Are polar bears going cannibal?

CNN, in the midst of a boilerplate September 23 article about the allegedly impending disappearance of Arctic ice, brings us an alarming development in the saga of the officially-threatened-but-not-actually-declining-yet polar bear:

"The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears," according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. "They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don't have access to their usual food sources."

Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years.

Cannibalism! Yikes! Given the extent of the summer melt in the past two seasons, researchers must have a lot of anecdotal evidence of this. Let's read on to learn the gory details:

In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female's den and killed her.

2004? Four years ago? Did the male bear eat the female after killing her? What was the frequency of such behavior in the polar bear population before any significant melting occurred?

Does article author Marsha Walton realize that this one sentence (which, by the way, is the only example given) undermines her alarmist conclusion? Apparently not. Even though the main purpose of the article is to report on the just-ended ice-melt season, her article is entitled:

Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks

Present tense: "resort". If there's evidence of it happening this season, Walton doesn't see fit to present it.

Perhaps because the true story gives no cause for alarm?

Perhaps because researchers have long known about cannibalism among the polar bears.


[P.S. Hello to everyone visiting here from the CNN article page!]

Sunspot milestone

August has the notable distinction of having passed without a single post by me to this blog (where did the time go?). Even more notable, however, is the fact that Mr. Sun was quiet the entire month as well, as Michael Asher reports:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, the last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

The alarmists will almost certainly yawn at the news, if they notice it at all. Sunspots, many argue, have no effect on the radiation output of the Sun.

This is correct, but misleading. The solar magnetic activity represented by sunspots affects our climate indirectly by influencing cloud formation on our planet, which in turn does affect our climate.

Sure, he may go to jail, but he may also have earned a carbon credit or two

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, July 25:

A 57-year-old south side man, who might have been struggling with a hangover, is charged today with shooting his lawn mower with a sawed-off shotgun.

"I'll tell you the truth," a criminal complaint quotes an apparently inebriated Keith Walendowski. "I got pissed because my lawn mower wouldn't start, so I got my shotgun and shot it.

"I can do that. It's my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want," Walendowski told police.

That beast'll never belch carbon again. Sure, it's only one lawn mower, but if each of us would commit to shooting our own lawn mowers, we might just end up saving the planet.

The War on Global Warming is the health of the state

Small-"l" libertarians are known for their opposition to policies that expand the power* of the state at the expense of individual liberty. That makes it all the more fascinating that the big-"L" Libertarian Party has nominated a man who has endorsed a plan that -- if implemented -- would amount to one of the biggest-ever expansions of government power*.

As CNSNews reports:

Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr praised Al Gore, who challenged the United States Thursday to run on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity within 10 years.

Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who attended the former vice president’s Washington, D.C., speech Thursday, said Gore’s plan “makes sense.”

“America responds well to challenges, if it is laid out, if it’s in terms that people can understand and relate to, if it makes sense – and what he’s laid out makes sense,” Barr said in an interview with Cybercast News Service after Gore spoke.

In a speech at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall, Gore said the United States should move towards producing all of its electricity from renewable energy and clean carbon-free sources, a strategy Gore said would “re-power America."

[...]

Barr, who attended Thursday’s speech, said he was “deeply” indebted to Gore for “laying the challenge out there.”

As any true libertarian will testify (I don't consider myself to be one, but I lean in that direction), the government almost never surrenders power* that is usurped in times of crisis.

So what do you think, LP members?

Of course, the candidate I'm most likely to vote for, although he represents the party that had a better-than-even chance of articulating a sane point of view on the AGW issue, has also completely embraced Gore's presuppositions (if not all of Gore's policy prescriptions). Sigh.


* (Given the subject matter of Gore's speech, I apologize for the repeated but unavoidable pun)

Gore's plan to bankrupt America

In a remarkable feat of understatement, The New York Times entitled its account of Al Gore's July 17 speech: Gore Urges Change to Dodge an Energy Crisis.

The word "change" has been bandied about so much in the current presidential campaign that people don't expect any specifics to be attached to the word. But Gore cannot be accused of empty rhetoric in this case. He believes that trillions of dollars should be shifted away from keeping our country's economic engine running and toward a complete replacement of our country's energy infrastructure. In ten years.

Gore was in fine TEOTWAWKI form in his Washington speech, as the NYT reports:

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday urged the United States to wean the nation from its entire electricity grid to carbon-free energy within 10 years, warning that drastic steps were needed to avoid a global economic and ecological cataclysm.

Like a modern Jeremiah, Mr. Gore called down thunder to justify the spending of trillions of dollars to remake the American power system, a plan fraught with technological and political challenges that goes far beyond the changes recently debated in Congress and by world leaders.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” he said in a midday speech to a friendly crowd of mostly young supporters in Washington. “And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.”

