What should I do now that my whole world has fallen apart?

Thirteen months ago, I launched a web site called Anything But Conservative to highlight Canada’s dismal record on global warming simply because I felt it should be THE issue during the Canadian election.

When the results were in, and nothing had changed, I transitioned the site to One Blue Marble, and settled in for a long fight against the forces of evil and stupidity in Canada’s government. I was so certain of the science, so sure of my convictions, that I didn’t notice the simple fact that many, many SCIENTISTS ARE DOING VERY STUPID THINGS THAT ARE DESTROYING THE PLANET!**

I now know that climate criminals heroes Anthony Watts and Steve Milloy are on the sides of the angels because today, I too, will show myself to be smarter than all the people with three and four degrees after their names, and fancy-schmancy honorifics like doctor and professor in front of them. Today, I shall highlight the work of a handful of brilliant greedy and incompetent scientists who are trying to destroy our way of life just so they can publish papers, play with cool equipment, and collect pensions in 20 years.

It makes me feel so dirty!

Read these three paragraphs to better understand how the scientists are abusing our trust. And then join me as I demolish them with my superior intellect and keen insights, á là Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That.

Using data culled from more than 50 million laser measurements, scientists have assembled a picture of the rapidly thinning glaciers along the coastline of both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The findings provide valuable information that will improve the accuracy of predictions for future sea level rise due to global warming.

In the study, published in the prestigious journal Nature, researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol discovered that ice sheets are thinning, and the most profound thinning is occurring at the coastal areas where glaciers are calving into the sea at a rate much faster than previously anticipated. This thinning occurs at all latitudes in Greenland, and it has intensified in key areas in Antarctica. Interestingly, water temperatures — not air temperatures — have been driving the dramatic losses of ice.

Lead author Dr. Hamish Pritchard from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says, “We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline — it’s widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometers inland. We think that warm ocean currents reaching the coast and melting the glacier front is the most likely cause of faster glacier flow. This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise.”

Hello! Is anyone home? For Christ sake, these are scientists — the nerdiest of the nerds! I happen to know that 97.6 percent of them own boxed sets of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly, so they can’t be as naive as they pretend.

If you shoot 50 MILLION LASER BEAMS at various places around the planet, then of course Greenland is going to melt, and of course ice shelves in Antartica will crumble. It’s a SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY, and it’s just commonsense! I have to believe the scientists at the British Antarctic Survey understand these facts, and can only conclude that they are being deliberately deceptive, like Gore, Hansen, and all the other evil doers who use threats of global warming to line their pockets.

Thank god we don’t have phasars yet! Then I have to believe these British Antarctic Survey types would be deliberately setting off explosions and starting fires just to prove that global warming is real. Climate scientists everywhere would be using lasers to get research grants, and we’d be burning. Just think how much better off we’d be if this funding was used to end world hunger, or support drilling in the high Arctic.

So please join me as I transition my site to join the fight alongside Watts and others. (And my humble apologies for giving Watts a Double Dumb Ass Award).

I’m just going now to see if 50millionlaserbeams.com is available.

UPDATE: After Adrian’s comment, I’m going to come clean. This is filed under Humor, and I’m poking fun at people like Watts.
____________

* We now know that this incredibly manipulative photo — called Mother Nature in Tears — was created by a laser cannon wielded by a BAS scientist. Photo credit: Marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan

** I shout a lot in this post so you know that I am angry and that I am really, really serious. I also use a lot of exclamation points for the same reason!!

Just days after Rasmussen reported that 47 percent of U.S. citizens suggested that it was OK to put the economy before climate change concerns, one of the key advisors to the German government suggested that North Americans know less about climate change than just about anyone else in the world.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, is one of the world’s foremost climate experts. On the sidelines at a climate conference at Oxford University, he predicted that it will be several years before the U.S. will be able to get its house — or perhaps Senate — in order to join the world in cutting emissions. And until that happens, says Schellnhuber, developing countries like India and China won’t set hard emission targets. It’s a dangerous Catch-22. He’s hoping that most G20 economies will reach some measure of an agreement at Copenhagen, and the U.S. and Canada will follow in a few years time.

And Schellnhuber hopes that will be enough because time is getting short. Global warming has often been sold as something nebulous that could bring ruination several generations into the future, but a new report prepared for the British government — and presented at the Oxford conference — is warning that most people alive today will see dangerous levels of warming. According to scientists at the Met Office in the UK, climate change will be a problem for our children — not our great-grandchildren — with a 4°C (7°F) rise temperatures expected by 2060 if humanity fails to cut emissions significantly. A temperature increase of this magnitude would likely threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low-lying coastal areas. Local impacts, in places like Africa and the Arctic, could be even more severe, leading to much greater temperature increases.

“We’ve always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4°C rise,” said Dr. Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre. “People will say it’s an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario. But it’s also a plausible scenario.”

