Topic: The Global Warming Super Thread

[COBRA-6]

Thucydides have you read "Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" by Bjørn Lomborg?

I've seen him speak on the Copenhagen Consensus in Ottawa and read his older but still outstanding book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", anyone interested in the environment and planet should give it a read... 

[Thucydides]

Dr Chris Essex gave a talk in London last month on the manipulations of the alarmists; his book Taken by storm is also very good.

[COBRA-6]

I'll add it to the list.

What's really interesting about Lomborg is that he used to be a member of Greenpeace until he realized they were outright lying WRT statistics used to argue their point... of course now there are numerous articles, websites and blogs all dedicated to discrediting Lomborg, the typical reaction of the alarmists, attack the messenger...

[Flip]

As interesting as Lomborg is, I like to listen to what he says, what about Patrick Moore?
He started Greenpeace! Now he's out. (similar reasons)

Kinda' makes you think there's something political going on, doesn't it? 

[Flip]

For the curious......

http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/

I found another resource for articles of interest 

[Colin P]

Global warming humour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmPSUMBrJoI

[old medic]

This has to be my favourite for the week.  It just begs for comments.


Canada's forests, once huge help on greenhouse gases, now contribute to climate change
Canada's vast forests, once huge absorbers of greenhouse gases, now add to problem

By Howard Witt  Tribune correspondent
January 2, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-canada-trees_wittjan02,0,539661.story

VANCOUVER — As relentlessly bad as the news about global warming seems to be, with ice at the poles melting faster than scientists had predicted and world temperatures rising higher than expected, there was at least a reservoir of hope stored here in Canada's vast forests.

The country's 1.2 million square miles of trees have been dubbed the "lungs of the planet" by ecologists because they account for more than 7 percent of Earth's total forest lands. They could always be depended upon to suck in vast quantities of carbon dioxide, naturally cleansing the world of much of the harmful heat-trapping gas.

But not anymore.

In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada's precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

Worse yet, the experts predict that Canada's forests will remain net carbon sources, as opposed to carbon storage "sinks," until at least 2022, and possibly much longer.

"We are seeing a significant distortion of the natural trend," said Werner Kurz, senior research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service and the leading expert on carbon cycles in the nation's forests. "Since 1999, and especially in the last five years, the forests have shifted from being a carbon sink to a carbon source."

Translation: Earth's lungs have come down with emphysema. Canada's forests are no longer our friends.

So serious is the problem that Canada's federal government effectively wrote off the nation's forests in 2007 as officials submitted their plans to abide by the international Kyoto Protocol, which obligates participating governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the Kyoto agreement, governments are permitted to count forest lands as credits, or offsets, when calculating their national carbon emissions. But Canadian officials, aware of the scientific studies showing that their forests actually are emitting excess carbon, quietly omitted the forest lands from their Kyoto compliance calculations.

"The forecast analysis prepared for the government ... indicates there is a probability that forests would constitute a net source of greenhouse gas emissions," a Canadian Environment Ministry spokesman told the Montreal Gazette.

Canadian officials say global warming is causing the crisis in their forests. Inexorably rising temperatures are slowly drying out forest lands, leaving trees more susceptible to fires, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Higher temperatures also are accelerating the spread of a deadly pest known as the mountain pine beetle, which has devastated pine forests across British Columbia and is threatening vital timber in the neighboring province of Alberta. More than 50,000 square miles of British Columbia's pine forest have been stricken so far with the telltale markers of death: needles that turn bright red before falling off the tree.

Bitter cold Canadian winters used to kill off much of the pine beetle population each year, naturally keeping it in check. But the milder winters of recent years have allowed the insect to proliferate.

"That's what's causing some of our forests to switch from a carbon sink position to a source position," said Jim Snetsinger, British Columbia's chief forester. "Once those infested trees are killed by the pine beetle, they are no longer sequestering carbon—they are giving it off."

Snetsinger noted that eventually, over the course of a generation, some of the dying forests will begin to regenerate and once again begin storing more carbon than they release. But for the foreseeable future, experts say, their models show that Canada's forests will stay stuck in a vicious global-warming cycle, both succumbing to the effects of climate change and, as they decay and release more carbon, helping to accelerate it.

That grim reality is stoking a new debate over commercial logging, one of Canada's biggest industries.

Environmentalists contend that the extreme stresses on Canada's forests, particularly the old-growth northern forest, mean that logging ought to be sharply curtailed to preserve the remaining trees—and the carbon stored within them—for as long as possible.

