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Entries in Climate: WG2 (388)

Thursday
Apr182019

More walrus articles

Over the last week, the walrus story has developed a lot.

I wrote an update at the GWPF blog, and then looked at some potentially explosive details of the geography of Cape Kozhenikova.

Then I summarised the whole story for Reaction magazine.

I'd say the Netflix team coming out of this looking very bad indeed.

Thursday
Apr112019

On walruses

My article on walruses appeared behind the paywall at the Spectator Coffee House blog earlier this week. 

Over the weekend, social media and the newspapers were full of stories of Pacific walruses plunging over sea cliffs to their deaths. Heart-wrenching film of the corpses of these magnificent beasts piled up on the shore have been driving many to tears.

This all came about as the result of the latest episode of Our Planet, the new wildlife extravaganza from Netflix. As is normal for such programmes, the story that accompanies the animal eye-candy is told by Sir David Attenborough and, as is positively compulsory, it is spiced with multiple references to the horrors of global warming. In fact, we are told, it is us who should shoulder the blame for the slaughter of the walruses, because shrinking sea ice caused by climate change forces them to haulout – leaving the water to take refuge on the shore instead.

The programme ends with Attenborough directing viewers to a website run by WWF, the co-producers of the series. It is therefore, in essence, an eight-part, multi-million pound fundraiser.

Which is a pity, because there is now considerable evidence emerging that the story is not quite what it seems.

For a start, as the zoologist Susan Crockford has documented for the GWPF, walrus haul out behaviour may not be related to global warming. In her 2014 paper On the Beach, she cites examples as far back as the 1930s, long before global warming. She also explains that there doesn’t appear to be a strong correlation between sea-ice levels and haulout behaviour.

Nor is the phenomenon of walruses falling to their deaths from sea cliffs new. American TV recorded the same phenomenon in 1994 and the New York Times reported 60 deaths in a single incident in 1996. Attempts were made to install a fence at one site, while another employs rangers whose sole job is to keep the walruses away from the cliffs. At the time, scientists explained that the most likely explanation  was overcrowding at the water’s edge.

Crockford thinks that the footage on the Netflix show comes from a well-documented incident that took place in the village of Ryrkaypiy, in eastern Siberia, in October 2017. September and October are the peak period for walrus haulouts, and there are numerous examples, which date back to the 1960s, of the cliff phenomenon taking place on Wrangel Island, a few hundred kilometres to the north.

However in 2017, as the Siberian Times reported, the colony attracted polar bears that frequent – and indeed at the time terrorise – the area. The bears drove several hundred walruses over the cliffs to their deaths, before feasting on the corpses. They continued to frequent the area right through into the winter.

I’ve been able to show that Crockford’s supposition about the geographical origin of the footage is correct: analysis of the rock shapes in the film and in a photo taken by the producer/director both match archive photos of Ryrkaypiy. The photo was taken on 19 September 2017, during the events described by the Siberian Times.

But whereas the Siberian Times and Gizmodo website, which also reported on the 2017 incident, were both quite clear that the walruses were driven over the cliffs by polar bears, Netflix makes no mention of their presence. Similarly, there is no mention of the fact that walrus haulouts are entirely normal. Instead, Attenborough tells his viewers that climate change is forcing the walruses on shore, where their poor eyesight leads them to plunge over the cliffs.

This is all very troubling as it raises the possibility that Netflix and the WWF are, innocently or otherwise, party to a deception of the public. Exactly who was aware of the presence of polar bears remains unclear, but it seems doubtful that no one at the WWF and the production team was unaware. And given that one of the prime objectives of the show seems to have been to raise funds for WWF, that seems… problematic.

Wednesday
May112016

Drought links

In the aftermath of my GWPF paper on drought the other day, ECIU has published a piece on the same subject. Entitled "Syria and climate change - did the media get it right?" it looks at the execrable Kelley et al paper that I have been so critical of over the last year or so. The author, Alex Randall, describes the paper as "measured and robust", which is a surprising thing to say about research that blamed a long-term, but slight decline in rainfall in Iran for social unrest in Syria, but as someone once said "Hey, it's climate science". 

His case is that the media have been misleading the public, hyping Kelley's paper and creating illusory links to the unrest. No doubt he is thinking of people like the ECIU.

In a companion piece, Randall claims that

 the media reporting and the Kelley paper were also broadly consistent with research exploring the impacts of drought on migration and displacement across the world. Specifically, there is strong evidence linking climate change impacts such as drought with patterns of rural to urban migration.

