Space clouds and you!

Space isn't entirely empty, there are a lot of loose particles, gas, and plasma spread through it. Interstellar clouds are areas of greater concentrations of that material. There are a number of interstellar clouds in our vicinity of the galaxy. In fact, we are currently moving through the Local Cloud and headed towards the denser G-Cloud which Alpha Centauri is located. Of course, all of this takes millions of years.

Could the passage through interstellar clouds influence the Earth and Solar System?

Also within our vicinity is a ribbon of clumps of denser interstellar medium known as Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds. It is theorized that 3 to 4 million years ago we passed through one of these dense areas. 

The Solar System is protected by the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a bubble of charged particles the Sun emits that buffers the Solar System from interstellar radiation and materials. However, it is believed that the encounter with one of the dense Cold Clouds could collapse the heliosphere significantly and expose the planets, including Earth, to the interstellar medium. There is some geological evidence that this did happen at the time we may have passed through one of the Cold Clouds.

There is then the question as to what, if any, effect this may have had on the Earth? There is a rough correlation between the time of passing through the Cold Cloud and the start of the Ice Ages. Correlation is not causation, but the timing is interesting. If nothing else, the rain of interstellar particles and radiation causing noticeable climate fluctuations seems to be both possible and plausible.

 

The silver lining of slaughter

You probably think that the Mongol slashing their way through Europe and Asia were a bad thing. Over the course of two centuries they destroyed civilizations and sacked numerous cities. They were also known being astonishingly cruel; when they captured the capital of Persia they murdered all of its inhabitants, even killing the dogs and cats in the streets. Estimates vary, but they killed tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

Can any good be wrung from such misery and suffering?

Well, perhaps that depends where your priorities lay -- people or carbon. How Genghis Khan cooled the planet discusses a Carnegie study by Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira that examined large scale historical disasters, the Black Death and the like, and estimated their effect on carbon production. From the post:

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," says Pongratz, lead author of the study in a press release. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth‘s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

The answer to how this happened can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Seems all a bit cold-blooded to me and I suspect their estimates are conveniently aimed guesses, but to be fair to Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira I haven't read their original paper, only this brief report on it, so I have no idea how sensationalized the article has painted their findings. Still, I wonder if they tried to match the Mongol Hordes' rampages with the actually historical temperature? I imagine they are trying to tie the Medieval Warming period to Genghis and his heirs, but it isn't clear from the part quoted.

At any rate, I'll leave you with John Wayne's portrayal of the newly anointed Mongol Eco Hero and Interpetive Dance enthusiast.

Where the Luddites are...

I've noticed there has been a huge uptick in articles about biodiversity in the last few weeks. Much of this is driven by that fact that the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Biodiversity (COP10) is being held in Nagoya Japan. 


Biodiversity is a problem, particularly in the area of over fishing controversy and the difficulty in setting fishing polices between nations. Larger exotic mammals are also threatened, and of course there is the frightening problem of the resurgence of  wheat stem rust. All serious topics for conservationists.


Unfortunately, the biodiversity issue is also a powerful Luddite magnet In fact for a brief time, after the Great Hole in the Ozone Crisis and before the rise of AGW, it was the Luddite issue of choice. I suspect with Climate Change losing steam it will return to the front burner with that group.

On biodiversity we're already seeing things like the following:

Prentice argues that biodiversity protection is not just up to national governments.

"Municipalities have to share that responsibility," he said. "And, frankly, all of us as citizens have to be interested in protecting the biodiversity of the planet."

Heather Hamilton, executive co-ordinator of the Canadian Biodiversity Institute, agrees that most biodiversity issues are local issues.

She cited the plight of the Blanding's turtle in the South March Highlands of the Ottawa suburb of Kanata. The turtle is an threatened species and shares the Highlands with 18 other threatened species. That didn't stop the City of Ottawa from splitting its habitat in half with a road extension.

Back to the Biodiversity Drawing Board

and this:

The strategy says biodiversity should be ''mainstreamed'' - that all Australians must take responsibility for improving wildlife protection if threatened ecosystems are to have the best chance of surviving climate change.
It calls for a 25 per cent boost in the number of Australians and organisations taking part in biodiversity conservation.

''If we continue to live unsustainably, we risk the degeneration of the ecological systems that support our life and our nation's productivity,'' says the report, endorsed by state and federal environment ministers. The Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council strategy is likely to receive a mixed response from green groups, which have called for more ambitious targets to protect threatened species.

Biodiversity plan to lock up land 

and of course what Luddite could ignore genetic engineering in an issue like this:

The 12-day Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Nagoya is intended to head off the rapid loss of plant and animal species that is happening around the world. The belief is that a more diversified global ecosystem has a better chance of protecting life. 

To facilitate this, summit participants are looking at things like hard targets to prevent deforestation and implementing new rules and regulations that would see victims of biodiversity loss compensated. They are also examining potential rules on sharing genetic material to ensure corporations don't get a stranglehold over biodiversity.

