenge to be confronted. We modelled the spread of North American wind-dispersed trees in current and future (c. 2060) conditions, accounting for variation in 10 key dispersal, demographic and environmental factors affecting population spread. Predicted spread rates vary substantially among 12 study species, primarily due to inter-specific variation in maturation age, fecundity and seed terminal velocity. Future spread is predicted to be faster if atmospheric CO2 enrichment would increase fecundity and advance maturation, irrespective of the projected changes in mean surface windspeed. Yet, for only a few species, predicted wind-driven spread will match future climate changes, conditioned on seed abscission occurring only in strong winds and environmental conditions favouring high survival of the farthest-dispersed seeds. Because such conditions are unlikely, North American wind-dispersed trees are expected to lag behind the projected climate range shift.

In essence this paper is only based on belief and the results actually obtained are denied. It seems to me that denying or twisting or “moulding” results actually obtained to fit pre-conceived notions is not just a case of confirmation bias but comes very close to scientific misconduct.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Environment, Media, Peer review, Science | Comments Off on Another perversion of science: Confirmation bias in the name of global warming dogma is also scientific misconduct

“What the Green Movement got wrong” (cont’d)

November 6, 2010

A follow up to the post about the Channel 4 programme with environmentalists beating their breasts is this very succinct cartoon from Josh which encapsulates the whole story very nicely:

 

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The End is Nigh!

October 26, 2010

Various headlines today tell their own story:

  1. Global Warming to Bring More Intense Storms to Northern Hemisphere in Winter and Southern Hemisphere Year Round
  2. As Arctic Warms, Increased Shipping Likely to Accelerate Climate Change
  3. Thermogeddon: When the Earth gets too hot for humans
  4. Space tourism could have big impact on climate
  5. WARMER ARCTIC SPELLS COLDER WINTERS, and finally
  6. Colorado climate scientists tell Ken Buck: Global warming is not a ‘hoax’

The scam is unravelling.

 

 

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That man-made carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate trends is irrational

October 24, 2010

 

Variations in temperature, CO 2 , and dust fro...

Vostok Ice core: Image via Wikipedia

 

One of a series of debate articles  in Ny Teknik by Professors Björnbom and Ribbing brings a refreshing whiff of sanity into the “closed and settled” science of global climate change. They conclude:

“To now stubbornly stick to the hypothesis that man-made carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate trends, is irrational in the headwinds from a growing number of critical articles based on measurements.”

Pehr Björnbom, Professor Emeritus, Chemical Engineering, KTH

Carl-Gustaf Ribbing, Professor Emeritus, Solid State Physics, Uppsala University

A free translation of their article is reproduced below:

Azar, Eriksson, Tjernström and Westerstrand, AETW, write: “strange that on the basis of only one study … rejecting decades of research “. This is a misleading summary of many years of development. For our article, and the references to the PDF version, showing a lower climate sensitivity than that shown by the UN’s Climate Change organisation, the IPCC, is not a new phenomenon. In less than ten years, the IPCC’s high values have been  disputed, partly because global warming has been lower than was predicted.

Instead of reducing the excessive carbon dioxide sensitivity the aerosol contribution has been increased to reduce climate sensitivity. In principle it is better to use measurements from high altitude, rather than parameter dependent adaptations to climate models to the Earth’s surface temperature.

AETW write about the glacial cycles that it is “.. very difficult to explain how Earth’s temperature can vary by as much as five degrees … between an ice age and a non-glacial climate when sensitivity is … one degree or less. ” It is “very difficult” only with today’s climate, which shows that the narrow focus on “explaining” the climate variations of carbon dioxide leads to absurdities.
We wonder why Per Ribbing blames us for over-simplification? What we are against is precisely the unilateral selection of the carbon dioxide created by human activity to be the dominant factor in climate regulation. We assert the contrary, that a half-dozen natural factors govern the very complex climate system. It will probably never be scientifically possible to completely describe this chaotic system.
Spencer and Braswell are making great progress with their phase diagram, so that variations in the natural driving forces can be separated from the feedbacks. This gives a higher correlation and a more accurate value of climate sensitivity: 0.6 degrees without the aid of climate models.
This uncertainty gives the obvious; that values can increase or decrease for longer periods than any measuring period. To now stubbornly stick to the hypothesis that man-made carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate trends, is unreasonable in the headwinds from a growing number of critical articles based on measurements.

