Articles Tagged "Lawrence Solomon"

An alarmingly large number of penguins could be starving due to unusually cold waters in the southern hemisphere, according to scientists interviewed by the Associated Press. "What worries us this year is the absurdly high number of penguins that have appeared dead in a short period of time," said Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at Brazil's Peruibe Aquarium, referring to 500 penguins found dead in the last 10 days alone on three beaches in Sao Paulo state.

Autopsies on several penguins show their stomachs to be entirely empty, pointing to starvation as a cause of death. The scientists speculate that frigid waters in the southern hemisphere, exacerbated by overfishing, may have deprived the penguins of food, forcing them to travel to warmer waters in search of sustenance.

The Antarctic has been in the throes of a long term cooling period that has seen the southern polar cap get progressively colder for decades. In 2002, scientists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at Harvard warned that the cooling that was then occurring in the Antarctic was leading to the starvation of penguin chicks. The Antarctic cooling with a resulting growth in sea ice -- a cooling that proved wrong the warming predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - was disrupting penguin populations, forcing them to migrate to more hospitable surroundings.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

The planet is experiencing “a summer of swelter,” states a front-page story in today’s Globe and Mail that provides us with anecdotes of the upshot, such as “more than 1000 Russians have drowned in the last month trying to escape record temperatures.” The Globe then speculates that one cause of the worldwide heat wave could be “the ever-shrinking size of the world’s ice caps.”

First, the Russians. The Globe might have told us that they drown in droves every year, disproportionately in the summer months, and the Globe might also have told us why. “The majority of those drowned were drunk,” explains Vadim Seryogin, a department head at Russia’s Emergencies Ministry. Last year, when 3000 Russian drowned, one analysis of drowned Russian males found that 94% had been drunk.

Perhaps the heat caused Russians to drink more – the data is not yet in – but most don’t need heat to drive them to drink. According to a study last year published in the British journal, the Lancet, alcohol was responsible for the deaths of about three quarters of all Russian men, and half of all Russian women, aged 15-54.

Next, those “ever-shrinking” ice caps, of which this planet has two. The ice cap in the southern hemisphere, in the Antarctic, has been growing steadily since the 1970s, especially so this summer. The ice cap in the northern hemisphere, in contrast, did shrink temporarily over the last few months, after having expanded temporarily earlier in the year, and it is now expanding again. On balance, Planet Earth now has slightly more ice than usual, according to the most recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It shows the Arctic to have 1.379 million fewer million square kilometres of ice while the Antarctic has 1.404 more.

“Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct,” stated the Muir Russell report into the Climategate scandal after it found the Climatic Research Unit at the UK’s East Anglia University guilty of “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness.” This failure, the Russell report declared to wide agreement among climate scientists, led to harm “to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.”

To ensure that climate scientists never again harm the cause of science in this way, the Russell report then recommended that scientists adhere to new standards of openness. “Without such openness, the credibility of their work will suffer because it will always be at risk of allegations of concealment and hence mal-practice.”

The Russell report was released last week. This week the UN’s Intergovernmental; Panel on Climate Change and other scientists have their first opportunity to apply the new standards by admitting to yet another gross transgression.

The UK Parliament was misled by East Anglia University when it conducted hearings into Climategate earlier this year, charges Graham Stringer, a scientist and prominent Labour Member of Parliament, in an article published yesterday in The Register, a UK science and technology journal.

Dr. Stringer, a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, was reacting to the release this week of the Russell Report on Climategate, which he considers a betrayal of an understanding that the Select Committee had with East Anglia University, home of the Climategate scandal.

As the Official Hansards of the Select Committee show, MPs believed that they needn’t examine the science in great detail following assurances from East Anglia that its own independent inquiries would serve that purpose. “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong,” the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Edward Acton, told the committee.

The first of the East Anglia inquiries, by Lord Oxburgh, did not do so and never intended to. As Oxburgh told Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit in an email, “The science was not the subject of our study.” Now that the Russell report is in, and it too underlines it never had any intention of examining the science, the snookering of the UK Select Committee is complete.

A panel criticizes the Climategate scientists for being defensive and unhelpful, for withholding data, for providing misleading information, for having been “blinded … to the possibility of merit” in the claims of their critics.

Panel in Britain clears scientists of misconduct allegations in ‘Climate-gate’,” read the Washington Post headline, one of many describing a vindication of the Climategate scientists at East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit in the U.K. Other press outlets saw the panel’s finding differently: “Clouds of doubt still hang over climate scientists,” the Calgary Herald’s headline stated.

The conflicting takes by the press are understandable. The British panellists, established by East Anglia University, saw too little evidence to declare the Climategate scientists at CRU guilty on most counts, and they saw too much to be always confident of their innocence.

