Climalteranti: Le variazioni climatiche durante l’ultimo milione di anni: mandanti, killer e alibi (seconda parte)

Grazie per il riferimento a Fig.2. Siamo sicuri che ritragga proprio “il passaggio di Nord Ovest libero dai ghiacci nell’agosto del 2007″?

Sul web ho trovato la foto ingrandita riguardo l’orso
http://ct5.pbase.com/t6/06/642906/4/69731346.rS3YVgSv.jpg

La pagina completa parla di “Artico e Passaggio a Nord Ovest”
http://www.pbase.com/spencer1959/arctic__northwest_passage&page=2

Ecco una foto del Passaggio, come da didascalia
http://www.pbase.com/spencer1959/image/69819192

Comunque dubito che il signor Wynn sarebbe contento dell’uso delle sue foto senza attribuzione, specie di quelle usate per la copertina di un libro che costa 77 dollaroni e dove il copyright e’ bello in grande a pagina 1

Su quella copertina c’e’ poi anche un titolo accanto all’orso…per favore non ditemi che avete “ritoccato” la fotografia

ps a quanto pare il viaggio di Wynn nell’Artico e’ del luglio 2006. Ecco la sua foto in un articolo del gennaio 2007
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/175673

Advertisement

Real Climate: Simple Question, Simple Answer… Not

I see that my point (#10) is more or less repeated by other commentators (eg #53 and #58).

Gavin: you reply to #53: “Why should anyone continue to discuss with you?”

If you really want to communicate, then you better find a way of communicating. If on the other hand you don’t want to communicate, there is little point in replying to comments, really.

In fact you remind me of those English-speaking tourists arriving back home in frustration, convinced that the locals they visited are brainless idiots, after having shouted, yelled, huffed and puffed to make themselves understood…by people that simply do not speak English.

If you or Mr Weart want to speak to engineers, or anybody else, then you both better speak in a way that engineers can understand. And if they don’t appear to have understood, you cannot simply jump to saying “why are you people so slow to understand?”…the only sensible option is to see where the miscommunication is (yes, it can be with you too), and to work to fix that.

I have provided a few suggestions already.

People do have various degrees of skepticism in the nature and dangers of anthropogenic global warming. How difficult is it to recognize that? If you instead poo-poo their thoughts whenever expressed, you will win nobody’s mind. Fine by me, but then what’s a blog for?

Accuweather Global Warming: 1997-2006 was Warmest in last 1,300 years in the Northern Hemisphere

For paulm: the “Jason” story should be considered carefully.

The idea of a shadowy organization capable of keeping tens of brilliant, famous minds in San Diego for 6 weeks every year, without arising suspicion, doesn’t seem likely.

I also find the suggestion that climate change skeptics have been able to “successfully delay significant political action to deal with greenhouse gas emissions” laughable in the extreme. Just look at the IPCC, and at the Kyoto Protocol (whose child called the “emission trading scheme” has meant billions of dollars in profit for energy companies in the EU, by the way).

Also note that the authors are Oreskes (the one unable to properly count pro-warming scientific papers) and Renouf (going to broadcast a programme on BBC2 the same day of that article’s publication, and thus in need of pumping the whole thing up to say the least).

Polar Defense Project: End in Sight

The more I look at this, the more it reminds me of people waving Tibetan flags and speaking in favor of the Tibetan cause. They have done for decades now, and look what good they have done to Tibet (=zilch).

Whoever does the “raise awareness” bit, they surely feel much better afterwards. Still, Tibet remains in its troubles, just like the the North Pole will. Whatever those troubles truly are.

Raising awareness is not the same as raising money for a charity by swimming the Atlantic or climbing Everest in the buff: because that money can be easily turned into something tangible, whilst the awareness is literally just hot air.

ps I don’t think 81N can be classified as an “achievement”, given the starting point. The only way to do less would have been had the Svalbards been ice-locked in August-September.

RealClimate: Butterflies, tornadoes and climate modelling

Maurizio Morabito Says:
1 May 2008 at 7:11 PM

There is a simple way to settle the falsifiability issue. Could anybody at RC please post a blog clearly stating what would falsify the climate models? Say (just as a way of example) “if temperatures will be cooler than today’s in 2020″ or “if there is a sustained negative trend over the course of 25 years”. Those statements are simplistic: I am sure you can come up with something more sophisticated.

