Daily Archives: August 16, 2011

Scientists try to dissolve sea urchin larvae in less-alkaline sea water – doesn’t work

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sea Urchin Babies Unharmed By Mean Old Ocean Acidification, Peer-Reviewed Study Finds

Read here. The left/green coalition has conjured up the boogieman termed “ocean acidification” to instill fear in the hearts of liberal/progressives “elites” that marine life will be adversely affected by greater emissions of human CO2. Based on the ocean acidification fears, Yu et al. conducted research on sea urchin babies larvae immersed in water with lower values of pH to determine its impact on larvae growth and well being.

The research found that sea urchin larvae were not impacted by levels of increasing “acidification” of sea water that some have predicted will represent ocean waters 100+ years from now.

“Yu et al. state that “the observed developmental progression and survival of cultures was within the norm typically observed for this species at this temperature range.” In addition, they indicate that “a lack of developmental deformities at early stages for pCO2 ~1000 ppm has been previously reported for this species…” And they say “there are even reports that survival is increased in this species and its congener S. droebachiensis under some low pH conditions…”…conclude, that “the effects of small magnitude in these urchin larvae are indicative of a potential resilience to near-future levels of ocean acidification.”" [Pauline C. Yua,  Paul G. Matsona, Todd R. Martzb, Gretchen E. Hofmanna 2011: Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology]

Note: Yes, indeed we know larvae are not ‘babies’ and we also know that polar bears are not ‘cuddly’ as the greens like to portray. (C3 Headlines)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, Research

Imaginary warming to extirpate [specific] fish populations [not now but maybe one day]

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

CO2: Over the last two centuries, it’s been completely ineffective in killing trout; but according to junk scientists, that will allegedly change this century

Another alarmist study with predictable results – This time it´s about trout

“We are not yet seeing the trend in the trout populations themselves,” Wenger said.

Scientists Say Kiss Goodbye to America’s Trout Population Due to Global Warming – Orange County Restaurants and Dining – Stick a Fork In It

You’ll have to be a scientist or nerdy college student to read the full report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but the free summary spells out the doom-and-gloom: brook trout populations will fall by 77%, brown by 48, and the legendary rainbow by 35, all because of shifting temperatures across the United States and its subsequent havoc on ecosystems.

(Tom Nelson)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in PlayStation® climatology

In the make-believe world climate change becomes a fish chauffeur (water taxi driver?)

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Climate change could drive native fish out of Wisconsin waters
Terry Devitt

The cisco, a key forage fish found in Wisconsin’s deepest and coldest bodies of water, could become a climate change casualty and disappear from most of the Wisconsin lakes it now inhabits by the year 2100, according to a new study.

In a report published online in the journal Public Library of Science One, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources project a gloomy fate for the fish — an important food for many of Wisconsin’s iconic game species — as climate warms and pressure from invasive species grows.

In the case of the cisco, a warming climate poses a much greater risk than do exotic species such as the rainbow smelt, the invasive that most threatens the deep-dwelling cisco by eating its eggs and young, the Wisconsin researchers say. (UW-M)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in PlayStation® climatology

So global warming causes toothache in bears…

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

… at least we assume that to be the case since global warming was blamed as the root cause of the recent fatal polar bear attack in the Svalbard Archipelago. Here’s a more complete explanation from the AFP:

Toothache blamed for Norway bear attack
From correspondents in Oslo From: AFP August 17, 2011 8:01AM

THE polar bear that mauled a British teenager to death on August 5 in the Norwegian Arctic may have attacked because he was suffering with a toothache, Norway’s veterinary institute says.

While examining the 250-kilogram male that was shot and killed after attacking the campsite of 13 people, the institute discovered that several of the bear’s teeth were “very damaged” before the attack.

“Under two of the canines and many of the incisors, the nerves were exposed. This causes serious pain and changes the behaviour of bears,” Bjoernar Ytrehus, the veterinarian who examined the bear’s head, said overnight.

The damage to the teeth suggests the bear was old, sick or injured and therefore forced to eat vegetables rather than seals, a polar bear’s normal prey. Eating vegetables may have caused the damage to the teeth.

“This could be a factor that contributed to the attack,” Mr Ytrehus said. “Starving and suffering, a bear is more unpredictable and aggressive than normal.”

Travelling with a British Schools Exploring Society expedition, the 13 people were camped on the Von Postbreen glacier on Spitsbergen, north of the Norwegian mainland.

The bear killed Horatio Chapple, 17, and injured four other members of the group.

The father of one of the injured boys previously told the BBC that some of the bears teeth were embedded in his son’s skull during the attack and had to be removed.

