Joanne Nova is, I gather, a former television personality in Australia now blogging away against science and the study of climate change at JoNova. Here’s how far off the track she is: She’s been sucked in by Monckton, as some great scientist and hero — he whose biggest achievements are to call scientists “bedwetters” and attack the reputations of famous dead women (what is it about Monckton and dead women?).
Her latest post is a hoot. She’s claiming that the case for global warming is coming apart. She illustrates it with this PhotoShop™ masterpiece (note the “JoNova” in the lower lefthand corner, and note it well):
JoNova defaces photo of Glen Canyon Dam. Original photo copyright by Wild Nature Images.
Glen Canyon Dam poses problems for serious advocates of environnmental protection for many reasons, not the least being the death of Glen Canyon. This dam represents one of the greatest losses of the environmental movement. That’s not why Nova chose the photos, I’m sure — I’d be surprised if she could find Glen Canyon on a map, and I’m all but certain she’s clueless about the controversy about the dam (don’t even wonder whether she’s ever read Ed Abbey).
Regardless where one stands on the issues around Glen Canyon Dam, one cannot look at this photo without seeing the white stripe from the water behind the dam, running about 50 feet up the canyon walls.
The original, without comment, is at once more beautiful, more awe-striking, and more accurate a portrayal of the effects of climate than Nova’s doctored version:
Glen Canyon Dam, photo by Ron Niebrugge, at WildNatureImages.com. Displayed here with express written permission.
See, climate change is thought to be one of the culprits for that white line. Glen Canyon Dam is in straits right now, as is the Colorado River Compact that created the legal justification for constructing the dam, because precipitation in the mountains where the Colorado River is born has fallen dramatically in the past couple of decades — and Lake Powell has shrunk to a vestige of its former self, of its planned extent, of the extent hoped for in cooler times.
Lake Powell's drop, circa 2008, photo by Marco Ammannati via National Parks Traveler. Caption from National Parks Traveler: "At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, years of drought, possibly an indicator of climate change, have revealed Lake Powell's bathtub walls. Spring runoff, however, could soon make those bathtub walls vanish."
JoNova uses a photograph showing the harms of climate change, to claim that climate change does not occur.
Is this the stupidest anti-climate change statement ever made?
Offer your candidates for dumber or stupider claims below. It’s time we started counting and cataloging.
“Desert mirage,” editorial discussion of Lake Powell’s climate-change-fueled dropping levels threatening a water project for St. George, Utah, with discussion of U.S. Research Council report on future levels of Lake Powell; Salt Lake Tribune, January 6, 2010. “Lake Powell’s current water level is 59 percent of capacity. The lake level, around 20 million acre-feet in 2000, dropped to about 8 million acre-feet by 2005. Water levels rebounded a bit over the next two years, but the U.S. National Research Council predicted in 2007 that the American West could see worse droughts in the future than the one Utahns experienced from 1998 to 2005. In fact, the early 20th century, when the Colorado compact was negotiated, was an anomaly, a relatively wet period for an otherwise historically much drier area.”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Does this photo, with caption, qualify as witch hunt material?
Caption from Randy Rives's campaign: "Left to right: Area ACLU secretary Steve Schafersman (in back, barely visible in this picture); arch-Darwinist Eugenie Scott of Berkeley, California; TFN's Kathy Miller (white coat); SBOE member Tincy Miller (in back, facing others); SBOE member Bob Craig of Lubbock. (Taken while the five were huddled in a strategy session to promote evolution being taught without weaknesses language. Do you have this sort of influence with your SBOE members?)"
It’s clear that the contrarians don’t have much experience in heavy documentation. If you follow the links they provide, you quickly get to the paper provided by the tourist industry noting their precautions to prevent contamination, provided to meet a request by scientists from the Australian team, and based on information well vetted to the point that it includes substantial excerpts from what appears to be a peer-reviewed journal on the types of solutions suitable for decontaminating foreign boots in the Antarctic (Polar Record, vol. 41, no. 216, Jan. 2005, p. 39-45; it is actually the official journal of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, UK). There is astounding and commendable attention to detail, much more than the contrarians can grok, it appears.