As this excerpt shows, no cost is too great for you and me to bear, because the future of human civilization is at stake.

“To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider seriously what the world’s scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don’t act in less than 10 years,” he said.

No, no, no... don't evaluate -- there's no time! The time for thinking is over -- it's time to act! So the complete reengineering of our power infrastructure would completely bankrupt our economy, likely taking the rest of the world with it -- what's your point?

Obama and McCain, while they may not have endorsed Gore's plan yet, seem all too happy to go the first step, which appears in the form of the EPA's Proposed Plan To Control Every Aspect Of Your Life. The Bush administration won't let that monstrosity move forward for now, but January 2009 is not far away.

US dodges economy-crushing bullet: EPA declines to regulate CO2 (for now)

Environmentalists rejoiced when scientists* sitting on the US Supreme Court ruled that the government had every right to regulate CO₂ -- a gas essential for life on earth -- as a pollutant. Although it would seem a bit of a challenge to distinguish anthropogenic CO₂ molecules from naturally-occurring ones (perhaps we could tag ours), or to prevent foreign-generated CO₂ from mixing with domestic CO₂, it appeared certain that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under mounting pressure from the greens, was ready to assert jurisdiction over nearly every aspect of human activity in America.

Stunningly, the Bush administration's EPA declined an opportunity that would in effect have given the environmentalists everything they wanted.

In its voluminous document [588 pages!], the EPA laid out a buffet of options on how to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, ships, trains, power plants, factories and refineries.

"One point is clear: The potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land," the EPA's Johnson said in a preface to the federal notice.

EPA said that it encountered resistance from the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Transportation departments, as well as the White House, that made it "impossible" to respond in a timely fashion to the Supreme Court decision.

"Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion because it does not fairly recognize the enormous — and, we believe, insurmountable — burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited benefits, of using the Clean Air Act" to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the secretaries of the four agencies wrote to the White House on July 9.

So, we've dodged a bullet, at least until the next administration takes office. It seems that John McCain, although he has embraced much of the propaganda, is far less inclined than Barack Obama is to use a heavy-handed, bureaucratic end-run technique like this to advance the AGW agenda.

* (Tim wrote with a straight face)

Funny numbers in TCPR 'Gore mansion' press release

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research made a splash last week with their press release claiming that energy usage in Al Gore's Nashville-area compound had actually increased ten percent since 'green' renovations had been completed.  TCPR was made news last year when they first brought Gore's conspicuous consumption to light. Although Team Gore denies any connection between TCPR's 2007 report and the subsequent renovations, the timing is, as they say, suspicious.

Your humble Heretic, of course, couldn't pass up an opportunity to highlight the latest release, joining countless others in the blogosphere.  I guess it is basic human nature that we are not as rigorous about fact-checking data that support our point of view.  It is also basic human nature that we try hard to find holes in data that appear to disagree with our point of view.  Sometimes such opposition research can yield results that further the cause of integrity in the AGW debate. 

Blogger Tim Lambert is no friend of the skeptic community, which no doubt made it easy for him to notice discrepancies between TCPR's 2007 release and last week's release.  At the risk of causing my readers to lapse into an eye-glazed stupor, let's look at the claims made in the two reports:

    February 2007 press release

• Gore's 2006 energy consumption: 221,000kwh/year [i.e. 18,417kwh/month]
  
• Average American household consumption: 10,656kwh/year [i.e. 888kwh/month]
  
• Gore's consumption 20 times the average American household
  

    June 2008 press release

• Gore's 2007 energy consumption: 213,210kwh/year [i.e. 17,768kwh/month]
  
• 2006 monthly consumption: 16,130kwh
• 2007 consumption 10% increase over 2006
• 2007 consumption would power 232 normal homes for a month
  

The 2008 report's numbers are internally consistent, but they do not mesh with what was claimed in the 2007 report.  Comparing the annual numbers, Lambert noted that a 2006 total of 221,000kwh and a 2007 total of 213,210kwh yields a 4% decrease, not a 10% increase.  On the basis of this observation, Lambert declared TCPR to be an unreliable source and summarily dismissed the larger point raised in the newest press release (namely, that Gore consumes energy like a drunken sailor).

Looking only at this month's release, however, the numbers do work out: the monthly consumption increased from 16,130kwh to 17,768kwh, which is indeed a 10% increase.  This raises problems with last year's press release, though.  That report gave Gore's 2006 annual consumption as 221,000kwh, but 16,130 x 12 is actually 193,560kwh. 

Sorry for the blizzard of calculations; let me get to my point.  The biggest discrepancy appears to be an incorrect annual total in the 2007 press release.  To my knowledge, TCPR has never corrected or clarified this number, and as of this moment TCPR has not yet responded to my request for a clarification.

