Thinking about Water: Sustainability and Climate Change (3)
Thinking about Water: Sustainability and Climate Change (3)
In the past two articles (Sustainability 1, Sustainability 2) I have been exploring the relation between climate change and sustainability. There are a couple of issues that floated to the top. The first is that both climate change and sustainability have complex and difficult issues of communication. For example, if an organization takes a strident and dogmatic position on a single issue, in my example, compostable plastic cups, then the important points about sustainability can be lost in a way that, bluntly, looks silly - and that is definitely damaging to advancing sustainability. The same is true for climate change. The second issue is that central to both sustainability and climate change is waste management – and in the particular case of plastic waste and carbon dioxide emissions there are some interesting parallels. The third is that there are practices in the sustainability movement that are not obviously “good” in the realm of addressing global warming. Ultimately, to address climate change we have to find sources of energy that do not emit carbon dioxide when energy is used.
In this entry, I want to visit the issues of water resources and sustainability and climate change; my primary purpose is to explore more fully the issues of communication, perspectives, and perhaps lumping people together into social and political groups.
In August I took a one-day course on grasslands and the reclamation of prairie land. Throughout eastern Colorado there are efforts to return farmland to natural prairie. Eastern Colorado is very dry, and in fact, southeastern Colorado was at the heart of the Dust Bowl ( an old dusty blog). To support crops such as sugar beets, corn, and Rocky Ford Cantaloupes, water for irrigation is required. The South Platte and Arkansas River watersheds are completely managed. If you drive the dirt roads through un-irrigated land, you see cholla growing.
The grasslands course that I took went to several fields where natural prairie grasses were being planted. Simply, this is agricultural land. If the land is abandoned, then all sorts of weeds, some of them considered pernicious invasive species, take over. That is, if there is some water. If there is no water then the land dries out and blows away. In the spirit of good land stewardship, grass seed are planted and the land is irrigated for a prescribed number of years. In this way, the broadleaf weeds grow first, the grass sprouts and takes hold, and then in five years the tough dry-lands grasses are left to fend for themselves – or perhaps used as rangelands. This appears to me to be good land management, sustainable perhaps, but I am not an ecosystems expert and if there are underlying problems with this, then I hope some readers will let me know.
What is the motivation for this return to prairie? The primary motivation is the capture of water for the cities along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains (Thirsty Cities, Dry Farms). So this might challenge some people’s notion of sustainability, especially those who couch the problem in terms of cantaloupes for suburban lawns.
But I don’t want to frame this in terms of suburban lawns. Denver Water is a large water owner in Colorado, and they have been long-time advocates for water conservation. In fact, if you look at most large U.S. West cities, their water consumption per person has gone down tremendously for the past decade or two. The population, their customer base, has gone up. Looking to a future with more people and a robust economy, water is important, so they are buying up water and water rights. These water rights, often, were originally for agriculture. Again this seems likes sensible, responsible behavior. From the point of view of sustainability, the fundamental problem is a lot of people in a dry land. But just to the west of Denver are the Rockies and they collect, or at least they always have collected – they collect water, store it snow and it flows down to the Plains in the summer. (Perhaps assisted by large tunnels and aqueducts – a good Latin word.)
So climate change – this is a blog about climate change. I started this series of blogs at the county fair. There were science exhibits, and a display on climate-wise gardening. There was a lot of attention to garbage; it was a zero-waste event. There was an exhibit and lecture on irrigation, with, of course, some discussion of stressed and contentious water resources. In one of the discussions I had, I brought up the climate-wise gardening exhibit, and the immediate response was that they did not think that climate change was a very important issue with regards to water for county farm land.
From the point of view of a farmer in eastern Colorado, the weather has always been an unreliable partner. You simply cannot count on water falling from the sky. When the farmer hears someone talking about climate change and the growing unreliability of water, they feel that they already have a large knowledge base about unreliable water. Already, they don’t count on the weather. If it rains, well, that is good fortune that means a little less irrigation or a little more corn. If you look at what affects the farmer’s water, it is cities buying up water rights at the head of the stream, in the mountains. The purchase of water, or more generally, water rights, water policy, and water engineering have a FAR greater impact than climate change. So if you are a farmer in eastern Colorado, the threat offered by climate change is pretty far down the list of risks.