More troubling to the Boy Scout in me is the contrarians’ contempt for what is, really, Leave No Trace Camping carried to an Antarctic tourist stop. This is part of the environment protection credo of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and it is sound policy that everyone should be teaching their children.
What is wrong with that? Why do the contrarians mock wise policies? Why do they make false claims against what amounts to good Scouting?
Contratians disapprove of the ethics of environmental stewardship?
One implicit complaint is that the footnote does not provide evidence of damage from climate change, in the Antarctic. It’s clear that the critics have not followed the footnote path to see why the boot cleaning poster and directive were issued, nor to see what is the research or official government action that prompted the tourist companies to implement the procedure.
It appears in a section of the IPCC reports on effects of warming on industries in affected areas. Only two industries are noted in the Antarctic, fishing and tourism. After establishing the increased chance of problem organisms, including micro-organisms, showing up in Arctic and Antarctic areas as the areas warm, and after noting two plagues that killed penguins recently, from micro-organisms, the IPCC paper notes that concern to prevent such tragedies have so far required only boot decontamination, and it offers a link to the flyer provided by an Antarctic tour operators group.
Got that? To show that the tour operators are affected, IPCC cited the flyer put out by the tour operators showing how and why they were changing their operations. It’s a minor, almost trivial point.
At no point did IPCC’s report claim this procedure as evidence of warming, or the effects of warming. So the claims of the contrarians and denialists are completely off base, as they’d recognize except for their own shouting for the lynching of science to proceed.
Criticism of IPCC for noting the good stewardship techniques used in the Antarctic comprises more political smear than scientific enlightenment, by a huge factor. Voodoo science from the contrarians begets voodoo criticism.
Contrarians lack wisdom in posing this complaint of theirs. This is one more point IPCC got right, factually and ethically. IPCC should be commended for that.
Wall of Shame (update added on February 7)
Outlets that cite the boot reference, falsely or stupidly, as some sort of flaw in the IPCC report, and thereby demonstrate malevolent intentions, and not scientific (“malice” for you Times v. Sullivan fans):
The decade that ended in 2009 was the warmest on record, NASA reported earlier this month. It displaced the decade of the 1990s as the warmest ever. The 1990s displaced the 1980s.
Last year was the second-warmest since 1880, when modern temperature measurements began. The warmest year on record was 2005. All of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern.
It really is that bad. Climate science denialists now attack any information simply for not being what they want it to be. Lysenko’s Ghost smiles broadly.
Anthony Watts is just the most prominent of the bloggers making hoax charges of error and worse in the fourth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), because of a footnote that cites a rock climbing magazine.
Here’s the trouble for Watts: There is no indication that the citation is in error in any way. Watts’s move is more fitting of King George III’s campaign against Ben Franklin’s lightning rods, the prosecution of John Peter Zenger, the pre-World War II campaign against Einstein’s work because he was born a Jew, or the hoary old Red Channels campaign against Texas history told by John Henry Faulk. It’s as bad as the Texas State Board of Education’s attack on Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?Watts’ and others’ complaint is simply that Climbing magazine’s story on the worldwide retreat of glaciers suitable for climbing is not published in a juried science journal.
In other words, they indict the science, not because it’s wrong — they have no evidence to counter it — but because it’s too American PatriotcorrectJewishleftTexanmistakenly thought to be political well-known, too accessible, (small “d”) democratically-reported.
And of course, any comment that points that out at Watts’s blog goes into long-term “moderation,” keeping it from the light of day in the best tradition of the Crown’s defense of Gov. Cosby’s misadministration of New York (see “John Peter Zenger”). Watts said in a quote that should have been attributed to the Daily Telegraph:
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
By those standards, Watts’s own readers should eschew his blog — it’s not peer reviewed science by any stretch, and Watts isn’t an established authority in climate science (he’s not even working for an advanced degree). Consistency isn’t a virtue or concern among climate change denialists. Watt’s entire modus operandi is much more anecdotal than the story in Climbing, which was written by a physicist/climber who studies climate change in the world’s mountains.