Pehr Björnbom, Professor Emeritus, Chemical Engineering, KTH

Carl-Gustaf Ribbing, Professor Emeritus, Solid State Physics, Uppsala University

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Resource depletion is imaginary

October 19, 2010

 

Limits of growth

Doomsaying: Image by net_efekt via Flickr

 

“Humanity’s demands on natural resources are sky-rocketing to 50 per cent more than the earth can sustain”

trumpets the WWF.

Similar headlines have been common-place for the last 40 years. “The Limits to Growth” in 1972 was not the first time such dire predictions were made. They only carried on from where Malthus left off with his  An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. And before Malthus there were plenty of alarmists and doom merchants  at least as far back as mankind has lived in complex societies where opportunists could exploit people by fears of catastrophes and impending doom.

Unfortunately, today’s so-called conservationists have descended to the level of doom “merchants”. Either they are propagating fears of humanity running out of food or oil or coal or metals or water or rare earths or they are screaming about the Earth running out of biological species or of polar ice or sustainability.

But I am not convinced.

Actually, mankind destroys nothing. At the elemental level we neither create or destroy anything (except in the use of nuclear energy where some elemental transformation takes place and where some little mass is converted to energy). All the metals we use or the fuels we use are merely transformed from one compound to another and occasionally some molecules are reduced to their elemental form. The Earth as a system loses only heat (and if the global warming maniacs are to be believed we are not even losing that). The mass of the earth changes only by the accretion of meteors and the leakage of atmosphere and this change is of no material significance.

All the elements that were available remain available. The forms of compounds that we currently use and which have been created slowly by slow natural processes may well be used up. But so what? Mankind has always used what is available and when natural rubber was not enough we made synthetic rubber. We usually take what is available and transform it into the form we want. We take metal oxides, reduce them to the elemental metals and then recombine them into the qualities of steel or alloys we need. We take oil and convert it into plastics. We take plant material and make paper. We take other plant material and make oils. We take sand and make glass. We take limestone and make cement or concrete. We are a carbon-based life form. We use carbon in all its forms as diamonds and all organic materials and now as graphene for nano-materials. We take oil and make food. Nearly all the drugs we use are synthesised.

Even if we restrict ourselves to the known form of the resources we use, we cannot forget that 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. We have not even begun to see what can be found there. Even the off-shore oil and gas we extract hardly scratches the (submerged) surface. We are crowding out some particular species but keep finding new ones. The number of mammals (but not necessarily species) in existence is increasing rather than reducing. The diversity of life in the sea is hardly touched.

The overwhelmingly pessimistic view of mankind and its future which drives the current-day conservationists to their creed of “stop everything” goes nowhere. “Stop the World, I wan’t to get off” is not something for me. A strategy for humanity – like any other strategy – cannot be based on “what not to do”.

I suppose it is the difference between an optimist and the doom sayers. I see no energy crisis – only some technological challenges to be met. I see no food crisis – only some tasks to be carried out, and these tasks do not need any technological breakthroughs. The Earth and the Sun will take care of climate as they see fit and our task is to adapt to whatever changes may come and not to waste our time in any futile attempt to try and control it. We could stop using all energy today and the Earth and the Sun will still cause climate change to happen and mankind is not even a bit player in that music.

I remain an optimist and I believe in the human ability to develop technology. As educational standards improve, human population will probably increase till about 2050, then reduce slightly from about 10 billion people and then stabilise at a very slow rate of growth. This development will be dynamically coupled to our rate of technological development which will continue but where we cannot predict the rate of breakthroughs appearing. A breakthrough in transportation methods (and since the invention of the modern internal combustion engine for transport in 1862, this is now overdue) or a breakthrough in food synthesising technology or finding new sources of energy (and I do not mean wind or solar) will have an obvious effect on quality of life and on rate of population growth.

A true environmentalist must be first concerned with the quality of life for humankind. The “environment” devoid of humans is no environment at all. I wish the so-called conservationists (who are not in my opinion true environmentalists) would stop telling me what not to do.

There is no resource crunch. There may come shortages of resources in the form we are used to but I have supreme confidence in our ability to develop the required technologies to keep improving on our quality of life – and to keep evolving.