The farmer’s climate risk is then influenced by, say, the cost of fuel. If you are reliant upon fossil fuels to pump water for your irrigation, then the increased cost of that fossil fuel to address climate change, that is threatening their water a few decades down the road – well it does not make a lot of sense. Ultimately, if it is the political will that matters, then the political support for climate change policy does not follow intuitively from their experiences. Plus, if you are a farmer in eastern Colorado, you likely sit on top of some oil or natural gas and with those high prices, and there’s a nice source of steady income – to replace the income lost because the water is being taken away by the city. That climate change is not a major environmental issue is not a surprise, and at least on the surface of policy options, much of what we propose to do about climate change does not appear to be in the farmer’s self interest.
So that’s one perspective of climate change. For another look at Denver Water. Denver Water looks at the mountains to their west, millions of people, and planning 50 years ahead. They look at cities that want to grow; towns that want to attract new businesses. They look across a large region. They look at changing seasonal supplies. Denver Water is one of the utilities that is most concerned about climate change. (Drought and Climate Change from Denver Water) The size of the problems Denver Water care about is large enough that climate change matters and is small enough that the climate projections, what will actually happen, is highly uncertain. They are prepared for the future, if the future looks like the past. But what if that future is different? The smart way to address such ambiguous risk is to buy more of the resource that you need.
I want to end with the grass tour. As we rode around in a bus looking at fields, you cannot help but be impressed by the presence of solar panels in those fields. Even if climate change is not a front-burner issue, energy, energy cost, energy access, energy reliability is.
r
Figure 1: From Rocky Mountain Climate Organization which works “to protect the West and its climate, by bringing about action to reduce heat-trapping pollution and to prepare for the changes that are coming.”
Reader Comments
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Yes, it does. Einstein's theory works flawlessly, on the large scale, so far. Einstein's theories does not work as well on the very small scale. We deal with the large scale where Einstein's theory works, since this is where we live, while we try to discover what works best to explain what happens on the very small scale. Quantum mechanics, so far, is our best way to discover this. This should not imply that they are on the right path to discovering this.
I do not think it would take a genius to know that science has made many advances since 1817 and 1912. I do think that there is a possibility that science would have advanced even further, if they would have had the internet back then. This, of course, is only my opinion.
No, I did not read the articles. Post #190 has lot of "______" and I do not see any links to follow. Perhaps you could repost the articles for me?
Are you here to play games, or are you here to try to advance the discussion? ..... Is there any reason why I should I take you seriously when you wish to play games?
Is it gullible to believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?
Is it gullible to believe that mankind's activities has released a large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere?
Is it gullible to believe that mankind's activities have destroyed some of nature's natural heat sinks, such as through deforestation?
Is it gullible to believe that Earth's resources are not infinite?
Is it gullible to believe that we are racing towards depleting our planets natural resources? All in the name of greed, self comfort and a sense of self worth?
Is there any gullibility in any of these things?
No one claims that man is responsible for all the changes to the environment. There is approximately 40% of the atmospheric CO2 today that cannot be explained, until you factor in mankind's activities.
What caused past environmental changes is less important than what is causing today's environmental changes. Nothing, other than mankind's activities, explains the geological rapid environmental changes that we are now seeing. Should you have a theory that explains all of this otherwise, I am more than willing to listen.
We cannot dismiss what we do know while we are trying to discover what we do not know. This would not be sound reasoning.
I will come back to respond to your post later. My pillow is making weird gestures at me and I need to check it out. I will return. I am enjoying our conversation and it has been very civil. Nice talking to you, nymore.
Good point about the clouds. There's the potential for some surprises there. Cloud feedbacks are poorly understood.
The climate system is very complex and unpredictable. When astrophysical cycles combined to overwhelm the last ice age, a funny thing happened. After thousands of years of sustained melting, the world went back into deep freeze mode, despite the fact that the astrophysical cycles and positive feedbacks should have been perpetuating the melting.
If there had been climate scientists around at the time, I bet no one would have predicted it. It just shows what kind of surprises may be in store. You can't rule out the possibility that something similar might happen in a globally warming world. Some totally unexpected negative feedback process could start a cooling trend and then everyone would be deriding the 'warmists' for their foolishness.
