GWPF | 16 Jan 2015
Brazil Appoints Climate Sceptic As New Science Minister
The state of the world’s seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. It is not just journalists who are to blame, they maintain: the marine research community “may not have remained sufficiently sceptical” on the topic. –Daniel Cressey, Nature, 14 January 2015
Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science. — The New York Times, 15 January 2015
There are a lot of conversations around meetings about the excess doom and gloom in our reporting of ocean health, but perhaps this is the first paper to bring these concerns out of the privacy of peer conversations. This is a silent movement, as there is a lot of peer pressure against voicing those concerns openly, so my co-authors and I expect significant heat upon us to be derived from our paper. –Carlos Duarte, University of Western Australia, Nature, 14 January 2015
1) Ocean ‘Calamities’ Oversold, Say Researchers: Scientists Call For More Scepticism – Nature, 14 January 2015
2) Greenland’s Ice Sheet Defies Predictions With 4-Year High – The Daily Caller, 13 January 2015
3) Antarctic Sea Ice Growth Is Real And Has Been Going On For Decades – Reporting Climate Science, 12 January 2015
4) Susan Crockford: Faux Polar Bear Figures – Financial Post, 15 January 2015
5) And Finally: Brazil Appoints Climate Sceptic As New Science Minister – Science Insider 9 January 2015
Despite fears that global warming is harming the Arctic region faster than the rest of the world, Greenland is defying climate scientists and currently growing at its fastest rate in four years. The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that Greenland’s ice sheet has seen more growth so far this year than in the last four years. Greenland’s growth in 2015 is also higher than the mean growth for 1990 to 2011. –Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 13 January 2015
The appointment of a reputed climate change denier as the head of Brazil’s science ministry has some scientists worried about the country’s environmental future. Others are withholding judgment, at least until the new minister, Aldo Rebelo, appoints the team of scientists and policymakers who will work with him for the next 4 years. Rebelo, a hard-line communist, labeled climate change an “environmental scam” in a 2010 open letter to environmentalist Marcio Santilli, according to Bloomberg View. –Lizzie Wade, Science Insider 9 January 2015
Science is not an oracle. In fact, there is no scientific proof of the projections of global warming, much less that it is occurring because of human action and not because of natural phenomena. It is a construct based on computer simulations. In fact, my tradition links me to a line of scientific thought that prioritizes doubt over certainty and does not silence a question at the first response. Parallel to the extraordinary advances and conquests that Science has bequeathed to the progress of Humanity, come innumerable errors, frauds or manipulations always spun in the service of countries that finance certain research projects or projections.– –Aldo Rebelo, Brazil’s new Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Open Letter July 2014
Growth in Antarctic sea ice extent measured by satellites since 1979 is real and is probably due to natural internal variability, according to new research. The new research published in Geophysical Research Letters highlights satellite data showing that Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing at a rate of around 1.5 per cent per decade since this generation of satellites first began making regular measurements in 1979. —Reporting Climate Science, 12 January 2015
Polar bears are a conservation success story. However, you’d never know that from the output of polar bear researchers, who lately seem to have forgotten that the most crucial part of their job is the unbiased collection and presentation of scientific data. –Susan Crockford, Financial Post, 15 January 2015
1) Ocean ‘Calamities’ Oversold, Say Researchers: Scientists Call For More Scepticism
Nature, 14 January 2015
Daniel Cressey
The global risk posed by jellyfish blooms and other afflictions of the oceans is often overplayed, a team of researchers claims.
The state of the world’s seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. The controversial study exposes fault lines in the marine-science community.
Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues say that gloomy media reports about ocean issues such as invasive species and coral die-offs are not always based on actual observations. It is not just journalists who are to blame, they maintain: the marine research community “may not have remained sufficiently sceptical” on the topic.
“There are a lot of conversations around meetings about the excess doom and gloom in our reporting of ocean health, but perhaps this is the first paper to bring these concerns out of the privacy of peer conversations,” says Duarte. “This is a silent movement, as there is a lot of peer pressure against voicing those concerns openly, so my co-authors and I expect significant heat upon us to be derived from our paper.”
In their review, published on 31 December in BioScience1, Duarte and his colleagues look at purported catastrophes, including overfishing, jellyfish blooms, invasive species and the impact of ocean acidification on organisms such as corals. In some cases, they say, there is strong evidence for global-scale problems bringing severe disruption — overfishing is a prime example. But for other topics that have excited scientific and media attention, the evidence is equivocal or weak. In these categories, Duarte places global blooms of jellyfish and the problems caused by invasive species.
