It’s not often one gets a chance to pack this much uncontested hyperbole into a news item;

Laval University’s Warwick Vincent, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the new ice island and couldn’t believe what he saw. “It was extraordinary,” Vincent said Thursday. “This is a piece of Canadian geography that no longer exists.”

Ice is geography now?

Vincent said in 10 years of working in the region, he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice.

And in 15 years of working in this region, I’ve never shovelled so much snow this early in the year. So what?

Scientists said it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years. They point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

And there they go again. Maybe they meant to say “3,000” years. Or maybe 300? In other words – what is the significance about any event of this type being the “largest” in 30 years and how does that legitimize the assertion that it’s an indication of global climate change? Are we to deduce that an even larger chunk broke free in 1976? Or that – more likely – data is insufficient prior to the mid-1970’s to make any meaningful comparisons.
Despite the article’s mention that this chunk of ice “travelled west for 50 kilometres until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter”, Mr. Vincent seems nearly inconsolable;

“We’re seeing the tragic loss of unique features of the Canadian landscape,” Vincent said, adding the global climate is crossing an unprecedented threshold.
“There are microscopic organisms and entire ecosystems associated with this ice, so we’re losing a part of Canada’s natural richness.”

It’s a good thing Dr. Vincent wasn’t around to witness the effects of the North American megadrought of the 1600’s. He’d have positively had a bird. In the comments, Cal2 makes this wry observation;

11000 football fields sounds way worse than 20 square miles […] just for comparison the area of Calgary is 300 square miles.the area of Red Deer Alberta 25 square miles or 14000 football fields.

Arctic weather map (It’s -36C in Alert this morning).
Back to our article. Just how did they learn of the momentous event? No one was on hand to observe it. Scientists “reconstructed” it “using high tech monitoring devices, including satellite images”. Presumably, the same ones that were in place prior to 1906, to enable widely quoted scientists like Dr. Vincent to place his “10 years” of regional observation in the broader climatological context.
With all due respect to the climate cultists – while it ensures the media attention you crave, the use of alarmist terminology like “tragic” and “unprecedented” to describe an ice cube floating in the arctic ocean isn’t likely to sway skeptics already desensitized to sensational overkill.

---

Related – Residents of Nunavut don’t seem as concerned about the polar bear population decline as the armchair activists are. In fact, they’d like to keep shooting them, thankyou very much.
Also related – The FCPP is hosting a lecture with historical climatologist, Tim Ball on January 27th in Winnipeg.

Kevin Vranes’ take on the American Geophysical Union;

To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.
What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. Sure, science is messy and always full of tension between holders of competing positions, opinions and analyses. That has always been the nature of science, and of course extends to climate science. Tensions come out at meetings, on listservs, on letters pages, and in the press. But these tensions normally surround a particular paper, or a particular question. While much more broadly-based tensions have existed for years on the state of understanding on global warming, they haven’t really been tensions internal to the climsci community, but tensions between the climsci community and interested outsiders.
What I am sensing now is something much broader and more diffuse, something that has less to do with particular components of the science in the field and is much more about how the field is composing itself.
What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a “hangover” or a “sophomore slump” or “buyers remorse.” None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the “it’s happening” side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they’re ready to take action. And now we’re wondering if we didn’t create a monster. We’re wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we’ve oversold the science. We’re wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as “skeptics.” We’re wondering if we’ve let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we’re wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}

Read it all. Via Iain Murray, who also points to this BBC viewpoint by Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research;

What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists?
I believe there are three factors now at work.
First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes – the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill.
Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.
Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity.
Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012.
The Exeter conference of February 2005 on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of “climate change is worse than we thought” news reporting and group-think.
[…]
Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets.
It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more “big push” of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively.
We need to take a deep breath and pause.

More – The media’s lust for “climate porn”.

Luboš Motl;

Using the WMO terminology, 2006 is set to become the “sixth warmest year” after 1998, 2005, 2002, 2003, and 2004: see WMO’s top five Nevertheless, when a naive and innocent girl would read most of the newspapers, she would most likely start to think that we live in an era of a spectacular global warming. In reality, we live in an era of a spectacularly inexpensive propaganda produced by unusually blinded zealots.
And that’s the memo.

