Blogging break

I plan to resume blogging in about a week.

The Great Pacific Climate Shift

Interesting piece here.

The summary:

Though recent studies have rediscovered natural variability in the Pacific and attributed the changes to global warming, we have shown how these are simply changes resulting from multidecadal oscillations that have repeated for many decades and likely centuries. In addition we showed how these cycles correlate extremely well with temperatures in the United States and the arctic. These cycles likely also are responsible for the recent decline in arctic ice as was previously observed in the 1930s and 1940s when arctic temperatures last peaked.

"Prepare for Cooling, Not Warming"

Article by Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris here.

Bringing the proxies up to date

An interesting post from Steve McIntyre is here.

An excerpt from his "Bring the Proxies Up to Date!!" piece:

I will make here a very simple suggestion: if IPCC or others want to use “multiproxy” reconstructions of world temperature for policy purposes, stop using data ending in 1980 and bring the proxies up-to-date. I would appreciate comments on this note as I think that I will pursue the matter with policymakers.

Let’s see how they perform in the warm 1990s -which should be an ideal period to show the merit of the proxies. I do not believe that any responsible policy-maker can base policy, even in part, on the continued use of obsolete data ending in 1980, when the costs of bringing the data up-to-date is inconsequential compared to Kyoto costs.

For example, in Mann’s famous hockey stick graph, as presented to policymakers and to the public, the graph used Mann’s reconstruction from proxies up to 1980 and instrumental temperatures (here, as in other similar studies, using Jones’ more lurid CRU surface history rather than the more moderate increases shown by satellite measurements). Usually (but not always), a different color is used for the instrumental portion, but, from a promotional point of view, the juxtaposition of the two series achieves the desired promotional effect. (In mining promotions, where there is considerable community experience with promotional graphics and statistics, securities commission prohibit the adding together of proven ore reserves and inferred ore reserves - a policy which deserves a little reflection in the context of IPCC studies).

Update: Now check out McIntyre's update here. Also note his comment #95:

#92. Erik, all the measurements and dendrochronological work is being in an accredited lab. The site selection was, in effect, done by Donald Graybill.

As to testing a “hypothesis” : I didn’t have a “hypothesis” about what the tree rings would look like. The people with the hypothesis were the Team: bristlecone ring widths should have been off the charts according to Team theory. Me, I had no personal views or expectations. They could have been anything as far as I was concerned. It seemed outrageous to me that the Team should rely on bristlecone ring widths and seemingly be so incurious about them that they haven’t updated the results for nearly 25 years. (Of course, Hughes updated Sheep Mountain results in 2002, but not a whisper of the results. You might ask him where the results are.) For good order’s sake, we’ll submit a “data paper” somewhere. I don’t anticipate that I’ll do principal components on the data or try to see if there is a teleconnection to Czech temperature history.

Actually I did have one “hypothesis” - the Starbucks Hypothesis. That you could have a latte in the morning, collect bristlecones and be back in time for dinner. Now the trip was by no means a walk in the park; it required skilful 4-wheel driving by Pete but I’d say that we confirmed the Starbucks Hypothesis and disproved Mann’s excuse as to why this data has not been updated.

Debating whether global warming is a crisis

In a Chicago Sun-Times article earlier this week, we see this from a Gore spokeswoman:

"The debate has shifted to how to solve the climate crisis, not if there is one," said Kalee Kreider. "It does not make sense for him to engage in a dialogue with them at this time."

I think that's a truly extraordinary statement, given that (as I've mentioned earlier) NPR held an actual scientific debate on that very subject earlier this year, and especially given that Gore's side lost.

You can hear that debate for yourself at NPR's web page here:

In this debate, the proposition was: "Global Warming Is Not a Crisis." In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience [of several thousand] agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.

A transcript of the debate is here.

More related information is here.

A 50-minute MP3 from NPR is here.

Gore and the IPCC win a Nobel Peace Prize

Here.

You may not yet realize it, but this Nobel panel's decision is comparable to the Explorers Club now-infamous decision to honor Sparling/Harrison/Gallagher for misidentifying a bird within earshot of the highway.

Update: Check out this 10/12/07 Gore quote:

"It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," Gore said.

More on Steinberg's book

As I mentioned earlier, Michael K. Steinberg has written a book called "Stalking the Ghost Bird: The Elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in Louisiana".

Now Fishcrow writes this:

10-11-07. Who is Michael K. Steinberg? Through the LSU Press, he's publishing a book that examines "reported sightings and extensive efforts to find the rare bird in Louisiana." Since I'm the only one who has obtained hard evidence in that state in many decades and I have more sightings than anyone else in that state, you would think that I'd have heard from the author of such a book. It will be interesting to see if the material in the book is more accurate than the comments in the announcement, which refers to Tim Gallagher (whose degrees are in journalism and English) and Bobby Harrison (who's in the Art Department at Oakwood College) as scientists.

Related links are here, here, here, and here.

More IBWO discussion on the Arkansas Birding list

Here.

