"Tales of close encounters with ivory-billed woodpeckers"

Here.

Note this curious paragraph:

The Louisiana ivorybills spent their time in the treetops, on the high ridges, and out in the sunshine in places with lots of dead trees. They flew high — not low and not close to the ground. And none were seen flying up from the ground or feeding on tree trunks near the ground like pileated woodpeckers do. These ivorybills were not seen near the water in the dark, shaded haunts of the nearby cypress swamp. Jim Tanner said, “The ivorybill is a dweller of the treetops and sunshine.”

Some problems with "An Inconvenient Truth"

Here.

The final paragraph:

Finally, Gore quotes Winston Churchill (p. 100) — but he should read what Churchill said when he was asked what qualities a politician requires: “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”

"Gore Dodges Repeated Calls to Debate Global Warming"

Here.

Two excerpts:

As over 150 heads of state and government gather at UN headquarters in New York to discuss climate change, former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of the theory of the human-induced, catastrophic global warming, continues to refuse repeated challenges to debate the issue.
...
Gore's reluctance to go toe-to-toe with global warming skeptics may have something to do with the - from the standpoint of climate change alarmists - unfortunate outcome of a global warming debate in New York last March. In the debate, a team of global warming skeptics composed of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor of biogeology Philip Stott, and physician-turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton handily defeated a team of climate alarmists headed by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt. Before the start of the nearly two-hour debate, the audience of several thousand polled 57.3 percent to 29.9 percent in favor of the proposition that global warming is a "crisis." At the end of the debate, the numbers had changed dramatically, with 46.2 percent favoring the skeptical point of view and 42.2 percent siding with the alarmists.

"Carbon dioxide & 800-year lag behind temperature:

Here.

A couple of excerpts:

As we have explained in 2006, Vostok ice core records show that the carbon dioxide concentration averaged over a few centuries has been correlated with temperature at least for half a million of years. However, we know for sure that the temperature was the cause and the CO2 concentration was its consequence, not the other way around. It follows that the greenhouse effect hasn't been important in the last half a million of years.
...
However, the most popular - and the most straightforward - explanation of the direction of the causal relationship is the fact that in all cases, the CO2 concentration only changed its trend roughly 800 years after temperature had done the same thing. There have been many papers that showed this fact and incidentally, no one seems to disagree with it. For example, a recent paper by Lowell Stott et al. in Science (2007) showed that 19,000 ago, when the last ice age started to go away, CO2 lagged by about 1,000 years, too.

Every sane person knows that this detailed insight implies that the greenhouse effect couldn't have been among the most important effects. Not only the ice core data fails to provide us with evidence supporting the greenhouse theory of the climate; it provides us with strong evidence against it.

"The Graph of Temperature vs. Number of Stations"

Some details and discussion are here.

An excerpt:

The graph mainly serves to illustrate one of the challenges for people who are trying to use land-based station data to construct a continuous index of the global average temperature over the 1990 boundary.

Southern hemisphere ignores "global" warming

Here.

An excerpt:

...If you look at the third graph, you see that there was no warming on the Southern Hemisphere in the last 25 years even though the "global warming theory" and the corresponding models are predicting even faster rise of the tropospheric temperatures than for the surface temperatures. The decadal trend is quantitatively around 0.05 degrees which is noise whose sign can change almost instantly.

Normally, I would think that one should conclude that according to the observations, there is no discernible recent warming on the Southern Hemisphere, and an experimental refutation of a far-reaching hypothesis by a whole hemisphere is a good enough reason to avoid the adjective "global" for the observed warming.

"Geoff Hill's Talk in NYC"

Here.

Some Ivory-bill links

1. John Fitzpatrick is scheduled to deliver a keynote called "How Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (and other birds) Can Save the World: A Multimedia Lecture" at next month's Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival in Georgia.

More information is here.

2. Another paragraph on Alex Karpovsky's IBWO film "General Impression of Size and Shape" is here:

Once thought to be extinct, The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is ‘rediscovered’ in Eastern Arkansas. Though numerous sightings have been reported, concrete proof remains elusive. Combing the bayou with a taciturn sidekick in tow, amateur birder Johnny Neander is getting close, but what he is about to find will undermine everything about this Southern mystery, and perhaps, himself.

A previous post on this film is here.

Freeman Dyson on global warming

December 2005 speech here.

An excerpt:

The first of my heresies says that all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.

But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

There's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime.

I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.

About Freeman Dyson:

Freeman Dyson has been and is an eminent physicist who has never received a PhD even though his name appears in the main text of 1,410 scientific articles.

"The ‘carbon offset’ child labourers"

Times Online (London) article here.

One excerpt:

Pumping furiously on a foot treadle in the afternoon heat, six-year-old Sarju Ram is irrigating her impoverished family’s field, improving the crop and – without knowing it – helping environmentally sensitive holiday-makers assuage their guilt over long-haul flights to dream destinations.

