Archives for October 25, 2007

Climate alarmists never miss an opportunity to capitilise on other people’s misery in order to fuel the global warming gravy train. Hurricane Katrina was a prime example, and now the California fires are an opportunity not to be missed. CNN are leading the way with their ‘Planet in Peril’ special that may well try to make a link between the fires and global warming. The rest of the mainstream media aren’t far behind.

Meanwhile, the FBI have shot dead a suspected arsonist and confirmed that a huge fire in the town of Santiago in Orange County that destroyed 10 homes was started on purpose in two different places. Furthermore, Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity is on course to match the record low of 1977. This could at least partly explain the lack of moisture/drought in the US Southwest. Remember, global warming was supposed to increase hurricane intensity and frequency, and in 2005 alarmists were suggesting a new category 6 classification would be needed for hurricanes.

It seems that global warming has become a ubiquitous explanation for every natural weather event. Shame on you!

Climate policy after 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires, needs a radical rethink. More of the same won’t do, argue Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner.

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments’ concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy.

Read Time to ditch Kyoto in this week’s Nature News (no subscription required).

Another ‘field day’ for the press as a new research paper, entitled ‘A long-term association between global temperature and biodiversity, origination and extinction in the fossil record’, is published in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society (Biological Sciences).

The abstract says:

The past relationship between global temperature and levels of biological diversity is of increasing concern
due to anthropogenic climate warming. However, no consistent link between these variables has yet been
demonstrated. We analysed the fossil record for the last 520 Myr against estimates of low latitude sea
surface temperature for the same period. We found that global biodiversity (the richness of families and
genera) is related to temperature and has been relatively low during warm ‘greenhouse’ phases, while
during the same phases extinction and origination rates of taxonomic lineages have been relatively high.
These findings are consistent for terrestrial and marine environments and are robust to a number of
alternative assumptions and potential biases. Our results provide the first clear evidence that global climate
may explain substantial variation in the fossil record in a simple and consistent manner. Our findings may
have implications for extinction and biodiversity change under future climate warming.

Of course, the press don’t have time to read it and the authors qualify the findings of the study in the text:

“A first qualification is that our results relate to the effects of residuals from the long-term trend. An increase in global temperature may therefore cause an increase in extinction rate but not necessarily an absolute decrease in biodiversity because the underlying trend is for biodiversity to increase over time.”

“A second qualification is that the coarse time scale of our data does not allow us to make short-term predictions,
although short-term effects also cannot be excluded.”

“Finally, although we have shown an association between temperature and both biodiversity and taxonomic rates, this association may not be causative. Deducing causation from correlation is, of course, difficult. The lags shown in some of our analyses suggest that temperature is affecting biodiversity and evolutionary rates, but well known links between organisms and geophysical processes suggest we should not yet rule out the opposite direction of causation (Rothman 2001).”

CO2 gets a mention:

“When atmospheric CO2 concentrations were included as an explanatory variable in our analyses, temperature
always remained significant, and CO2 was normally not significant. CO2 was significant for both marine genus origination and extinction rate, and in the latter case was a stronger predictor than temperature. Overall, temperature was the better predictor of diversity and taxonomic rates.”

The BBC News website goes with Climate threat to biodiversity

“Global temperatures predicted for the coming centuries could trigger a mass extinction, UK scientists have warned.”

Australia’s ABC News gets rather carried away and headlines with Global warming to cause mass extinction: report

“Researchers in Britain say in the long term, global warming could lead to a mass extinction of animals and plants.”

Whilst we are on the subject of climate warming and cooling, how has man fared specifically in the UK over the past 700,000 years?

If we turn the clock back 12 months, we have this report on the BBC News website with a nice graphic:

Britain’s human history revealed

Eight times humans came to try to live in Britain and on at least seven occasions they failed – beaten back by freezing conditions. Scientists think they can now write a reasonably comprehensive history of the occupation of these isles. It stretches from 700,000 years ago and the first known settlers at Pakefield in Suffolk, through to the most recent incomers just 12,000 years or so ago (the end of the last great ice age). The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project.

“Australian aboriginals have been in Australia longer, continuously than the British people have been in Britain. There were probably people in the Americas before 12,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer explained.

So there you have it – in the cold we die, in warm intergalcials we thrive.