Science

Speaking Monday at Fresno State University in California, Sen. John McCain put forward what may be the most promising and important energy-policy proposal of the campaign: a $300 million prize for the development of advanced battery technology. “In the quest for alternatives to oil, our government has thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure,” he noted. Yet rather than have Washington pick winners and losers from within the energy industry, McCain suggested that the government should reward innovation and actual achievement. “From now on, we will encourage heroic efforts in engineering, and we will reward the greatest success.”

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Nice to see Ryan Radia's piece in the Des Moines Register today after yesterday's abominable piece reporting on what global climate change "means to Iowa." As usual the article ignores real global trends (no temp increase in last 10 years; oceans not warming; Antarctic sea ice increase; record cold winter; etc.) and instead regurgitates the IPCC Summary schtick and alarm-sounding from the Center for Climate Strategies, U. of Iowa prof Jerald Schnoor, and Iowa State U. global warming studier Eugene Takle.

"People are more worried," Takle was quoted without reporter curiousity or devil's advocacy.

Anyway, according to the Register, what does this all "mean to Iowa?" Let us count the "coulds," "ifs," "likely's," and "mights:"

"If we do this smart, we will create green jobs, improving the economy and cutting greenhouse gases," Schnoor said…

Scientists have noted for years that more carbon dioxide, which feeds plants, will likely mean booming crop yields. Takle said the longer period between the spring thaw and the return of frost in winter could mean longer growing seasons. The changes could open the door for farmers to grow two, maybe even three, crops a season, Takle said…But weather and climate changes could dampen the gains…For example, crop yields could drop 40 percent by 2100 because of higher levels of ground-level ozone…

Moisture in the air will likely increase because water vapor is the most prevalent greenhouse gas. Over time, this results in higher temperatures day and night….

Warming might make water shortages a bigger issue in Iowa, where a boom in ethanol plants and hog confinements have already strained supplies….

Milder temperatures could mean savings on home-heating bills, Takle said. It also could provide more groundwater recharge in periods of fast snowmelts. On the down side, look for more freeze-thaw cycles, damaging roads and bridges and altering growing seasons…

Deer, skunks and raccoons could benefit from a smorgasbord of new plant growth in places, but they might spread rabies and other diseases farther….

Of course, sprinkled about are claims made with more certainty, all based upon computer models fed by who-knows-what kind of data. Meanwhile the Register clings to only their kind of experts and ignores the respected Joe D'Aleo- and William Gray-types within meteorology and atmospheric science.

I have lost the count on the number of stories I have seen about coral reefs dying out because of global warming. A recent report in Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences details the corals warming adaptation strategy.

As the so-called climate change deniers emphasize continually: Climate changes, the only thing stable about the climate is that it changes. They are a modern day version of Heraclitus and his proclamation Panta Rei! for those of you who remember your western civilization classes. If climate change is permanent, it follows that the species alive today have a strategy for coping with the change.

We have seen this in papers published last year as well; one I remember quite vividly was about the migration of plants in the Arctic.

Now we have documentation about how the rich ecosystems around coral reefs adapt, so maybe its time to stop crying wolf and dedicate ourselves to an honest and meticulous examination of the actual effects of the changing climate?

The Interior Department's Inspector General has started preliminary investigations into why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is delaying their decision on whether polar bears ought to be listed as a threatened species due to global warming.
Bloomberg even brings breaking news today that the greens are going to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the two months delay as compared to the initial projected processing time.

I can come up with two very good reasons for the delay:

1. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service do not consider the polar bear as threatened, but do not have the political cahones to just say so outright. The ostrich tactic of sticking their heads in the sand is not working, so they might want to consider just fess up to the lack of scientific evidence to support the claim that the bear is threatened.

2. The evidence for the polar bear status as threatened is shaky at best. It is based on selective use of statistics and models that assume that the current trends in climate change will continue perpetually, which is highly unlikely.

Morten Jødal, the chair of the Biology Society in Norway has criticized the World Wildlife Foundation's selective use of population statistics in this debate in a recent commentary in the largest newspaper in Norway. It is in Norwegian, but here is a translation:

" Polar bear populations has increased dramatically from the 1960's to our time from about 5,000 individuals to about 25,000 individuals. It appears to be stable."

"It is correct as they point out that the population is down from 1,200 individuals in 1987 to about 950 individuals in 2004. What they omit si that the same population increased from 500 individuals in 1981. That gives a different picture, which does not indicate a species on the brink of extinction."

"Another piece of information that changes the statistic is that 49 polar bears are shot annually in the Western part of Hudson Bay. 833 polar bears have been shot over 17 years from 1987 to 2004. That is far more than the ones assumed to have lost their lives due to global warming."

There is no doubt that the listing of polar bears as an endangered species will have an enormous symbolic effect for the alarmists, but I was not aware that the endangered species list was a political propaganda tool, I thought it was a conservation tool, but then again I am naïve when it comes to politics and the things people are willing to do in the name of a cause.

Finally some science applied to the scientific consensus on global warming, and guess what, it does not exist! Consensus studies are not uncommon in the world of economics, and the people that claim constituency in the discourse over climate policy ranges from every academic discipline in Hayek's grand tradition of being an expert in all areas once you established your "expertdom" in one.