But Sarju and her four brothers and sisters working flat out in a clump of trees that provide scant shelter from the sun illustrate a growing argument over claims that British environmentalists’ efforts to curb greenhouse emissions are inadvertently fuelling an increase in child labour.

Sarju’s family is a beneficiary of Climate Care, an organisation that helps some of Britain’s leading public figures and companies to offset their carbon dioxide emissions by funding sustainable energy projects.

The Prince of Wales turned to Climate Care after his environmental adviser, Jonathon Porritt, worked out the prince’s carbon footprint.

Customers of British Airways are among those who have been encouraged to log on to Climate Care’s website and calculate how many tonnes of greenhouse gases their flights will generate, and how much it will cost to neutralise the impact on the atmosphere. A flight to Barbados for a family of four, for example, generates 7.55 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which will cost them £56.64 to offset.

Climate Care uses the money to help persuade families such as Sarju’s to give up labour-saving diesel pumps and buy human-powered treadles instead. It claims that by using the treadle, a family will save money on diesel and hire charges, earn more from increased crops and cut the carbon emissions that would have been produced by the pump.

Last week Indian experts criticised the scheme, saying it was promoting child labour and forcing poor farmers to work harder so that wealthy air travellers could enjoy exotic holidays without worrying about the environment.

“The problem is the number of times child labour is involved,” claimed Ashutosh Pandey of Emergent Ventures India, which advises companies on clean technology.

“It’s not being monitored properly. It’s not reducing emissions. People are selling their diesel pumps to others who are using them.”

Regarding the role of water vapor in climate change, is the science settled?

The correct answer is "no".

One excerpt from this article:

...When they tracked the daily evolution of a composite of fifteen of the strongest intraseasonal oscillations they found that although rainfall and air temperatures would be rising, the amount of infrared energy being trapped by the cloudy areas would start to decrease rapidly as the air warmed. This unexpected behavior was traced to the decrease in cirrus cloud cover.

The new results raise questions about some current theories regarding precipitation, clouds and the efficiency with which weather systems convert water vapor into rainfall. These are significant issues in the global warming debate.

"Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," [Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center] said. "Everyone just assumed that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..."

There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.

"Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty."

A related article is here.

One excerpt:

According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.

Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

Another related article is here (PDF).

An excerpt:

EXTREME variations in local weather and the seasons make it easy for people to mutter “greenhouse effect”, and blame everything on carbon dioxide. Along with other man-made gases, such as methane, carbon dioxide has received a bad press for many years and is uniformly cited as the major cause of the greenhouse effect. This is simply not correct. While increases in carbon dioxide may be the source of an enhanced greenhouse effect, and therefore global warming, the role of the most vital molecule in our atmosphere – water – is rarely discussed. Indeed, water barely rates a mention in the hundreds of pages of the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many aspects of the seemingly simple water molecule conspire to make it difficult to model its effect on our climate. Unlike most other atmospheric gases, the distribution of water in the atmosphere varies strongly with time, location and altitude...

Congratulations!

This now appears on Bobby Harrison's site:

NOVEMBER:

Thursday, 8 th, Book launching @ the Explorer's Club, NYC. They Lived to Tell the Tale, in which Bobby has a chapter, the book is available through amazon.com, Public is welcome, resevations.

Some views from Norman Borlaug

Here.

Excerpts:

In the food-versus-fuel debate, there's little doubt where Norman Borlaug's heart lies.

The father of the "Green Revolution," Borlaug's life has been dedicated to increasing the food supply in the developing world. His work with grains is credited with saving millions of lives, and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So Borlaug, now 93, watches with dismay as ever-greater amounts of the world's grain are turned into motor fuel for developed nations.

"It isn't going to solve our energy problems, and it's going to disrupt our food system," Borlaug said Thursday.

He stressed that he's not against biofuels, "up to a certain point." But using food as a fuel requires a careful balance, and Borlaug tilts his arms wildly to show how lopsided he thinks the balance has become.
...
Yet today's food-versus-fuel debate has a new element since 1970: growing concern about global climate change. Count Borlaug as a skeptic.

"I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up," he said. "But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?"

He's not sure, and he doesn't think the science is, either.

"How much would we have to cut back to take the increasing carbon dioxide and methane production to a level so that it's not a driving force?" he asked. "We don't even know how much."

So today a new debate is under way, as the world struggles with the proper balance between food production, fuel production, global hunger and global warming. What would Borlaug do? He'd like to turn back the clock to seek greater investment in alternative energy -- fuel from plant waste, sunlight, water and wind.

"What we should have done is to spend much more research on many different sources of energy, and we neglected that," he said. "If we have to start with grain, that's very different than starting with wood chips."

They call this a consensus?

Here.

Some excerpts:

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.
...
My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007."

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.