And did you notice? They’re whining about research done by a scientist in pursuit of a degree, complaining about the second citation. That’s the exaclty kind of research that they claim the magazine article is not. Their complaint is, it appears, that a scientist in pursuit of education is not the right “kind” of person to do climate research. It’s the chilling sort of bigotry that we spent so much time in the 20th century fighting against. In the 21st century, though, it appears one can still get away with demonizing knowledge, education and research, part of the campaign to indict “elitism,” the same sort of elitism aspired to by America’s founders. Too much of the criticism against scientists involved in documenting global warming is the cheap bigotry the critics claim to find in science, falsely claimed in my view.
Topsy-turvy.
And the glaciers? Yeah, the evidence tends to show they are in trouble. Those Himalayan glaciers? The IPCC report was accurate in everything except the speed at which the glaciers decline — they should be with us for another three centuries, not just 50 years, if we can reduce warming back to 1990s levels (oddly, denialists rarely deal with the facts of accelerating warming, preferring to point to a local snowstorm as a rebuttal of all knowledge about climate).
I’ll wager Watts hasn’t read the article in Climbing, and didn’t know who Bowen was when he launched his attack, though. The denials of bias coming out of the denialists’ camp will be interesting to watch.
Let the denialists roll out the rope far enough, they’ll inevitably hang themselves.
Biology covers vast fields, with experts in some areas able to spend entire lives without touching other areas of the science of living things.
Working on the effects of climate change, many different areas of biology need to be tapped to figure out what is going on, and what might happen.
Mushrooms, anyone?
Old friend Greg Marley, one of the very few I’d trust to identify edible wild ‘shrooms, presents a session on mushrooms in Maine, tomorrow. Mushrooms had a tough go of it in Maine over the last season. Why? Marley may offer suggestions, you may have some data.
Greg Marley is the author of Mushrooms for Health
In any case, if you’re in or near Brunswick, Maine, this is one of the better things you could do tomorrow; I hear from Marley:
The Maine Mycological Association is holding their second Winter Lecture this Saturday, Jan 30 In Brunswick.
Many people talk about the cold wet year that we just allowed to slip into history. “Boy, it must have been a fantastic year for mushrooms!” they say. Well, in reality it wasn’t. We didn’t see many common species at all or in anything approaching normal numbers. Other species were delayed or fruited in very different habitats that usual. It was a very odd mushroom season.
Greg Marley will be leading a discussion and showing slides of mushrooms fruiting in 2009. We will look at weather patterns and talk about out ideas on what happened and, more importantly, what we can learn from the year’s lessons.
Please come, bring your ideas and opinions along with your mushroom stories from 2009 and join the conversation!
Saturday, January 30. 9-11:30am Free and open to all.
Curtis Memorial Library
Pleasant St
Brunswick, ME
Exit 28 from I-295 onto Route 1 (Pleasant St). At the 3rd traffic light continue straight as Rt 1 bears left. Curtis Library is 2.5 blocks down on the right, across from the Post office.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
That fat pay the denialists keep claiming comes to the scientists, and urges them to misreport the data?
The only remuneration IPCC scientists get – as a quick check of last week’s ad would have made clear — is travel costs and living expenses while they are at IPCC meetings. The IPCC work is on top of their day jobs as academics and researchers.
You know that denialists won’t apply to do the job. Most of us suspect they don’t have the courage of their convictions to do it, but there’s another problem: Very few of them are qualified. They don’t do science.
As of January 26, 2010 9:00 AM MST there have been 1,360 located earthquakes in the recent Yellowstone National Park swarm. The swarm began January 17, 2010 around 1:00 PM MST about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the Old Faithful area on the northwestern edge of Yellowstone Caldera. Swarms have occurred in this area several times over the past two decades.
