div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/20090217-army-solar-panel.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=3229220090217-army-solar-panel.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pRepublicans on the span class=capsU.S./span House Armed Services Committee have decided that the militaryrsquo;s push for clean, renewable energy has gone far enough, and have proposed for next yearrsquo;s budget that the Pentagon not spend a dime on renewable energy sources that cost more than traditional dirty energy.br / br / This news comes on the heels of the a href=http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/republican-navy-biofuel/Navyrsquo;s announcement of their new ldquo;Great Green Fleet,rdquo;/a which features an aircraft carrier and strike group that are all a href=http://energyboom.com/biofuels/military-testing-algae-fuel-sourcepowered by renewable, cleaner energy sources/a.br / br / The shift in policy came from the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by California Republican Howard ldquo;Buckrdquo; McKeon. Republicans on the committee complain that the fuel being used for the ldquo;green fleetrdquo; and other military renewable energy projects is too costly, and contend that the military should never spend more on a renewable energy source that is more costly than traditionalnbsp;petroleum./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/house-republicans-attempt-nix-military-s-clean-energy-initiatives target=_blankread more/a/p

p style="text-align: justify;"strong/strongClimate change is debated in letters to the editor of hometown newspapers all over the world. nbsp; In the Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sun-News, one reader recently cited "a 1996 paper by Kiegwin (sic) in Science which showed that, despite the present having a COsub2 /subconcentration of 388 PPM, the present temperature is cooler than the average of the last 3,000 years, and that it was considerably warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Holocene climate Optimum.rdquo;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; A few months later another reader asserted that ldquo;Keigwin, Science, 1996, shows present temperatures arenrsquo;t much different from the 3,000 year mean.rdquo;/p p style="text-align: justify;"Did the Keigwin paper really say that?nbsp; And how is it that two non-scientists from a mid-sized New Mexico city would be so confident that a scientific paper published a decade-and-a-half earlier supports their belief that the world was warmer during Medieval times?nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"First, letrsquo;s review Keigwin (1996).nbsp;nbsp; The title ldquo;The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Seardquo; might provide the first clue that it isnrsquo;t about global temperatures, but about one location on Earth:nbsp; the Sargasso Sea.nbsp; What Keigwin did was to use oxygen isotope measurements in plankton skeletons from sediment cores as a proxy to reconstruct the sea surface temperature (SST) of the past 3000 years.nbsp; nbsp;The cores were collected in 1990, and were divided into 50- to 100-year segments.nbsp; In the absence of mixing or bioturbation from below, the mid-point of the most recent 50-year thick sample, whose value would represent the most recent paleotemperature, would be 1965.nbsp; In a perfect world, the bottom of the segment would date to 1940.nbsp; However, sediments in the real world are never completely undisturbed.nbsp; It is very likely that the most recent segment contained shells from the early 1900s or even from the previous century.nbsp; That means the last paleotemperature is really an average that probably includes values from before automobiles and light bulbs were invented./p p style="text-align: justify;"Keigwin published a graph, as Figure 4b (K4B), of his best estimate of the resulting time series.nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_sst.gif" alt="" width="570" height="275" //p !--more-- p style="text-align: justify;"He also included several years of modern instrumental measurements at hydrographic station ldquo;Srdquo; in Bermuda, starting in 1954.nbsp; The modern year-to-year temperatures fluctuate significantly, but the mean is well above the 23deg;C average of the entire proxy record./p p style="text-align: justify;"It is unlikely that the Las Cruces letter-writers ever read this paper, or they would have known it wasnrsquo;t about global temperatures.nbsp; It is highly cited in the contrarian literature as evidence against human-caused global warming, and turns up in many blogs and editorials without reference to the Sargasso Sea.nbsp; How did this happen?/p p style="text-align: justify;"The misuse appears to have started in the late 1990s, when Arthur P. Robinson of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (OISM) started the so-called ldquo;Oregon Petitionrdquo; to collect signatures of people opposed to the Kyoto Protocol.nbsp; With his son Zachary and two associates from the conservative George C. Marshall pressure group (Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon), he self-published a paper called ldquo;Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxiderdquo; designed to look like a peer-reviewed article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US). nbsp;It was mailed out with the petition to many thousands of engineers, dentists, veterinarians, and even some scientists.nbsp; In January, 1998 it appeared in a periodical published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a political advocacy organization with a stated mission to ldquo;fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine.rdquo;nbsp; The executive director of AAPS is also member of Robinsonrsquo;s OISM.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; In it was their Figure 2, a modified version of Keigwinrsquo;s K4B.nbsp;nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_mco.gif" alt="" width="570" height="348" //p p style="text-align: justify;"Robinson and coauthors made several changes in representation and labeling.nbsp; First they inverted the axes so time runs from left to right, but they were unaware that when paleoclimate data are plotted ldquo;years before presentrdquo;nbsp; means ldquo;years before 1950rdquo; so their data is shifted by about 50 years.nbsp;nbsp; Second, they removed the data from hydrographic station ldquo;Srdquo; which showed that recent temperatures are above the long-term average.nbsp; Third, they neglected to label it as being a record for the Sargasso Sea.nbsp; Fourth, they called it a global temperature in the text, saying, ldquo;For the past 300 years, global temperatures have been gradually recovering. As shown in figure 2, they are still a little below the average for the past 3,000 years.rdquo;/p p style="text-align: justify;"This paper became the basis for statements in two influential Wall Street Journal opinion pieces.nbsp; The first, in 1997, was by Robinson and his son Zachary, called ldquo;Science Has Spoken: nbsp;Global Warming Is a Myth.rdquo;nbsp; They stated,/p blockquote pemDuring the past 3,000 years, there have been five extended periods when it was distinctly warmer than today. One of the two coldest periods, known as the Little Ice Age, occurred 300 years ago. Atmospheric temperatures have been rising from that low for the past 300 years, but remain below the 3,000-year average. /em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"The second editorial, with son Noah, was called ldquo;Global Warming is 300-Year-Old News.rdquo;nbsp; In that one, they stated that ldquo;Earth temperatures are now near the 3,000-year average and clearly not unusual.rdquo;nbsp; Their Oregon Petition figure was re-drafted with different temperature units, but the time scale was still wrong, and the current thermometer measurements were still missing.nbsp; Despite the misrepresentation in the text as ldquo;Earth temperaturesrdquo; the graph this time was labeled ldquo;Temperature of the Sargasso Sea from 1000 BC to 1975 AD.rdquo;nbsp; The source of the year 1975 as the endpoint is unclear and did not come from Keigwinrsquo;s paper./p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_sargasso.gif" alt="" width="350" height="470" //p p style="text-align: justify;"This Wall Street Journal version of the graph appears to have become the emnew/em ldquo;primary sourcerdquo; for those who argue that temperatures are actually lower now than they were in the past.nbsp; Award winning editorial cartoonist John Trever redrew it for an ironic dig at climate scientists who claim otherwise (includingmdash;with true ironymdash;Lloyd Keigwin, the original author of the figure)./p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_toon.gif" alt="" width="570" height="411" //p p style="text-align: justify;"In 2004, I was asked by my management to review the original sources of these claims, and I wrote several messages to Arthur Robinson asking for some clarifications.nbsp;nbsp; Because I was planning to write a report, I wanted to give him the courtesy of responding with any clarifications or corrections.nbsp; Among other questions, I included the following,/p blockquote pemI'm wondering what is your basis for the statement, "During the past 3,000 years, there have been five extended periods when it was distinctly warmer than today." (Robinson amp; Robinson, The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4, 1997).nbsp; I've seen this quoted by others (often without attribution) but it looks like you were the first to say it./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Robinson responded,/p blockquote pemI note that the Sargaso (sic) Sea curve shows five earlier periods where the temperature was above the mean and therefore warmer than today. This is probably the source of the statement./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Significantly, business advocate Raymond Keatingmdash;in testimony to House Small Business Committee (June 4, 1998)mdash;said, ldquo;During the past 3,000 years, there have been five extended periods when it was distinctly warmer than today.rdquo;/p p style="text-align: justify;"I proceeded to ask Robinson some more difficult questions,/p blockquote pemI can see that your Figure 2 was taken directly from the 1996 Keigwin paper, but with the post-1954 instrumental "Station S" SST data removed.nbsp; Was there a reason you took the directly measured temperature off?nbsp; What method did you use to calculate the 23 C mean?nbsp; Did you derive it from the original Keigwin data or was that simply an estimate to the nearest degree?/em/p pemYou incorrectly represented the graph as global temperature.nbsp; You stated, "For the past 300 years, global temperatures have been gradually recovering (11). As shown in figure 2, they are still a little below the average for the past 3,000 years."/em/p pemI plan to include these observations in my final writeup.nbsp; If you care to respond, I would be happy to include your comments./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"To which Robinson replied,/p blockquote pemRegarding the world data. We clearly labeled this data location. Since virtually all other available dats (sic) from other locations (see Soon and Baliunas) is similar, providing this example was entirely ethical. /em/p pemIt is too bad your employers could not find an objective scientist for this task. I will not be providing any additional comments, since I am quite sure they would not be presented in their enirety (sic) to your employers, any more than will those I have already written. You are clearly devoted to lifting selected things from their context./em/p pemDo not waste your time with additional email. It will be shunted to the unopened file here./em/p pemAR/em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"For the record, I provided all his responses to my management in their entirety./p p style="text-align: justify;"The most recent chapter of this story began when the periodical of the AAPS re-published an edited and colorized version of the paper in 2007 under a different author rotation (Baliunas was removed, and son Zachary was replaced by son Noah).nbsp; Perhaps because of my 2004 criticisms, an instrumental data point was added for year 2006, and the mean temperature was shifted./p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_mco2.gif" alt="" width="570" height="406" //p p style="text-align: justify;"The paper explained the source of the 2006 temperature thusly, ldquo;A value of 0.25 deg;C, which is the change in Sargasso Sea temperature between 1975 and 2006, has been added to the 1975 data in order to provide a 2006 temperature value.rdquo;nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"Unable to reproduce this temperature with the data I had, I wrote to Willie Soon in 2010 and asked for the source of the data.nbsp; He cordially responded and sent me the table, telling me,/p blockquote pemhellip;also about the most recent point at "2006"---sorry that I could not be more certain, but I am sure Noah has carefully included this updated SST series from station S that Dr. Keigwin sent me around July of 2007 (which as you can see from the file name was obtained by Dr. Ruth Curry of WHOI)./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Graphing the Station S data with their data point for 2006 (blue) demonstrates that the 2006 is about a degree too low in Robinson et al. (2007)./p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_2006.gif" alt="" width="570" height="396" //p p style="text-align: justify;"If they had plotted the data they had, the way they said they did, it would have looked like this:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_2006b.gif" alt="" width="570" height="279" //p p style="text-align: justify;"On Nov. 2, 2010, I presented this to a large audience at the Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting in Denver.nbsp; Always wanting to give others the benefit of the doubt, I wrote to Noah Robinson several times at his OISM address.nbsp; On Oct. 23, 2010 I wrote:/p blockquote pemWillie amp; Noah,/em/p pemAttached is a draft of a couple slides I plan to present, which strongly suggest that your team fabricated the 2006 data point to hide the increase in Sargasso Sea surface temperature./em/p pemYou plotted your 2006 point too low by more than a degree C.nbsp; If this was an honest arithmetic mistake or silly drafting error, now would be the time to explain it and correct it.nbsp; If you let me know before my presentation, I will be happy to include your explanation./em/p pemBest regards, br //em/p pemMark Boslough/em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"I did not get a response./p p style="text-align: justify;"The Heartland Institute, a fossil-fuel-funded political pressure group, reprinted a distorted version the latest OISM the graph in their advocacy report, ldquo;Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climaterdquo; (S. Fred Singer, editor).nbsp; This was published for an organization called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and was sent to American members of Congress and other policy makers.nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3000yr_mco3.gif" alt="" width="570" height="266" //p p style="text-align: justify;"In 2011, I submitted an abstract, coauthored by Lloyd Keigwin, to the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change, so that we could present these findings.nbsp; According to the conference summary, it was ldquo;to focus on climate change and variability from observational and modeling perspectives.rdquo;nbsp; The chair of the conference, Petr Chylek is affiliated with one of the sponsors (Los Alamos National Laboratory) as well as the Heartland Institute (as a ldquo;Heartland Expertrdquo;).nbsp; With many speakers affiliated with the Heartland Institute (it turned out to be at least nine) it seemed like a good opportunity to provide feedback.nbsp; Unfortunately, Keigwin and I received a rejection letter from Chylek, who told us,/p blockquote pemThis Conference is not a suitable forum for type of presentations described in submitted abstract. We would accept a paper that spoke to the science, the measurements, the interpretation, but not simply an attempted refutation of someone else's assertions (especially when made in unpublished reports and blog site)./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"This was a puzzling rejection given that the ldquo;unpublished reportrdquo; was the NIPCC document released by the Heartland Institute, which is widely cited by the many Heartland-affiliated speakers invited by Chylek./p p style="text-align: justify;"Nevertheless, I was able to have a conversation with Fred Singer, the editor of the NIPCC report, about the Sargasso Sea graph.nbsp; At first, he told me that I should take it up with Robinson, but ultimately he assured me that it would be corrected in the next edition of the NIPCC. nbsp;He also revealed that he had been the one who had sent Keigwinrsquo;s paper to Robinson in the first place, back in the lsquo;90s./p p style="text-align: justify;"In a final attempt to get my feedback directly to the Heartland Institute before writing this guest post, I offered in April, 2012 to give a presentation at their annual meeting in Chicago in May.nbsp;nbsp; My offer was rejected by Heartlandrsquo;s Director of Communications, Jim Lakely, who told me in no uncertain terms, ldquo;you will not be getting an invitation to speak.rdquo;/p p style="text-align: justify;"I look forward to their response to this article./p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/shutterstock_15465343.