The landmark 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report included scenarios that predicted more rapid warming, but these predictions were considered less likely to occur. More recent observations suggest just the opposite: That global warming is barreling along, and greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise faster than predicted in the worst-case IPCC projections. That’s why Met Office scientists used new computer models to update the IPCC predictions — models which include so-called carbon feedbacks that occur when warmer temperatures release more carbon, such as methane, from melting tundra. That, too, is already occurring, decades earlier than expected.

The Met scientists are quick to dismiss claims that the planet is doomed. If the world’s nations reach an international climate change agreement, and emissions peak sometime in the next decade, we still have a shot at keeping the rise in temperatures to below 2°C (3.6°F).

Once, on a comment board, a provocative poster asked why Republicans — who think the economy takes precedent over the environment — don’t love their children as much as Democrats. If Republican leaders in the House and Senate don’t stop wearing their scientific illiteracy like a badge of honor, that biting comment might gain currency among the next generation.

Photograph: Vinay Dithajohn, EPA

The picture was captured by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual voyage to observe the glacier and its surrounding wildlife.

Here’s more about soaring arctic temperatures at CBC and what it means for the planet.

While Anthony Watts runs around trying to convince Americans that the temperature record is flawed and global warming is a socialist commie plot, the Urban Heat Island Effect is melting the magical place that is Canada’s High Arctic.

I mean, if you’re a denier, that has to be how you rationalize it, right? It can’t be global warming because Anthony Watts says that climate change is nothing more than a scary fairy tale.

It follows then that all Inuit are alarmists, and that the same heat island effect that invalidates the temperature readings throughout ALL of the good ole US of A is causing temperatures to soar in Northern Canada. Obviously, Resolute — the city town village hamlet settlement community whistle stop lonely outpost on Cornwallis Island, population 229, is so bustling with activity during the summer that’s it’s melting the ice throughout The Land of the Midnight Sun, and causing temperatures to soar in Canada, Siberia, and Greenland.

What else could it be? The fact that Arctic Amplification was predicted by climate models is further proof that it CAN’T possibly be happening.

But surely… even a denier wouldn’t believe that tiny Resolute could be melting Northern Canada and Siberia.

We need to look elsewhere. Maybe the big cities. Yeah, that’s it. Big cities like Toronto, Montreal, and New York — 4,000 kilometres to the south — are somehow sending their incredble urban island warmth northward, and mimicking arctic amplification, fooling all those naive scientists.

Man… the mental gymnastics that deniers have to go through must hurt their brains.

I think it’s far easier to blame the whole problem on the socialists in our midst. Like this one comrade scientist and arctic researcher from Lotus Land who is just spreading panic and alarmism in order to secure funding for his trips to Resolute and beyond.

Here’s a brief story on Arctic Amplification from Reuters.

The Arctic region is warming by about 1°C per decade — far greater than most other regions — and releasing greenhouse gases on a scale that will likely accelerate global warming. But that’s the not the only change that University of British Columbia researcher Greg Henry has seen during his career, for the higher temperatures are causing the tree line to extend northward, bringing larger plants to areas that once only held shrubs, lichen and ice, so the Arctic region is darkening and absorbing more heat. In fact, virtually every summer since 1990 has set a new record temperature.

“We’re finding that the tundra is actually giving off a lot more nitrous oxide and methane than anyone had thought before,” said Henry told reporters from Resolute, in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. “We’re really trying to get a handle on this because if (further tests show) that’s true, this actually changes the entire greenhouse gas budget for the North, and that has global implications.”

___________________

*I’m just trying to be funny. Let me know if you think I’ve succeeded.

Anthony Watts, the scientifically-illiterate host of Watts Up With That, has been running a silly initiative called the Surface Stations Project through which he is trying to invalidate recent historical temperature records in the US to prove that global warming is a HOAX. His belief is that these surface stations are too often located close to airport runways, city parking lots, air condioners, and other manmade constructions that raise localized temperatures a degree or two. On a larger scale, a similar phenomenon makes cities much warmer than the surrounding countryside in the Urban Heat Island Effect, and Watts believes that this siting of surface stations invalidates the entire temperature record compiled by the pinko socialists at NOAA.

Watts is a former weatherman and an ideologue, and in any other sphere of comment, he would be considered a buffoon. He should have no more credibility than a conspiracy buff who thinks the moon landing was faked. An old math teacher often used to say that you don’t know enough to know that you don’t know.

If the issue wasn’t so serious, I would take no pleasure in belittling his lack of education. Anthony Watts doesn’t have a science degree, but that doesn’t stop him — and his loyal minions — from libeling better men and women of climate science at every opportunty. It’s preposterous, really. He doesn’t even understand the science he’s attempting to refute. (See here, and here, for instance).

