Deniers petition - by Richard... Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Deniers petition - by Richard... Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The No10 "deniers" petition is up to 242 318 this morning (midday) – now 387 408 450 533 571710 828 869 - not bad from seven yesterday. Any chance of 1000 by the end of today?

There is tactical sense in pushing this – with a media which is wedded to personality politics, it personalises the issue in a very simple, uncluttered way. Enough signatures will get some media interest and put the prime minister on the spot.

Furthermore, if you change the vocabulary of the debate, you change the debate. This is more important than it seems - I'm leaving the post at the top of the blog for the day, and will keep a running total.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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You will love this - by Richard...

Hot on the trail of the Golden-Gate scam, a readers draws my attention to an article in the San Francisco Chroniclefor 6 July 2009.

The title of the piece somewhat gives the game away, as it declares: "Get ready for even foggier summers". The opening lines of the text tell us that the Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. "And thanks to global warming, it's about to get even foggier."

This makes an interesting counterpoint to the article inThe Daily Telegraph today, proclaiming: "Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change".

The lead author of the 2009 study is Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University who points out that "global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast."

We are told that study would appear in the journal Climate, which may be this one here, headed: "Observed 1970-2005 cooling of summer daytime temperatures in coastal California."

Bornstein and team argue that as global warming heats up the Central Valley gets, the greater the temperature and pressure gradients between the inland and coast would be greater - therefore forming more fog.

To demonstrate the thesis, they broke the Bay Area down into smaller regions and looked at daily temperatures for the last half century, focusing on the rapid post-1970 warming period. They found that, although temperatures were trending upward as a whole, they were asymmetric - the hills and inland areas were warming, while low-elevation coastal areas were actually cooling.

This was by no means the only time Bornstein ventured into print, his views being aired in theVentura County Reporter in October 2008. In November 2007 in the Nappa Valley Register, another scientist, Jeffrey P. Schaffer, seemed to support him, predicting that summers in the Bay Area would become cooler, windier and foggier. "And this has already happened," he observed.

However, there is no shortage of conflicting material, this undated paper (circa 1997?) finding a fog decrease in four West Coast locations. On the other hand, this comprehensive review (107 pages) points to considerable variation in fog levels over time, with periods when fog levels were considerably lower than at others.

Ironically – at least, according to the Los Angeles Times, fog is a major nuisance to San Francisco Airport, where Dr Johnstone did his measurements. The two main runways are only 750 feet apart, so they cannot be used simultaneously when it is foggy. If Johnstone's observations about fog were correct, the tree-huggers' loss would be aviation's gain.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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Golden-Gate-gate? - by Richard...

It is business as usual for The Daily Telegraph, resuming its usual slot with a crise du jour story.

This one, by Richard Alleyne, who laughably calls himself a science correspondent is headlined, "Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change" and the ritual incantation: "scientists have found". Ah ... the scientists!

Interestingly, this is territory where even New York Times does not venture, not mentioning "climate change" in its story. But where the NYT dare not venture, Alleyne fealessly treads.

His scare line is based on work by Dr James Johnstone at the University of California, published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a journal which also offers such delights as a paper on, "A robust automated system elucidates mouse home cage behavioral structure", in its most recent online edition.

The significance of the finding, we are told by the egregious Alleyne, is that it is not just bad for scenery, the reduction in the cooling effect of the fog could damage the health of the huge redwood forests nearby. Thinking politically, one is almost pleased at the prospect of a particular Redwood being damaged by climate change, but we will pass that one by.

Crucially, though, the Dr Johnstone observes that it was unclear whether the receding fog was "part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity" – or indeed whether this was a temporary phenomenon or a long-term change. That, though, would only support a headline: "Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to unknown causes", which does not have quite the same ring as the Armageddon scenario posited by Alleyne.

Nevertheless, the original PNAS paper is not yet published, so Alleyne has got his copy from the advance release, and one can assume from that that Dr Johnstone, who recently received his PhD from UC Berkeley's Department of Geography, is not averse to attracting a little personal publicity from a quick scare story.

From elsewhere though, we learn that Dr Johnstone's work is in part supported by the Save the Redwoods League, a multi-million dollar advocacy organisation which last year paid Ruskin K. Hartley, its executive director, a cool $182,154. There's money in them thar redwoods.

Futhermore, there's money in climate change and redwoods. Last year, the League – which has awarded 54 grants totalling $771,000 since 1997, had been offering grants to examine the impact of global climate change on redwood forests.

Academia being what it is, it goes with the money and, sure enough, with money being available for researching the impacts of climate change on the forests, up pops a tame academic to pronounce on ... the impact of climate change on the forests. Fame and fortune beckons as the IPCC prepares to single out the loss of the redwoods from climate change in its next report.

The fact that Hartley has been banging the drum on climate change, having first offered grants in April 2007, is neither here nor there. That it might have something to do with protecting the League's income stream from a cash-strapped California State is also neither here nor there.

For the likes of uncritical journalists such as Alleyne and his increasingly dire newspaper, a press release is a story, and another hare is up and running.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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Hatton on hurricanes - by Richard...

Over at The Register is a report of Les Hatton testing the assertions in the IPCC AR4 on hurricane trends, using observational data. From a comparison of the period 1946-2009 with 1999-2009, Hatton finds that there is no evidence of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.

He acknowledges that the IPCC conclude that "there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones," but also notes that the IPCC also states that: "It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity."

This, Hatton points out, comes from computer climate models, not from the observational data, which show no increase.

Actually, I cannot find the exact quote – which does not mean it is not there. But there is something very similar in WGI, which states that "detection and attribution of observed changes in hurricane intensity or frequency due to external influences remains difficult because of deficiencies in theoretical understanding of tropical cyclones, their modelling and their long-term monitoring".

The report continues: "These deficiencies preclude a stronger conclusion than an assessment that anthropogenic factors more likely than not have contributed to an increase in tropical cyclone intensity." That, in itself, is very revealing of the mindset - they would like to go further, but the data do not support them.

If the IPCC take any notice of Hatton, however, the likelihood is that they will dismiss his thesis in the contemptuous way that they do. There are "no errors" in the report, apart from the glaciers ... and the Netherlands ... and ...

This regardless, there is an interesting article in Energy Tribune which tells you why an increase in storm intensity should not be expected as a result of global warming. It is a matter of basic physics, as the warmists keep saying.

But never mind. The EU is riding to the rescue, with a research project called HURRICANE, oddly enough. The University of Durham, with Bristol and the US Skidmore College, are carrying out a five-year exercise, which started this January, to answer the question: "Have humans increased storm risk?" So much for "the science is settled".

The research involves using stalagmites in caves to develop "extraordinarily high-resolution" North Atlantic hurricane activity records for the past five hundred years, "thus permitting more statistically robust comparisons of hurricane activity between pre- and post-anthropogenic greenhouse gas climatic states."

And the "starting grant" is only going to cost €1.39 million – a trivial amount for finding out (or not) what Hatton is already able to tell us for free, over the period that matters. But then, what is the point of having global warming is there are no grants available to study it, and people can work it out for themselves?