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=18447shutterstock_15465343.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pWhen does a study on the a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/unconventional shale gas industry/a become a quot;shill gas studyquot;? The quick answer: when nearly everyone writing and peer reviewing it has close ties to the industry they#39;re purportedly doing an quot;objectivequot; studynbsp;on./p pThe newest kid on the block: a recent study published by a href=http://artvoice.com/issues/v11n20/week_in_review/ub_shale_shillsspan class=capsSUNY/span Buffalo#39;s Shale Resources and Society Institute/a, titled,nbsp;quot;a href=http://www.buffalo.edu/news/pdf/UBSRSI-Environmental%20Impact.pdfEnvironmental Impacts During Shale Gas Drilling: Causes, Impacts and Remedies/a.quot;/p h3 The four co-authors of the quot;a href=http://www.buffalo.edu/news/pdf/UBSRSI-Environmental%20Impact.pdfstudy/aquot; all have backgrounds, directly or indirectly, in the oil and gasnbsp;industry:/h3 ul li strongTimothy Considine and Robert Watson/strong: A professor emeritus at Universitynbsp;of Wyoming and a professor at Pennsylvania State University respectively,nbsp;Considine and Watsonnbsp;co-authorednbsp;anbsp;a href=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Marcellus_Shale_Coalition style=text-align: left; target=_blankMarcellus Shale Coalition/anbsp;quot;jobsquot; study often cited by the industry and mainstream pressnbsp;span style=line-height: 10px; titled, quot;/spana href=http://marcelluscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/PA-Marcellus-Updated-Economic-Impacts-5.24.10.3.pdf style=line-height: 10px; target=_blankThe Economic Impacts of the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Play/a,span style=line-height: 10px; quot; published in May 2010. Thenbsp;/spanspan style=text-align: left;Marcellus /spanspan style=text-align: left;Shale/spanspan style=text-align: left; Coalition isnbsp;/spanspan style=color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; a gas industry lobbying groupnbsp;/spana href=http://marcelluscoalition.org/about/coalition-members/ style=text-align: left; target=_blankrepresenting nearly all of the corporations/aspan style=color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; nbsp;fracking for gas in thenbsp;Marcellus. That quot;jobsquot; data was used in a July 2011 New York fracking jobs quot;studyquot; shown to be farcical by Food and Water Watch in a a href=http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/briefs/exposing-the-oil-and-gas-industrys-false-jobs-promise/November 2011 report/a, asnbsp;a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/food-and-water-watch-report-exposes-lies-about-oil-and-gas-industry-jobs-claimscovered by DeSmogBlog/a./spanbr /nbsp;nbsp;/li li strongNicholas Considine/strong:nbsp;Head of the University of Wyoming#39;s a href=http://www.uwyo.edu/ser/centers-of-excellence/energy-economics.htmlCenter for Energy Economics and Publicnbsp;Policy/a.nbsp;He co-authored, along withnbsp;his brother Timothy and Robert Watson, a a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4425Manhattan Institute/a-commissioned paper published in June 2011nbsp;titled, quot;a href=http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_09.htmThe Economic Opportunities of Shale Energy Development/a.quot; The Institute is a href=http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research/fundersheavily funded by the oil and gas industry/a.br /nbsp;nbsp;/li li strongJohn Martin/strong: Martin is a Consultant at a href=http://jpmartinenergy.com/JPMartin Energy Strategy span class=capsLLC/span/a. According to a href=http://jpmartinenergy.com/biography.phphis biography appearing on the JPMartin website/a, he has spent decades working in various sectors of the oil and gas industry, during which he also was responsible for overseeing the research and writing of the first examination of quot;the natural gas potential of New York#39;s Utica Shale that helped stimulate significant industry investment in this resource.quot; Martin also serves as co-director of the recently creatednbsp;span class=capsSUNY/span Buffalo#39;s Shale Resources and Society Institute, which publishednbsp;thisnbsp;quot;study.quot;nbsp;/li /ul h3 /h3pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/new-shill-gas-study-published-suny-buffalo-institute-heavy-industry-ties target=_blankread more/a/p

pPeter Sinclair, the creator of the quot;a href=http://climatecrocks.com/Climate Crock of the Week/aquot; series, has a new video posted at the a href=http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2012/05/margaret-thatcher-others-neither-murderers-tyrants-nor-madmen/Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media/a documenting just how out of touch with reality the Heartland Institute#39;s recent offensive a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/will-heartland-institute-s-corporate-funders-tacitly-endorse-comparing-climate-realists-bin-laden-and-unabomberUnabomber billboard campaign/a is. Featuring the calm and insightful comments of Margaret Thatcher, Sinclair shows the stupidity of Heartland#39;s claim that all of us who acknowledge climate change science are quot;a href=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/04/477921/heartland-institute-compares-climate-science-believers-and-reporters-to-mass-murderers-and-madmen/murderers, tyrants, and madmen/a.quot;/p pWatch Sinclair#39;s piece, part of a href=http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2012/05/margaret-thatcher-others-neither-murderers-tyrants-nor-madmen/Yale Forum#39;s quot;This Is Not Coolquot;/a series:br / object height=304 width=540param name=movie value=http://www.youtube.com/v/77VejUbuFsk?version=3amp;hl=en_US /param name=allowFullScreen value=true /param name=allowscriptaccess value=always /embed allowfullscreen=true allowscriptaccess=always height=304 src=http://www.youtube.com/v/77VejUbuFsk?version=3amp;hl=en_US type=application/x-shockwave-flash width=540/embed/objectbr /nbsp;nbsp;/p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/peter-sinclair-s-new-video-skewers-heartland-s-offensive-murderers-tyrants-and-madmen-billboard-campaign target=_blankread more/a/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/school-bus.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=17286school-bus.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pemThis is a guest post bynbsp;Juanita Constible, Science and Solutions Director of a href=http://climaterealityproject.org/2012/05/16/new-national-standards-ask-schools-to-teach-climate-change/The Climate Reality Project/a, cross-posted with permission./embr / br / As a scientist, I know how important it is for our kids to get a top-notch science education. So itrsquo;s extremely significant that a new set of national science standards ndash; the first to be released in over a decade ndash; explicitly ask our schools to address climatenbsp;change./p pbr / The a href=http://www.nextgenscience.org/Next Generation Science Standards/a lay out core ideas K-12 students should understand about the basics of science ndash; from biology, to physics and chemistry, to earth science. The last national standards were released back in 1996, and manmade climate change wasnrsquo;t mentioned. However, the new standards recognize that students need to know human activities are changing our climate. They also recognize that schools are training the next generation of engineers and scientists who can help solve the problem.br / br / In the standards for middle school, for example, one of the core ideas is that ldquo;human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earthrsquo;s mean surface temperature (lsquo;global warmingrsquo;).rdquo; The standards for high school note that ldquo;changes in the atmosphere due to human activity have increased carbon dioxide concentrations and thus affect climate.rdquo;br / br / This is welcome news after a disheartening couple of months in the science education world. In February, news broke about the industry-funded a href=http://climaterealityproject.org/2012/02/24/heartland-institute-keep-climate-denial-out-of-our-schools/Heartland Institutersquo;s plans to push misinformation/a about climate change into schools. (Yes, the same Heartland Institute that compared people who believe in climate change science to a href=http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/06/billboard-likening-global-warming-believers-to-unabomber-is-pulled/mass murderers/a. Many schools already a href=http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/climate-change/jan-june12/teachclimate_05-02.htmlavoid teaching about climate change/a because some teachers (and parents) view the topic as too controversial. (Of course, therersquo;s a href=http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/nothing controversial/a about the underlying science.)br / /ppa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/new-national-standards-ask-schools-teach-climate-change target=_blankread more/a/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/Josph Bast.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=92744Josph Bast.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pThe a href=http://blog.heartland.org/2012/05/joe-basts-response-to-scholars-feeling-pressure-after-attacks-on-heartland/somewhat hysterical/a Heartland Institute President Joe Bast has lashed out at the lengthening list of quot;friendsquot; who are trying to distance themselves from the institute#39;s increasingly embarrassing anti-sciencenbsp;antics./p pIn a letter to one of the quot;scholarsquot; who have asked to be removed from the list of quot;a href=http://heartland.org/expertsHeartland experts/aquot; (BigCityLiberal is keeping a good headcount a href=http://bigcitylib.blogspot.ca/here/a), Bast complains that his institute has always tried to stay quot;above the fray,quot; and it#39;s now being victimized quot;by ideological extremists as part of the ongoing attack on us and ournbsp;donors.quot;/p pIn that light, Bast scolds his formernbsp;supporter:/p blockquote pSo John, Irsquo;m disappointed that you would side with folks who would use such tactics. if you want to stand up for truth seeking and honesty, for taking an unpopular stand against prevailing wisdom, then you should be speaking up for me and The Heartland Institute, not abandoning us in this moment ofnbsp;need./p /blockquote pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-s-joe-bast-lashes-out-institute-s-own-friends target=_blankread more/a/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/dispersant.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=29510dispersant.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pLess than two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (span class=capsEPA/span) told span class=capsBP/span that they had to a href=http://inhabitat.com/epa-demands-bp-stop-using-toxic-dispersants-they-wont-comply/#ixzz0osp4qVj9stop using the highly dangerous and potentially toxic oil dispersant Corexit/a on the oil that was spewing from a blown out wellhead at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. a href=http://www.truthistreason.net/bp-refuses-to-comply-with-epa-demand-to-stop-use-of-corexit-dispersantspan class=capsBP/span refused/a, and the span class=capsEPA/span took no action.br / br / But this week, the span class=capsEPA/span has told us all that there is a href=http://www.nationofchange.org/epa-grossly-misrepresents-toxicity-corexit-used-gulf-mexico-1336922852absolutely nothing to worry about/a, and that Corexit is essentially ldquo;non-toxic.rdquo;br / br / Those of us living along the Gulf Coast would all love to breathe a huge sigh of relief, but wersquo;re too busy a href=http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110420-gulf-oil-spill-anniversary-health-mental-science-nation/choking on the toxic air/a that has been causing ldquo;a href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/18/gulf-oil-spill-health-cleanup-workers_n_850486.htmlmystery respiratory illnesses/ardquo; for a href=http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-is-making-a-lot-of-people-really-sicktwo years now/a.br / br / But still, the a href=http://www.nationofchange.org/epa-grossly-misrepresents-toxicity-corexit-used-gulf-mexico-1336922852span class=capsEPA/span released a report/a earlier this month that says that their testing revealed that the numerous different dispersants used in the cleanup fall into the ldquo;practically non-toxicrdquo; or ldquo;slightly toxicrdquo; category. What they mean by this is that the dispersants essentially have an equal toxicity to the oil that was released into the Gulf of Mexico.br / br / Again, this new report runs completely contradictory to what the agency was warning us about in immediate months following the disaster. But instead of insisting that span class=capsBP/span use a href=inhabitat.com/2010/05/05/top-5-green-ways-to-clean-up-oil-spillsequally effective, less toxic organic methods/a of dispersants, they went along with the oil giant and allowed them to continue pumping toxic chemicals into ournbsp;waters./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/epa-covering-oil-dispersant-dangers target=_blankread more/a/p