Moreover, they argue that the disruptive process of logging releases even more carbon stored in the forest peat, threatening to set off what they describe as a virtual "carbon bomb"—the estimated 186 billion tons of carbon stored in Canada's forests, which is equivalent to 27 years worth of global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

"There's only one thing which hauls all that carbon out of the forest, and that's logging," said Merran Smith, director of the climate program at the environmental group ForestEthics. "What we need to do is maintain as much biodiversity as we can, so we are prepared to adapt as temperatures change, so we have resilience."

But Kurz and other government scientists contend that a logging moratorium is no solution to the global warming problem and would in fact increase carbon emissions over the long term.

That's because, they argue, essential wood products for construction, furniture and other uses would have to be replaced with other man-made materials, such as plastic, steel or concrete, which require the burning of even more fossil fuels—and therefore carbon emissions—during their manufacturing process.

"It's not as simple as saying, 'Log less and therefore have more carbon sequestered in the forests,' " Kurz said. "That is true, but if in order to do that you have more fossil fuel emitted elsewhere, your impact on the climate may be negative."

Instead, some scientists argue for more extensive logging of the remaining commercial forests so that older forest stands, which are most vulnerable to insect infestations and have nearly reached their carbon-storage capacity, can be replanted with younger trees that will take in even more carbon during their growing years.

[Brad Sallows]

Those people are supercharged morons.

Before believing that the fraction of a degree or so of temperature increase claimed by the warming alarmists is "drying out the forests", we need to see some annual precipitation and water flow figures to prove that rainfall is down and less water is escaping the watersheds via the streams and rivers.  It would also be useful to compare year-to-year acreage lost to fires.

It is unlikely that pine beetle kill is a recent novelty.  We just don't know how often the cycle repeats, since the recorded history of which we know only goes back a couple of hundred years or less in BC.  Back when the infestations were just starting, there was talk of spraying to kill the beetles.  The environmentalists objected - let nature take its course, was the governing principle - so the countermeasure was never tried.  For all that, the new growth is there - I've walked near my parents' property in the Cariboo, which has no pine in sight for miles in any direction except that which is beetle killed, and there are seedlings aplenty already in addition to the very young trees the beetles don't touch.  There will be recovery, and it will happen in our lifetimes.

Logging can't begin to equal the effects of pine beetle kill.  As usual, nature dwarfs anything of which we are capable.  To claim that this would never have come to pass but for our own miniscule efforts is a competition between arrogance and basic stupidity.

Of course forests contribute to climate change - you pointless, vacuous wankers.

[GDawg]

For the last 50 years we've intervened in the natural and healthy order of the great forests of North America by fighting forest fires. I suspect the pine beetle devastation and the observed reversal of the forests from carbon sink to carbon source are tied to our foolish practices.  This is a text book example of mankind deciding to intervene heavily into the realm of nature without having long term observations, or a complete understanding of how natural systems work.

[Flip]

Brad,   I suspect this kind of article is meant to reinforce the "tipping point" argument in a slightly veiled way.

I don't know that beetles are the result of anything in particular, but if Mom drops her crystal platter on the kitchen floor, it had to be climate change.

[Flip]

This article contrasts rather sharply with the CBC narrative.

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13834

[Thucydides]

More real science:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm

Solar Wind Loses Power, Hits 50-year Low
   09.23.2008

Sept. 23, 2008: In a briefing today at NASA headquarters, solar physicists announced that the solar wind is losing power.

"The average pressure of the solar wind has dropped more than 20% since the mid-1990s," says Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "This is the weakest it's been since we began monitoring solar wind almost 50 years ago."

McComas is principal investigator for the SWOOPS solar wind sensor onboard the Ulysses spacecraft, which measured the decrease. Ulysses, launched in 1990, circles the sun in a unique orbit that carries it over both the sun's poles and equator, giving Ulysses a global view of solar wind activity:

Above: Global measurements of solar wind pressure by Ulysses. Green curves trace the solar wind in 1992-1998, while blue curves denote lower pressure winds in 2004-2008. [Larger image]

Curiously, the speed of the million mph solar wind hasn't decreased much—only 3%. The change in pressure comes mainly from reductions in temperature and density. The solar wind is 13% cooler and 20% less dense.

"What we're seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s," explains Arik Posner, NASA's Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.

How unusual is this event?

"It's hard to say. We've only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age—from the early 60s to the present," says Posner. "Over that period of time, it's unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody's guess. We don't have data going back that far."

Flagging solar wind has repercussions across the entire solar system—beginning with the heliosphere.

The heliosphere is a bubble of magnetism springing from the sun and inflated to colossal proportions by the solar wind. Every planet from Mercury to Pluto and beyond is inside it. The heliosphere is our solar system's first line of defense against galactic cosmic rays. High-energy particles from black holes and supernovas try to enter the solar system, but most are deflected by the heliosphere's magnetic fields.

Right: The heliosphere. Click to view a larger image showing the rest of the bubble.