Figure 1: Global cooling. This graph, depicting 6 warmest years since 1998 according to their rank, shows how Al Gore and other people with comparable moral and scientific standards would be presenting the recent temperature records if cooling became more convenient for their goals than warming.

h/t

Exerpts from an interview with Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World;

…I think what is happening now is that we are increasingly seeing a tailspin into hysteria over the global warming discussion, where it is almost commonplace to say things are worse than we thought.
It’s at the stage where people are saying its even worse than we thought yesterday, and that it is going to be catastrophic, and chaotic and disruptive – all these kinds of words. This has actually led to one of the lead modellers in the UK to come out and say it’s bizarre that before we had the debate between the climate change skeptics and the scientists, and that now we have the debate between the scientists, who are now becoming the skeptics, and those who are saying it’s all going to end in chaos, when it is going to do nothing of the sort – and this is not what the UN panel is telling us.
Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore. Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves – or New York, or Shanghai – leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm – about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we’re being told and what we’re actually seeing.
[…]
One of the top climate change economists has modelled – and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out – that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.
There is a total lack of a sense of proportion about where we are in terms of the environment but also on non-environmental issues, which is of course what I am looking at now with the Copenhagen Consensus, where we try to look at what are the big issues of the world, and where can we do a lot of good, and where can we do a little good. And the bottom line is there are many problems in the world where we can do much more at much lower cost. So presumably, if our goal is to help people, then there are many other things we should do first. If our goal is to help the environment, then there are also many other things we can do first.

Here on the island of Borneo, a thick haze often encloses this city of 500,000 people. The cause: forest fires that have blazed across the island. Many of them were set to clear land to produce palm oil — a key ingredient in biodiesel, a clean-burning diesel fuel alternative.
At a new oil-palm plantation, the hillsides have been cleared and terraced.
The bluish smoke is at times so dense that it leaves the city dark and gloomy even at midday. The haze has sometimes closed Pontianak’s airport and prompted local volunteers to distribute face-masks on city streets. From July through mid-October, Indonesian health officials reported 28,762 smog-related cases of respiratory illness across the country.
[…]
In the 1800s, Dutch and British traders began carving up parts of the island to produce rubber and other commodities. Later, Malaysian and Indonesian timber barons devastated millions of acres of forest logging tropical hardwoods. Today, only a little more than half of Borneo’s once-ubiquitous forest cover remains, according to WWF, the global conservation organization.
Now, the palm-oil boom threatens what’s left. In West Kalimantan, a province along the western coast, the palms cover about 988,000 acres or more, up from less than 37,000 acres in 1984. Fleets of orange and mustard-colored trucks ply the province’s few paved roads, ferrying the oil to river ports.
[…]
As fires burn deep into the dry peat soil beneath Indonesia’s forests, centuries of carbon trapped in the biomass are released into the atmosphere. A study presented last month at a U.N. Climate Change Conference in Nairobi showed that Indonesia is the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter behind the U.S. and China, when emissions from fires and other factors are considered.

Currently behind a WSJ subscriber wall, I received the full article by email, but if someone finds a free access page, let me know.
Previous: “climate injustice”

Matthew Sheffield;

As already noted here on NewsBusters, the Senate held a hearing today examining the role of the media in promoting climate alarmism. With others covering the newsmaking part of the discussion, I decided to drop by to observe things from a blogger’s point of view.
I went into the hearing expecting it would be more interesting than your typical congressional hearing and wasn’t disappointed. Dr. David Deming, a geophysicist from the University of Oklahoma recount an experience he had with an NPR reporter who hung up on him after he declined to say that he thought global temperature increases were human-caused.
[…]
I also heard some interesting scientific debate as to whether ice core temperature readings can really be used as a reliable indicator of whether carbon dioxide is related to global climate changes. Don’t expect to hear much about this, though, since it the CO2 proponent, Dr. Daniel Schrag of Harvard, was less-than-articulate arguing the affirmative. As of the writing of this posting, I haven’t found a single news source that quoted from today’s hearing. I did see and converse with several reporters but so far have yet to read any coverage.

Don’t expect much in the way of first hand report from CNN anchor Miles O’Brien, either. He fell asleep during the hearing.
Update : Exerpts of the statement by David Deming;

“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
“I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” “The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” took hold in the 14th century. … The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be “gotten rid of.”
“In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the “hockey stick,” because of the shape of the temperature graph. “Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.
“There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed.”

Via Drudge.