p style="text-align: justify;"An increasingly common fallback position once climate change "skeptics" accept that a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/evidence-for-global-warming.htm"the planet is warming/a and a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-review-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html"humans are the dominant cause/a is a href="http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm"the myth that climate change won't be bad/a.nbsp; In fact, this particular myth comes in at #3 on a href="http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php"our list of most used climate myths/a.nbsp; It's an ideal fallback position because it allows those who reject a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/big-picture.html"the body of scientific evidence/a to believe that if they are wrong on the science, it's okay, because the consequences won't be dire anyway./p p style="text-align: justify;"One of my colleagues, Molly Henderson recently completed a Masters Degree program class on scientific research which focused on climate change, which she aced (way to go, Molly!).nbsp; For her final research paper, she examined the consequences of climate change on the prevalence of water-borne diseases in the US Great Lakes region./p p style="text-align: justify;"This is obviously a very focused topic on a specific region and predicted consequence of climate change, but I think it also provides a perfect example as to why this notion that the effects of climate change will somehow be benign or good is fundamentally flawed.nbsp; As a general rule, climate change is not a good thing, because all species are adapted to the current climate in the region in which they reside.nbsp; There is a certain amount of climate change to which species can adapt and survive, but adaptation can be a difficult and ugly process./p p style="text-align: justify;"As Molly's paper makes clear, while humans are a very adaptable species, at the same time we've built a lot of infrastructure whose specifications are based on the current climate.nbsp; We have large agricultural farms which depend on a relatively constant climate in order to successfully grow crops, for example.nbsp; As Molly's paper shows, there are some other climate change consequences on our infrastructure which we might not even normally think about./p !--more-- h3 style="text-align: justify;"The Problem/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"Molly states the problem as follows./p blockquote p style="text-align: justify;""Many cities that surround the Great Lakes are equipped with sewer systems that capture and combine sanitary sewage and stormwater as they are conveyed to wastewater treatment plants (McLellan et al., 2007). nbsp;The EPA estimates that 150 communities within the Great Lakes drainage basin are serviced by combined sewer systems (CSS) (U.S. EPA, 2012).nbsp; nbsp;Extreme precipitation events can overcome the conveyance capacity of CSS and cause overflows, known as combined sewer overflows (CSO).nbsp; These overflow events result in untreated sanitary sewage and stormwater discharges into receiving waters (i.e, rivers, streams, lakes, etc.).nbsp;nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"Urban stormwater and sewage overflow water contains human pathogens including viruses, protozoans, and pathogenic bacteria that can cause adverse health effects if ingested.nbsp;nbsp; The Great Lakes provide drinking water for an estimated 40 million people and there are more than 500 recreational beaches along lake shores (Great Lakes Legislative Caucus, 2012).nbsp; Waterborne disease outbreaks result when water supplies are contaminated with pathogens that infect humans./p p style="text-align: justify;"It is well known that extreme precipitation events that cause CSO in the Great Lakes Region can lead to waterborne disease outbreaks, as seen in the 1993 outbreak of intestinal illness in Milwaukee, Wisconsin which affected an estimated 403,000 people (Curriero et al., 2001).nbsp; nbsp;Observed and projected climate changes due to global warming infer that more frequent extreme precipitation events are on the horizon for this region, thus potentially leading to a higher incidence of waterborne disease outbreaks if mitigation measures are not taken to improve existing CSS infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions."/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Personally when I think about the consequences of climate change, the possibility that increased heavy precipitation events could cause combined sewer systems to overflow, thus introducing pathogens into drinking water sources has never previously crossed my mind.nbsp;/p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Climate Literature Investigating this Problem/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"In retrospect this is a perfectly logical climate change consequence in regions which will receive increased precipitation, and indeed Molly shows that a great deal of research has been done on this specific concern in the specific region of the Great Lakes.nbsp; Sousounis amp; Grover (2002) used thenbsp; the Canadian Coupled Climate Model and the Hadley Coupled Climate Model to show that an increase in heavy precipitation events is among the expected climatic changes in the Great Lakes region.nbsp; A paper led by Katharine Hayhoe (who we've previously seen a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Katharine-Hayhoe-labour-of-love-inspires-torrent-of-hate.html"here/a and a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/katharine-hayhoe-much-of-this-is-intended-to-intimidate.html"here/a responding to the wave of hate directed her way when she was asked to write a climate chapter for a Newt Gingrich book) also examined some of the expected climatic changes in the Great Lakes region, as described by Molly:/p blockquote p style="text-align: justify;""Some positive impacts such as a decrease in energy use in the winter and risk of cold-related illnesses may result; however, a higher demand for energy in the summer and higher rates of heat-related mortality is likely to offset this positive impact.nbsp; This study also highlights the economic impacts on the Great Lakes due to projected lake level reductions and the article places emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas emissions."/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Patz et al. (2008) hypothesized that extreme precipitation events may overwhelm the common combined sewer systems in the Great Lakes region, causing potentially dangerous overflows into sources of drinking water and recreational waterways, and recommended upgrading sewage/stormwater infrastructure and greater protection of watersheds./p p style="text-align: justify;"A National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) fact sheet highlights the fact that that more than half of the waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States over the past 50 years are linked to heavy rain events, lending additional credibility to this potential problem.nbsp; Curriero et al. (2001) examined the association between extreme rainfall and waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States between 1948 and 1994, and their conclusions were consistent with the NRDC fact sheet, finding that 51% of outbreaks in their study sample were preceded within a 2-month lag by an extreme level of precipitation./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Adaptation Has a Cost/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"The good news is that while most of us probably haven't considered this particular climate change consequence, obviously a number of scientists have investigated it.nbsp;nbsp; While it may seem on the surface like a relatively minor regional concern, Molly notes that 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes Region as a water supply, and the recreational beaches along the shores of the Great Lakes are an important economic contributor to the region. Additionally,nbsp;a href="http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/cso/demo.cfm"combined sewer systems serve roughly 772 communities containing about 40 million people/anbsp;in the USA.nbsp; It's also a larger region - over 30 million people live within the Great Lakes basin area; that's 10% of the US population plus 25% of Canada's.nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"However, since we are aware of the problem, the Great Lakes region can adapt to it.nbsp; The bad news is of course that upgrading sewage and stormwater infrastructure is not a cheap undertaking.nbsp; As another example we recently discussed, a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-causing-heat-fatalities.html"adjusting to a rising frequency of heat waves/a resulting from continued climate change will be another costly adaptation, as will shifting the geography of our agricultural production./p p style="text-align: justify;"There are alternatives to facing these types of climate change costs.nbsp; We can try to prevent the problems from occurring by addressing the source (greenhouse gas emissions), which is likely a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-economy.htm"the cheapest option/a, or we can simply allow them to happen and face the consequences.nbsp; As renowned paleoclimatologist a href="http://skepticalscience.com/researchnews.osu.edu/archive/TBA--LTonly.pdf"Lonnie Thompson put it/a:/p blockquote p style="text-align: justify;""Three options remain for dealing with the crisis: mitigate, adapt, and suffer...Sooner or later, we will all deal with global warming. The only question is how much we will mitigate, adapt, and suffer."/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"Molly's research provides one specific example of this choice.nbsp; If we fail to mitigate these types of consequences, we will either have to pay the cost to adapt to them, or suffer the consequences of failing to act.nbsp; The good news is that we are aware of the problem both on a global and local scale.nbsp; Now we just have to decide how we want to address it./p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"References/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"McLellan, Sandra L., Hollis, Erica J., Depas, Morgan M., VanDyke, Meredith, Harris, Josh, and Scopel, Caitlin O. (2007).nbsp; Distribution and Fate of emEscherichia coli/em in Lake Michegan Following Contamination with Urban Stormwater and Combined Sewer Overflows.nbsp; emJournal of Great Lakes Research, (33), 566-580./em/p p style="text-align: justify;"U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2012).nbsp; National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES).nbsp; Retrieved April 27, 2012 from a href="http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/"http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes//a./p p style="text-align: justify;"Great Lakes Legislative Caucus (2012).nbsp; Great Lakes Facts and Figures.nbsp; Retrieved on April 27, 2012 from a href="http://greatlakeslegislators.org/"http://greatlakeslegislators.org//a./p p style="text-align: justify;"Curriero, Frank C., Patz, Jonathan A., Rose, Joan B., Lele, Subhash (2001).nbsp; The Association Between Extreme Precipitation and Waterborne Disease Outbreaks in the United States, 1948-1994.nbsp; emAmerican Journal of Public Health, 91(8),/em 1194-1199./p p style="text-align: justify;"Sousounis, Peter J. and Grover, Emily K. (2002).nbsp; Potential Future Weather Patters over the Great Lakes Region.nbsp; emJournal of Great Lakes Research/em. em28(4), 496-520/em./p p style="text-align: justify;"Hayhoe, Katharine, VanDorn, Jeff, Croley, Thomas II, Schlegal, Nicole, and Wuebbles, Donald (2010).strongnbsp; /strongRegional Climate Change Projections for Chicago and the U.S. Great Lakes.nbsp; emJournal of Great Lakes Research, 36, 7-21/em./p p style="text-align: justify;"Patz, Jonathan A., Vavrus, Stephen J., Uejio, Christopher K., McLellan, Sandra L. (2008). Climate Change and Waterborne Disease Risk in the Great Lakes Region of the U.S. emAmerican Journal of Preventative Medicine, 35/em(5), 451-458. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2008.08.026./p p style="text-align: justify;"National Resources Defense Council (2010).nbsp; Rising Tide of Illness:nbsp; How Global Warming Could Increase the Threat of Waterborne Diseases.nbsp; Retrieved March 12, 2012 from a href="http://www.nrdc.org/health/files/GWillness4pgr_08.pdf"http://www.nrdc.org/health/files/GWillness4pgr_08.pdf/a./p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-png alt=image/png icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/Koch Facts.png type=image/png; length=13710Koch Facts.png/a/div /div /div /div piAuthored by Connor Gibson, cross-posted with permission from a href=http://www.polluterwatch.com/blog/koch-facts-flummoxed-over-undeniable-tar-sands-business-keystone-xl-interestPolluterWatch.org/a/ibr / br / For those who missed the deep investigative piece published by InsideClimate News last week documenting a half-century of a href=http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120510/koch-industries-brothers-tar-sands-bitumen-heavy-oil-flint-pipelines-refinery-alberta-canadaKoch Industries involvement in the destructive tar sands/a of Alberta, Canada, it has finally closed the coffin on a vicious round of lies straight from Kochnbsp;Industries./p pThrough its aggressive KochFacts span class=capsPR/span website, Koch lawyers, lobbyists and communications advisors hammered InsideClimate for its initial reports on the Koch connection to tar sands and the Keystone span class=capsXL/span pipeline, specifically a href=http://www.kochfacts.com/kf/continuingfalsehoods/attacking the outlet#39;s publisher/a and calling the reporting quot;deceptive,quot; quot;untruequot; and quot;utterly false,quot; among other claims that, ironically, are deceptive, untrue and utterlynbsp;false./p pA major indicator of InsideClimate#39;s diligence is the response from KochFacts this time around, which mentions nothing of InsideClimate#39;s damning new documentation of ongoing Koch operations in the tar sands, including the following points from thenbsp;article:/p blockquote pembull; The company is one Canada#39;s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters, with more than 130 crude oilnbsp;customers./em/p pembull; It is among the largest span class=capsU.S./span refiners of oil sands crude, responsible for about 25 percent ofnbsp;imports./em/p pembull; It is one of the largest holders of mineral leases in Alberta, where most of Canada#39;s tar sands deposits arenbsp;located./em/p pembull; It has its name attached to a href=http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/354454-koch-facilities-noconf-doccloud.html target=_blankhundreds of well sites across Alberta/a tracked by Canadiannbsp;regulators./em/p pembull; It owns pipelines in Minnesota and Wisconsin that import western Canadian crude to span class=capsU.S./span refineries and also distribute finished products tonbsp;customers./em/p pembull; It owns and operates a 675,000 barrel oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, a major tar sands exportnbsp;hub./em/p pembull; And this year it kicked off a 10,000 barrel-a-day mining project in Alberta that could be the seed of a much largernbsp;project./em/p /blockquote pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/koch-facts-flummoxed-over-undeniable-tar-sands-business-keystone-xl-interest target=_blankread more/a/p