However, if greenhouse gases continued to rise, the cooling trend would probably be relatively short lived, perhaps a few decades, until the warming took over again.
Not sure how long the re-freezing lasted at the end of the last ice age. A thousand years or more, maybe. The period was called the Younger Dryas and is believed to have occurred because the input of fresh meltwater caused the oceanic thermohaline circulation to stop. I'll google the details when I've got time. Got to catch a bus, now.
The physics professor who scooped the Nobel Science Prize in 1973 sagely notes, "It is amazing how stable temperature has been over the last 150 years."
Professor Giaever and the rank and file of scientists are increasingly aware that the ‘consensus’ Cohen and his collaborators alludes to is little more than 77 of 10,000 scientists polled.
Surge in Government Climate Experts Going Skeptic
To further llustrate just how off base Cohen’s spin really is just observe the increasing number of experts who actually worked for the IPCC as contributors / editors / reviewers now turning against global warming junk science. (Hat Tip: The Galileo Movement).
Below, for Cohen and those other mainstream media deniers of climate realism, is a list of just 50 former IPCC experts whose voices your prejudiced ears refuse to hear
1. Dr Robert Balling: "The IPCC notes that "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." (This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers).
2. Dr. Lucka Bogataj: "Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don't cause global temperatures to rise.... temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed."
3. Dr John Christy: "Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report."
4. Dr Rosa Compagnucci: "Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate."
5. Dr Richard Courtney: "The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong."
6. Dr Judith Curry: "I'm not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don't have confidence in the process."
7. Dr Robert Davis: "Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers."
8. Dr Willem de Lange: "In 1996, the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3,000 "scientists" who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate. I didn't. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities."
9. Dr Chris de Freitas: "Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the longstanding claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of 'argument from ignorance' and predictions of computer models."
10. Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: "Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it."
11. Dr Peter Dietze: "Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake."
12. Dr John Everett: "It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios."
13. Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: "The IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change."
14. Dr Lee Gerhard: "I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) concept until the furor started after [NASA's James] Hansen's wild claims in the late 1980's. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting at first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false."
15. Dr Indur Goklany: "Climate change is unlikely to be the world's most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk."
16. Dr Vincent Gray: "The (IPCC) climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies."
17. Dr Kenneth Green: "We can expect the climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority."
18. Dr Mike Hulme: "Claims such as '2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous ... The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was "only a few dozen."
19. Dr Kiminori Itoh: "There are many factors which cause climate change. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful. When people know what the truth is they will feel deceived by science and scientists."
20. Dr Yuri Izrael: "There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate."
21. Dr Steven Japar: "Temperature measurements show that the climate model-predicted mid-troposphere hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them."
22. Dr Georg Kaser: "This number (of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC) is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude ... It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,"
23. Dr Aynsley Kellow: "I'm not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be."
24. Dr Madhav Khandekar: "I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence."
25. Dr Hans Labohm: "The alarmist passages in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring."
26. Dr. Andrew Lacis: "There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department."
27. Dr Chris Landsea: "I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."
28. Dr Richard Lindzen: "The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance."
29. Dr Harry Lins: "Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. The case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated."
30. Dr Philip Lloyd: "I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said."
31. Dr Martin Manning: "Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors."
32. Stephen McIntyre: "The many references in the popular media to a "consensus of thousands of scientists" are both a great exaggeration and also misleading."
33. Dr Patrick Michaels: "The rates of warming, on multiple time scales have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled."
34. Dr Nils-Axel Morner: "If you go around the globe, you find no sea level rise anywhere."
35. Dr Johannes Oerlemans: "The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine."
36. Dr Roger Pielke: "All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not as a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system."
37. Dr Jan Pretel: "It's nonsense to drastically reduce emissions ... predicting about the distant future-100 years can't be predicted due to uncertainties."
38. Dr Paul Reiter: "As far as the science being 'settled,' I think that is an obscenity. The fact is the science is being distorted by people who are not scientists."
39. Dr Murray Salby: "I have an involuntary gag reflex whenever someone says the "science is settled. Anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic is in fantasia."
40. Dr Tom Segalstad: "The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data."
41. Dr Fred Singer: "Isn't it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites--probably because the data show a (slight) cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction to the calculations from climate models?"