"The solar wind isn't inflating the heliosphere as much as it used to," says McComas. "That means less shielding against cosmic rays."

In addition to weakened solar wind, "Ulysses also finds that the sun's underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s," says Posner. "This reduces natural shielding even more."

Unpublished Ulysses cosmic ray data show that, indeed, high energy (GeV) electrons, a minor but telltale component of cosmic rays around Earth, have jumped in number by about 20%.

These extra particles pose no threat to people on Earth's surface. Our thick atmosphere and planetary magnetic field provide additional layers of protection that keep us safe.

But any extra cosmic rays can have consequences. If the trend continues, astronauts on the Moon or en route to Mars would get a higher dose of space radiation. Robotic space probes and satellites in high Earth orbit face an increased risk of instrument malfunctions and reboots due to cosmic ray strikes. Also, there are controversial studies linking cosmic ray fluxes to cloudiness and climate change on Earth. That link may be tested in the years ahead.

Above: The temperature and density of electrons in the solar wind have dropped since the mid-1990s. [Larger image]

Some of most dramatic effects of the phenomenon may be felt by NASA's two Voyager spacecraft. After traveling outward for 30+ years, the two probes are now at the edge of the heliosphere. With the heliosphere shrinking, the Voyagers may soon find themselves on the outside looking in, thrust into interstellar space long before anyone expected. No spacecraft has ever been outside the heliosphere before and no one knows what the Voyagers may find there.

NASA is about to launch a new spacecraft named IBEX (short for Interstellar Boundary Explorer) that can monitor the dimensions of the heliosphere without actually traveling to the edge of the solar system. IBEX may actually be able to "see" the heliosphere shrinking and anticipate the Voyager's exit. Moreover, IBEX will reveal how our solar system's cosmic ray shield reacts to changes in solar wind.

"The potential for discovery," says McComas, "is breathtaking."

[JBG]

Thucydides have you read "Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" by Bjørn Lomborg?

I've seen him speak on the Copenhagen Consensus in Ottawa and read his older but still outstanding book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", anyone interested in the environment and planet should give it a read... 

Al Gore signally refused to debate Lomborg on this issue when he had a chance. Thus, Lomborg is not (to quote a post above, attacking someone who's not there.

The [color="blue"]article below [/color] (link)[/url]details Al Gore’s artifice and cowardice in ducking an interview with people who actually know something about the environment and global warming. It seems that he prefers Sunday morning potshots on MSM interviews, where a panel or reporters, half asleep, lob softballs. He realizes that a debate with someone knowledgeable would be fatal to his book and movie if not to his political career.

Maybe Dion should step up to the plate that Gore left behind.

Excerpts below (link):

Will Al Gore Melt?

By FLEMMING ROSE and BJORN LOMBORG

January 18, 2007; Page A16
Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

One can only speculate. But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.

*snip*

He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn't tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don't mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn't we hear those facts?

*snip*

Al Gore is on a mission. If he has his way, we could end up choosing a future, based on dubious claims, that could cost us, according to a U.N. estimate, $553 trillion over this century. Getting answers to hard questions is not an unreasonable expectation before we take his project seriously. It is crucial that we make the right decisions posed by the challenge of global warming. These are best achieved through open debate, and we invite him to take the time to answer our questions: We are ready to interview you any time, Mr. Gore -- and anywhere.

[zipperhead_cop]

Of course forests contribute to climate change - you pointless, vacuous wankers.

And with that, I have a new sig line 

[Kirkhill]

For the last 50 years we've intervened in the natural and healthy order of the great forests of North America by fighting forest fires. I suspect the pine beetle devastation and the observed reversal of the forests from carbon sink to carbon source are tied to our foolish practices.  This is a text book example of mankind deciding to intervene heavily into the realm of nature without having long term observations, or a complete understanding of how natural systems work.

....Maintaining that fire is a “natural disturbance” or merely a “simple technique” is imperceptive in the extreme  (No slam on you GDawg  )…

Essentially Stewart was pleading with anthropologists and ecologists to become meticulous historians or at least to understand that the land is partially a product of its human history, He warned that not to consider Indians as a legitimate and important disturbance factor was a dangerous oversight that would ultimately cloud ecologists’ findings, theories, and concepts…

Proof of the accuracy of his [Stewart’s] interpretations has now been provided by an enormous amount of work done in the biologicalsciences since the 1950’s. For example, it is well accepted that the prairies were shaped by both Indian and lightning fires… The landmark Leopold Report (Leopold et al. 1963) supported Stewart’s emphasis on burning…

Pyro-dendrochronology studies around the country suggest that the high frequency of fires in sequoia-mixed conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, the oak-hickory forests of eastern North America, and the lodgepole pine forests of the Rocky Mountains could not be explained by the contemporary ignition rate from lightning alone but only in conjunction with indigenous burning (Abrams 1992; Barrett and Arno 1982; Barret 1981; Kilgore and Taylor 1979). Stephen Pyne, the acknowledged authority on the history of fire, and Thomas Bonnicksen, a renowned expert on fire and restoration ecology, have both presented major studies that emphasize the importance of understanding indigenous peoples’ uses of fire (Bonnicksen 2000; Pyne 1982, 1991, 1997).