p style="text-align: justify;"Wouldn't it be nice to see something like following headlines in popular news media:/p p style="text-align: justify;"em"Growth change of oak and beech are related to climate time series and N deposition trends!"/em/p p style="text-align: justify;"em"Atmospheric lifetime of methane only 9.1 plusmn; 0.9 years!"/em/p p style="text-align: justify;"em"WAIS Divide was colder than the last 1000-year average from 1300 to 1800 C.E.!"/em/p p style="text-align: justify;"em"Concentrations of rBC in the ice cores displayed significant variability at annual to decadal time scales!"/em/p p style="text-align: justify;"I bet papers with these in their frontpage would be sold out in minutes./p p style="text-align: justify;"img src="http://agwobserver.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/tempsmodel.jpg" alt="" //p !--more--hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Contrary to expectations, British butterflies don't utilise an increased range of habitat types with global warming/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02737.x/abstract"Habitat associations of thermophilous butterflies are reduced despite climatic warming - Oliver emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Climate warming threatens the survival of species at their warm, trailing-edge range boundaries, but also provides opportunities for the ecological release of populations at the cool, leading edges of their distributions. Thus, as the climate warms, leading-edge populations are expected to utilise an increased range of habitat types, leading to larger population sizes and range expansion. Here, we test the hypothesis that the habitat associations of British butterflies have expanded over three decades of climate warming. We characterise the habitat breadth of 27 southerly-distributed species from 77 monitoring transects between 1977 and 2007 by considering changes in densities of butterflies across 11 habitat types. Contrary to expectation, we find that 20 out of 27 (74%) butterfly species showed long term contractions in their habitat associations, despite some short-term expansions in habitat breadth in warmer-than-usual years. Thus, we conclude that climatic warming has ameliorated habitat contractions caused by other environmental drivers to some extent, but that habitat degradation continues to be a major driver of reductions in habitat breadth and population density of butterflies."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emTom H. Oliver, Chris D. Thomas, Jane K. Hill, Tom Brereton, David B. Roy, Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02737.x./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Droughts have become more intense and last longer in Urmia Lake Basin, Iran/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/5727l7r2360kk7v6/"Observed climate variability and change in Urmia Lake Basin, Iran - Delju emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "This paper analyzes climate variability and change in the Urmia Lake Basin, northwest of Iran. Annual average of the following data time series has been analyzed by statistical methods: dry bulb temperature, maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation, and number of rainy and snowy days. We have also used mean monthly temperature and precipitation data for analysis of drought spells for the period 1964ndash;2005 to find out whether fluctuations in the lake level are attributable to natural drought. Our results indicate that mean precipitation has decreased by 9.2 % and the average maximum temperature has increased by 0.8deg;C over these four decades. The seasonal changes are particularly visible in winter and spring. Results of the Palmer Drought Severity Index show that on average, drought episodes have hit the Urmia Lake Basin every 5 years and most of them reached severe levels, but recent droughts have become more intense and last longer."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emA. H. Delju, A. Ceylan, E. Piguet and M. Rebetez, Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s00704-012-0651-9./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Asian summer monsoon intensity has decreased with global warming/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/71q0718262547277/"Decreasing Asian summer monsoon intensity after 1860 AD in the global warming epoch - Xu emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "The trend of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) intensity and its nature during the past 100 and 200 years still remain unclear. In this study we reconstructed the ISM intensity during the past 270 years from tree ring delta;sup18/supO at Hongyuan, eastern edge of the Tibet Plateau. The monsoon failures inferred from delta;sup18/supOsubtree ring/sub correlate well with those recorded in ice cores, speleothem, and historical literature sources. 22.6, 59.0, and 110.9-years frequency components in the Hongyuan delta;sup18/supOsubtree ring/sub series, which may be the responses to solar activities, synchronize well with those recorded in other ISM indices. A notable feature of the reconstructed ISM intensity is the gradually decreasing trend from about 1860 to the present, which is inversely related to the increasing temperature trend contemporaneously. Such ldquo;decreasing ISM intensityndash;increasing temperaturerdquo; tendency can also be supported by ice core records and meteorological records over a wide geographic extension. The decrease in sea surface temperature gradient between tropical and north Indian Ocean, and the decrease in land-sea thermal contrast between tropical Indian Ocean and ldquo;Indian sub-continentndash;western Himalayardquo; are possibly responsible for the observed decreasing ISM trend."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emHai Xu, Yetang Hong and Bin Hong, Climate Dynamics, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-012-1378-0./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Sunshine hour decline in China since 1960's due to air pollution/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JD016753.shtml"The magnitude of the effect of air pollution on sunshine hours in China - Wang emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "This study investigates the changes in sunshine hours in relation to API (Air Pollution Index) across China. Data were collected from a total of 38 cities over the period of 1960ndash;2009. Sunshine hours in over 84% of the cities significantly (emp/em lt; 0.05) decline with an average of 16.7% for the 1960sndash;2000s. This decline is mainly prevalent over Sichuan Basin (22.4%), North China Plain (18.8%), and Yangtze River Delta (18.2%). While the sunshine hour decline is largely in the 20th century (with the strongest drop in the 1980s and the least in the 1990s), it rebounds by 0.3% after 2000. For especially in winter seasons and the North China region, API is negatively related with sunshine hours. For days with API gt; 80, sunshine hours are on the average 0.7 h dsupminus;1/sup (8.4%) shorter than for days with API le; 80 under clear-sky condition for 2001ndash;2005. In cities with average daily API le; 80 and gt;80 for the 2000s, sunshine hour decline for the 1960sndash;2000s is 0.8 h dsupminus;1/sup (13.4%) and 1.0 h dsupminus;1/sup (15.9%) respectively. Winter seasons with high API (90) exhibit the highest sunshine hour decline (21.5%). The study shows that spatiotemporal changes in sunshine hours in China could largely be explained in terms of API."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emWang, Y., Y. Yang, N. Zhao, C. Liu, and Q. Wang (2012), The magnitude of the effect of air pollution on sunshine hours in China, J. Geophys. Res., 117, D00V14, doi:10.1029/2011JD016753./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"In 2007 there were lot of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice and in 2011 there were even more/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JC007869.shtml"Exceptional melt pond occurrence in the years 2007 and 2011 on the Arctic sea ice revealed from MODIS satellite data - Rouml;sel amp; Kaleschke (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Melt ponds contribute to the ice-albedo feedback as they reduce the surface albedo of sea ice, and hence accelerate the decay of Arctic sea ice. Here, we analyze the melt pond fraction, retrieved from the MODIS sensor for the years 2000ndash;2011 to characterize the spatial and temporal evolution. A significant anomaly of the relative melt pond fraction at the beginning of the melt season in June 2007 is documented. This is followed by above-average values throughout the entire summer. In contrast, the increase of the relative melt pond fraction at the beginning of June 2011 is within average values, but from mid-June, relative melt pond fraction exhibits values up to two standard deviations above the mean values of 30 plusmn; 1.2% which are even higher than in Summer 2007."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emRouml;sel, A., and L. Kaleschke (2012), Exceptional melt pond occurrence in the years 2007 and 2011 on the Arctic sea ice revealed from MODIS satellite data, J. Geophys. Res., 117, C05018, doi:10.1029/2011JC007869./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Signal of human influence on climate has strengthened over the first decade of the 21st century/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asl.383/abstract"Observed 21st century temperatures further constrain likely rates of future warming - Stott amp; Jones (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "We carry out a detection and attribution analysis of observed near-surface temperatures to 2010 and demonstrate that the signal of human influence on climate has strengthened over the first decade of the 21st century. As a result, we show that global warming is set to continue, with the second decade of the 21st century predicted to be very likely warmer than the first. Estimates of future warming rates consistent with observations of past climate change are now better constrained than they were a decade ago. The highest rates of warming previously consistent with past warming now appear to be unlikely."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emPeter A. Stott, Gareth S. Jones, Atmospheric Science Letters, DOI: 10.1002/asl.383./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Antactic ice core records of black carbon deposition since 1850/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/4107/2012/acp-12-4107-2012.html"Changes in black carbon deposition to Antarctica from two high-resolution ice core records, 1850ndash;2000 AD - Bisiaux emet al./em (2012)/a [a href="http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/4107/2012/acp-12-4107-2012.pdf"strongFULL TEXT/strong/a]/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Refractory black carbon aerosols (rBC) emitted by biomass burning (fires) and fossil fuel combustion, affect global climate and atmospheric chemistry. In the Southern Hemisphere (SH), rBC is transported in the atmosphere from low- and mid-latitudes to Antarctica and deposited to the polar ice sheet preserving a history of emissions and atmospheric transport. Here, we present two high-resolution Antarctic rBC ice core records drilled from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet divide and Law Dome on the periphery of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Separated by ~3500 km, the records span calendar years 1850ndash;2001 and reflect the rBC distribution over the Indian and Pacific ocean sectors of the Southern Ocean. Concentrations of rBC in the ice cores displayed significant variability at annual to decadal time scales, notably in ENSO-QBO and AAO frequency bands. The delay observed between rBC and ENSO variability suggested that ENSO does not directly affect rBC transport, but rather continental hydrology, subsequent fire regimes, and aerosol emissions. From 1850 to 1950, the two ice core records were uncorrelated but were highly correlated from 1950 to 2002 (cross-correlation coefficient at annual resolution: r = 0.54, p lt; 0.01) due to a common decrease in rBC variability. The decrease in ice-core rBC from the 1950s to late 1980s displays similarities with inventories of SH rBC grass fires and biofuel emissions, which show reduced emission estimates over that period."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emBisiaux, M. M., Edwards, R., McConnell, J. R., Curran, M. A. J., Van Ommen, T. D., Smith, A. M., Neumann, T. A., Pasteris, D. R., Penner, J. E., and Taylor, K.: Changes in black carbon deposition to Antarctica from two high-resolution ice core records, 1850ndash;2000 AD, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 12, 4107-4115, doi:10.5194/acp-12-4107-2012, 2012./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Most temperature proxies really are linear functions of annual mean temperature/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00632.1"A test for non-linearity in temperature proxy records - Stoslash;ve emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Are temperature proxy records linear recorders of past temperature conditions? We apply a statistical test for linearity to 15 millennial-long proxy records with annual resolution that where shown to significantly respond to Northern Hemisphere annual mean temperature selected from a collection of 30 proxies. The test, based on generalized additive modeling, shows that most of the proxies can indeed be shown to be linear functions of annual mean temperature, but two proxy records do not appear to have a linear relationship with temperature -- this supports the assumption of linearity in most climate reconstruction work. The method tests for non-linearity in a proxy relative to the group of proxies it is being used together with. We test robustness of the results and find that the results are stable to choice of proxies. The linearity-testing method is quite general and could in the future be used for larger and more extensive sets of proxies."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emBaring;rd Stoslash;ve, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Peter Thejll, Journal of Climate 2012, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00632.1./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"New technique for measuring past methane mixing ratios from ice cores/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/5/999/2012/amt-5-999-2012.html"Continuous measurements of methane mixing ratios from ice cores - Stowasser emet al./em (2012)/a [a href="http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/5/999/2012/amt-5-999-2012.pdf"strongFULL TEXT/strong/a]/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "This work presents a new, field-deployable technique for continuous, high-resolution measurements of methane mixing ratios from ice cores. The technique is based on a continuous flow analysis system, where ice core samples cut along the long axis of an ice core are melted continuously. The past atmospheric air contained in the ice is separated from the melt water stream via a system for continuous gas extraction. The extracted gas is dehumidified and then analyzed by a Wavelength Scanned-Cavity Ring Down Spectrometer for methane mixing ratios. We assess the performance of the new measurement technique in terms of precision (plusmn;0.8 ppbv, 1sigma;), accuracy (plusmn;8 ppbv), temporal (ca. 100 s), and spatial resolution (ca. 5 cm). Using a firn air transport model, we compare the resolution of the measurement technique to the resolution of the atmospheric methane signal as preserved in ice cores in Greenland. We conclude that our measurement technique can resolve all climatically relevant variations as preserved in the ice down to an ice depth of at least 1980 m (66 000 yr before present) in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling ice core. Furthermore, we describe the modifications, which are necessary to make a commercially available spectrometer suitable for continuous methane mixing ratio measurements from ice cores."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emStowasser, C., Buizert, C., Gkinis, V., Chappellaz, J., Schuuml;pbach, S., Bigler, M., Faiuml;n, X., Sperlich, P., Baumgartner, M., Schilt, A., and Blunier, T.: Continuous measurements of methane mixing ratios from ice cores, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 5, 999-1013, doi:10.5194/amt-5-999-2012, 2012./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Evidence for global Little Ice Age from West Antarctic borehole temperatures/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL051260.shtml"Little Ice Age cold interval in West Antarctica: Evidence from borehole temperature at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide - Orsi emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "The largest climate anomaly of the last 1000 years in the Northern Hemisphere was the Little Ice Age (LIA) from 1400ndash;1850 C.E., but little is known about the signature of this event in the Southern Hemisphere, especially in Antarctica. We present temperature data from a 300 m borehole at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. Results show that WAIS Divide was colder than the last 1000-year average from 1300 to 1800 C.E. The temperature in the time period 1400ndash;1800 C.E. was on average 0.52 plusmn; 0.28deg;C colder than the last 100-year average. This amplitude is about half of that seen at Greenland Summit (GRIP). This result is consistent with the idea that the LIA was a global event, probably caused by a change in solar and volcanic forcing, and was not simply a seesaw-type redistribution of heat between the hemispheres as would be predicted by some ocean-circulation hypotheses. The difference in the magnitude of the LIA between Greenland and West Antarctica suggests that the feedbacks amplifying the radiative forcing may not operate in the same way in both regions."