Headline hype
Duarte’s team reviews a number of news reports and scientific papers. It contrasts these with other papers that would seem to undermine the catastrophe narrative.
Among the “excessive media headlines” cited are the CNN’s ‘Overfished and under-protected: Oceans on the brink of catastrophic collapse‘. Duarte also told Nature that its own news story ‘Coastal havoc boosts jellies‘ fell into the ‘doom and gloom’ trap.
Another example is the decline of species that build calciferous shells, attributed to ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide dissolving in the seas. In 2013, The Seattle Times said that this issue “is helping push the seas toward a great unraveling that threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom”.
But the authors of the BioScience paper say that there are significant uncertainties in this. Many experiments are based on “worst-case scenarios”, they say, and claims that calciferous organisms are already declining may relate not to carbon emissions, but to other oceanic processes.
And although it is sometimes claimed that jellyfish blooms are increasing around the world, Duarte’s paper says there were no global attempts to quantify the increase until 2012, so such claims are extrapolated from a small number of cases.
Overselling such claims is dangerous, says the group, because the public may become inured to them and give up trying to save an ocean that it believes is already beyond redemption.
Duarte is now looking to bring together a group of like-minded researchers to ‘audit’ claims of ocean disasters by critically assessing the evidence. This would weed out claims based on poor evidence, he says, and bring society some hope that the oceans can be saved.
As well as pointing the finger at scientists and journalists, Duarte’s group places some of the blame for the hype at the door of some journals, including Nature.
“The appetite of the media for particular headlines can influence the contents of top scientific journals,” they write. (Note: Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)
Philip Campbell, Nature’s editor-in-chief, disagrees. “We select research for publication in Nature on the basis of scientific significance,” he says. “That in turn may lead to citation impact and media coverage, but Nature editors aren’t driven by those considerations, and couldn’t predict them even if they wished to do so.”
2) Greenland’s Ice Sheet Defies Predictions With 4-Year High
The Daily Caller, 13 January 2015
Michael Bastasch
Despite fears that global warming is harming the Arctic region faster than the rest of the world, Greenland is defying climate scientists and currently growing at its fastest rate in four years.
The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that Greenland’s ice sheet has seen more growth so far this year than in the last four years. Greenland’s growth in 2015 is also higher than the mean growth for 1990 to 2011.
Greenland has been a curious case in the global warming debate. On the one hand, scientists and environmentalists have pointed to it as a prime example of a country being impacted by global temperature rises. Greenland is home to the world’s second-largest ice sheet and scientists say it’s melting at an accelerated rate.
But a paper from earlier this year found that only about half the warming impacting Greenland is due to global warming, the other half is due to natural oceanic cycles originating in the tropical Pacific.
“The pattern of the changes in the tropical Pacific that are responsible for remarkable atmospheric circulation changes and warming in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic are consistent with what we would call natural variability,”said David Battisti, co-author of the study and a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
On the other hand, Greenlanders themselves have benefited from a shrinking ice sheet as it’s allowed them to access natural resources and lands previously unattainable under heavy ice coverage.
“We simply refuse to go under as a culture because of climate change,” Prime Minister Aleqa Hammond told Reuters in January 2014. “We have to adapt because the ice is disappearing and hunting is no longer the main source of income.”
“But climate change gives us a new chance to survive because our minerals become accessible so we’ll adapt,” Hammond said. “We are one of the very few countries around the world where climate change is giving us benefits.”
Greenland removed a ban on exporting uranium last year, against the wishes of Denmark, as foreign companies become more interested in pulling minerals out of the ground as more areas open up.
But it shouldn’t be too surprising that Greenland has defied dire predictions. The Arctic region as a whole has been more or less stable in recent years, stumping scientists who said it would be ice-free by now.
“The Antarctic is actually growing and all the evidence in the last few months suggests many assumptions about the poles are wrong,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told the U.K. Express.
“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted,” Peiser said. “Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not. This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”
3) Antarctic Sea Ice Growth Is Real And Has Been Going On For Decades
Reporting Climate Science, 12 January 2015
Growth in Antarctic sea ice extent measured by satellites since 1979 is real and is probably due to natural internal variability, according to new research.
Sea ice around Antarctica chalked up a new record high in September 2014 with an extent of more than 20 million km2. The observed year-on-year growth in Antarctic sea ice contrasts sharply with the long-term decline seen in Arctic sea ice over the same period and has prompted a number of explanations as to what might be causing such growth at a time of high global surface temperatures.
The new research published in Geophysical Research Letters highlights satellite data showing that Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing at a rate of around 1.5 per cent per decade since this generation of satellites first began making regular measurements in 1979 and it also points to imagery from earlier Nimbus satellites which show that Antarctic sea ice extent in September 1964 was greater than all the Septembers from September 1979 except September 2014.