According to Norway’s TV2, it was the first deadly polar bear attack in the Svalbard archipelago since 1995. (news.com.au)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, Propaganda, Wildlife

CO2 Science Volume 14 Number 33: 17 August 2011

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Editorial
The Future of Earth’s Coral Reefs: How will they be affected by projected increases in global warming and ocean acidification?

Journal Reviews
Implications of an Extended Multivariate ENSO Index: What are they?

Tropical Cyclones and Super Typhoons: Their Influence on China: How have they varied in frequency and intensity over the past half-century or more?

On Determining Changes in Intertidal Marine Species Ranges: How well suited for the task is a knowledge of regional air temperature change?

Woody Thickening in Australia: The case for it occurring in response to the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2content grows ever stronger, both “down under” and throughout the world.

The Effect of Elevated CO2 on N2O and CH4 Fluxes from a Warming and Drying Temperate Heathland: Does it enhance or reduce them?

Ocean Acidification Database
The latest addition of peer-reviewed data archived to our database of marine organism responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment is Northern Abalone [Haliotis kamtschatkana]. To access the entire database,click here.

Plant Growth Database
Our latest results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature are: Ginger (Ghasemzadeh and Jaafar, 2011) andTobacco (Fu et al., 2010).

Medieval Warm Period Project
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 1002 individual scientists from 574 research institutions in 43 different countries … and counting! This issue’s Medieval Warm Period Record comes from Carolina Slope, Western North Atlantic Ocean. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project’s database, click here.

World Temperatures Database
Back by popular demand and upgraded to allow patrons more choices to plot and view the data, we reintroduce the World Temperatures section of our website. Here, users may plot temperatures for the entire globe or regions of the globe. A newly added feature allows patrons the ability to plot up to six independent datasets on the same graph. Try it today. World Temperatures Database. (co2science.org)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate

And we thought fat people actually sequestered more carbon sourced from atmospheric CO2 (a.k.a. “food”), kind of like large forest trees

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Breaking: New peer-reviewed study suggests that droughts and floods are caused by fat people breathing

Researchers Suggest Link Between Obesity & Global Warming – Scotland Food and Drink

The academics suggest that global weight loss would result in a drop in the production of the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO(2)).

The study was carried out by a trio of researchers within the university’s Centre for Obesity Research and Epidemiology (CORE). It suggests that if every obese and overweight person in the world lost 10 kilograms (or 1.58 stone), the resulting drop in greenhouse emissions would be the equivalent of 0.2% of the CO(2) emitted globally in 2007 (49.560Mt).
…
Dr Catherine Rolland was one of the lead researchers on the study. She explains: “This decrease can be explained by the principles of respiration – the process by which organisms breathe in oxygen, which is then converted to CO(2) and then exhaled.

“CO(2) production is proportionate to body mass and heavier individuals naturally produce more than those of a healthier weight. The global obesity epidemic, therefore, has resulted in humans producing a higher volume of a major greenhouse gas.”

The initial study was carried out by Phd student Ania Gryka as supervised by Dr Rolland and Professor Iain Broom, director of CORE. It was published in International Journal of Obesity on 26 July this year.

(Tom Nelson)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, Rubber room

Willis Eschenbach: Radiating the Ocean

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Radiating the Ocean
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Once again, the crazy idea that downwelling longwave radiation (DLR, also called infra-red or IR, or “greenhouse radiation”) can’t heat the ocean has raised its ugly head on one of my threads.

There are lots of good arguments against the AGW consensus, but this one is just silly. Here are four entirely separate and distinct lines of reasoning showing that DLR does in fact heat the oceans. (WUWT)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate

Witch hunt or loaded for bear?

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Inhofe seeking data on polar bear probe
JIM MYERS

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, and the polar bear.

That triad from the years-old global warming debate is back – sort of. And this time there’s a mysterious investigation – some say witch hunt – thrown into the mix.

Inhofe managed to put the trio back together in a recent letter to Mary Kendall, the acting inspector general at the U.S. Department of Interior, asking for more information about an investigation involving Charles Monnett. (Tulsa World)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Activists, Climate change, Research, Wildlife

Ever wonder what happened to all those “first victims of climate change”?

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

A short history of climate science hysteria
Gavin Atkins

Tim Blair recently posted this list of things that the media have trumpeted as being the “first casualties of climate change”.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to check the veracity of each story – but what I was not expecting is that every story up until 2010 (after which some of the claims are too recent to verify one way or another) has either been completely debunked, or has since had some serious doubts placed on it.

So the following examples have not been cherry picked – it’s a quick analysis of every claim made about “the first casualty of global warming” up until 2010.