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emOrsi, A. J., B. D. Cornuelle, and J. P. Severinghaus (2012), Little Ice Age cold interval in West Antarctica: Evidence from borehole temperature at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L09710, doi:10.1029/2012GL051260./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Yet another analysis suggests that greenhouse gases and aerosols controlled temperature after 1950/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/348g07361627360x/"A fractal climate response function can simulate global average temperature trends of the modern era and the past millennium - van Hateren (2012)/a [a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/348g07361627360x/fulltext.pdf"strongFULL TEXT/strong/a]/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "A climate response function is introduced that consists of six exponential (low-pass) filters with weights depending as a power law on their eme/em-folding times. The response of this two-parameter function to the combined forcings of solar irradiance, greenhouse gases, and SOsub2/sub-related aerosols is fitted simultaneously to reconstructed temperatures of the past millennium, the response to solar cycles, the response to the 1991 Pinatubo volcanic eruption, and the modern 1850ndash;2010 temperature trend. Assuming strong long-term modulation of solar irradiance, the quite adequate fit produces a climate response function with a millennium-scale response to doubled COsub2/sub concentration of 2.0 plusmn; 0.3 deg;C (mean plusmn; standard error), of which about 50 % is realized with eme/em-folding times of 0.5 and 2 years, about 30 % with eme/em-folding times of 8 and 32 years, and about 20 % with eme/em-folding times of 128 and 512 years. The transient climate response (response after 70 years of 1 % yearly rise of COsub2/sub concentration) is 1.5 plusmn; 0.2 deg;C. The temperature rise from 1820 to 1950 can be attributed for about 70 % to increased solar irradiance, while the temperature changes after 1950 are almost completely produced by the interplay of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and aerosols. The SOsub2/sub-related forcing produces a small temperature drop in the years 1950ndash;1970 and an inflection of the temperature curve around the year 2000. Fitting with a tenfold smaller modulation of solar irradiance produces a less adequate fit with millennium-scale and transient climate responses of 2.5 plusmn; 0.4 and 1.9 plusmn; 0.3 deg;C, respectively."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emJ. H. van Hateren, Climate Dynamics, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-012-1375-3./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"New derivations for atmospheric lifetimes of some GHG's/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL051440.shtml"Reactive greenhouse gas scenarios: Systematic exploration of uncertainties and the role of atmospheric chemistry - Prather emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Knowledge of the atmospheric chemistry of reactive greenhouse gases is needed to accurately quantify the relationship between human activities and climate, and to incorporate uncertainty in our projections of greenhouse gas abundances. We present a method for estimating the fraction of greenhouse gases attributable to human activities, both currently and for future scenarios. Key variables used to calculate the atmospheric chemistry and budgets of major non-COsubspan style="font-size: small;"2/span/sub greenhouse gases are codified along with their uncertainties, and then used to project budgets and abundances under the new climate-change scenarios. This new approach uses our knowledge of changing abundances and lifetimes to estimate current total anthropogenic emissions, independently and possibly more accurately than inventory-based scenarios. We derive a present-day atmospheric lifetime for methane (CHsubspan style="font-size: small;"4/span/sub) of 9.1 plusmn; 0.9 y and anthropogenic emissions of 352 plusmn; 45 Tg/y (64% of total emissions). For Nsubspan style="font-size: small;"2/span/subO, corresponding values are 131 plusmn; 10 y and 6.5 plusmn; 1.3 TgN/y (41% of total); and for HFC-134a, the lifetime is 14.2 plusmn; 1.5 y."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emPrather, M. J., C. D. Holmes, and J. Hsu (2012), Reactive greenhouse gas scenarios: Systematic exploration of uncertainties and the role of atmospheric chemistry, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L09803, doi:10.1029/2012GL051440./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"Causes and differences of temperature response of tree species radial growth/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j883w14n3360516/"Radial growth change of temperate tree species in response to altered regional climate and air quality in the period 1901ndash;2008 - Kint emet al./em (2012)/a/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong "Both increasing and decreasing 20th century growth trends have been reported in forests throughout Europe, but only for few species and areas suitable modelling techniques have been used to distinguish individual tree growth (operating on a local scale) from growth change due to exogenous factors (operating on a broad geographical scale). This study relates for the first time observed growth changes, in terms of basal area increment (BAI) of dominant trees of pedunculate oak, common beech and Scots pine, in north-west European temperate lowland forests (Flanders) to climate, atmospheric COsub2/sub and tropospheric Osub3/sub concentrations, N deposition, site quality and forest structure for more than a century (the period 1901ndash;2008), applying mixed models. Growth change during the 20th century is observed for oak (increasing growth) and beech (increasing growth until the 1960s, growth decline afterwards), but not for pine. It was possible to relate growth change of oak and beech to climate time series and N deposition trends. Adding time series for COsub2/sub and Osub3/sub concentration did not significantly improve model results. For oak and beech a switch from positive to negative growth response with increasing nitrogen deposition throughout time is observed. Growth increase for oak is mainly determined by the interaction between growing season temperature and soil water recharge. It is reasonable to assume that the observed growth trend for oak will continue for as long as early season water availability is not compromised. The decreasing trend in summer relative air humidity observed since the 1960s in the study area can be a main cause of recent beech BAI decrease. A further growth decline of beech can be expected, independent of site quality."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emVincent Kint, Wim Aertsen, Matteo Campioli, Dries Vansteenkiste and Andy Delcloo, et al., Climatic Change, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0465-x./em/p hr / h3 style="text-align: justify;"CLASSIC OF THE WEEK: Lord Kelvin (1864)/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"strongOn the secular cooling of the earth - Lord Kelvin (1864)/strong [a href="http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/olappi/kurssimateriaalit/cog103/Kelvin%20On%20the%20secular%20cooling%20of%20the%20earth%20Trans%20r%20soc%20london%201890.pdf"strongFULL TEXT (partial)/strong/a]/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongAbstract:/strong No abstract. Quote from the beginning of the paper: "For eighteen years it has pressed on my mind, that essential principles of Thermo-dynamics have been overlooked by those geologists who uncompromisingly oppose all paroxysmal hypostheses, and maintain not only that we have examples now before us, on the earth, of all the different actions by which its crust has been modified in geological history, but that these actions have never, or have not on the whole, been more violent in the past time than they are at present."/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongCitation:/strong emLord Kelvin (William Thomson), Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. XXIII, pp. 167169, 1864. Read April 28, 1862./em/p p class="greenbox" style="text-align: justify;"This is a cross-post from a href="http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/"AGW Observer/a. When each paper is published, it is notified in AGW Observer a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/AGW-Observer/123870914333344"Facebook page/a and a href="https://twitter.com/AGWobserver"Twitter page/a. At least some of these are also retweeted in Skeptical Science Twitter page. Here's a href="http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/articles/"the archive for the research papers of previous weeks/a. If this sort of thing interests you, be sure to check out a href="http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/"A Few Things Illconsidered/a. They also have a weekly posting containing lots of links to new research and other climate related news./p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/EPA Kills Jobs Facebook Ad.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=19263EPA Kills Jobs Facebook Ad.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pa href=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=FreedomWorksFreedomWorks/a, the sister organization to the a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-manifestation-kochtopus-empireKoch-funded Americans for Prosperity/a (span class=capsAFP/span), has launched a new website and advertising campaign to convince American voters that the Obama administration and the span class=capsEPA/span are out to destroy American jobs.br / br / FreedomWorks has been a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/koch-industries-funding-anti-climate-agenda-and-now-democratic-senatorsinstrumental in creating the Tea Party/anbsp;in America, bankrolling the so-called ldquo;grassrootsrdquo; group and a href=http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/04/09/37433/lobbyists-planning-teaparties/fueling their hatred against the Obama administration/a by spreading false information. In addition to early funding from the Kochs, FreedomWorks (formerly called a href=http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/citizens-for-a-sound-economy/Citizens for a Sound Economy/a) has alsonbsp;a href=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=FreedomWorksreceived funding/anbsp;from the tobacco industry.br / br / The advertising campaign is prevalent on Facebook, with the ad seen above appearing on numerous user pages. But therersquo;s a problem with the current ad ndash; FreedomWorks didnrsquo;t take the time to check their work, resulting in the ad directing interested users to an invalid web address. Clicking on the Facebook link takes you to ldquo;EPAKillJobs.com,rdquo; instead of ldquo;EPAKillsJobs.com.rdquo; Therersquo;s no telling how many confused conservatives attempted to visit the site, only to receive an errornbsp;message./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/freedomworks-creates-error-filled-site-accuse-epa-killing-jobs target=_blankread more/a/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/WStandard.c1.v17-34.May21.Cover_.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=8350WStandard.c1.v17-34.May21.Cover_.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pIn its a href=http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/new-phrenology_644420.html?nopager=1latest cover story/a, the conservative emWeekly Standard/em has decided to try to refute, outside of the scientific literature, the large body of research on the psychological underpinnings of political ideology (summarized in my book a href=http://republicanbrain.com/emThe Republican Brain/em/a). The critique, written by Andrew Ferguson, fails badly, in part because it is highly selective at best. Detailsa href=http://scienceprogressaction.org/intersection/2012/05/the-weekly-standard-slam-the-republican-brain/ here/a./p pBut whatrsquo;s particularly interesting is how Ferguson handles the overwhelming evidence of modern day conservative science denial. The basic answer is that he trivializes it. Therersquo;s really just one sentence on the matter in his article, and itrsquo;s prettynbsp;mystifying:/p p style=margin-left:.5in;[Mooneyrsquo;s] list of [conservative] false claims is instructive. emAlong with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming/em, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palinnbsp;hypothesizedhellip;./p pFerguson then goes on to try to defend some of these false claims. He even manages to stand up for ldquo;death panels,rdquo; which was PolitiFactrsquo;s 2009 ldquo;a href=http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/lie of the year/ardquo;!/p pBut notably, Ferguson does nothing to defend evolution denial or global warming denial#8212;or to suggest that conservative science critics are actually emfactually right/em in thesenbsp;areas./p pSo what, precisely, is going on here? Is emThe Weekly Standard/em saying that it is ldquo;hillbillyrdquo; to deny global warming and evolution, and it is too smart a publication for such nonsense? That seems unlikely, for reasons Irsquo;ll explainnbsp;below./p pOr alternatively, is Ferguson suggesting that emIrsquo;m saying/em that such beliefs are ldquo;hillbillyrdquo;? But that doesnrsquo;t make sense eithermdash;if only because Irsquo;m certainly saying no suchnbsp;thing./p pI know, I know#8212;it can be tough to figure out what conservatives intellectuals are saying sometimes. But let#39;s try to make sense ofnbsp;this./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/weekly-standard-hillbilly-climate-denial target=_blankread more/a/p