The combination of satellite imagery from the 1960s together with satellite data for the period from 1979 suggests that there is some natural variability leading to the periodic expansion and contraction of sea ice extent and that for at least some part of the period from 1964 to 1979 Antarctic sea ice extent decreased.
Lead author Marie-Ève Gagné of the University of Toronto together with co-authors Nathan Gillett and John Fyfe, both of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, tested this using simulations in computer climate models.
The researchers simulated Antarctic sea ice concentration in response to all major historical anthropogenic and natural climatic forcings including changes in greenhouse gases and ozone on 41 computer models and then they compared the computer model simulated sea ice extent with the actual sea ice extent measured by satellite instruments.
They found that changes in observed in Antarctic sea ice and computer model simulations over the last 50 years “seem to be consistent over the longer term given the new information for September 1964 and May–July 1966”.
However, the researchers also report that over the shorter period since 1979 the observed growth is larger than most of the computer model simulations suggest should be the case due to natural variability and this remains a puzzle. The researchers say in their paper that it is still to be determined whether this discrepancy is due to internal variability, overestimation of the growth in sea ice extent or to shortcomings in the computer models.
Last year, research was published suggesting that part of the historic Antarctic sea ice growth had been overestimated due to an error in data processing.
4) Susan Crockford: Faux Polar Bear Figures
Financial Post, 15 January 2015
Polar bears are a conservation success story. However, you’d never know that from the output of polar bear researchers, who lately seem to have forgotten that the most crucial part of their job is the unbiased collection and presentation of scientific data.
The most recent example of this disturbing conduct came to light this fall. A new peer-reviewed paper hyped by the media was published by a research team that included several senior biologists belonging to the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG). The PBSG was formed to summarize information mandated by the 1973 Arctic treaty to protect polar bears from overhunting.
Co-authors of the new paper included American PBSG members Steven Amstrup and Eric Regehr, as well as Canadian members Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher. The researchers took population estimates from a previous study (conducted 2001-2006) and added four years of new data (2007-2010). They used a computer model, developed by lead author Jeff Bromaghin, to suggest that a severe decline had occurred from 2004 to 2006, with a modest recovery from 2007 to 2010. The size of the polar bear population in 2010 was estimated at about 900 bears (range 606-1,212), a drop of about 40% from the 2006 estimate of 1,526 (range 1,211-1,841).
However, the polar bear researchers knew before starting their new field work in 2007 that the 2004-2006 polar bear population crash had occurred, and they knew why: Sea ice in the Southern Beaufort was unusually thick in the mid-2000s during the critical spring feeding period. Periodic thick spring ice is a phenomenon unique to this region and is known to have occurred every decade since at least the 1960s.
During springs with thick sea ice, ringed seals (polar bears’ primary prey) either moved elsewhere to have their pups or were harder to find. Every time this happened, the food scarcity caused wide-spread starvation among polar bears – mothers with cubs and sub-adult bears were especially hard-hit.
Thick spring ice conditions in 1974, for example, were just as severe as in 2004-2006, and a similar crash in polar bear numbers occurred. More importantly, the 1970s polar bear population decline was followed by a rebound in numbers, a fact known to at least one of those involved in the recent study (Stirling).
So why did the authors terminate their study period at 2010, when data from field work was available until 2013 (a fact evident from another paper)? They must have known that cubs born in 2007, when survival of bears began to improve, would not have been old enough to produce cubs themselves by 2010. The authors had to have realized a cut-off date of 2010 would produce a misleadingly low population estimate.
5) And Finally: Brazil Appoints Climate Sceptic As New Science Minister
Science Insider 9 January 2015
Lizzie Wade
The appointment of a reputed climate change denier as the head of Brazil’s science ministry has some scientists worried about the country’s environmental future.
Others are withholding judgment, at least until the new minister, Aldo Rebelo, appoints the team of scientists and policymakers who will work with him for the next 4 years.
Rebelo, a hard-line communist, labeled climate change an “environmental scam” in a 2010 open letter to environmentalist Marcio Santilli, according to Bloomberg View. As a legislator in Brazil’s Congress, he called the movement to curb the emission of greenhouse gases “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism,” The New York Times reported this week.
“His positions on climate change are completely out of phase with the Brazilian scientific community,” says Paulo Artaxo, an atmospheric physicist at the University of São Paulo who studies climate change in the Amazon. “We are expecting serious problems in several areas, such as environment, biodiversity, climate change, and forest protection.”