42. Dr Hajo Smit: "There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change."
43. Dr Roy Spencer: "The IPCC is not a scientific organization and was formed to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Claims of human-cause global warming are only a means to that goal."
44. Dr Richard Tol: "The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices."
45. Dr Tom Tripp: "There is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made."
46. Dr Robert Watson: "The (IPCC) mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened."
47. Dr Gerd-Rainer Weber: "Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis."
48. Dr David Wojick: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
49. Dr Miklos Zagoni: "I am positively convinced that the anthropogenic global warming theory is wrong."
50. Dr. Eduardo Zorita: "Editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. By writing these lines... a few of my future studies will not see the light of publication."
Linkady?
On a somewhat more important note, how is it that, when confronted with the names of dozens of national and international science bodies comprising tens of thousands of members that have come out in support of AGWT, denialists will claim there is no consensus, and even if there was, it wouldn't prove anything. Yet they'll repeatedly produce lists of the same few dozen climate "experts" who are "skeptical" of AGWT, and point at them as evidence that the theory is flawed, if not altogether fake. I wish they'd make up their minds...
9 September 2011 Last updated at 00:34 ET
UK joins laser nuclear fusion project
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
"Our goal is to have ignition within the next couple of years," he said.
"We've done fusion at fairly high levels already. Even on Sunday night, we did the highest fusion yield that has ever been done."
Dr Moses said that a single shot from the Nif's laser - the largest in the world - released a million billion neutrons and produced for a tiny fraction of a second more power than the world was consuming.
Link
How many Gigawatts can I pump through my fusion powered Hummer.
Now all they have to do is get together, put this junk into a scientific paper, and get it published.
Until then, you really must excuse me if I consider that post to be so much hot air and probably sprinkled with out of context quotes.
Nonsense. A number of those people are hacks that have claimed consistently that either man isn't responsible for the warming or that no warming is occurring. (A few of them claim(ed) that smoking wasn't harmful; a few are creationists, too.)
Few of them have published anything in the peer-reviewed literature that's of any use, if they published anything at all.
And the graph at your link is priceless! LOL
Exactly, some examples,
No.5 Dr Richard Courtney is a Technical Editor for CoalTrans International and has not published any research in the area of climate change.
No. 16 Dr Vincent Gray is a retired coal industry researcher and has never published any research in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change.
No. 19 Dr. Kiminori Itoh declares himself a “physical chemist familiar with evironmental sciences", and not particularly specialized in climate science. He has not published any work in the area of climate change in peer-reviewed science journals.
No. 48 Wojick is a self-described journalist and policy analyst and not a climate scientist. He hasn’t published any research in peer-reviewed journals on the subject of climate change.
... and No.2 Dr. Lucka Bogataj.... Dr Bogataj has more to say about climate change in this Link
Nonsense? Anyone who doesn't agree with the real "nonsense" of AGW is a hack? The peer review process is a load of dung. The hacks such as Trenberth, Jones, et al don't approve anything for publication that doesn't agree with their non-science. Scientists who have been hiding their true beliefs out of fear are beginning to gain a little courage.
No, scientists who claim that the peer-reviewed literature is wrong and that they themselves are right --almost always in the popular media-- are cranks.
Those who do those things for money or politics are hacks.
Hope this helps.
Out of context quotes are the bread and butter of the anti-science brigade. Such "quotes" are used extensively by creationists, so it is no surprise to see the same tactic used by climate denialists.
Considering the last 100 posts I just read through, I was compelled to post this item :)
Have Fun!
La Nina returns - what impact on global climate?
Paul Hudson | 12:27 UK time, Friday, 16 September 2011
After a lull over the last few months, weak La Nina conditions are re-establishing themselves in the Pacific.
La Nina is a term used to describe an area of water that is colder than average in the tropical Pacific.
It follows on from the major La Nina event which lasted from June 2010 to May 2011 which was one of the strongest on record, and which depressed global temperatures.
The last back to back La Nina event was recorded from 1998-2000.
In some areas of the world La Nina is a very important forecasting tool, as the colder than average ocean directly impacts pressure patterns, which in turn can lead to extreme weather.
In America, La Nina was blamed for this spring's flooding and drought.