p style="text-align: justify;"CRUTEM is a version of the surface temperature record based on weather station data spanning the last one and a half centuries. It is produced by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and provides the land component of the widely quoted HadCRUT global temperature record. Version 3 of this dataset (CRUTEM3) was the current version from 2006-2012, however in the past few months a new version, CRUTEM4, has been released./p p style="text-align: justify;"Why produce a new version? Studies from the a href="http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/land-warming-record"ECMWF/a and a href="http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=ha00510u"GISS/a identified a significant bias in the CRUTEM3 record: The dataset has been under-reporting recent temperatures, owing to poor sampling of high Northern latitudes which have displayed the fastest warming over the last decade. The coverage issue has been examined in previous articles on a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/hadcrut_cool_or_uncool.html"HadCRUT3/a and a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/gistemp_cool_or_uncool.html"GISTEMP/a./p p style="text-align: justify;"CRUTEM4 (a href="http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/crutem4/CRUTEM4_accepted.pdf"Jones emet al/em, 2012/a) takes the existing CRUTEM3 dataset and adds a significant number of new records. 344 stations were added in the Russian federation, 223 in other former USSR states, 125 in the Arctic and 7 in Greenland. A number of other records were updated. 312 records which were adjusted by CRU in the 1980s for inhomogeneity were either replaced with other records or had their adjustments reassessed. The total number of temperature series in the dataset is now ~5500, although only about 3000 can be updated on a monthly basis./p !--more-- h3 style="text-align: justify;"Does the update address the issues?/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"Let's take a look. Figure 1 shows a coverage map for the last 15 years, with an indication of temperature change given by color. The figure shows the difference in temperature between the mean for 2006-2011 and the mean for 1996-2001 (red=+2deg;C and blue=-2deg;C). Note that the rectangular projection used here does exaggerate area at higher latitudes, so this figure does not give an accurate representation of the area covered./p pimg style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Figure 1: CRUTEM3 and CRUTEM4 maps 2006-2011 minus 1996-2001" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/cru4-maps.gif" alt="Figure 1: CRUTEM3 and CRUTEM4 maps 2006-2011 minus 1996-2001" width="362" height="182" //p p style="text-align: justify;"Coverage of Canada, Asia and Australia has improved significantly in the new dataset. Coverage of Africa and Antarctica remains poor./p p style="text-align: justify;"A more representative measure of coverage is the fraction of the land surface area which is covered by the dataset. This is shown in Figure 2. (This figure was calculated using a high-resolution land mask, and thus the numbers are slightly lower than the corresponding figures in the distributed CRUTEM data files.)/p pimg style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Figure 2: Land coverage CRUTEM4 vs CRUTEM3" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/cru4-coverage.gif" alt="Figure 2: Land coverage CRUTEM4 vs CRUTEM3" width="500" height="300" //p p style="text-align: justify;"Apart from a recent anomaly in 2010 land coverage has improved from around 60 to 70%. (Antarctica, which is still largely uncovered, comprises about 10% of the Earth's land surface.)/p h3 style="text-align: justify;"A confusion of conventions/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"How have the global land temperature estimates been affected by the new dataset? Unfortunately at this point we run into a problem. There are several ways of calculating a land temperature estimate. First there is a choice of how to calculate the average:/p ol style="text-align: justify;" liA global area average over all the land./li liHemispheric averages, combined according to the formula (0.68xTsubNH/sub + 0.32xTsubSH/sub), where the coefficients are the fractions of the global land area in each hemisphere. This gives a result similar to method 1 (or identical if coverage is uniform)./li liHemispheric averages, combined according to the formula 0.5x(TsubNH/sub + TsubSH/sub)./li /ol p style="text-align: justify;"Then, there is a choice of how to treat coastal map cells:/p ol style="list-style-type: upper-alpha; text-align: justify;" liWeight them according to the proportion of land in that cell./li liTreat them as 100% land./li /ol p style="text-align: justify;"NCDC and BEST seem to use method 1A for their land products (i.e. a true land-area average). CRUTEM3 used method 3B (equal weighted hemispheres, no weighting of coastal cells). CRUTEM4 changed to method 2B (land area weighted hemispheres, no weighting of coastal cells). The GISTEMP dTs land products don't fit any of the above categories./p p style="text-align: justify;"When it comes to calculating a global emland-ocean/em temperature average, all the options give roughly the same answers, because the hemispheric land-ocean distribution cancels, and both parts of coastal cells are used. However for emland-only/em temperature indices, the results can differ significantly. When calculating a difference between two series, such as CRUTEM3 and CRUTEM4 the same convention must used for both. For subsequent calculations we will use the CRUTEM4 convention (i.e. 2B)./p h3Temperature series/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"Figure 3 provides a comparison of the CRUTEM3 and CRUTEM4 temperature series using a 12 month moving average./p div style="text-align: center;" div id="flipimage1a" style="display: block;"img title="Figure 3: Comparison between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/cru4-compare.gif" alt="Figure 3: Comparison between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" width="500" height="300" //div div id="flipimage1b" style="display: none;"img title="Figure 3: Comparison between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/cru4-compare-1980.gif" alt="Figure 3: Comparison between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" width="500" height="300" //div input onclick="document.getElementById('flipimage1a').style.display='block';document.getElementById('flipimage1b').style.display='none';" checked="checked" name="flipimage1" type="radio" value="on" / 1900-2010 input onclick="document.getElementById('flipimage1a').style.display='none';document.getElementById('flipimage1b').style.display='block';" name="flipimage1" type="radio" value="on" / 1980-2010/div p style="text-align: justify;"Note that with the temperature estimate for the strong El-Nino year of 1998 has decreased, however temperature estimates for the subsequent years have generally increased. El-Nino is a tropical phenomena,nbsp; thus it is to be expected that increasing high latitude coverage would reduce the impact of the El-Nino cycle on the temperature record./p p style="text-align: justify;"More than a third of the difference over recent years comes from the switch from reporting the mean of the hemispheric means to the more conventional global average. Using only the weighted hemispheric series to ensure a like-for-like comparison, the trends in the series shown above over the 15 year period 1996-2010 are 0.213deg;C/decade for CRUTEM3 and 0.274deg;C/decade for CRUTEM4./p p style="text-align: justify;"How have the global land temperature estimates changed between the datasets? Figure 4 shows the difference between the estimated global land temperature./p pimg style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Figure 4: Difference between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/cru4-difference.gif" alt="Figure 4: Difference between CRUTEM4 and CRUTEM3" //p p style="text-align: justify;"The effect of increasing the high latitude coverage has increased the global land temperature anomaly, as more of the rapidly warming high-latitude regions are included in the data. The impact of the change matches the onset ofnbsp;a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/gistemp-coverage-zonal.gif"rapid Arctic warming/a as expected. The actual differences show significant inter-annual variability./p p style="text-align: justify;"strongComparison to other land temperature series?br //strong/p p style="text-align: justify;"NCDC and the Berkeley Earth project also report land-only temperature records, and it is interesting to make a comparison of the series. However the significant impact of the choice of averaging convention complicates the comparison. In their a href="http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-averaging-process.pdf"draft paper/a the BEST team state the problem as follows:/p blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"emWe note that the difference in land average trends amongst the prior groups has not generally been discussed in the literature. In part, the spread in existing land-only records may have received little attention because the three groups have greater agreement when considering global averages that include oceans ... . We strongly suspect that some of the difference in land-only averages is an artifact of the different approaches to defining ldquo;land-onlyrdquo; temperature analyses./em/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"A second issue is thatnbsp; the interpretation of a comparison can be affected by the choice of baseline. As a result of these issues, while you can compare the published series at a href="http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:60/offset:0.12/plot/best/mean:60"Wood for Trees/a the results should be treated with caution./p p style="text-align: justify;"My own attempt at a like-for-like comparison will be presented in a later article which will gather together some more tentative analysis of the Hadley/CRU datasets and look at possible sources of bias in the resulting records./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Summary/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"The CRUTEM4 update set out to reduce a known bias in the dataset, identified in multiple studies, by improving land coverage. While coverage is still far short of complete it has improved significantly. The effects on the temperature record are minimal before 1990, but have resulted in a significant increase in the trend over the past 15 years. This corresponds well to the period over which the Arctic has shown rapid warming./p p style="text-align: justify;"Additionally, a change in the definition of global land temperature has been made bringing CRUTEM4 somewhat into line with the other records. While this change has a significant impact on the recent land temperature trends it has minimal impact on the more frequently quoted land-ocean indices./p p style="text-align: justify;"The CRUTEM4 land data is primarily of interest for its contribution to the global surface temperature series, HadCRUT4. This will be the focus of the next article in the series./p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/shutterstock_71070031.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=13683shutterstock_71070031.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pFollowing the a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/corporate-exodus-heartland-institute-continues-usaa-and-insurers-bailMay 4 shocking Unabomber billboard campaign/anbsp;and subsequent departures of a href=http://forecastthefacts.org/press/releases/2012/5/14/eli-lilly-bbt-and-pepsi-confirm-they-will-no-longe/more of Heartland#39;s corporate donors/a, Heartland was likely heartened to add the a href=http://www.ilcoalassn.com/Illinois Coal Association/a as a new Gold Sponsor for its forthcoming span class=capsICCC/span-7 quot;climatequot; conference.a href=http://www.ilcoalassn.com/nbsp; /aAlthough span class=capsICA/span was not on the a href=http://www.webcitation.org/67WZ0DZbO05/09/12 sponsor list/a,nbsp; it joined the usual collection of thinktank sponsorsnbsp; no later than a href=http://www.webcitation.org/67f8Js64605/14/12/a,nbsp; Maybe the billboard finally convinced them to come outnbsp;publicly?/p pIn the a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy2012 Fundraising plan/a p.24,nbsp; a href=http://www.ohiovalleycoal.com/Murray Energy /agave $100,000 in 2010 and was expected to give $40,000 in 2012.nbsp;span class=titlenbsp; /spanIts a href=http://www.ohiovalleycoal.com/map.shtmlsubsidiary/a, The American Coal Company is a a href=http://www.ilcoalassn.com/memberslist.htmlmember of the span class=capsICA/span/a, along with Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, amongnbsp;others./p pIn the span class=capsPDF/span at a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/fake-science-fakexperts-funny-finances-free-taxFake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax/a, pp.84-85 I showed Heartland#39;s Environment and Climate News to have consistent views on somenbsp;topics:/p pNegatives included the emspan class=capsEPA/span /em(2160 mentions), emrenewable /em(761), emwind farm/em (333), emwind power /em(277), emsolar power/em (209), emwind turbine/emnbsp;(188)./p pemMercury/em (941 mentions) was generally viewed as span class=capsOK/span, in fish or the environment, unless it came from CFLs.emnbsp; Coal /em(935) was oftennbsp;praised./p pIn any case, the span class=capsICA/span#39;s post-billboard sponsorship of span class=capsICCC/span-7 is a bold publicnbsp;leap./p div class=field field-type-nodereference field-field-profile-related div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=field-label-inline-first Related Profile(s) :nbsp;/div a href=/joseph-bastJoseph Bast/a /div /div /div pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/illinois-coal-association-emerges-heartland-denial-palooza-sponsor target=_blankread more/a/p

h2strongspan style="color: #0000ff;"SkS Highlights/span/strong/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"The first article out of thenbsp;chute, Dana'snbsp;nbsp;strongnbsp;a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzens-clouded-vision-part1.html"Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science/anbsp;/strongcreated the biggest buzz of comments for the week.nbsp;nbsp;MarkR'snbsp;strongnbsp;a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/turbines_texas.html"Turbines in Texas mix up nighttime heat/anbsp;/strongstirred-upnbsp;the second highest number of comments. Coming in thirdnbsp;wasnbsp;Dana'sstrongnbsp;a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/tom-harris-carleton-university-climate-misinformation-class.html"Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class/a. /strongTom Harris himselfnbsp;actually dropped a couple of comments on the thread./p h2 style="text-align: justify;"strongspan style="color: #0000ff;"span style="color: #0000ff;"Toon of the Week/span/span/strong/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"strong/strongnbsp;img title="Hank D and the Bee: A Bunch of Hot Air" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/2012Toon19.jpg" alt="2012Toon19" width="500" height="580" //p !--more-- h2 style="text-align: justify;"strongspan style="color: #0000ff;"span style="color: #0000ff;"Quote of the Week/span/span/strong/h2 blockquote pspan style="color: #000000;""We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising mdash; and itrsquo;s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions."strong /strong/span/p /blockquote p style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #000000;"strongSource: "a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?_r=3"Game Over for the Climate/a" /strongOp-ed by strongJames Hansen/strong, New York Times, May 9, 2012/span/p h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #0000ff;"Issue of the Week/span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #000000;"Are you reluctant to ask a "dumb question" on a comment thread for fear of being lectured to by one or more of members of the SkS author team?