As long as TCPR allows this discrepancy to stand, its credibility in the AGW debate will be open to legitimate question.  I'm hoping that integrity will win out over the simple desire to score political points over Al Gore.

eBay foils a good deed

Tom at Radio Free New Jersey has a tall, beautiful oak tree in his yard. He found that the tree was casting a shadow on the solar heater for his pool, so he planned to cut the tree down.

Then he had in inspiration: Why not leave the tree alone, and sell its carbon sequestration services to someone out there who was feeling guilty about their lifestyle? He would do a good deed, and for that he would be willing to put up with a slightly cooler swimming pool.

So, he put an ad on eBay, hoping to get a bid of $420 based on his calculation of how much carbon the tree would end up sequestering.

Alas, eBay yanked the auction after a few days without really explaining why. Tom speculates that eBay secretly knows that carbon credits are a scam, and thus is not willing for them to be sold on its site.

In my opinion, it is equally likely that the eBay folks accept the concept of carbon credits, and saw Tom's auction as mockery of the concept. Which it was, of course.

Bravo, Tom, for giving it a try. Perhaps you could find a way to contact the Gore estate; it seems that they could use a little feel-good P.R. right now.

When I think of all of the trees I've cut down on my property for one reason or another, and think about people who are more than willing to part with their money in the belief that the act frees them to maintain their wasteful lifestyles...... sigh...... what could have been.

If only we commoners could afford Al Gore's carbon footprint...

A year ago we saw that Al Gore was investing a lot of money in his Tennessee mansion to help it comply with U.S. Green Building Council standards.

You would think that after all of those improvements, we would see the efficiency improvements reflected in an overall decrease in the amount of energy consumed in Gore's home. You would be wrong.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research has been watching Gore's energy usage for a long time. It was their first press release about his wasteful lifestyle that appears to have prompted last year's renovations.

TCPR issued another report this week letting us know how things are going at the Gore estate:

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

[...]In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In addition to efficiency improvements, Gore relies on the purchase of carbon offsets to somehow make his off-the-charts consumption (both at home and in his extensive travel by private jet) okay.

What he has really done is prove that reliance on carbon offsets tends to lead to an increase in wasteful consumption. This makes sense, because carbon offsets amount to doing penance for your bad behavior without actually making an effort to modify the bad behavior.


June 20 UPDATE: Although the numbers in TCPR's June 17th press release are internally consistent, it is true that, as detractor Tim Lambert observes, the numbers are not consistent with TCPR's 2007 press release about Gore's 2006 consumption (linked above). It appears to boil down to a misstated number in the 2007 press release -- which to my knowledge TCPR has never corrected. I have asked them for an official clarification, and will post an update if and when I hear back from them.

Tree-ring-based climate models further undermined by leaf-temperature study

Will this break the hockey stick for good?

We've known for a while about studies demonstrating significant shortcomings in the use of tree-ring data to infer historical climate information. Now University of Pennsylvania researchers Brent Helliker and Suzanna Richter have published a study in the British journal Nature that seems to drive another nail into the coffin of the methodology that was supposedly the basis of Michael Mann's discredited "hockey stick" graph (which can be seen in the post linked above).

From a June 11 AFP article (emphasis added):

The internal temperature of leaves, whether in the tropics or a cold-clime forest, tends toward a nearly constant 21.4 degrees Celsius (71 degree Fahrenheit), reports a study released Wednesday.

It had long been assumed that actively photosynthesising leaves -- using energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar -- are nearly as cold or hot as the air around them.

The new findings not only challenge long-held precepts in plant biology, but could upend climate models that use tree rings to infer or predict past and present temperature changes.

For decades, scientists studying the impact of global warming have measured the oxygen isotope ratio in tree-rings to determine the air temperature and relative humidity of historical climates.

Oxygen atoms within water molecules evaporate more or less quickly depending on the number of neutrons they carry, and the ratio between these differently weighted atoms in tree trunk rings has been used as a measure of year-to-year fluctuations in temperatures and rainfall.

"The assumption in all of these studies was that tree leaf temperatures were equal to ambient temperatures," lead researcher Brent Helliker told AFP. "It turns out that they are not."

Oopsie.

------
Study Reference:
Helliker, Brent and Suzanna L. Richter. 2008. Subtropical to boreal convergence of tree-leaf temperatures. Nature. In press. doi:10.1038/nature07031

Another update on the remarkable winter of 2007-8

Last summer our part of Texas enjoyed one of its coolest summers in living memory, but this year we're roasting at more typical temperatures (mid to upper 90s). A rotten time for our 20-year-old home air conditioning system to give up the ghost, but we finally got that replaced a couple of weeks ago, so we're comfortable again.