Alternatively, if such a clear-cut answer has already been the topic of one of your blogs, could you please provide the link. thanks in advance.

=======

7 May 2008 at 7:03 PM

Re #107

I am preparing a relatively long commentary on what I am learning from this blog and its comments. For now let me clarify that I do not think that current climate models are based on incorrect physics.

The black-body radiation equivalence still holds though, as what looked like a relatively minor nuisance (“noise”?) to your average XIX century physicist, was the basis for a whole new understanding of the whole science of physics.

Think of genetics: yesterday’s “junk DNA” is (in part) today’s “gene switches”. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

As for the comments policy, in the past I have seen some thoughts of mine not published, for whatever reason. I am pleasantly surprised that nothing of the sort is happening this time around, and hopefully the situation won’t change.

Letter to the BBC: Climate news bias (China vs Argentina)

Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007
From: Maurizio Morabito
Subject: Climate news bias (China vs Argentina)
To: Jonathan Amos, Richard Black

Dear Jonathan, dear Richard

Are some weathers more equal than others?

Why is it that if (A) it’s exceptionally warm in China, the news page on the BBC web site is graced by links to (anthropogenic) “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” but if (B) it’s exceptionally cold in Argentina, there is no recommendation at all to read further about climate change?

If you/the BBC believe that extreme weather events can be traced back to anthropogenic climate change (check the articles about the UK’s heat wave last April), then the same links should appear next to B just as next to A.

Otherwise, it will look like you’re suggesting that weather news are globally relevant only when they are about increased warmth.

That would be an unwelcome, blatant reporting bias.

In the meanwhile, pity those Southern Americans surely undergoing a bad case of “warming envy” at the moment.

William M. Briggs, Statistician: Is climatology a pseudoscience?

• 26. Maurizio Morabito  |  January 30th, 2008 at 3:35 am

  I wonder if Park’s warning signs 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 apply to several “anti-AGWers” aka “skeptics”?

  1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media
  2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
  4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
  5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
  6. The discoverer has worked in isolation

Climate Resistance: Physician, Heal Thyself

maurizio morabito said…The AR4-WG2 report is interesting on several other fronts as well. It is the one place where (in its chapter 1) there is an analysis of hard data about the present-day world, instead of predictions about the future or discussions about models. I hope you will find the time to read it in detail, and comment it here.

For now I point out to an evident bias in what is reported: “Global Warming May Be Just European”

18 January 2008 19:21

BigCityLib: Auditing Climate Audit

Maurizio Morabito said…

Has anybody else noticed that the IPCC has dropped the hockey stick, of late?That graph resembles no Hockey Stick anybody will ever want to play with. Looks more like a wide-bodied, irregular golf club…

5:58 AM

Accuweather Global Warming: In Case You Missed It

Maurizio Morabito:

It appears that the Patagonian glaciers are so plentiful anybody can pick-and-choose one or the other to prove or disprove Global Warming.

For example the Pio XI glacier advanced for 50 straight years from 1945 to 1995. The Perito Moreno glacier has been used in movies by Al Gore (and by Frank Capra, in 1958) as proof of warming: unfortunately, they both show the phenomenon of calving, usually a characteristic of advancing glaciers.

And of course there are the dramatic pictures of the retreating Upsala glacier, whose story in truth is a bit complicated.

I have written a brief overview of the scientific literature on the topic of Patagonian glaciers.

IHT Business of Green: Tata’s Nano and global warming

Posted by: Maurizio Morabito — 13 January 2008 1:13 am

One wonders how many nightmares is Dr Pachauri having about his own globetrotting activities, including no doubt plenty of car journeys to and from several airports

Tierney Lab: Contrarians vs. Bali

To davod (55):

Of course it is much easier (and cheaper) for researchers to go about investigating what’s around them, and therefore a certain pro-Europe and pro-North America bias could be well expected, as well-funded research may obviously correlate with high national wealth.

On the other hand, the ratio Europe/North America is around 36 to 1. That is, for every change noted in North America, there are 36 changes noted in Europe.

I cannot see how could European research be 36 times better funded than the North American one.

And I would discount pro- and anti-AGW bias, as the IPCC has looked at all available research (and rightly so!), not just the studies funded for climate purposes.