/span/p h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #000000;"span style="color: #0000ff;"Words of the Week/span /span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"strongClimate:/strong Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system. In various chapters in this report different averaging periods, such as a period of 20 years, are also used.strongnbsp;/strong/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongClimate system: /strongThe climate system is the highly complex system consisting of five major components: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the land surface and the biosphere, and the interactions between them. The climate system evolves in time under the influence of its own internal dynamics and because of external forcings such as volcanic eruptions, solar variations and anthropogenic forcings such as the changing composition of the atmosphere and land-use change.strongspan style="text-decoration: underline;"nbsp;/span/strong/p p style="text-align: justify;"strongClimate change: /strongClimate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use. Note that the Unite Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in its Article 1, defines climate change as: lsquo;a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periodsrsquo;. The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, and climate variability attributable to natural causes. See also emClimate variability; Detection and Attribution/em./p p style="text-align: justify;"strongSource: a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_glossary.shtml"Annex I (Glossary) /a/strongto Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report./p h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #0000ff;"The Week in Review/span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"A complete listing of the articles posted on SkS during the past week./p ul style="text-align: justify;" li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Speed-of-Greenland-Glaciers_NSF.html"Analysis of Speed of Greenland Glaciers Gives New Insight for Rising Sea Level/anbsp;/strongby John Hartz/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Arctic-Winter-Analysis.html"Arctic Winter Analysis/a/stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Arctic-Winter-Analysis.html"/anbsp;by Neven/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/two-centuries-climate-science-3.html"Two Centuries of Climate Science: part three - Manabe to the present day, 1966-2012/a/stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/two-centuries-climate-science-3.html"/anbsp;by John Mason/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/tom-harris-carleton-university-climate-misinformation-class.html"Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class/anbsp;/strongby Dana/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/turbines_texas.html"Turbines in Texas mix up nighttime heat/anbsp;/strongby Mark R/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/101-responses-Ian-Plimer-climate-questions.html"101 responses to Ian Plimer's climate questions/anbsp;/strongby John Cook/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-clouded-vision-part2.html"Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 2: Risk/a/stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-clouded-vision-part2.html"/anbsp;by Dana/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/new_research_18_2012.html"New research from last week 18/2012/a/stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/new_research_18_2012.html"/anbsp;by Ari Jokimauml;ki/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"stronga href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzens-clouded-vision-part1.html"Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science/anbsp;/strongby Dana/li /ul h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #0000ff;"Coming Soon/span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"spanA list of articles that are in the SkS pipeline. Most of these articles, but not necessarily all, will be posted during the week./spannbsp;/p ul style="text-align: justify;" li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongCRUTEM4: A detailed look/strong (Kevin C)/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongNew research from last week/strong 19/2012 (Ari Jokimauml;ki)/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongClimate Change Consequences - Often Unexpected/strong (Dana)nbsp;/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongDavid Evans: All at Sea about Ocean Warming and Sea Level Rise/strong (Rob Painting)nbsp;/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongResolving Confusion about Modeled and Observed Ocean Heat Content/strong (Dana)nbsp;/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongOpen letter to an anonymous climate scientist/strong (Dumb Scientist)nbsp;/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongIn Search Of: Himalayan Ice Loss/strong (mspelto, Daniel Bailey)nbsp;/li li style="margin-bottom: 5px;"strongLatest Southern Ocean research shows continuing deep ocean change/strong (John Hartz)nbsp;/li /ul h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #0000ff;"SkS in the News/span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #000000;"a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-predictions-hansen-1981.html"Lessons from Past Predictions: Hansen 1981/a was ra href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/08/479652/lessons-from-past-predictions-hansen-1981/"e-posted by Climate Progress/a. nbsp;/span/p pa href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzens-clouded-vision-part1.html"Lindzen's Clouded Vision, Part 1: Science/a and a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-clouded-vision-part2.html"Part 2: Risk/a was re-posted by a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/09/480733/a-cloudy-day-for-climate-skeptics-mainstream-research-discredits-lindzen-theory/"Climate Progress/a and a href="http://planetsave.com/2012/05/11/low-climate-sensitivity-theory-last-climate-skeptic-claim-gets-debunked-x-3/?utm_source=Planetsave%20News"PlanetSave/a./p h2 style="text-align: justify;"span style="color: #0000ff;"SkS Spotlights/span/h2 p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.awi.de/en/home/"strongThe Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research/strong/a:nbsp;Polar and Marine research are central themes of Global system and Environmental Science. The Alfred Wegener Institute conducts research in the Arctic, the Antarctic and at temperate latitudes. It coordinates Polar research in Germany and provides both the necessary equipment and the essential logistic back up for polar expeditions. Recent additional research themes include North Sea Research, contributions to Marine Biological Monitoring, Marine Pollution Research, Investigation of naturally occuring marine substances and technical marine developments./p p style="text-align: justify;"The Institute was established as a public foundation in 1980. The Foundation Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research includes the a class="internal-link" title="Ouml;ffnet einen internen Link im aktuellen Fenster" href="http://www.awi.de/en/institute/en/institute/sites/bremerhaven/"Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven/a the a class="internal-link" title="Ouml;ffnet einen internen Link im aktuellen Fenster" href="http://www.awi.de/en/institute/en/institute/sites/potsdam/"Potsdam Research Unit/a (1992), the a class="internal-link" title="Ouml;ffnet einen internen Link im aktuellen Fenster" href="http://www.awi.de/en/institute/en/institute/sites/helgoland/"Biologische Anstalt Helgoland/a and the a class="internal-link" title="Ouml;ffnet einen internen Link im aktuellen Fenster" href="http://www.awi.de/en/institute/en/institute/sites/sylt/"Wadden Sea Station Sylt/a. It is a member of the a href="http://www.helmholtz.de/" target="_top"Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres/a; the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (a href="http://www.bmbf.de/" target="_top"BMBF/a) covers 90% of financing, the state of Bremen 8% and the states of Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein provide 1% each. The Foundation employs over 900 staff and has a total budget of 100 million Euro in 2005./p pnbsp;/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg alt=image/jpeg icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/shutterstock_49157602.jpg type=image/jpeg; length=18347shutterstock_49157602.jpg/a/div /div /div /div pAt an a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/gas-fracking-industry-using-military-psychological-warfare-tactics-and-personnel-u-s-communitiesindustry public relations conference/a last year, Michael Kehs of Chesapeake Energy described a Wall Street Journal a href=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904006104576502531479527412.htmlop-ed/a to gathered oil and gas officials, saying it pointed out the industry#39;s quot;credibility problem.quot;br / br / ldquo;And Irsquo;m sure some of it relates to defensiveness,rdquo; Kehs added. (a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/MIchael-Kehs.mp3span class=capsMP3/span Audio/a)nbsp;/p pSmallnbsp;wonder./p pFor years, the oil and gas industry has adopted a a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/gas-fracking-industry-using-military-psychological-warfare-tactics-and-personnel-u-s-communitieswar-like mentality/a towards its critics. When confronted with problems caused by drilling and fracking, instead of acknowledging them and working to prevent more, their approach has too often been to cover up the issues while attacking any critics who make problems knownnbsp;publicly./p pThis pattern has sharply accelerated in recentnbsp;months./p pEarlier this month, Al Armendariz, the span class=capsEPA/span#39;s regional administrator for the oil-and-gas rich states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, a href=http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/e-p-a-official-resigns-over-crucify-flap/sent his letter of resignation/a to Lisa Jackson, head of the span class=capsEPA/span. Mr. Armendariz had come under heavy fire over comments he made two years ago at a local government meeting innbsp;Texas.nbsp;/p pIn explaining his law enforcement philosophy, he analogized his agency#39;s strategy to the early Romans, who he said would quot;crucifyquot; law-breakers to make examples of them. After a video of these remarks was a href=http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/224515-epa-official-resigns-over-crucify-commentscirculated last week/a by Sen. James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, who counts the oil and gas industry as one of his a href=http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cycle=Careeramp;type=Camp;cid=N00005582amp;newMem=Nlargest donors/a, a firestorm of controversy brokenbsp;out./p pAs Media Matters a href=http://mediamatters.org/research/201204270015pointed out/a, when Mr. Armendariz said he intended to make an example of offenders, he was referring only to companies that actually broke the law #8212; but this was not enough to save hisnbsp;career./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/oil-and-gas-industry-moves-silence-critics target=_blankread more/a/p

pThis is a reprint of a a href="http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?org=NSFamp;cntn_id=124102amp;preview=false"news release/a posted by the National Science Foundation on May 4, 2012./p pimg src="http://www.nsf.gov/images/greenlineshort.jpg" border="0" alt="" vspace="2" width="368" height="4" //p pstrongResearchers determine that although glaciers continue to increase in velocity, the rate at which they can dump ice into the ocean is limited./strong/p pstrongimg title="Jakobshavn Isfjord (ice fjord)--the largest outlet glacier on Greenland's West Coast." src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/JakobshavnIceFjord.jpg" alt="Photo of Jakobshavn Ice Fjord" width="520" height="345" //strong/p pspan id="photocaption" class="caption" style="background-color: #ffffff;"!--more--The north branch of Jakobshavn Isbrae is in the upper left corner of the image, with several newly calved icebergs in front of it. The larger, faster moving, south branch is located near the upper right corner. Prior to about 2003, both branches merged to create a large floating ice tongue that extended beyond the iceberg covered area visible in this image. Since the 1990, the glacier calving front (terminus) has retreated about 18 km (11 miles). Now, it is only in the winter that both branches sometimes merge to form a much smaller seasonal ice tongue, which breaks up in the spring.br /br /Credit: emPolar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington/em/span/p hr / pChanges in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland's contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century could be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible./p pThe finding comes from a paper funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA and published in today's (May 4, 2012) journal emScience/em./p pWhile the study indicates that a melting Greenland's contributions to rising sea levels could be less than expected, researchers concede that more work needs to be done before any definitive trend can be identified./p pStudies like this one are designed to examine more closely and in greater detail what is actually happening with the ice sheets, often using newer and more precise tools and thereby better defining the parameters that scientists use to make predictions, such as the upper limits of sea-level rise./p p"This study provides more evidence that the rate at which these glaciers can dump ice into the ocean is indeed limited," said Ian Howat, assistant professor of Earth sciences and member of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, a co-author on the paper. "What remains to be seen is how long the acceleration will continue--but it appears that our worst-case scenarios aren't likely."/p pThe fate of the Earth's ice sheets and their potential contributions to sea-level rise as the globe warms are among the major scientific uncertainties cited in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is in part because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have historically been, and in large measure continue to be, relatively sparsely monitored, as compared to other parts of the globe./p pThe faster the glaciers move, the more ice and melt water they release into the ocean./p pIn previous studies, scientists trying to understand the contribution of melting ice to rising sea level in a warming world considered a scenario in which the Greenland glaciers would either double or increase by as much as ten-fold their velocity between 2000 and 2010 and then stabilize at the higher speed./p pThis new study shows Greenland ice would likely move at the lower rate--a doubling of its speed--and contribute about four inches to rising sea level by 2100. The previous studies used the higher speed and estimated the glaciers would contribute nearly 19 inches by the end of this century./p pIn the new study, the scientists extracted a decade-long record of changes in Greenland outlet glaciers by producing velocity maps using data from the Canadian Space Agency's Radarsat-1 satellite, Germany's TerraSar-X satellite and Japan's Advanced Land Observation Satellite. They started with the winter of 2000-01 and then repeated the process for each winter from 2005-06 through 2010-11 and found that the outlet glaciers had not increased in velocity as much as had been speculated./p p"So far, on average we're seeing about a 30 percent speedup in 10 years [of Greenland glaciers, which gives new insight for rising sea level]," said Twila Moon, a University of Washington doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and lead author of the paper documenting the observations./p p"This study is a great example of the power of high-resolution data sets in both space and time, and the importance of looking carefully at as much data as possible in helping make the best predictions we can of future changes", said Henrietta Edmonds, program director for Arctic Natural Sciences in NSF's Office of Polar Programs./p pThe scientists saw no clear indication in the new research that the glaciers will stop gaining speed during the rest of the century, and so by 2100 they could reach or exceed the scenario in which they contribute four inches to sea level rise./p pThe record showed a complex pattern of behavior. Nearly all of Greenland's largest glaciers that end on land move at top speeds of 30 to 325 feet a year, and their changes in speed are small because they are already moving slowly. Glaciers that terminate in fjord ice shelves move at 1,000 feet to a mile a year, but didn't gain speed appreciably during the decade./p pIn the East, Southeast and Northwest areas of Greenland, glaciers that end in the ocean can travel seven miles or more in a year. Their changes in speed varied (some even slowed), but on average the speeds increased by 28 percent in the Northwest and 32 percent in the Southeast during the decade./p pMoon said she was drawn to the research from a desire to take the large store of data available from the satellites and put it into a usable form to understand what is happening to Greenland's ice. "We don't have a really good handle on it and we need to have that if we're going to understand the effects of climate change," she said. "We are going to need to continue to look at all of the ice sheet to see how it's changing, and we are going to need to continue to work on some tough details to understand how individual glaciers change."/p