Too bad we can't have a summer like they're having up in the Pacific northwest. As reported June 10 in the Seattle Times:

Seattle just experienced the coldest first week of June, according to climate records dating to 1891, said Cliff Mass, University of Washington metrologist. Both 1999 and 2008 share the record, with 1917 falling in second place, he said. "Just wait until tomorrow," he said, when temperatures are going to be even colder.

A heavy snow warning has been issued for the Washington Cascades and Olympics as a storm from the Gulf of Alaska plows into the state tonight.

And on June 11:

It doesn't seem fair, but it's the cold, hard truth — accent on cold: While Seattle hasn't seen a 70-degree day in more than two weeks, Fairbanks, Alaska, has had six of them in the past 10 days.

Just about everyone, it seems, is toastier than we are. You've heard of International Falls, Minn., the self-proclaimed "Icebox of the Nation?"? It's had four days this month in the 70s, topped off with a pleasant 75 on Sunday.

Across the Atlantic, the northern destination of Oslo, Norway, has been passing the 70-degree mark nearly every day recently, while even the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia, hit the 70s last weekend.

Not that I'm suggesting anything. Highlighting local weather patterns for AGW propaganda purposes is a tricky business, because you have to choose your data points carefully. Chilly in Seattle (global cooling!), but sweltering in New York (global warming!).

This is the purpose of the "proof by anecdote" label for certain posts on this blog. You can prove just about anything anecdotally, if you choose the right anecdote. I try never to commit this fallacy on purpose here (the "proof by anecdote" label is your hint that I'm being facetious), but feel free to call me on it if you think I've let one slip by without admitting it.

(via ICECAP)

Youth indoctrination Down Under: Planet Slayer

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's website is hosting an online game called Planet Slayer.

The villains are hypocritical meat-eating bourgeois materialist greenhouse pigs. The heroes are those who, in the words of Ludwig von Mises Institute essayist Ben O'Neill, "[oppose] logging, nuclear waste, war, consumerism, and other evils, and [support] such good things as composting, clean transport, solar power, and protesting."

The site has all sorts of fun activities for the kids, including a calculator apparently intended to show them that they've already contributed more than their share of CO2, and that they would do well to go some place quiet and kill themselves.

I wish I was kidding. Here's the screenshot for the opening page of the when-you-should-die calculator (click to view full-sized image):


This site is supported in part by the tax dollars of the citizens of Australia (via Film Victoria). Hope you feel like you're getting your money's worth, my Australian friends.

The Sun: Now with a spot-free shine!

Science Daily reports from a Montana State University press release that an increasing number of solar scientists are puzzling over the fact that Solar Cycle 24 is still refusing to make an appearance, two years after Cycle 23 showed clear indications of leaving the stage:

The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.

That's good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology, but it became a point of discussion for the scientists who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University. Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about "Solar Variability, Earth's Climate and the Space Environment."

The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual.

"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission. "That's a small concern, a very small concern."

History shows a strong correlation between long intercycle calm periods and global cooling. The press release notes that a 50-year sunspot-free period occurred in the 17th century, during what is now known as the Little Ice Age.

If this spot-free period persists, I suppose we'll know before too long whether or not the earth's climate truly responds to such changes in solar activity.

Seriously, who didn't see this coming?

It sure didn't take long.

The ink had hardly dried on Interior Secretary Kempthorne's directive designating the polar bear as "threatened" (based purely on hypotheticals and what-ifs, not on reality) when the environmental left showed why they pressed so hard for the designation. From a June 9 Associated Press story:

Two conservation groups plan to sue to protect polar bears from petroleum exploration and drilling off Alaska's coast.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Environment gave the federal government formal notice Monday that they will sue under the Endangered Species Act to protect the bears, which were listed as threatened last month by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Do I need to say it again? The AGW scare is merely a tool used by certain parties to advance portions of their agenda that might not otherwise be enacted.

In this case, many in the environmental left are flat-out opposed to developing oil resources anywhere, and they have shown themselves to be masters at using regulation and litigation to head off new drilling in the United States. Arctic Alaska is by far the easiest target, because... well, polar bears are just so doggone cute!



In the current political climate (pardon the pun), what are the odds that this lawsuit will succeed? Never mind the fact that (as the article mentions) arctic exploration has led to zero deaths of polar bears and walruses in the fifteen years that "incidental harm" to these animals has been decriminalized within this context.

In case you haven't noticed...

Where's Tim?

As you can read in the sidebar, Real Life often takes me away from posting here. Recently, the aforementioned Real Life has forced me into a hiatus that is now in its sixth week. I'll be back soon, hopefully no later than the week after next. Thanks for your patience!