This year's walrus articles

So I wake this morning to find two stories about walruses in my Twitter feed. Why the sudden interest. There doesn't appear to be any news as such, but the Associated Press are telling readers that there is a steep decline in the walrus harvest in Alaska:

Hunters and scientists say walrus migration patterns are veering from historical hunting grounds as temperatures warm and the ocean ice used by the animals to dive and rest recedes farther north. Village elders also tell biologists the wind is blowing in new directions. In 2013, a late-season icepack clustered around St. Lawrence Island, blocking hunters from the sea.

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In which Nature Climate validates my predictive models

In order for a predictive model to be useful it needs to be validated in some way. Here are two predictive models that I suggest might be useful in interpreting scientific papers.

• If the paper is published in a Nature journal it's probably nonsense. Particularly if it's in (a) Nature itself or (b) Nature Climate Change
• If it calls RCP8.5 "business as usual" it is political drivel.

With these predictions in mind, readers may be interested in this new paper from Nature Climate Change:

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of some climatic extremes^{1, 2}. These may have drastic impacts on biodiversity^{3, 4}, particularly if meteorological thresholds are crossed, leading to population collapses. Should this occur repeatedly, populations may be unable to recover, resulting in local extinctions. Comprehensive time series data on butterflies in Great Britain provide a rare opportunity to quantify population responses to both past severe drought and the interaction with habitat area and fragmentation. Here, we combine this knowledge with future projections from multiple climate models, for different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and for simultaneous modelled responses to different landscape characteristics. Under RCP8.5, which is associated with ‘business as usual’ emissions, widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur as early as 2050. However, by managing landscapes and particularly reducing habitat fragmentation, the probability of persistence until mid-century improves from around zero to between 6 and 42% (95% confidence interval). Achieving persistence with a greater than 50% chance and right through to 2100 is possible only under both low climate change (RCP2.6) and semi-natural habitat restoration. Our data show that, for these drought-sensitive butterflies, persistence is achieved more effectively by restoring semi-natural landscapes to reduce fragmentation, rather than simply focusing on increasing habitat area, but this will only be successful in combination with substantial emission reductions.

My predictive models appears to be working splendidly.

Corals are survivors

The Natural History Museum has put on display a bit of fossilised coral reef discovered in what is now Wiltshire. It's a pretty thing.

The museum tells us that the fossil is 160 million years old and that some of the species included are relatives of those alive today, an observation that seems to have important implications for global warming alarmism:

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Overriding the benefits

The World Resources Institute blog has a fascinating article about the greening of Ethiopia in recent years. This is largely based on a paper in Science of the Total Environment by Nyssen et al. 

Jan Nyssen, a geographer at the University of Ghent, together with a large team of colleagues reviewed historic photographs of the Ethiopian highlands comparing them to more recent pictures of the same locations. They then assessed the change in greenery in the landscape, using a benchmarking methodology to assign a value, before performing a multiple regression analysis against possible causes.

The upshot of their paper is that these welcome changes seem to be largely the result of human activity - the landscape has greened the most in areas of higher population density. This seems to be related to factors such as the planting of eucalyptus trees in response to market demand for poles as well as more obvious conservation measures such as the use of terracing to prevent water run-off and soil erosion.

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Quote of the day, Boyd edition

I see too many studies...assigning causation to climate change when the evidence for this is quite poor...I think this is bad for climate science in general and authors and journal editors need to try to avoid the temptation of headline-grabbing when it is not justified by the evidence.

This comes from Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra, whose blog can be found here. It doesn't seem to be updated often, and the quote is from an old post. But fun nevertheless.

More polar bear poop

Another day, another misleading piece on the alleged dangers of global warming. This time it's an article by Matt McGrath, which sexes up claims made in a new paper about polar bear metabolisms:

Polar bears are unable to adapt their behaviour to cope with the food losses associated with warmer summers in the Arctic.

Scientists had believed that the animals would enter a type of 'walking hibernation' when deprived of prey.

But new research says that that bears simply starve in hotter conditions when food is scarce...

Polar bears survive mainly on a diet of seals that they hunt on the sea ice - but increased melting in the summer reduces seal numbers and as a result the bears struggle to find a meal.

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Minority Report and the polar bears

Polar Bears International has launched its programme to help the recovery of the thriving population of the said beasts. In their post, the team have helpfully explained some of the problems they faced:

...our team faced a unique task: to create a recovery or management plan for a species whose primary threat is largely in the future, not the past.

I can see how that would be a problem. It's rather like something out of Minority Report, but instead of precrimes solved by precogs we will have premelts dealt with by prethinkers.

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Deben diggin' in the dirt

Lord Deben has been speaking at a food industry conference, still exhibiting the pronounced eccentricity we have noted in recent months:

Lord John Deben, a member of the Government’s climate change committee, said there would need to be some ’fundamental changes’ in how the [food] sector operated.