div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-bimage div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div class=filefield-fileimg class=filefield-icon field-icon-image-png alt=image/png icon src=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png /a href=http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/Blackoutspeakout.png type=image/png; length=75725Blackoutspeakout.png/a/div /div /div /div pWith full page ads in the Globe and Mail and La Presse national newspapers, a major coalition of Canadian environmental non-profits have come together to launch the a href=http://blackoutspeakout.caBlack Out Speak Out/a campaign (a href=http://silenceonparle.ca/Silence, on parle!/a pour lanbsp;Francophonie.)/p pspan style=font-family:quot;Verdanaquot;,quot;sans-serifquot;span class=capsCPAWS/span, David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Equiterre, Environmental Defence, Greenpeace, Nature Canada, Pembina Institute, Sierra Club Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, and span class=capsWWF/span Canada/span ndash; groups representing millions of Canadians ndash; are appealing to all who care about nature and democracy to join them in blacking out their websites on June 4th in protest against the federal government#39;s efforts to weaken many of the country#39;s most important environmental protection measures and silence Canadians hard at work defending the public interest.br / br / Canadian environmental non-profits point to changes in the most recent a href=http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/home-accueil-eng.htmlfederal budget/a, which leaves Ottawa playing a much smaller role in protecting people from harmful projects, while at the same time granting politicians the power to overrule the National Energy Boardrsquo;s experts if powerful industry interests donrsquo;t like its decision -nbsp;irrespective of fish habitat destruction or threats to species atnbsp;risk./p pThe coalition argues that the Federal government will now be able to rubber stamp big projects that powerful oil interests want behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny.br / br / Their core contention is that the Federal government has circumvented the usual process of democratic debate by introducing sweeping change by shoehorning the gutting of environmental protectionsnbsp; into the massive budget withoutnbsp;discussion./p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/canadian-environmental-groups-black-out-speak-out-against-government-threats-nature-democracy target=_blankread more/a/p

p class="greenbox" style="text-align: justify;"This is a re-post from the a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/04/20112012-winter-analysis.html"Arctic Sea Ice blog/a./p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="float: right;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/winterice-small.jpg" alt="winterice-small" width="110" height="70" /I'm starting this blog post off with a conclusion that was reached a while back already: sea ice on the Atlantic and Russian side of the Arctic br /looks vulnerable, sea ice on the Pacific and North American side br /should be thicker./p p style="text-align: justify;"Right, with that out of the way we can now look at various aspects of the 2011/2012 freezing season, and compare them to previous years, to be precise the previous freezing season of 2010/2011, and the freezing seasons leading up to and following that other record year: 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. Simply put: I'll be comparing 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2012 before their respective start of the melting season./p p style="text-align: justify;"I'll try not to use too many words, but I'll be using a lot of images. A bigger version of these images can be found by clicking on them in the original a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/04/20112012-winter-analysis.html"blog post/a./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Ice age/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"I'll start with the a lang="1amp;mod=0amp;yy=2012\\" href="http://www.aari.ru/odata/_d0015.php?lang=1amp;mod=0amp;yy=2012"AARI/a ice age maps. These images are for the end of April, and they look upside down, because it's from the perspective of the Russians who produced them:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="vertical-align: middle; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/AARI-april-comparison-small.jpg" alt="AARI-april-comparison-small" width="500" height="352" //p p style="text-align: justify;"This year, at the end of April, the Arctic seems to hold less of the brown 'old ice' than last year and 2007 (older version), and a tad more than 2008, that had relatively little multi-year ice (MYI) after the 2007 melting season/massacre./p p style="text-align: justify;"Another source that was already mentioned in the a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/a-first-clue.html"A first clue/a blog post, were these images based on data a href="http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/thick-melt.html"compiled/a by NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso from NASA's Nimbus-7 satellite and the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio). The images show the amount of MYI at its maximum, I presume:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Comiso-comparison-small.jpg" alt="Comiso-comparison-small" width="500" height="283" //p !--more-- p style="text-align: justify;"These images look similar to the ones from AARI, with 2012 showing less old ice/MYI than 2007 and 2011, and a bit more than 2008 (look at the graph in the bottom right image). However, at the time a flag was a href="http://diablobanquisa.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/el-agua-atlantica-y-la-banquisa-artica/#comment-391"raised/a by Spanish blogger Diablobanquiso on his excellent a href="http://diablobanquisa.wordpress.com/"blog/a, maintaining there was more MYI than AARI and Comiso indicated. He based himself on a href="http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/ascat_images/ice_image/"ASCAT radar images/a, where slightly brighter white represents older ice. The following image shows March 16th 2011 and March 15th 2012 side by side (unfortunately there are no radar images available from 2007 and 2008), with 2012 merging into an image a href="http://diablobanquisa.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/el-agua-atlantica-y-la-banquisa-artica/#comment-395"made/a by Diablobanquisa, showing what part was missing from AARI and Comiso:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/ASCAT-075-comparison-small.gif" alt="ASCAT-075-comparison-small" width="500" height="250" //p p style="text-align: justify;"In my view he was proven right when James Maslanik and Chuck Fowler a href="http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/04/"produced/a their bi-yearly graph/map for NSIDC, showing March ice age distribution, compared here with our other years of interest:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Maslanik-comparison-small.jpg" alt="Maslanik-comparison-small" width="500" height="469" //p p style="text-align: justify;"Here we see the zone delineated by Diablobanquisa on the ASCAT radar images that reaches much further towards the East Siberian Sea. Could it be that Comiso and AARI overlooked it because it stands out less clear than the rest of the MYI on the radar images? Maybe there's a difference in the way the respective teams define old ice/MYI. Either way, it still looks like 2012 has less old ice/MYI than 2011 and 2007, but more than 2008.nbsp;/p p style="text-align: justify;"This isn't surprising as there has been a lot of transport of ice towards Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago, and through Fram Strait./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"spanSea level pressure and ice driftbr //span/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"The movement of ice floes is largely determined by wind, and wind is largely determined by sea level pressure gradients. So let's first have a look at SLP maps from NOAA's Earth Science Research Laboratory (a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/"daily mean composites page/a). I have divided the freezing season up into 3 parts with a duration of two months each:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SLP-comparison-small.jpg" alt="SLP-comparison-small" width="500" height="419" //p p style="text-align: justify;"Obviously the mean of two months of SLP patterns will look similar from year to year, but there is still some interesting info here. Take a look for instance at the purple-blue region of low pressure around Greenland. Low pressure means winds blowing counter-clockwise, so the intensity of this low pressure area tells us something about ice transport through Fram Strait and towards Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. Darker purple means more transport, and particularly the Dec-Jan row looks intense in this sense for this winter and the winter preceding the 2007 melting season./p p style="text-align: justify;"Also noteworthy is how far the purple blot stretches towards Siberia. Looking at Dec-Jan for this year and last year we see that the low doesn't stretch all the way over Novaya Zemlya, which partially explains why that region showed a retreat of ice earlier on in 2012 and 2011: westerly winds blowing between high and low pressure systems./p p style="text-align: justify;"One last thing I noted is that comparing Dec-Jan from year to year, and also Feb-Mar from year to year, the pressure over Siberia seems to be getting higher every winter. Whether this means anything with regards to the a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/wacc-overview.html"WACC/a theory (Warm Arctic, Cold Continents), I wouldn't know. Either way, it's not relevant to this Winter Analysis./p p style="text-align: justify;"The effect of the various SLP patterns can also be seen on these excellent IFREMER/CERSAT a href="ftp://ftp.ifremer.fr/ifremer/cersat/products/gridded/psi-drift/quicklooks/arctic/merged-ascat-ssmi/"sea ice drift maps/a (hat-tip yet again to a href="http://diablobanquisa.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/el-agua-atlantica-y-la-banquisa-artica/#comment-387"Diablobanquisa/a). I've made an animation covering the October-March period of 2011/2012:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/icedrift2011-2012-small.gif" alt="icedrift2011-2012-small" //p p style="text-align: justify;"In December and January there are a lot of long arrows, pointing towards Fram Strait, but also to Greenland, the Canadian Archipelago and the Beaufort Sea. This explains in large part why the ice pack looks vulnerable on the Atlantic/Siberian side of the Arctic, and should be stronger on the Pacific/North American side of the Arctic. But there are other factors as well./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Air and sea surface temperatures/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"For SAT and SST images we turn again towards that most excellent tool: the a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/" daily mean composites page/a from NOAA's Earth Science Research Laboratory. First of all the surface air temperatures of the four freezing seasons, divided into two periods:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SAT-comparison-small.jpg" alt="SAT-comparison-small" width="500" height="259" //p p style="text-align: justify;"With regards to the first half of the freezing season we see that in 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 large parts of the Arctic are anomalously warm, and the freezing season of 2010/2011 had a very big anomaly over Baffin Bay and the Canadian Archipelago. In the second half of the last freezing season the contrast between the positive anomaly in the Barentsz/Kara region and the negative anomaly in the Bering Sea is very pronounced./p p style="text-align: justify;"And now for the SSTs:/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SST-comparison-small.jpg" alt="SST-comparison-small" width="500" height="255" //p p style="text-align: justify;"I'm not really sure how useful this is, because it would seem to me that satellites can't measure SSTs when the sea is covered by ice (maybe I did something wrong while entering the parameters on the a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/" daily mean composites page/a), but nevertheless we see again a big contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Arctic for the second half of the past freezing season, a contrast that translated into record anomalies in the Barentsz and Bering Seas./p h3 style="text-align: justify;"Ice thickness/h3 p style="text-align: justify;"One final comparison to look at are the thickness maps generated by the Naval Research Laboratory's PIPS model and its a href="http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/skill_public.html"follow-up/a, the Arctic Cap HYCOM/CICE/NCODA Nowcast/Forecast System (ACNFS):/p p style="text-align: justify;"img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Thickness-comparison-small.jpg" alt="Thickness-comparison-small" width="500" height="491" //p p style="text-align: justify;"There seems to be a lot more of the thickest 4-5 meter thick ice north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago when compared to 2008. But then again, PIPS wasn't the best tool for ice thickness projections, so I'll just have a look at higher-resolution ACNFS images and compare 2012 to 2011./p p style="text-align: justify;"There seems to be less thick ice now than last year, but overall it's thicker, which makes sense, after all those winds pushing the winds from Siberia towards Greenland, the Canadian Archipelago and the Beaufort Sea in December and January. Here too the Atlantic side of the Arctic looks vulnerable, compared to last year, and there's a lot more (thin) ice in the Bering Sea./p p style="text-align: justify;"---/p p style="text-align: justify;"So that was all the evidence for the conclusion given at the start of this blog post. The big questions now are of course:/p ul style="text-align: justify;" liHow thick is the ice on the North American and Pacific side of the Arctic?/li liWill it be able to fend off the attacks from the west/south, just like in 2010 and 2011?/li liHow fast will the ice on the Atlantic and Russian side disappear?/li liWhat will the effect of that be on local SSTs and the adjacent ice edge?/li /ul p style="text-align: justify;"How this plays out, mostly depends on the weather, albeit less so than in the past when ice was thicker. We will be keeping a close watch through the (bi-)weekly a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/asi-update-2012/"ASI updates/a, the monthly a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/nsidc/"NSIDC/a and a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/piomas/"PIOMAS/a updates, comparisons of sea ice concentration maps and an a href="http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/animations.html"animation/a here and there./p

pMore than two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and span class=capsBP/span#39;s well spewed millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Greenpeace has finally been granted access to pictures that show the real impact of the oil on marine life. The pictures were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request (span class=capsFOIA/span) and show a a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/previously-unreleased-photographs-show-impact-of-bp-oil-on-endangered-sea-turtles/2012/05/06/gIQAEgcY6T_story.html?tid=pm_national_popvery different side/a of the Gulf than what the media, span class=capsBP/span, and the federal government have portrayed.br / br / These images are a href=http://greenpeaceblogs.com/2012/05/07/shocking-new-images-from-the-bp-gulf-disaster/among those obtained by Greenpeace/a:br / br / a href=http://s1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb321/fcousins1/?action=viewamp;current=oilturtle1.jpg target=_blankimg alt=Photobucket src=http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb321/fcousins1/oilturtle1.jpg style=border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-top-style: solid; border-right-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: solid; width: 540px; height: 405px; //a/p pa href=http://www.desmogblog.com/greenpeace-uncovers-shocking-photos-gulf-mexico-oil-disaster target=_blankread more/a/p