It is also thought that La Nina last year was to blame for Australia's second wettest year since 1900, and forecasters believe another cool and wet summer in that part of the world is on the cards, although flooding on the scale that was witnessed last summer is thought unlikely.
Closer to home, there is little evidence to indicate how, if at all, La Nina impacts weather here in the UK.
As for global temperatures La Nina will have a cooling influence, depending on its strength and longevity.
Climate experts at NOAA believe that La Nina conditions will slowly strengthen and continue through winter.
And the Japanese climate centre expects weak La Nina conditions to continue into next year, and then strengthen by Spring 2012, as can be seen from the two projections below.
Link
Another frigid winter in store?
Judging by the southern hemisphere's record cold and snowy winter which just finished, we'll see.
Link
According to Reiter, his experience of climate change is from "talking" to many "scientists" and I suppose one of these is probably his pal Mr Singer Link
Singer (no.41) is one of these handful of scientists obscure the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming.
I'll never understand how anyone can be so gullible as to believe all the nonsense Singer et al are spreading.
An article by Jesse Kornbluth from last year; "In Merchants of Doubt, the Same Scientists Who Lied About Tobacco Also Lied About Global Warming" Link
(Reuters) - The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said on Monday.
The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States.
The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and significant shrinking could lead to a global rise in sea levels.
"While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available," HarperCollins said on its website on Monday.
However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.
"We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading," said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge.
"We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered."
Other scientists agreed.
"These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland," said Jeffrey S. Kargel, senior research scientist at the University of Arizona.
The Times Atlas suggested the Greenland ice sheet has lost 300,000 square kilometers in the past 12 years, at a rate of 1.5 percent per year.
However, measurements suggest this rate is at least 10 times faster than in reality, added J. Graham Cogley, Professor of Geography at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.
"It could easily be 20 times too fast and might well be 50 times too fast," he added.
Last year, a U.N. committee of climate scientists came under fire for bungling a forecast of when Himalayan glaciers would thaw.
The panel's 2007 report, the main guide for governments in fighting climate change, included an incorrect projection that all Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035, hundreds of years earlier than scientists' projections.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/us-atla s-ice-idUSTRE78I4UG20110919
See? A map was published containing erroneously exaggerated data, and scientists immediately jumped all over it, demanding corrections be made.
Sorta throws water on that whole "all scientists are corrupt liars" thing, doesn't it?
Not all scientists.
That's what "peer review" is all about. Peer review in climate "science" is the epitome of consensus-forced fraud.
The "scientists" who espouse AGW are usually financed by our tax dollars, are they not? As of late, the federal budget is an infinite source of dollars for anyone. I'm glad to see that some in Congress are curtailing some of the money supporting questionable science.
Yeah, lots of climatologists are driving around gold-plated Bugattis. It's really the only reasonable transportation choice, though. I mean, you can't be seen leaving your 20,000 sq. ft. mansion in a VW Passat, now can you?
Oh, and btw, the "scientists" who deny AGW are usually funded by the fossil fuel industry or right-wing think tanks. Some of those boys and girls do, in fact, make some real money.
In the end, it's the peer-reviewed literature that stands the test of time and scrutiny that matters. So far, the denialists have nothing or next to nothing.
Warmista's run amok. ManBearPig.
Randy Mann The Spokesman-Review
September 8, 2011
With the first day of fall about two weeks away, I’ve been getting questions about our upcoming winter. At Harris-Mann Climatology, we watch the winter’s weather in the Southern Hemisphere (which is during our summer) in order to pick up possible clues for the Inland Northwest’s upcoming winter four to six months later.
The Southern Hemisphere has had a series of unusually cold and snowy winters since solar activity dropped off in 2007. The following winters in the Northern Hemisphere were likewise colder and snowier than normal, especially in North America, the British Isles and central Europe.
Last month, a record cold blast from Antarctica brought measurable snows to New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington for the first time since the early 1970s. Earthquake-battered Christchurch had its heaviest snowfall since 1939, creating widespread travel disruptions.
This has also been the wettest, snowiest and coldest winter in decades in Chile’s Atacama Desert. This region is normally the driest place on earth.