But Canada has already been blamed for being obstructionist in several aspects of the biodiversity meetings. Chief among these is the fact that Canada objects to a reference to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in a protocol over sharing the proceeds from the sale of genetic material with sovereign populations.

For that, Canada has already won a "Dodo Award"—similar to the Fossil Awards handed out during climate change summits—by a network of NGOs following the bio-diversity summit. 

Government opposes biodiversity protocols

Let's see... turtles, check; sustainability, check; UN Declaration, check. Been there and done that, and  I'm also sure there is a shake down of money in there somewhere that I've missed.

The shame of it is that this is a serious issue. Conservation, like pollution reduction, is a worthy goal. However, already I'm seeing the usual buzzwords, wild 'goals' being demanded and tisk-tisking over humans daring to cast their shadow on the Earth.

The Best Global Warming Thought of the Year

I'm not sure where I picked this up, so I apologize for the intellectual theft, but here's the gist of it:

If someone asks you whether you "believe in global warming" then you know they are talking about belief systems, not science.

Utter insanity

The Wall Street Journal reports that, as expected, the EPA has just declared C02 to be a pollutant.

We have unelected bureaucrats making decisions that will impact the entire U.S. economy. Worse, we all know this was done so that Obama can strut around the collapsing Copenhagen Conference and act like a savior.

We know that in a week or so Obama will sign off on some sort of lunatic World Carbon tax to transfer Western money to Third World kleptocrats. The Senate would never agree to such absurdity, but I suppose a puffed up bureaucrat who knows best will be found.

A million here, a billion there, a trillion over yonder... step by foolish step these people are trying their best to impoverish me in my old age. Disgusting, absolutely disgusting.

How have we allowed this to come to this pass and what can we do about it?

The man behind the curtain

From Bore Patch

The Piltdown Man walks

A lot of the posting about the CRU document hack revolves around how it will play in the press. There is a certain amount of cynicism that, because of the investment in AGW, the press and politicians tied to its cause will ignore or explain away the documents as best as possible. While I have no doubt that is true, I don't think it matters. What really matters is how the Climatologists and other Science Departments view it.

In 1908 the first fragments of the Piltdown Man skull were reportedly found. By 1912 the news of the discovery reached the popular press. While scientists outside of Britain were at first skeptical of the find, many were converted when, in 1917 it was announced that Piltdown II had been discovered.

The Piltdown skulls were of course hoaxes. They were a combination of fragments of a medieval man's skull, a orangutan's jawbone and chimpanzee teeth. However, the hoax wasn't unmasked until 1953. Prior to that date other hominid skulls had to fit into a sequence that included Piltdown man, and that resulted in a highly distorted family tree for modern man and his ancestors.

The revelation of the hoax badly damaged the reputation of the science of Anthropology. I remember sitting in Anthropology classes in the 1970s where the Piltdown hoax still cast its shadow -- there was a definite stress that the digs had to be done scrupulously, and the findings judged carefully, to avoid another such embarrassment.   

I think the leaked documents are absolutely devastating, not only to the AGW theory, but to the reputation and credibility of  Climatology in general. If the emails detailing the filtering of data to get the desired results hold up, and I expect what will turn out to be ludicrous computer programs and shaky primary data turn out to be true, then it will mean that the reputation of Climatologists as serious scientists has been brought into question and found wanting.

It is hard for me to imagine that climate scientists felt comfortable walking onto campuses Monday morning after word of the hacked documents spread. It is not what is reported in the press that will matter as much as how their peers view the scandal. It is that censure that matters. They have a lot of work ahead of them to repair the reputation of their discipline, and that reputation will not be repaired by spinning more alarm out of vapor in the Sunday supplements.

If nothing else, it is not often the Social Scientists can laugh at how sloppy a so-called hard science is with its facts.

Helloooo visitors from Free Republic. Thanks for dropping by.

What if They use Email Proxies Instead

As you may have heard, a hacker has released data implicating CRU as less than straightforward about AGW. Our own Charlie Martin has a piece up on PJM. The reputation of the Hockey Team could suffer as a result. I have plotted the hypothetical relationship between reading the hacked emails and Hockey Team's reputation. As more emails are read, the reputation plummets.




But what if the Hockey Team were to run some filters on the data and instead create email proxies. These proxies have the advantage of getting rid of unwanted noise. Maybe it would look like this.



Gee, it's not so bad after all. A reputation Hockey Stick, the more you read, they better it looks.

And That's What It's All About...

Narcissism, that is.

This from Algore: "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions."

What utter piffle.

Alligators in Ellesmere Island?

Ellesmere Island, which lies within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, appears to have once been the home of alligators, according to the fossil records of the Eocene epoch (see After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals, 2006. By Donald R Prothero. Bloomington (Indiana): Indiana University Press). Alligators cannot tolerate freezing temperatures for long. Such tidbits are of interest to any folks who want to take a long view concerning temperature variations of the earth.

