Climate Crisis // Current

The world has never seen such freezing heat

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
A sudden cold snap brought snow to London in October

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm... more

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Biotech snake oil: a quack cure for hunger

Commercialized GM crops are confined to soybeans, corn, cotton and canola. Soybeans and corn predominate, and are used mainly to feed animals or fuel cars in rich nations. For instance, Argentina and Brazil export the great majority of their soybeans as livestock feed, mainly to Europe and Japan, while more than three fourths of the U.S. corn crop is either fed to animals or used to generate ethanol for automobiles. Expanding soybean monocultures in South America are displacing small farmers, who grow food crops for local consumption, and thus contribute to food insecurity, especially in Argentina and Paraguay. The only other commercial GM crops are papaya and squash, both grown on miniscule acreage.

Most revealing, however, is what the biotech industry has engineered these crops for. Hype and promises of future innovations notwithstanding, there is not a single commercial GM crop with increased yield, drought-tolerance, salt-tolerance, enhanced nutrition or other attractive-sounding traits touted by the industry. Disease-resistant GM crops are practically non-existent.

We have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious or tastes better, says Hope Shand, research director for the Ontario-based ETC Group. Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially useful.

The industry's own figures reveal that GM crops incorporate one or both of just two traits; herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Insect-resistant cotton and corn produce their own built-in insecticide to protect against certain, but far from all, insect pests. Herbicide-tolerant crops are engineered to withstand direct application of an herbicide to kill nearby weeds. These crops predominate, with 82 percent of global biotech crop acreage.

Herbicide-tolerant crops (mainly soybeans) are popular with larger farmers because they simplify and reduce labor needs for weed control. They have thus helped facilitate the worldwide trend of consolidating farmland into fewer, ever bigger farms, like Argentina's huge soybean plantations. According to a 2004 study by Charles Benbrook, former executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences, herbicide-tolerant crops have also led to a substantial increase in pesticide use. Benbrook's study found that adoption of herbicide-tolerant crops in the United States increased weed-killer use by 138 million pounds from 1996 to 2004 (while insect-resistant crops reduced insecticide use by just 16 million pounds over the same period).

The vast majority of herbicide-tolerant crops are Monsanto 's Roundup Ready varieties, tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, which is sold under the brand-name Roundup. The dramatic rise in glyphosate use associated with Roundup Ready crops has spawned an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds, just as bacteria evolve resistance to an overused antibiotic. Farmers respond to resistant weeds by upping the dose of glyphosate and by using greater quantities of other herbicides, such as the probable carcinogen 2,4-D (a component of Agent Orange) and the endocrine-disrupting weed killer atrazine, recently banned in the European Union. Glyphosate-resistant weeds and rising herbicide use are becoming serious problems in the United States, Argentina and Brazil.

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1 month ago

Skeptics' Claim of Cooling Climate 'Consensus'? Bull, Says New Research

I've started losing count of the number of times global warming skeptics have been proven wrong, but I'm sure the official tally must be fast approaching: skeptics 0, scientists 10,000 (give or take a few thousand). The latest talking point debunking comes courtesy of ScienceNews' Sid Perkins, who gently points out that the so-called "climate cooling consensus" of the 1970s, despite what those kooky deniers would have you believe, never was.

Because predictions of a cooling planet made during the 1970s -- a number of researchers then believed that increases in the emission of aerosols, such as dust and smog, could put the planet on a path of sustained cooling -- turned out to be wrong, climate deniers argue that the current projections could prove to be just as fallacious. That would be a powerful argument -- if it was true.

Perkins writes:

Not true, climatologist Thomas C. Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and his colleagues report in the September Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The team’s survey of major journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 found that only seven articles predicted that global average temperature would continue to cool. During the same period, 44 journal papers indicated that the average temperature would rise and 20 were neutral or made no climate predictions.

The findings were “a surprise to us,” Peterson says. For decades the “skeptics had repeated their argument so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times.”

Strike one.

When these skeptics mention previous concerns about global cooling, they typically cite media reports from the 1970s rather than journal papers —“a part of their tremendous smoke screen on this issue,” says Peterson. Among major magazines, Time and Newsweek ran articles expressing concern about the previous decades’ cooling trend, juxtaposing the specter of decreased food production with rising global population.

But even a cursory review of 1970s media accounts shows that there was no consensus about global cooling among journalists, either, Peterson says. In May 1975, the headline of a New York Times article warned that “major cooling may be ahead.” Three months later, another headline in the same paper — atop a feature written by the same reporter — stated that two recent journal articles “counter [the] view that [a] cold period is due.”

Strike two.

But wait, skeptics will say, what about that Science article that predicted the possibility of a future ice age triggered by a fourfold increase in aerosols? They are referring to a 1971 article written by climatologist Stephen Schneider, in which he did, indeed, make that prediction; however, as he himself now acknowledges, new evidence soon followed its publication that suggested that 1) the cooling impact of aerosols was not nearly as high as originally estimated and 2) there were many other gases in the atmosphere, including methane, CFCs and ozone, that had the same warming effect as carbon dioxide. Perkins, again:

When global warming skeptics draw misleading comparisons between scientists’ nascent understanding of climate processes in the 1970s and their level of knowledge today, “it’s absolute nonsense,” Schneider says. Back then, scientists were just beginning to study climate trends and their causes, and the probability of finding evidence to disprove a particular hypothesis was relatively high. Nowadays, he contends, “the likelihood of new evidence to overthrow the concept of global warming is small. Warming is virtually certain.”

Strike three. I'd gloat some more, but then I might actually start feeling bad.I've started losing count of the number of times global warming skeptics have been proven wrong, but I'm sure the... more