=======

So there is an evident, gigantic European bias in the data, and it may as well be that “global warming” is mostly a European phenomenon linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Of that we are not sure: the one thing we surely should agree on, is that before stating that AGW evidence is solid, a good amount of funding must go into research in neglected areas, that is the whole world apart from Europe.

=======

If anybody believes I am cherry-picking on this, please visit the IPCC link, read the document (chapter 1 should suffice) and counter-argue. I am all ears on this.

I am all ears, that is, apart than with people calling me a “denier” with the obvious intent of equalling AGW skepticism to the denial of the Holocaust. It’s a heavy-handed, futile attempt at silencing dissent.

Please stop (yes this is about you Mr/Ms A3k)

Accuweather Global Warming: World Temperature Analysis so far this Year

Hansen acknowledges that different groups may come up with different results regarding global temperatures.

How different? The HadCRUT set says something so completely different from the GISS statement, one wonders if they are referring to the same planet

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/

If you go there you’ll see the southern ocean temperatures in November are the second-lowest in 16 years, and the only notable warming is in northern landmasses (2nd highest level in the record). Everything else is around or below the median values for more than one decade.

Brett: I understand you are “moderating” but there must be one person at Accuweather allowed to perform computations and report their results…why don’t you identify such a person and ask to report sometimes in January or February on what the various data sets (NOAA, GISS, HadCRUT, etc) actually say, regardless of what their proprietors claim they are saying?

Tierney Lab: Contarians vs. Bali

I wouldn’t experiment with geoengineering as yet.

There are too many examples of unwanted consequences with similar lines of thoughts in the past.

One of the worst cases concerns the Cane Toad, that is devastating Australia as we speak after being introduced in the misguided attempt at controlling some species of insect (that is actually doing just fine).

Geoengineering should be left as “extrema ratio”, the direst of circumstances, if there is nothing else left to do.

That is definitely not the case for “global warming”.

In fact, if anybody bothers to read the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report – Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2), it will be clear that 96% of reported changes are about Europe, 3% about North America and just 1% for the rest of the planet.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.htm

I give more details in a recent blog:
http://omnologos.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/global-warming-may-be-just-european/

But by all means, everybody should read the original themselves. That may help keep the discussion within the confines of the real world, instead of shouting accusations of “fascism” like Al Gore just did in Bali

The New York Review of Books: Bill McKibben vs. Bjorn Lomborg

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:11:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: “Maurizio Morabito”
To: “Letters NYRB”

Dear Editors

Bill McKibben devotes almost 40% of his “Can Anyone Stop It?” piece (NYRB, October 11, 2007) to a series of invectives against Bjorn Lomborg and his new book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming”.

I cannot remember any article of comparable vitriol on the New York Review of Books during the past 2 years at least. Perhaps if people hold grudges against one another they should at least try to save the rest of the world from boredom.

Are you going to allow any space to Mr Lomborg to reply to the plethora of negativity sent his way by Mr McKibben?

Or, as the latter recommended just the once, will you simply point your readers in the direction of http://www.lomborg.com?

Accuweather Global Warming Blog: Surface Temperatures Correlate to Ice Free region

I find it amusing that people reading the Accuweather web site would find “temperature” so important “per se”.

As any metereologist would explain (feel free to correct me, Brett), if it’s “hot” in a place (eg the North Pole) it must be because something is happening in the skies above, such as an increase of cloud-free areas, or winds bringing warmer air in this case obviously from the South.

I doubt that anybody would believe that CO2 molecules are actually floating around above the pole reflecting IR radiation and directly causing the temperature increases/ice melting/etc etc.

Clouds and winds in turn are regulated by atmospheric circulation.

Therefore to prove that AGW or whatever is causing ice-free areas at the pole, then it must be shown how AGW or whatever is causing those particular conditions of clouds and winds. I don’t think there is anything of the sort in any of the models, at the moment

Accuweather Global Warming Blog: CO2 not the Prime Suspect in Ending Last Ice Age

Note that Stott’s result appear to contradict the standard interpretation of ice-core data.

It is likely that in a few years it will be recognized that ice cores are almost impossibly hard to interpret for investigating past climates, as gases (and liquid water) keep mixing vertically throughout a glacier