Climate & Climate Change

“A recent study, Richey et al 2007, showed a warm MWP in the Pigmy Basin, Gulf of Mexico. Julie Richey made an effective presentation at the AGU Session showing an elevated MWP from her foram studies and, together with Alicia Newton who made a similar presentation. Richey said that they had faced unusual opposition from one reviewer who threw many roadblocks towards publishing their results – something that was unprecedented in their experience in presenting empirical results from a qualified laboratory.”

From Climate Audit: Richey et al 2007 and Cariaco

“But we know that Linah Ababneh updated the Sheep Mountain data in 2002. We also know that Linah Ababneh’s update, aside from finding a difference between strip bark and whole bark chronologies, did not replicate Graybill’s results and had no HS shape whatever. (Figures for Sheep Mountain for strip bark and whole bark from 1600 on are shown separately in the thesis.) So the Sheep Mountain chronology had been updated – why wouldn’t this update have been used, aside from it not having a HS shape?”

Ababneh Fig. 5. Cold and warm periods as inferred from tree ring widths chronology (Ababneh, 2006, This study) fluctuations above and below the mean after normalizing, whole-bark and strip-bark chronologies are grouped together from two sites Patriarch Grove and Sheep Mountain.

From Climate Audit: ‘Hughes and the Ababneh Thesis’

No one can deny that in recent years the need to “save the planet” from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses “a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism”, warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

The Sunday Telegraph: ‘The deceit behind global warming’

New Book:

Scared to Death: From BSE To Global Warming — How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth by Christopher Booker and Richard North (Continuum, £16.99)

Julia Slingo and Rowan Sutton of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Walker Institute for Climate System Research, University of Reading, have an interesting letter in this week’s Nature magazine. They point out that this year’s loss of sea-ice cover in the Arctic is unlikely to be explained by temperature change alone. Arctic wind anomolies are implicated as part of a global pattern of exceptional summer circulation.

They conclude:

“The growing La Niña in the East Pacific undoubtedly had a major influence globally, and there is some evidence from past events that La Niña predisposes the circulation towards the type of exceptional patterns seen this summer.”

It’s normally associated with copious rainfall, but this time around, La Nina has failed to deliver.

While the east coast of Australia has received some rain over the last few months, inland Australia has missed out.

It’s a very unusual event, and one that some scientists say has not occurred for many decades.

ABC News: ‘Farmland misses out on La Nina rains’

Dear Jennifer,

I have been wondering what thoughts you may have on the NSW state governments stance on global warming and their seemingly contradictory actions of tying 2 or 3 million dollars of fireworks to the Sydney Harbour Bridge each New Year and Australia Day and letting it rip oblivious on at least these two days of their claimed effects on global warming.

Kind Regards,
Trevor Devine
Councillor
Hawkesbury City Council.