There have been 11 events with a magnitude larger than 3, 101 events of magnitude 2 to 3, and 1248 events with a magnitude less than 2. The largest events so far have been a pair of earthquakes of magnitude 3.7 and 3.8 that occurred after 11 PM MST on January 20, 2010.
The first event of magnitude 3.7 occurred at 11:01 PM MST and was shortly followed by a magnitude 3.8 event at 11:16 PM. Both shocks were located around 9 miles to the southeast of West Yellowstone, MT and about 10 miles to the northwest of Old Faithful, WY. Both events were felt throughout the park and in surrounding communities in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
Ground deformations in the Yellowstone Caldera, from satellite photos, in 2005 - Geology.com image (This isn't really directly related to the earthquake swarm, but it's a cool image.)
Update, March 12, 2011: This post has been mighty popular over the last week. Can someone tell me, in comments, whether this post was linked to by another site? Why the popularity all of a sudden — even before the Japan earthquake and tsunami? Please do!
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
On January 24, 1950, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Percy L. Stevens patent # 2,495,429, for his “Method of Treating Foodstuffs” with waves from a magnetron oscillator. Sixty years ago today Percy Stevens changed culinary life forever.
You guessed it: The microwave oven.
Patent for "Method for Treating Foodstuffs," granted January 24, 1950, to Percy L. Stevens of the Raytheon Corp. - the microwave oven. Image via FreePatentsOnline.com
On CBS “Sunday Morning” Charles Osgood said that in 1975 microwave oven sales surpassed conventional oven sales for the first time. This is more remarkable because the first commercial microwave in 1955 was too big for home kitchens, and at $1,300, too pricey. Japanese modifications of the magnetron to shrink it made microwave ovens much like those we have today ready for the market for the first time in 1967. Eight years from market entry to majority of the market.
It only makes sense: Today offices on every floor of every office building have microwave ovens in their break rooms, but almost none ever had conventional ovens. College students have microwaves in their dormitory rooms. Even gasoline stations offer foods for microwaving by customers.
Spencer’s invention makes it possible to heat foods quickly with a relatively small device, in thousands of places where no conventional oven would work well, or be welcomed.
According to legend — accurate? — Spencer got the idea after working with magnetron tubes while carrying a chocolate bar in his pocket. He noticed the chocolate bar melted. Within a short time he had demonstrated the ability to pop popcorn and burst an egg with the microwaves from the tube.
Sign of the changing times: Many children today do not know how to pop popcorn without a microwave. Legend has it that children in elementary school ask where the Massachusetts natives kept the microwaves with which they popped the corn that delighted the settlers of the Plymouth Colony.
Microwave oven inventor Percy Spencer with early microwave equipment at Raytheon - photo from Spencer family archive
Media Check carries edited excerpts from a book by Daniel Gutstein from last year, Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy (Key Porter, 2009) by Donald Gutstein, Key Porter (2009).
The problem with the coverage of the DDT issue and with the eco-imperialism charge is that they are based on falsehoods that the media did not investigate. Former CBC-TV National News anchor Knowlton Nash once said that “…our job in the media… is to… provide a searchlight probing for truth through the confusing, complicated, cascading avalanche of fact and fiction.” In this case, the media let their audiences down; fiction prevailed over fact.
Despite what the pro-DDT organizations alleged, DDT was not banned for use in mosquito control and could continue to be used in 25 countries in malarial regions. In these countries, limited amounts of DDT can be sprayed on the inside walls of houses to combat malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “The environmental community is collaborating with the World Health Organization to ensure that the phase-out of the remaining uses of DDT does not undermine the battle against malaria and the well-being of people living in malarial zones,” the United Nations Environmental Programme reported when the treaty came into force.
Has anyone read the book? Has anyone seen it? (So what if it’s aimed at Canada?)
More thoughts: Years ago, when Jan Brunvand first achieved some fame cataloging urban myths, it occurred to me that his books should be required reading in the very first survey classes in journalism school. Maybe they should be required reading in political science, rhetoric, and philosophy, too.