Moving to more contemporary pursuits, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, suggests the signature of Greenhouse warming (that the warming should be accompanied by rather large changes in atmospheric temperatures in the tropics) has not occurred. The warming levels that have occurred in the atmosphere of the tropics imply that perhaps only a third of surface warming has been due to the greenhouse effect, and it is unclear how much of that small effect could be attributable to humans. Lindzen says:

This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modelers defend this situation by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming, and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution (Smith et al, 2007). Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modelers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ up to 2015 (Keenlyside et al, 2008).

So should we hope that the political class taxes us to save us from ourselves? Who has lobbied hard for Kyoto? Enron (will we see some revisionist history on that score), Goldman Sachs lobbies fro cap and trade. If Healthcare is a 1000 page bill, how big will a final cap and trade bill be? If a bill is too big to read, maybe it's too big to pass.

Climate Hysteria and its Heretics

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.

But what kind of religion? More than 200 years ago, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume put his finger on the process. His essay, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilised societies the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions when real worries are missing.

As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today's greenhouse gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations, mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and petrol-driven lawnmowers.

Read the whole thing.

Is this a trick question?

It's not in my bailiwick, so maybe I'm missing something, but why is anyone even considering this cap-and-trade nonsense rather than a carbon tax? They're both taxes, except that a carbon tax doesn't give the government huge new powers over the means of production,.... Mark Krikorian (who I normally think is a moron but he's got this one)

Knut's gone knuts!

And to think, not all that long ago, it took more than half the developed world to kick these dopes arses and it was a close run thing for a long time! (ht: Tim Blair)

Anybody have a good recipe for Honey Glazed Wingnut?

Ted Turner's been thinking. Thinking a lot. This NewsBusters article offers an entertaining view into the mind of Ted when its wheels are churning away.

There is the usual "war is bad, we should stop fighting" stuff. Well yea... the first part is a given, the second part is rather more problematic. In talking about Iraq he says, "I think that they're patriots and that they don't like us because we've invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we'd be doing the same thing: we'd be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded."

Patriots? I suppose, then again, I imagine the Waffen SS also thought they were being patriotic when they were defending the rubble of Berlin. There might be more to it than just bandying the word patriot about.

But enough of that, such happy claptrap is rather common in some circles. What elevates Turner to the rarefied heights of nuttery few have achieved are his deep thoughts on global warming (no waffling on about climate change for him). Have a look at a bit of it:

"Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state -- like Somalia or Sudan -- and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there'll be no more corn grown."

Yowza! That sounds even worse then Mad Max. No roaring around in souped up dune buggies, with stylish Mohawk hairdos, for our future selves. We won't be looking for gas, we'll be searching for the other red meat. I have dibs on Michael Moore -- he should feed me and my family for a week or two.

Is it warming or cooling?

Temperature trends are not obeying IPCC models. This winter was (and is) a cold one. One winter does not a trend make, but since the 1998 El Nino (and increased water vapor emissions, a major Greenhouse gas), the lower atmosphere does not appear to be warming. You may now return to your regularly scheduled panic about the climate.

Global-Warming Payola? - TierneyLab - Science - New York Times Blog

Global-Warming Payola? - TierneyLab - Science - New York Times Blog: "Do the critics really think there’s more money and glory to be won by doubting global warming than by going along with the majority?

I ask this question not because I doubt the integrity or competence of the researchers and environmental groups who are getting billions of dollars from government agencies, corporations, foundations and private donors concerned about climate change. If I write about prominent climate scientists like James Hansen of NASA, I don’t feel obliged to note how much research money they get — or how much extra money is going to their field because of the concerns they’ve raised about climate change."

DailyTech - Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

DailyTech - Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling: "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on."

Spotting Watermelons

This from R. Pielke, Jr. captures it nicely in Climate Policy as Farce:

Much of climate debate is exactly backwards. Advocates are spending far too much time arguing over how important that it is that others change their behavior, usually in ways that those doing the advocating would want regardless of climate change. In this way climate change becomes not a problem to be solved but a political weapon in service of other goals.

Dendrochronology for Dummies

The PDF for the page can be found here.

WARNING - THE DATA FROM WHICH THIS POSTER WAS DEVELOPED IS CONSIDERED TO BE RESTRICTED!!!

At least by the warmermonger set.

It may actually be restricted for all I know. I wouldn't think that an IP restriction on the data set would prevent the study in question (and its conclusions) from being at least referenced. While the IP issues are interesting (minimally), the proxies being dropped are even more interesting. I suppose it's all part of strengthening the "consensus". They need to start using backhoes to bury contradictory studies - the shovels just aren't getting 'em deep enough.

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

Steve McIntyre has another post up documenting Dr. Hansen's dedication to the maintenance of consensus regarding global warming. The unraveling of the spaghetti Fortran code that Hansen finally released continues apace in other threads at Climate Audit.

If a publicly owned corporation tried this with information presented in a prospectus they would incur some rather lengthy visits from the FBI followed by very serious discussions with a US attorney. Dr. Hansen is not building confidence with these maneuvers.