More from Patrick Coin

A few new posts by Patrick Coin are on Birdforum starting here.

One excerpt:

(I received an e-mail from a USFWS official a while ago, stating he was confident that the IBWO would eventually be documented in "up to six river systems". How could any rational person believe so at this point?)

Camille Paglia on "mass hysteria over global warming"

(Democrat) Camille Paglia writes at salon.com:

...Thank you for your input on the mass hysteria over global warming. The simplest facts about geology seem to be missing from the mental equipment of many highly educated people these days. There is far too much credulity placed in fancy-pants, speculative computer modeling about future climate change. Furthermore, hand-wringing media reports about hotter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rarely balanced by acknowledgment of the recent cold waves in South Africa and Australia, the most severe in 30 years.

Where are the intellectuals in this massive attack of groupthink? Inert, passive and cowardly, the lot of them. True intellectuals would be alarmed and repelled by the heavy fog of dogma that now hangs over the debate about climate change. More skeptical voices need to be heard. Why are liberals abandoning this issue to the right wing, which is successfully using it to contrast conservative rationality with liberal emotionalism? The environmental movement, whose roots are in nature-worshipping Romanticism, is vitally important to humanity, but it can only be undermined by rampant propaganda and half-truths.

Paglia previously wrote:

Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.) To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical.

However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.
...
I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" on cable TV recently, I wasn't able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore's lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming -- which is blatantly untrue -- he forfeited his own credibility.

Environmentalism is a noble cause. It is damaged by propaganda and half-truths...

Maybe Paglia has been paid off by the alleged Big Oil Climate Catastrophe Denial Machine, but somehow I doubt it.

British Judge Bruises Al Gore’s Movie

From a New York Times blog here:

Critics of “An Inconvenient Truth” include Al Gore’s political opponents, global warming skeptics and even rank-and-file scientists. But the former vice president waited until today for a detailed review from a high court in Britain.

Asked to ban the film from secondary schools, Judge Michael Burton refused, as long as “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush” were explained at screenings, Agence France-Presse reported.

It'll be an interesting juxtaposition if Gore suffers this serious setback, then wins the Nobel Peace Prize, all in the same week.

Posting from Gary Graves

Currently on the Arkansas Birding list here:

Many sections of the draft Ivory-bill recovery plan still reflect the euphoria of the "rediscovery" announcement in 2005. Much has been learned since then. Although intelligent well-intentioned people may have different perspectives on the unfolding Ivory-bill story, there is little reason for optimism in October 2007. The failure to obtain tangible, indisputable proof of an Ivory-bill after the largest and most expensive government-sponsored biological search effort in history dictates a reappraisal of the supposed evidence and a conservative prospectus for recovery. Virtually every scrap of information that has come to public attention since the veil of secrecy was lifted suggests that the recent records of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers from Arkansas and Florida were likely based on misidentification of the common Pileated Woodpecker, misinterpretation of sounds produced by other avian species, or on purely wishful thinking. All it takes is a few minutes of high-quality videotape of a calling and actively foraging Ivory-bill to falsify this hypothesis (still photos and sound recordings are too easy to fake). Despite the enormous academic and financial incentives to obtain such evidence, nobody has been able to locate an Ivory-bill that can be shown to someone else. That is telling fact. Confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret data in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and desires) and Groupthink (where critical thinking and skepticism are set aside so that the group can reach consensus and avoid conflict) have almost certainly played an important role from the beginning. As depressing as it may be, each passing month without definitive proof makes these dark possibilities a little more likely. Regrettably, it may already be too late to prevent the Ivory-bill phantasma from becoming the "cold fusion" debacle of conservation biology. This spectacle will undoubtedly damage the credibility of the USFWS and the participating NGO's and make conservation work a tougher sell with state and federal legislators and the general public. In any event, the hubbub over Ivory-bills should not distract federal and state agencies and NGO's from the laudable goal of preserving and creating new wildlife habitat in the Mississippi Embayment.

Gary Graves
Smithsonian Institution

Article with Nancy Tanner quotes

Here.

The demolition of the "hockey stick"

Some excellent information about the IPCC "hockey stick" fiasco is here.

One excerpt:

As I will show, the hockey stick paper was deeply flawed, and it contradicted other credible evidence then appearing in the scientific literature. The flaws could have been discovered during the review process under even the most elementary fact-checking. Yet the review process not only allowed this paper through, but made it front-and-centre in the final Report.

If you're currently an Ivory-bill skeptic but also a climate alarmism believer, you really should give the above piece a very careful read.

As you know, as the centerpiece of CLO's "Ivory-bill" case, the Luneau video was thoroughly demolished when exposed to the review of outsiders. As the centerpiece of the IPCC's anthropogenic global warming case, the hockey stick has suffered a similar fate.

I think it's in your own best interest to learn about this situation now. As demonstrated in the IBWO case, it's clearly more fun to figure out the truth earlier rather than later.