A recent report by the committee warned the UK was in danger of seeing a reduction in productivity because of the damage caused by intensive farming practices.

Lord Deben said soils were degenerating ’so fast it is visible’.

"So far the agricultural community has been blind to what is happening.

"In 30 years the Fens will not produce because of what we have done to it," he said.

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Sutter thread

CNN's JD Sutter - the author of that piece the other day that alleged the Marshall Islands are going to disappear - wants to talk to sceptics. How nice!

The comments are yours sir. I'm hoping you will tell us why you are telling your readers these things about Pacific atolls.

[Preemptive comments by others will be deleted. Let's wait until the man himself has chimed in].

Update on Jul 9, 2015 by Bishop Hill

From the silence, I guess this could be one of those "new dialogues" that upholders of the climate consensus are always on about. Oh well.

More on calcifiers

Updated on Jul 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In response to my comments on her appearance on BBC news, Daniela Schmidt has tweeted some thoughts. Recall that I highlighted some comments she had made in a Geology paper about calcifier exctinctions occurring tens of thousands of years after extreme temperatures were reached, contrasting this with her on-air claim that the oceans were doomed by the end of the century:

My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. I would like them to be able to eat mussels and oysters and crayfish and if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen.

Prof Schmidt has apparently told Roger Harrabin that I have misunderstood her work. In a tweet she notes that her comments in Geology represented a citation of other scientists:

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Marshall islands typhoon: weather not climate

Updated on Jul 4, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In my Twitter timeline come a couple of tweets from Tony de Brum Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, which is currently in the middle of a typhoon:

Just landed home. Majuro like a war zone. Roofs torn off, huge blackout, ships ashore. On alert for more tonight.

Today in Majuro. My family home battered by the beginnings of yet another cyclone. Climate change has arrived. MinTdB

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Science says one thing, scientists another

Anyone would think there was a big climate conference coming up, because the BBC is pumping out the climate propaganda left right and centre. A couple of nights ago we had Kirsty Wark fawning all over Chris Rapley on Newsnight (from 40 mins) and wondering why good people like him weren't making the policy decisions. Today we have Roger Harrabin on ocean acidification (video here).

The samples are chalky white for millions of years from the fossils of tiny shellfish. That's until this dramatic point 55 million years ago [the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; PETM], when the oceans suddenly got hotter and more acidic and the shellfish disappeared. It took shellfish 160,000 years to recover and scientists say humans are changing the seas ten times faster than at this catastrophic event...

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Polar propaganda

The US Geological Survey is trying on the "polar bears are all going to die" line again, the latest in a long line of attempts to link polar bear populations to summer ice extent (predicted to decline rapidly under global warming) despite all the evidence pointing to spring ice thickness (little affected by small amounts of warming) being the critical factor. In fact it is thick ice that seems to be the problem, causing declines in populations of both seals and the polar bears that prey on them. Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring, when seal pups are there for the taking; they tend to fast over the summer.

The USGS press release is interesting, revealing that the authors used IPCC models of sea ice extent and then tried to derive future polar bear populations from them (I kid you not). They conclude that all bear populations will decrease in the future except in one region "where sea ice generally persists longer in the summer". And confirming that they are quite clear that it's summer ice that is the issue, there is this:

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More alarmist than thou

A new paper on sea-level rise by Grinsted et al is currently doing the rounds, with horror stories about what the future holds in store being touted to newspapers across Europe. The authors have provided a list of the "probable" levels of sea-level rise in major European capitals, a step that editors no doubt find extremely helpful.

The University of Delft, home to some of the paper's authors, has a blog post on the findings. It's typical of the genre, reporting a rise of 0.83m for The Hague and generally trying to drum up a bit of excitement. The paper itself is entitled `Sea level rise projections for northern Europe under RCP8.5', so it's fairly clear that it's exploring outlier scenarios. As if to emphasise the point, there's this quote from Grinsted himself:

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The Lancet goes all Andrew Wakefield again

Updated on Jun 23, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jun 23, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The Lancet - the medical journal that brought you Andrew Wakefield and the return of mumps, measles and rubella - has a grandly named Commission on Climate Change and Health, which has announced its findings today. We are facing a crisis apparently.

Wake up at the back there.

This is fairly transparent politicking from a group of authors who might best be described as "the usual suspects" - Anthony Costello, Hugh Montgomery and Paul Ekins are all very familiar names round these parts and the lines they recite are familiar ones too. There is absolutely no pretence that the commission's report is anything other than an attempt to influence the political agenda ahead of the Paris conference, just as its previous report was an attempt to influence the result at Copenhagen. Here's the executive summary:

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