But, the Atacama Desert has received more moisture than Spokane or Coeur d’Alene since early July. The month of July had four major storms in Chile’s arid northern interior regions. Combined, they dumped more than five times the annual average of both rain and snow on the Copiapo area, damaging the homes of more than 1,800 people. The coastal town of Antofogasta measured .29 inches of precipitation in a single day in early July, more than four year’s worth of rain. The annual normal is only a puny 0.07 inches. The above-average moisture has led to a burst of rare flowers.
The same July storm system also brought about three feet of snow to the northern mountains of Chile, more snow than had been measured previously in more than a full century combined. This region has the same annual snowfall as Riverside, Calif., less than 0.2 inches. Soldiers were forced to rescue more than 400 people trapped by 10-foot snowdrifts caused by winds in excess of 50 mph. Survivors of the big snowstorm called it “Snowmageddon.”
From the capital city of Santiago, Chile, southward, the winter of 2011 has so far been the driest on record. Severe drought conditions have drained reservoirs needed for both irrigation and hydroelectricity.
I should mention as well that rare snowfalls have likewise been reported in parts of Argentina, Australia and South Africa this chilly winter of 2011 in the Southern Hemisphere.
A weather station in Antarctica, where parts of the icepack has increased by 8 percent since 2007, reported an all-time record July low temperature of 78 below zero.
It remains our opinion that all of these global weather extremes are being caused by rapidly changing sea-surface temperature events in the world’s oceans along with variable sunspot patterns.
We are currently in between the cool La Niña and the warm El Niño sea-surface temperature patterns. But, we may move into a new El Niño by December or January, meaning less snow than normal across the Inland Northwest. However, if La Niña is reborn, we could see another tough winter like they’re enduring in the Southern Hemisphere.
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You are an amazing person. You continuously post articles that show there are still cold weather events happening around the world. I do not believe that cold weather events surprises anyone. Even most that will deny AGW is happening will not go so far as to say that the climate is not changing or that it is warming. They only deny that it is man made warming. Natural events. The climate has changed in the past. Things like this. Very few will say that we are entering another ice age. Yet, you keep hanging tough with nothing but cold weather events to support your hypothesis. Since you use cold weather events to support your hypothesis, then why do not warm weather events negate your hypothesis? Do you really wish to just compare weather events to support your hypothesis? There are more warm weather events happening than there are cold weather events. I do not see how that could be a winning plan, for you. How do you propose to show that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will actually cause global cooling?
You have logic, in your statements but, you nearly take a defeatist approach towards this. The U.S. is one of the largest contributors of atmospheric CO2, by a considerable margin over nearly every other country, and this is in view of the fact that we have exported most of our dirtiest manufacturing to other countries. We have to start soon to reduce our atmospheric CO2 concentrations regardless of what the rest of the world does. We have the people, ability and technology to do this. The only thing that is really lacking is our political desire to do so. Why are we willing to let China beat us at what we should be the best at? Innovation.
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Oh, thanks for this, the silliest kind of denialism in a single nutty nutshell. Mann goes on and on about the abnormal and extreme weather all over the globe--then blames it all on sunspots.
Yeesh.
AGW deniers are like a lifelong three-pack-a-day smoker who goes in to his doctor and is told he has terminal lung cancer (along with emphysema and high blood pressure and so on) from the more than one million cigarettes the patient has smoked since his teens, but who responds, "No, it can't be from smoking; I'm sure it's just heredity. Or coincidence. Or just part of a natural cycle. Or maybe I don't really have cancer at all, and you, Doctor, are only trying to get more research grant money. Or it's not terminal at all, and you're just trying to scare me, but you secretly know I'll live another 40 or 50 years. Anyway, cancer is actually healthy, and you're just trying to make it sound worse than it is. Also, a cigarette is just a tiny stick of dried leaves surrounded by tissue paper, so how could something so small possiblyhave an effect on a human body which is so much bigger? Well, whatever; I don't believe all those peer reviewed 'scientists' who claim that smoking causes cancer and emphysema; they're all just in on the fraud. Phillip Morris and the American Tobacco Company say smoking is fine, and I tend to believe them; why would they lie?"
Pathetic, really. And really pathetic...
Then maybe, just maybe, it's our woeful economic system that is at fault.
Maybe.
Neapolitan, this is probably the best analogy that I have ever seen! A+
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