But if you read his links you find only support for the hypothesis that drought causes migration. With no evidence that climate change causes droughts to become more intense or more prevalent, our green friends are left to insert the word "climate change" whereever they can, and to hope that nobody notices what they are up to.

Monday
Apr252016

Parched earth policy

I'm back - after a fashion. I may get back to blogging more regularly in coming days if I can find something to say. Today though, I have a new paper out for GWPF. This is a companion piece to my earlier briefing on precipitation and floods. This one is on drought, heatwaves and conflict. Here's the headline message.

Droughts are not getting worse and they are not causing wars

Claims that droughts are getting worse are not supported in the scientific literature. This is true for both on a global level and for the UK, where historical records indicate much longer and more severe droughts occurred long before human carbon dioxide emissions became significant.

Moreover, claims that “climate change” was behind the conflicts in Darfur and Syria are shown to be based on highly partisan scientific studies that ignore a host of conflicting evidence.

Of course readers here know that papers like the "Drought caused the Syria crisis" one are bunk - I could have written lots more if I'd included all the stuff that has been debunked on the blogs. But there's enough in the peer reviewed literature to kill off this set of disinformation from our green friends.

The briefing is here.

Wednesday
Feb102016

Tail wind

I once faced off against Paul Williams of Reading University in a radio debate. He came across as a pretty rational kind of guy and we had a nice exchange of emails afterwards. But I have to say that his most recent paper is one of those ones that make you despair with their sheer futility. Here's the BBC take on it.

Flights from the UK to the US could take longer due to the changes in the climate, according to a new study.

Global warming is likely to speed up the jet stream, say researchers, and slow down aeroplanes heading for the US.

While eastbound flights from the US will be quicker, roundtrip journeys will "significantly lengthen".

It's published in Environmental Research Letters, which is usually not a good sign. The authors apparently fed "synthetic atmospheric wind fields generated from climate model simulations into a routing algorithm of the type used operationally by flight planners" and deduced that westbound transatlantic flights were going to take longer while eastbound flights will be faster. But, almost inevitably, the losses are expected to outweight the gains.

I wonder what evidence there is that GCMs can predict, or even hindcast, changes in wind speeds in a warming world? 

Monday
Feb082016

The bonkers emanations of Prof Hugh

Professor Hugh Montgomery is much given to making wild unsubstantiated comments about the terrors of climate change so it's no surprise to see him given pride of place in the ECIU's expensively produced report on the Paris conference.

Get a load of this:

 

 

Yessiree, human life on this planet is threatened this decade.

Madman.

Monday
Jan252016

How is this not fraud?

I'm not a great one for shouting fraud, but I can't see that there is any other conclusion that one can draw.

Somebody on Kickstarter is trying to raise funds for a film about Kiribati, the coral atoll that all BH readers know is not getting smaller

Yet the promoters of this film are saying this (click for larger):

That to me looks distinctly like a false statement being used to raise money. A fraud, in other words.

Monday
Jan182016

Wam, bam

At the start of March, the University of Exeter is hosting an extreme weather day, as part of WAMfest, the festival of weather art and music. The festival programme can seen here, and the extreme weather event is described as follows:

What is happening to our weather? An entertaining and informative evening full of surprises with one of the country's leading science communicators, Helen Czerski and the Chief Scientist of the Met Office, Prof. Dame Julia Slingo OBE FRS. 

In the first half of the evening Helen Czerski and leading climate scientist, Dr. Peter Stott of the Met Office will embark on an exploration of extreme weather, including here in Devon, and how this fits into a pattern of changing climate. As they will discuss, there is so much more to climate change than global warming. Find out how the climate varies from a host of fascinating natural processes, and how science is making progress at helping all of us be more resilient to its vagaries.

After the interval, Helen is joined by Prof Dame Julia Slingo OBE FRS, Chief Scientist of the Met Office and other leading experts to explore with you, the audience, some of the intriguing questions raised earlier. Chaired by Prof. Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Institute of Physics and with Prof. Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, our panel will invite your questions and take you on an entertaining journey through the science of weather and climate and what it means for you.

If anyone is going along, a report would be welcome.

Sunday
Jan172016

January hurricanes

There has been a certain amount of interest in a tropic weather system, christened Hurricane Alex, which is apparently the first Atlantic hurricane for nearly a century:

Alex first became a hurricane in the eastern Atlantic Ocean Thursday, making it just the second hurricane on record to form in that basin during the month of January. The last hurricane that formed in the Atlantic during January was in 1938, according to NOAA's historical hurricane tracker database

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Jan132016

McKibben's mindpoop

Here's a tweet from Bill McKibben

And here's an excerpt from Wikipedia about the same lake.

