Tuesday
Apr132010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill It's the climate, innit?
Apr 13, 2010 Climate: WG2 Matt Ridley:
A scientist does a study of how Arctic seabirds die. It's not a bad idea: die they do, but not from the usual diseases and predators that kill birds in more temperate zones. So what does kill them?
He pores over thousands of records from birdwatchers in the Arctic and concludes that weather-related events kill a lot of them. Fulmars run into cliffs in fog, Murres get buried in landslides when cliffs collapse. Birds get swept away in storms. And so on.
Now the scientist has two options. He can say in a paper that a lot of Arctic birds die due to `factors related to weather' and bask in perpetual obscurity. Or he can slip in, just before the word `weather', the phrase `climate and'...
Reader Comments (17)
Interesting. Honestly, I am not sure why climatologists aren't using wine and coffee beans as proxies. I'm sure the better tasting wines happen during mild climate seasons. I'm sure if things get too hot, the wine taste worse. I'm sure we also have wine going back further than many temperature records.
I really think wine would give better proxy results than tree rings. Same for coffee. I could see myself sitting in a lab sipping wine and drinking coffee to determine climate change.
What a marvelous list of items linked to climate change. I did not see any listing for either potato early wilt or late wilt, so I think I will apply for a grant.
Not trying to go OT, but I spoke too soon. Seems some folks in New Zealand have considered a correlation between wine and climate change. I might make a career change.
Of the items in his list of things affected by climate the one that caught my eye (and brought a tear to it) was 'circumcision in decline'.
Nothing new. Climate alarmists have been 'whining' for years.
Isn't it amazing how nothing good comes from global warming?
Kevin,
You have the right idea. We should get together and buy bottles of wine from all over the world with vintages going back at least 50 years (as long as we can find, at least) and do a wine taste to see which years are better than others, then do a OLS correlation on the taste results verses the weather of the vintage year. I am sure we can get a grant for say £5.000.000 or perhaps the equivalent in euros, and we could publish it in Wine Growers Climate Change, a scientific journal we found, with, of course, us as the peer reviewers.
It would be a great deal more fun than slogging through some tundra freezing our arses looking for tree rings.
And if we invite VS upfront, perhaps we can avoid the dreaded Unit Root pest.
Don Pablo: You might save some time by avoiding any wine of less than 12 percent, of any age.
Me thinks this so-called scientist ought to look into birds getting smashed by "green" windpower. This is not some nightmare conjured up by [snip - venting] Chomsky and Finklestein, this is real stuff witnessed by thousands of us in California.
Ridley about sums up how global climate change came to be a cause celebre.
Nice to see John Brignell's Global Warming List get an outing. See here for the references: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
There is clearly more to be gained from crying 'wolf' than from reporting 'situation normal'.
But I'm missing something here. There ought to be equal and opposite benefits and opportunities for those who see through the great global warming scam. Where are these benefits?
From a national perspective, those governments who refuse to throw public funds at this poppycock will end up with lower taxation and a more competitive economy. From the personal perspective, the only moneymaking opportunity I can think of is to sell wind power into the grid (at premium rates), powering it by an electric fan. Even if it's legal, such activity would be unethical. It has recently been reported that in Spain there is nocturnal solar power feeding into the grid! Such transparently corrupt practices are amusing, but I fear that if such plundering of the public purse grows in scale, many categories of unambiguously good state spending will have to fall.
We AGW sceptics seem to have ever greater clarity of vision, exposing the gravy trains, demolishing the fallacies and the bunkum futurology. We also have great fun, mocking the warmists mercilessly. But I see no sign of statesmen with the courage to slay this heinous dragon. We need a hero...
@Brent Hargreaves
Superman never got paid, nor does Mr Watts or Mr Hill (although buying Mr Montford's book helps).
Don Pablo
Someone has thought of your wine experiment already. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Laudrie has reconstructed temperatures from Pinot Noir harvest dates. My translation:
"The reconstructions of the experts show that Burgundy experienced several periods as hot as the 1990’s between 1370 and 1850 (commonly called the Little Ice Age). On the other hand, 2003 seems by far the hottest year Burgundy has experienced, with an anomaly of +5,86 °C, that is to say 43% higher than the anomaly of the last hottest year recorded in 1523 (+4,10 °C)."
Funny how these reconstructions always start after the MWP.
http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/589.htm
You should check out Doug Keenan's website too. He did a rather amusing fisking of a temperature reconstruction from wine harvest dates.
I guess Doug Keenan shut the door on the grape idea. Too bad. It was sounding like a promising career.
Bishop
Thanks for the reference. I guessed something was wrong when I saw the amazing precision of the results. I suppose I'll have to join Don Pablo in drinking the stuff after all.
I think Le Roy Laudrie must be the historian that signed the petiktion against Allegre. He is very eminent, but is a gentleman of a certain age. 'Just sign here, Prof.' I suppose.