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Posted in Behaviour, Engineering, Environment, Ethics, Evolution, Technology | 1 Comment »

Evaporation from land increased from 1982 to 1998 and then stopped

October 10, 2010

Interesting paper but the headlines it generates are even more interesting.

A new Letter to  Nature:

Recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply

Martin Jung et al, Nature, DOI:10.1038/nature09396

The authors write:

Our results suggest that global annual evapotranspiration increased on average by 7.1 ± 1.0 millimetres per year per decade from 1982 to 1997. After that, coincident with the last major El Niño event in 1998, the global evapotranspiration increase seems to have ceased until 2008. This change was driven primarily by moisture limitation in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly Africa and Australia.

But the New Scientist in its wisdom reports this under the headline:

Water cycle goes bust as the world gets warmer

That evapotranspiration should decrease if the moisture is not there in the first place seems perfectly reasonable.  That we will have to use technology to get ground water levels back up as water usage increases is also fairly obvious.

It occurs to me that global temperatures have been stable if not declining over the last decade which also fits the period when they measured the stable evapotranspiration.

I note – in passing – that evaporation from ocean surfaces is some 7 times greater than the evaporation from land surfaces while precipitation over the oceans is about 4 times greater than that over land.

But the NS headline is a little bizarre.


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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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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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Life flows back into the Murray-Darling Basin

October 1, 2010

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

An aerial view of the Choke (north and south lagoon) of the Coorong. Photo: David Mariuz

The long wait is almost over at the mouth of Australia’s greatest river. A decade after it last spilt into the sea, the Murray River will reconnect with the Southern Ocean in a matter of days.

The Murray-Darling Basin is having its fourth wettest year (to date) on record, the Bureau of Meteorology said yesterday. The Murray’s famous Lower Lakes – surviving on environmental ”death row” last year – have swollen close to 150 centimetres higher than the nadir of 2009, thanks mostly to summer downpours in northern Australia and the September floods in Victoria.

Chief executive of South Australia’s environment and water department Allan Holmes is bullish about the future, saying the region was already ”an entirely different environment” to the one he was managing six months ago. ”These systems, provided you don’t tip them over the edge, are enormously resilient and they come back with a vengeance,” he said.

Just a month ago The plight of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin was being attributed to climate change:

“Australian climate scientists see the country as ‘extremely vulnerable’ to climate change and the Murray-Darling Basin as a ground zero for global warming. Climate change advisors to Australia’s government have warned that agricultural production in the basin could fall by up to 92% by 2100”.

“Global warming will trigger more frequent and severe droughts, as well as more devastating bushfires, cyclones and floods”–Kathy Marks.

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Science, Weather | 1 Comment »

Is Greenpeace fabricating data?

September 28, 2010

In July this year Greenpeace trumpeted

rain forest

“A new investigative report from Greenpeace, ‘How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet’, shows how major brands like Walmart, Auchan and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) are fueling climate change and pushing Sumatran tigers and orang-utans towards the brink of extinction. These companies are using or selling paper made from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), part of the notorious Sinar Mas group that is destroying Indonesia’s rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands.”

The Jakarta Globe reports

Sinar Mas commissioned an independent audit which has now accused Greenpeace of “false and misleading information to attack a company’s credibility”. International Trade Strategies Global (ITS) conducted a peer-review on Greenpeace’s report, “How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet.”

“The evidence shows that Greenpeace provided quotes that don’t exist, maps that show concessions that don’t exist, and used source material with high margins of error that was cited as absolute fact,” said Alan Oxley, chief executive office of the Melbourne-based ITS Global on the press release.

Oxley said the Greenpeace report was highly misleading and indefensible. In addition, the audit stated that a map in the Greenpeace report shows four concessions which don’t exist. “Sadly this is not an isolated incident. Greenpeace has exaggerated claims in the past.  When we see reports like this with such obvious factual inaccuracies it makes us call into question the real Greenpeace agenda, risking the greater good to achieve its own political ends.”

However, Bustar Maitar, lead forest campaigner for Greenpeace Indonesia, dismissed ITS’s report, saying it was biased. “If they claim it’s an independent report, it’s a joke because Alan Oxley is speaking as an APP representative,” he said.

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Posted in Development, Environment, Ethics | 2 Comments »

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