However, the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta, did canvas their members with a consensus survey and here is some highlight from the results. 99 percent thinks the climite is changing, 45 percent blame both human and natural causes, and 68 percent disagree with the statement "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled." 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

For those of us that talk to scientists that have gag-orders, that fear retribution from colleagues that thinks skepticism jeopardize department funding, and that feel mistreated and ridiculed by the media; this does not come as a surprise. These results was not a surprise to APEGGA executive director Neil Windsor, but then again, the man is a scientist, not a media spin doctor with political credentials.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Amazing — a new study released in the journal Science claims that everything we always understood about the age of the Grand Canyon was wrong. Turns out that rather than being 5 or 6 million years old, the new report says it is more like 17 million years old:

Not so fast, said Joel Pederson, a geomorphologist at Utah State University who has spent his career studying the Grand Canyon. He said the estimated age of 5 million to 6 million years is based on abundant evidence amassed by scientists over many decades. Seventeen million is impossible, he said, because there is no evidence of a large quantity of sediment flowing out of a canyon before 6 million years ago.

 

"They clearly have not taken the time to be rigorous and actually understand the regional geography," Pederson said.

Sound familiar? Won't be long before the paradigm-changing geologists are called deniers and banished from any further publication in established science journals. Let the mock and ridicule begin!

I adore Matthew Nisbeth's research but he is off his rocker in this comment he posted on his blog and that he presented in an interview on The World. I did not see him at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, and this is not the first time I catch researchers I respect in their lack of actual grounding in facts before they present research on an issue.

The first ever research conference I attended as a graduate student, I attended a panel on the ethical issues on plant biotechnology. I won't mention names, but some old geezer that had not left his ivory tower for quite a few years was talking about the problem of having one genetically modified plant growing all around the world. He was a bit shocked to find out that the GMO trait was bred into more than 70,000 local varieties, because the corn that will grow in the Midwest will not grow in India quite as well. But that is the reporter in me, I call people, and I ask what they actually do.

A communication professor that I adore got into my car when I gave her a ride to a conference, and she saw a name tag from the Heritage Foundation with my name on it hanging from my rear view mirror (yeah, it's a quirky habit, but good for conversations). She said, "but Lene, aren't those conservatives?" Hell yeah they are, and I don't like them much for it, but every year they put on a conference where you meet everything from the pro-life think tanks from St. Louis (Phyllis Schlafly & Co.) to the hippie libertarian lawyers from San Francisco. At one of these conferences I got to have lunch with the guy that organize some of the bioconservative groups that Nisbeth is comparing the Heartland Institute with. I need to know those groups, it is my job and my research passion. An trust me, Nigel S. Cameron, David Prentice, or their left wing ally Wesley Smith would never publish any of my work, but Joe Bast would.

Nisbeth is off his rocker, cause he is applying theory as a map without checking the terrain. I am a reporter first, communications researcher second. I call the people that I don't think will ever talk to me again, and ask them to show me their way, I might have my facts wrong after all. So maybe, just maybe, I should challenge the guy to put on a climate change panel for AJMC in August, cause I know that I have access to enough data to prove that his point in the World segment is doggone wrong, and I think the coverage from the conference prove it. There is no way Heartland's view of climate change is the predominant frame on this issue, no matter how right those scientists and policy wonks are in their assessment of the consequences and lack of scientific justification for current public policy on the issue.

Last night I got home from an exhausting and exhilarating trip to New York City. During my stay, I barely got out of the hotel and I am still annoyed at all the wonderful presentations that I missed. Lucky for me, they will end up on the Internet shortly. I attended the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. There was some totally cool and breaking science stories at this conference, and here are some of the impressions I had when I was talking to Gardner Goldsmith at Against the Grain on Monday and Tuesday.

Monday

Tuesday

The global temperature has been stable since 1998 according to Ole Humlum at the University of Oslo. In the largest paper in Norway, he is stating that this stabilization can mean one of three things:

1. We have achieved a stable temperature
2. We have reached a "plateu" and rise again in a bit
3. We have reached a top in the global temperature, and it will soon start sinking again.

As a true scientist, Prof. Humlum says we do not have the knowledge of which one of these three alternatives will come to pass, but considering the fact that we have had an increase in CO2 concentration without a warming the last decade, the greenhouse theory  should be considered debunked by now.

The dogmatics in Norway is stating that Humlum cannot use the record year of 1998 as a benchmark year, although they have no problem using the cool 1970's as the benchmark to prove that its getting warmer. I am not sure how they can throw out a decade's worth of stable temperature as benchmark related though.

Even though media in Norway has shunned the climate skeptics in Norway for a long time, but their media climate is finally warming up. A push for less campaign journalism by the Norwegian trade publication for reporters on the week of the Nobel Prize gala in Oslo is slowly changing the debate. I talked to Prof. Humlum a few weeks before the Nobel award, and he had several tales of editors that told him that his research was not welcome on their pages, now he has a full page story on the biggest newspaper in the country.