It’s true that many weather stations were established before global warming became an issue, so some of them might not have been ideally situated. But Anthony Watts parades around like he’s got something over on the scientists, like he’s thought of a very important detail that they hadn’t considered with all their fancy PhDs and Ivy League educations. But the simple truth is that anything he could think of as a layman has already been considered and accounted for a very long time ago. And thats why temperature records are accurate, and why we know the planet is warming dangerously. We also have the thousands of empirical studies which support the temperature record.

Watts doesn’t even understand how ridiculous he sounds. He‘s a con man, a snake oil salesman.

Peter Sinclair, the incisive mind behind the Crock of the Week series, published this analysis of Watts’ surface station project last week, but Watts claimed copyright infringement, and it was removed until his claims could be examined and, of course, rejected. It’s 8 minutes long, and worth every minute.

In a similar vein, NOAA recently eviscerated Watts’ — and his misinformed minions — hard work at Surface Stations in an excellent Q&A.

Q. How has the poor exposure biased local temperatures trends?

A. At the present time (June 2009), to the best of our knowledge, there has only been one published peer-reviewed study that specifically quantified the potential bias in trends caused by poor station exposure (Peterson, 2006). The analysis examined only a small subset of stations –- all that had their exposure checked at that time -– and found no bias in long-term trends.

Q. Does a station with good exposure read warmer than a station with poor exposure?

A. Not necessarily. Many local factors influence the observed temperature: whether a station is in a valley with cold air drainage, whether the station is a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters, whether the station reads and resets its maximum and minimum thermometers in the coolest time of the day in early morning or in the warmest time of the day in the afternoon, etc. But for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature -– whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station over grass -– but how that temperature changes over time.

Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?

A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.

And here’s the killer graphic. Watts has assayed 71 percent of the 1,218 weather stations used by NOAA to compile their historical temperature record, and found that only 70 stations could be classified as good or better.

But this graph highlights what happens when you compare the difference between the Watts-approved stations and NOAA’s entire 1218.

Can you see the difference? Apparently, only conspiracy buffs can.

Global warming has serious consequences for the international fishing community — and for humanity. A study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that individual fish have lost half their average body mass, that fish populations have thinned drastically, and that smaller species are starting to dominate European fishing grounds. Although overfishing may have played a role, the long, steady increase in ocean temperatures caused by global warming takes the lion’s share of the blame.

“It’s huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France. “Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity — the capacity to reproduce.”

Marine biologists know that smaller fish have fewer innate resources, and tend to produce fewer eggs, and so fewer offspring. Lower individual weights also mean that the same number of fish feed fewer people and, by extension, fewer predators along the food chain. This study builds on previous work and establishes that marine life has shifted migratory and breeding patterns in response to rising sea temperatures, and that warmer seas seem to favor smaller breeds of fish.

Dr. Daufresne and his colleagues examined long-term surveys of fish populations in rivers, streams and the Baltic and North Seas and also performed experiments on bacteria and plankton. They have determined that many individual species have lost 50 percent of their mass in just 25 years, and that stocks have declined by 60 percent.

While commercial and recreational fishing does affect some of the fisheries studied, it “cannot be considered as the unique trigger” for the changes in size, Daufresne’s group found. “Although not negating the role of other factors, our study provides strong evidence that temperature actually plays a major role in driving changes in the size structure of populations and communities.”

Editor’s Note: I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic on television which filled with a deep and abiding awe for the creatures that share the world with us. The worst case scenarios suggest that warming this century will place 50 to 70 percent of the world’s species at risk.

Is this really the world we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Well, at least that clears up the mystery. Over the past year I’ve been fretting over an intractable contradiction. The government has promised spectacular cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It is also pushing through new roads and runways, approving coal-burning power stations, bailing out car manufacturers and ditching regulations for low-carbon homes. How can these policies be reconciled?

Monbiot is always persuasive. But this is required reading.

The news from the Arctic isn’t good, for polar bears or for humanity. Arctic sea ice has thinned dramatically since 2004, with older, thicker ice giving way to fragile young ice that can easily melt during the long, cool northern summer days. Researchers have long known that the overall area covered by arctic ice was decreasing, but these new satellite studies by NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) demonstrate that the overall volume is decreasing dramatically — with unfortunate consequences for the planet.

Older, thicker arctic sea ice is more resistant to melting, and a persistent ice cover in the arctic helps cool the planet by reflecting a substantial amount of the sun’s rays back into space. On the other hand, open water absorbs the once-reflected heat, and this accelerates the warming of the planet.

Using NASA’s ICESat spacecraft, scientists have determined that the overall thickness Arctic sea ice has thinned by an average 2.2 feet over four winters. The total area covered by thicker, older ice that has survived at least one summer shrank has nosedived to 32 percent of the total — down from 62 percent in 2003. It’s the first time that older sea ice hasn’t been dominant.

_________________

Dot Earth has a good interview with the JPL scientists.