Here are the stories that Tim gathered together, followed by the latest information about them: (Asian Corespondent)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Climate change, Propaganda

Roger Pielke Sr. on the serious flaws in the use of multi-decadal global climate models to provide value-added information to the impacts community

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

A New AGU EOS Article Titled “Guidelines For Constructing Climate Scenarios” By Mote Et Al 2011 Which Inadvertently Highlights This Flawed Climate Science Approach

There is an astonishing new article in the August 2 2011 issue of EOS which lays open the serious flaws in the use of multi-decadal global climate models, even when downscaled to regions, to provide value-added information to the impacts community. (Roger Pielke Sr.)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in PlayStation® climatology

PlayStation® climatology fails at crop prediction too

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Climate Models Not So Good For Crop Prediction

Many global warming alarmists tout the notion that anthropogenic global warming will result in widespread crop failures as (projected) climate changes increasingly lead to increasingly bad growing conditions (see our article Science Fiction Down on the Farm, for some examples).

Using Al Gore’s lingo, we are quick to call “BS” on that premise, for the simple fact that that is not how things work. Crop scientists and farmers have an economic incentive to improve genetic cultivars and agricultural practices to maximize output given the prevailing environmental conditions. And, they are pretty effective at what they do. Despite the “global warming” and other affiliated and/or non-affiliated climate changes that have occurred over the past 100 years, global crop production just keeps on increasing—see our recent coverage here of this very good news.

We are clearly and demonstrably able to change agricultural practices to keep up with changing climate while increasing yields.

So much for the “dumb farmer scenario” that farmers stand by and watch their crops fail as conditions change.

But what about those future climate changes that underlie the scare scenarios? Are climate models really able to the climatic factors that are important for agriculture?

A new soon-to-be-published study finds that the models are not so hot, at least over the world’s most productive agro-region, the good-old-US of A. As we shall see, though, the pressures to say the politically correct thing still comes beaming through from the halls of Academia. (WCR)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Agriculture, PlayStation® climatology

Can they get any more offensive with these damned aerial cuisinarts?

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 2 Comments

D-Day vets: Wind turbines off Normandy beaches a ‘desecration’
By Caroline May

American D-Day veterans are crying foul over a French initiative, approved last month by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to construct over one hundred 525-feet wind turbines just off the Normandy landing grounds.

Gérard Lecornu, president of the Port Winston Churchill Association of Arromanches, says the giant structures, expected to be built seven miles offshore, will be visible from the Normandy battleground beaches of Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

“Three million tourists come from the world over to the landing beaches. The first thing they do is look at the line of horizon from where the landings came,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “D-Day is in our collective memory. To touch this is a very grave attack on that memory.” (Daily Caller)

The Party’s Over for Big Wind
Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Wind

Dipstick greens want everyone to invest in idiotic (and collapsing) solar scam

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

A Solar Panel on Every Roof? In U.S., Still a Distant Dream
Dave Levitan

Daunted by high up-front costs, U.S. homeowners continue to shy away from residential solar power systems, even as utility-scale solar projects are taking off. But with do-it-yourself kits and other innovative installation approaches now on the market, residential solar is having modest growth. (e360)

Solar company Evergreen files for bankruptcy

Gotta love these ‘green’ jobs – exported to China at huge taxpayer expense:

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Energy, Green jobs, Green scams, Rubber room, Solar

Issa to the rescue over CAFE?

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 2 Comments

Issa: 54.5 MPG Fuel Economy Standard Negotiated Outside Scope of Law
by MARLO LEWIS on AUGUST 15, 2011

In a sharply worded letter (August 11, 2011) to White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrel Issa (R-Calif.) contends that “the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and EPA vehicle greenhouse gas (GHG) standards announced by President Obama and select automobile manufacturers on July 29, 2011, were negotiated in secret, outside the scope of law, and could generate significant negative impacts for consumers.”

Issa is also concerned “that the government’s ownership interest in General Motors and Chrysler at the time these negotiations were conducted creates a troublesome conflict-of-interest.”

Accordingly, Issa is launching ”an investigation into the activities of the Administration leading up to the agreement for new CAFE standards for model years (MY) 2017-2025.” (Cooler Heads)

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Energy, Regulation, Transport

‘Green’ tax ripoff

Posted on August 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Matthew Sinclair: Let Them Eat Carbon
Monday, 15 August 2011 10:13 Taxpayers’ Alliance

The biggest threat to taxpayers right now is expensive new green taxes and subsidies. In the first ever mainstream book on this subject – published Thursday 18 August – TaxPayers’ Alliance Director Matthew Sinclair has exposed how this is the critical new threat to family finances. With rising fuel bills and petrol prices, it will be a defining feature of the political landscape over the coming year.

‘Let Them Eat Carbon’ shows how Fuel Duty is putting huge pressure on motorists. An energetic campaign against the tax is arguing for it to be frozen for the rest of this Parliament, after the cut at the last budget, and is among the most popular on the new government e-petition website. (GWPF)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Cap and tax, Energy, Regulation, Transport