But here’s another take on the same report, and another headline, that almost all newspapers would agree to: “Panel recognizes that the science is not settled on climate change.”

The panel’s weighty 160-page report, The Independent Climate Change Emails Review, deals overwhelmingly with one theme: How best to conduct a scientific debate? The report does not attempt to judge whether the Climategate scientists were right or wrong on the science; it judges the behaviour of the scientists and of the Climatic Research Unit that they worked at, and then suggests reforms for the scientific establishment as a whole, in effect using Climategate as a case history.

The Arctic shows no signs of warming, according to the latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Centre for Ocean and Ice. Last month, in fact, virtually every single day saw temperatures below the mean experienced over the last half-century. The Danish data – taken daily – casts doubt on climate models that had predicted a steady warming of the Arctic. Earlier this year, Arctic temperatures had been warming, giving hope to those who back the global warming hypothesis that their long expected Arctic warming had begun.

The Danish institute has tracked mean temperatures above the 80th northern parallel since 1958. For a graph of how June 2010 compares, click here.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.

Long-term global cooling began in 2002, according to a just-released study in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed publication produced at Harvard-Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics. Man-made global warming was real and dangerous, the study finds, but the danger has passed.

The study, authored by Qing-Bin Lu, a rising star at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explains why climate models have been so spectacularly wrong in trying to tie the global warming of the last half of the 20th century to CO2 — the climate modelers fingered the wrong culprit when they targeted CO2. The true culprits, Dr. Lu explains, were CFCs, the now banned substances that until the 1990s had been a refrigerant and propellant to products as diverse as air conditioners and hair spray cans.

Fortunately for the globe, environmentalists had CFCs banned because of their role in depleting the ozone layer, not realizing that the ban was simultaneously solving the global warming threat.

According to Dr. Lu, the phase-out of CFCs will be reversing the global warming effect by ushering in a 50 to 70-year period of global cooling.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.

G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change — and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

Newspapers Retract ‘Climategate’ Claims, but Damage Still Done,” reads the headline in Newsweek this weekend, in a column over the latest controversy in the global warming debate. The headline, and the article beneath it, are so inaccurate that Newsweek should retract them.

For starters, no newspaper that the column describes retracted any claims about Climategate, the scandal that hit the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last November when private emails showed, among other things, that all of the IPCC’s temperature data was suspect. The newspaper retractions – all two of them, by the UK’s Sunday Times and a much earlier change of heart by a small German daily — dealt with Amazongate, one of the many scandals that followed Climategate.

Next, the Newsweek column states that “In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40% of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was ‘unsubstantiated.’ … The Times‘s criticism of the IPCC—look, its reports are full of mistakes and shoddy scholarship!—was widely picked up at the time it ran, and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion sharply against the established science of climate change.”

The Times article was hardly pivotal in turning British public opinion against the climate alarmists. For one thing, public opinion had turned against climate alarmism months earlier, even well before Climategate, so much so that the British government took out paid TV ads in 2009 in an explicit attempt to win back public opinion. For another, the retracted Times article did little to publicize Amazongate – by the time the Sunday Times article appeared, Amazongate was old news, having been covered by hundreds if not thousands of media outlets around the world. Here’s the timeline.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has utilized a non-expert to write an analysis entitled “Expert credibility in climate change.” This analysis judges the climate science credentials of scientists who have taken a position in the climate change debate, and disqualifies those who are not expert enough in climate science for its choosing.

The non-expert writer of this analysis of credibility, James W. Prall at Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, is not only not an expert in the field of climate change, he is also not an expert in electrical and computer engineering, at least not in the sense that some might assume from his University of Toronto affiliation. Mr. Prall is an administrator who looks after computers at the university, not a scientist or even a lowly researcher in the field. If it strikes you as odd that an editor at the National Academy of Sciences would accept someone with a life-long service and programming career in the computer field to judge the academic credentials of scientists, it gets odder.

Prall’s methodology in determining who is credible as a scientist involves the use of Google Scholar which, he explained last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “studies just the scientific literature. They look at peer-reviewed journals.” Prall uses Google Scholar to determine how often people publish and how often they are cited. Based on the number of hits that Google Scholar produces – not on any analysis of the actual content of climate studies – Prall determines scientific merit. It’s an easy and straightforward process, he explained, that anyone can perform.

Does Google Scholar really limit itself to scholars? No. Search “Al Gore” on Google Scholar and you will find some 33,200 Scholar hits, almost 10 times as many as obtained by searching “James Hansen,” a true scientist and easily the best known of those endorsed by Prall as a bona fide believer. Neither does Google Scholar limit itself to “just the scientific literature.” Google Scholar finds articles in newspapers and magazines around the world: 113,000 in the New York Times, 22,000 in Economist, 21,000 in Le Monde, 16,000 in The Guardian.