When the water level of Titicaca Lake drops below 3,810 m, the flow of Desaguadero River is so low it can no longer compensate for the massive water losses due to evaporation from the surface of Poopó Lake. At this point, the lake volume begins to decrease. At its maximum in 1986, the lake had an area of 3,500 km2. During the years that followed, the surface area steadily decreased until 1994 when the lake disappeared completely. The time period between 1975 and 1992 is the longest period in recent times with a continuous existence of a water body.

And here's a research paper too:

The lake seems from the records of Marin & Quitanilla (2002) to have been dry between 1939 and 1944, and nearly dry in 1970–1972.

Tuesday
Jan122016

Wanna bet?

A blog called "Professional Conflict Resolution" is calling for the two sides of the climate debate to resolve their differences by means of a positive spree of gambling. The author says that "What the climate community needs are objectively verifiable predictions", which is, I think, a position that few people on this site would disagree with.

The climate community is losing the battle because it has failed to put out objective measurable changes.  The climate community requires something akin to the Simon-Ehrlich wager. I myself see the argument as whether climate change is happening (it is) or whether the earth’s temperature is rising (it is).

The debate – indeed, the whole debate in Paris was about this – is about whether the effects of climate change will be beyond the ability of humans to adapt.  To quote a presentation by Mark Boslough, is global warming “inconvenient or catastrophic?” The future can only be projected.  We have no empirical observational data about 2025.  Or even about tomorrow.

Whether climate change is inconvenient or catastrophic must be demonstrated with predictions ahead of time

Thus I maintain that in order to obtain credibility, the climate community must provide objective benchmark predictions.  These predictions must not be subject to interpretation.  They must also be indicative of a trend and cannot be individual events like storms or droughts.

One caution: do not place bets on global temperature. This must not be about whether the world is warming. It must instead focus solely on impacts.  In order to demonstrate that there will be catastrophic things, there must be demonstrated that there was predicted these events.

The reaction should be interesting.

Monday
Jan042016

Flood prevention

I recently chanced upon the website of the Flood Prevention Society, a voluntary organisation that tries to shape public policy on flooding. Their website has a long and detailed report on some of the floods in recent years and, for those with less time on their hands, a snappy "Urban myths about flooding" page. They seem less than impressed with the Environment Agency, and indeed with George Monbiot's ideas about grouse moors and flooding. I reproduce the whole thing here.

1. “Increased flooding is because of more land drainage”.

The opposite is true.  During the last Great War and for years after to produce more food and later help the balance of payments, farmers were given a 50% capital grant by Governments to clean ditches, brooks and land drainage.  This grant ceased over 30 years ago – so while flooding is on the increase, land drainage is on the decrease.

2. “Modern farming with heavy tractors and machinery causes a plough pan seal (compaction) in the land preventing it soaking up rain, so the rain runs straight into rivers”.

Modern farmers also use subsoilers that break up any plough pan letting air and moisture penetrate up and down – so no change.

3. “Rainfall running off moorland causes urban flooding”.

Click to read more ...

Monday
Jan042016

The greens' next deception

Just before the end of the year, Oxfam put out a press release about the impacts of El Niño on developing countries, which they said is happening at a time when the humanitarian system is under unprecedented strain.

The press release went on to note that niños are not climate phenomena:

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Jan032016

Not so simples

One of the more interesting suggestions about the reasons for the impact of the floods in the UK in recent weeks has been the suggestion that land use may be a factor. George Monbiot has been sounding off on this subject although it's difficult to take him seriously because he keeps drifting off into class-warrior mode, linking the floods to grouse moors and the like.

Today his green colleague Geoffrey Lean takes up the baton, with an article in the Independent which claims that the North Yorkshire town of Pickering avoided being flooded because of preventative measures taken by the locals:

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Dec272015

The EU's role in the floods

With a bit of luck, BH readers should by now have worked off the excesses of Christmas and be ready to return to the fray.

With flooding back in the news, I thought it might be useful to point readers to this very interesting piece from a couple of weeks ago, which considers the European Union's role in causing the floods.

[I]n order to comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their floodplains’, as the currently fashionable jargon has it.

And to ensure this is done, the obligation to dredge has been shifted from the relevant statutory authority (now the Environment Agency) onto each individual landowner, at the same time making sure there are no funds for dredging. And any sand and gravel that might be removed is now classed as ‘hazardous waste’ and cannot be deposited to raise the river banks, as it used to be, but has to be carted away.

And all paid for by you.