Source
Source.

Perhaps one of the reasons we didn't have the massive pine-beetle infestations was that the locals were inefficiently converting mass quantities of carbon to CO2 every year to "sterilize" the place.......and to create better berrying sites, and to knock down the weeds, and to make hunting easier.  In effect they were farming the land on a grand scale by use of fire.  They were modifying their environment.

[Flip]

In effect they were farming the land on a grand scale by use of fire.  They were modifying their environment.

Perhaps correct - I dunno. 

From what I understand, the problem is not the beetle pre se, but the fungus that the beetle carries.
Much in the same manner as Dutch Elm Disease.  Has the fungus changed?  Has the beetle changed?
Many funguses can be controlled by introducing another biological vector - like another fungus or a bacterium that controls it.  Maybe there is a completely different chemical trigger like ground level Ozone.

All I'm really confident about is that the pine beetle deforestation will lead to AGW conjecture and hysteria in a completely predictable manner - like every other thing that happens. 

[BernDawg]

Holy crap I'm glad I don't live in Winterpeg any more.  Shilo might even be colder.

Record cold wind chills of -50 C recorded overnight in Saskatchewan
5 hours ago

EDMONTON — A fierce blast of snow and cold was making its way east into Manitoba on Sunday after triggering record low wind chills of -50 C and colder in neighbouring Saskatchewan overnight.

Wind chill warnings were in effect in both provinces throughout the day, prompting warnings from Environment Canada that exposed skin would freeze in less than 10 minutes.

Residents of Saskatoon woke up to the coldest temperatures since 1966, with a wind chill of -45 C, leaving the city shrouded in ice fog.

More on the link...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jDUS6SE58AhlkslJI4ISP3tsb5rg

[NFLD Sapper]

Umm... how does this fit under Military Current Affairs & News?

[GAP]

If you live in winterpeg, you would remember it's normal, ..........cold, but normal............but on the other hand, this has to be great for controlling the "spuce bud worm?" (I don't think that's the bug but one like that) that's killing all the trees in BC and Ab.....


edited to add: and also great for the contruction of winter roads....

[CDN Aviator]

(I don't think that's the bug but one like that) that's killing all the trees in BC and Ab.....

Pine beetle...IIRC

[Cataract Kid]

Wow, good thing I just left Winnipeg 2 hours ago...............................to go back to Shilo 

Tomorrows post leave run should be........"interesting".

[xo31@711ret]

Ahhhh, but 'they't call it 'global warming' anymore...now it's 'climate change'...

[DustintheWind]

Ahhhh, but 'they't call it 'global warming' anymore...now it's 'climate change'...

Yea, the term Global Warming is a misconception because it'll do the extremes of both hot AND cold.  bluh.

[Kirkhill]

Al Gore - "Under the bus?"

Huffington Post publishes article debunking Global Warming.

Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted
     
 You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that "the science is in." Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:

1. First, the expression "climate change" itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots -- and even revolutions, including the French Revolution -- were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).

So, no one needs to say the words "climate" and "change" in the same breath -- it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. ......

Source

Now that the Climate Change cudgel has achieved its desired end - mobilizing poorly educated university students to effect regime change - it now seems that Obama needs to be cut some slack on that front.

Maybe he can now convince his followers that Cnut was right after all.

Canute the politician

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey".

So spoke King Canute the Great, the legend says, seated on his throne on the seashore, waves lapping round his feet. Canute had learned that his flattering courtiers claimed he was "So great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back". Now Canute was not only a religious man, but also a clever politician. He knew his limitations - even if his courtiers did not - so he had his throne carried to the seashore and sat on it as the tide came in, commanding the waves to advance no further. When they didn't, he had made his point that, though the deeds of kings might appear 'great' in the minds of men, they were as nothing in the face of God's power.

Edit: PS

Cnut's courtiers were concerned about rising waters at the beginnning of the Mediaeval Warm Period that saw one of the longest periods of prosperity and advancement in European history (along with the advance of the Inuit from Alaska to Greenland subsuming the indigenous peoples of the north).

[GAP]

Wow, good thing I just left Winnipeg 2 hours ago...............................to go back to Shilo 

Tomorrows post leave run should be........"interesting".

That's just........sad.....at least in Winnipeg you had buildings, etc....