Gutstein’s book would be a good reader for a class on reporting, or investigative reporting, or science reporting, or political reporting. I’m not sure where it would fit in to a science curriculum, but I wish more scientists came out of undergraduate years aware that they can get hammered by these hoax-selling, axe-grinding disinformation machines. All those reports about how Rachel Carson is the “murderer of millions?” They coarsen dialog, they misinform, disinform and malinform the public. They do great disservice to citizenship and voters, and ultimately, to our democratic institutions.
It’s not enough to have a counter, good-information plan. These people must be convinced to stop.
NASA GISS [Goddard Institute for Space Studies] has released the estimated monthly temperature for December 2009, which closes out the year 2009, which closes out the decade of the 2000s. The result: 2005 is still the hottest calendar year, 2009 is the 2nd-hottest year ever, although it’s really in a statistical tie with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007.
They’ve confused weather with climate. They’ve failed to keep score. Perhaps they’ve spent wasted their time hacking e-mails instead of measuring climate.
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
Caption from RealClimate: Figure 1. (a) GISS analysis of global surface temperature change. Green vertical bar is estimated 95 percent confidence range (two standard deviations) for annual temperature change. (b) Hemispheric temperature change in GISS analysis. (Base period is 1951-1980. This base period is fixed consistently in GISS temperature analysis papers. . . Base period 1961-1990 is used for comparison with published HadCRUT analyses in Figures 3 and 4.)
Heat things up a bit, and spread the alarm:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Do we have any readers in Iowa City? Near Iowa City?
A presentation on the history of malaria and DDT, and the recent use and abuse of those stories to flog environmentalists and others on the internet, is set for the Hardin Library for Health Sciences at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, on January 19, 2010 (next Tuesday).
If you’re there, can you snap a couple of pictures to send, and get any handouts, and write up a piece about it?
The University of Iowa History of Medicine Society invites you to hear Patrick T. O’Shaughnessy, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, University of Iowa, speak on “Malaria and DDT: the History of a Controversial Association” on Tuesday, January 19th, 5:30 to 6:30, room 2032 Main Library. [in Iowa City, Iowa.]
Dr. O’Shaughnessy observes: ”Although it helped prevent millions of cases of malaria after its widespread use in the 1950’s, the pesticide DDT was banned from use in the United States and fell out of favor as an agent to reduce cases of malaria around the world. This history of the events associated with the effort to eradicate malaria, as well as the environmental movement that led to the ban on DDT, will center on the story of a story that incorporated both issues and grew into a modern myth still seen in books and multiple websites today.”
The session is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Hardin Library for the Health Sciences stands on the campus in Iowa City.
The Hardin Library for the Health Sciences is located on Newton Road, directly north of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and approximately 1/2 mile east of Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Go here for directions and more information.
Maybe I’m not the only bothered by the usual abuse of history and science on the issues of DDT and malaria.
Bizarre as it may seem, the imagined profiteering of environmentalists has becoma favorite complaint of global warming deniers. Ignoring the fact that he’s on the board of Apple Computers and a very savvy investor, and ignoring the facts of his donation of proceeds he gets from lectures, deniers claim Al Gore has gotten rich off of warning people about global warming.
During this tour, Lord Monckton will be chaperoned by wealthy mining consultant and geologist Professor Ian Plimer. Lord Monckton will also be getting a fee of $20,000 and all his travel and accommodation – somewhere in the region of $100,000 – will be paid for.
Who might be paying for Monckton’s tour?* China? India? We don’t know, but following Monckton’s lead, we might hope that the western intelligence agencies are investigating Monckton to see just what he’s up to.
$120,000 to make up political smears that damage national policies and science? Mencken would be ashamed.
* It’s a paraphrase of Monckton, who evilly worried about funding for climate research and ill-funded environmental groups, “Goodness knows where they get it from! Foreign governments, possibly! I don’t know! I haven’t looked. But it’s certainly an alarming question: Are the environmental movements being backed by China or India so they won’t have to compete with us for natural resources because we will have shut our industry down. It’s a question that the security services, I hope, are looking at, because it certainly worries me.”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 