More excerpts from this related post:

So compelling was 1,000-yr long “hockey stick” graphic, that it quickly became the poster child for anthropogenic global warming. As such, it was prominently displayed as the first figure of the oft-read Summary for Policymakers of 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The “hockey stick” graphic gives the appearance that left to its own devices, nature displays very little in the way of temperature variation, but that during the past century, humans have come along and thrown everything out of kilter. It is thus the perfect representation of the greenhouse alarmists’ message—humans have caused the weather to be like never before (and this is bad).
...
But, the “hockey stick” was remarkable. And as such, it will be remembered as a remarkable lesson in how fanaticism can temporarily blind a large part of the scientific community and allow unproven results to become mainstream thought overnight. The embarrassment that it caused to many scientists working in the field of climatology will not be soon forgotten. Hopefully, new findings to come, as remarkable and enticing as they may first appear, will be greeted with a bit more caution and thorough investigation before they are widely accepted as representing the scientific consensus.

More Ivory-bill links

1. Geoff Hill is scheduled to speak in Alabama on Friday 10/19/07:

...Recently, the team has discovered many large cavities and unique feeding trees, heard the distinctive kent calls or double raps on 41 occasions, and observed Ivorybills 14 times, according to Dr. Hill...

A related excerpt is here:

“We know that Dr. Hill and his team have heard the birds’ distinctive calls and seen evidence of nests and feeding, and whether or not they have conclusive proof by October, we know he will have fascinating stories to tell about the search,” said John Borom, president of the Mobile Bay Audubon Society.

2. According to the ABA website, another IBWO book will be available next May. The book, by Michael K. Steinberg, is called "Stalking the Ghost Bird: The Elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in Louisiana".

3. A bit more from David Luneau is here:

...I've been planning a way to get more people involved remotely by reviewing videos of the swamp. More on the video review soon - let me know if you think you might be interested in watching swamp videos.

Updated CLO Ivory-bill FAQ

Here.

Check out this claim:

Since spring 2004, search teams have made at least one visit to about 16.5% of the total area of southeastern Arkansas that has been the focus of the search.

Update: Patrick Coin provides some translations here.

NBC Fleecing of America - IBWO Oct. 8 (bumped)

A reader writes:

FYI, I just saw a promo run on MSNBC (Oct. 6 about 12:15pm EDT) that the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams will have a "Fleecing of America" segment about money being spent on the IBWO in Arkansas on the October 8 broadcast.

Update 1: Welcome, "fleecing of america ..." Googlers. A post on the extreme weakness of the Arkansas Ivory-bill "evidence" is here.

Update 2: You should be able to watch the segment by clicking below:


27 million tax dollars for 'ghost bird'

Update 3: A related KARK story is here, and a related WIS News story is here.

Update 4: For some reason, as of 4am Central on 10/9/07, NBC's Ivory-bill story is not mentioned on Cornell's "Ivory-bill in the News" page.

Update 5: A "Florida Bird" post is here. Readers are directed here for what is allegedly "the real story".

Update 6: More discussion is currently available on the Arkansas Birding List here.

If a large hurricane struck NYC, should we immediately blame CO2?

From World Climate Report here:

The pair of geologists was able to reconstruct storm surge levels in the New York City area, and as seen in Figure 1, largest surges are found in 1788, 1821, and 1893. Maybe it is just us at World Climate Report, but we fail to see any trend upward coincident with the buildup of greenhouse gases. Furthermore, we notice that the three large surges occurred during a time when, last we checked, the Northern Hemisphere was considerably cooler than what we have today.

Figure 1. Storm surge heights relative to modern mean sea level which accompanied the 1788, 1821, and 1893 hurricanes inferred from historic archives and the most extreme flooding events of the 20th century recorded by the Battery Park (New York City) tide gauge from 1920 to present (from Scileppi and Donnelly, 2007)

"RSS MSU: September 2007 was 7th coolest month in this century"

Excerpts from this post:

According to the new RSS MSU satellite data, September 2007 was the 7th coldest month among 81 months since January 2001. It has made it to the 9% of the coolest months of the 21st century so far. Their gadgets measure temperature at latitudes between -70.0 (S) and +82.5 (N) - about 94.5% of the surface if I compute well.

In the last month, the global temperature was just 0.12 Celsius degrees above the long-term average which means that it was 0.78 Celsius degrees cooler than the temperature in April 1998 when the anomaly was +0.9 Celsius degrees. The main reason is La Nina that is getting stronger and might continue to do so for a few months.

The Southern hemisphere was 0.015 Celsius degrees cooler (!) than the long-term average, fifth coldest month since January 2001. Antarctica has cooled down by roughly 1 Fahrenheit degree in the last 50 years.
...
By the way, in an interview with Dennis Prager, Prof Robert Giegenback who is a geologist at UPenn describes some climate issues from a geological perspective. Among other things, he argues that only during 5% of the last one billion of years, the Earth could support permanent ice on both poles. We're living in one of the coolest periods of the geological history.