Departing from the highly compelling and science-based arguments (“consensus! you’re an idiot!”) usually offered towards dissenters, global warming … er… “climate change” theologists are now demanding they be silenced. Or else;

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world’s largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

The Wall Street Journal response to Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe is scathing;

Let’s compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We’ll grant that’s a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.
The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn’t return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it’s easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.
The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming–as it has–but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.
Every dogma has its day, and we’ve lived long enough to see more than one “consensus” blown apart within a few years of “everyone knowing” it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they’ve made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it’s useful to have a few folks outside the “consensus” asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
Imagine if this letter had been sent by someone in the Bush Administration trying to enforce the opposite conclusion? The left would be howling about “censorship.” That’s exactly what did happen earlier this year after James Hansen, the NASA scientist and global warming evangelist, complained that a lowly 24-year-old press aide had tried to limit his media access. The entire episode was preposterous because Mr. Hansen is one of the most publicized scientists in the world, but the press aide was nonetheless sacked.

Via Daimnation.

17: The number of named storms predicted May 31 by a team at Colorado State University led by Professor William Gray

More on the “creeping threat”. Or, I guess – less.
(Now, back * to regular shoveling.)

Stupid Comics;

From the dim recesses of the 1970s comes SUPERKIDS, a free educational comic published by the Office Of Energy Conservation of the Department Of Energy, Mines, and Resources of Canada…

Via Colby Cosh.

Drought, floods, severe winters, warm winters, more frequent storm activity, less frequent storm activity, early frost, early thaw, receding glaciers.
All have, to the best of my recollection as a news consumer, been cited by one climate research expert or another as evidence of “global warming”.
The same experts will also quickly caution that even in the midst of dramatic climate change, one should expect periods of “average” rainfall, temperature, storm activity.
With today’s addition of expanding glaciers, the list is finally complete. It’s therefore, official – climate change proponants have taken ownership of virtually every local and global weather phenomenon worthy of newspaper ink, including “average”.
One would think that more people would have noticed.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
*

That I find myself wishing I owned a prostate.

Because SUV’s aren’t just killing the planet, they have a hate on for your children, too.

In the first report of its kind, University researchers found children are 2.4 times more likely to be struck by a van and 53 percent more likely to be hit by a truck than by a car. The study, conducted by the U’s Intermountain Injury Control Center, also found children hit by high-profile vehicles, such as trucks, SUVs or minivans, are more likely to require hospitalization, surgery, and treatment in an intensive care unit than children backed over by cars.
Previous reports have suggested high-profile vehicles produce a large blind spot behind them, but no studies in the United States have attempted to document the rate of injury by type of vehicle.

In the July 2006 issue: “In collisions with speeding locomotives, passengers cars fare poorly”..

Remember all those news magazine “special reports” devoted to the alarming rise in autism?

The big problem is something called �diagnostic substitution.� In special education programs, �autism� was not a required category until created by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Suddenly, �autism� diagnoses for special education sky rocketed. At the same time things like �mental retardation� and other categories for mental disabilities declined. The researcher, Dr. Paul Shattuck, notes that this pattern has been observed in the past and that it was not the case that there was epidemic. In short, the problem is that there was a better diagnosis/classification scheme put into place and the primary data source that is often used to justify the �autism epidemic� claim is tainted and cannot be used to determine if there really is an epidemic.

Read the rest at OTB.

Scotland on Sunday;

IT IS straight out of a nightmare: a wave almost 100ft high bears down on your helpless vessel miles from the safety of the shore.
But that is exactly what a team of British scientists faced while conducting experiments off the west coast of Scotland.
[…]
The significance of the Rockall event is that the height of the sea was measured by an onboard wave recorder, making it officially the biggest ever.
The NOC’s boat, RSS Discovery, a successor vessel to Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ship, was stranded by storms for five days, with waves averaging 61ft. Wind speeds hit the severe gale category.
The 295ft-long vessel was in the area to conduct experiments on global warming, but the onboard instruments were also capable of accurately measuring wave height.
Holliday said: “Very strong winds are common here all the year round. The point is that all of these previously high measured waves were under hurricane conditions – really extreme conditions, but our big waves weren’t. These are not especially unusual conditions. It wasn’t just a one-off.”

The event happened in 2000, but was recently published in Geophysical Research Letters Journal.

The researchers believe the discovery of such a huge wave amid relatively low, non-hurricane wind speeds could have implications for oil exploration on Britain’s Atlantic shelf.
Holliday believes the extreme waves were caused by a resonance effect.
It occurs when the wind velocity matches the speed of the waves, resulting in wind continually feeding energy into the sea.
She said: “Energy was continually being put into this wave group. This was pretty close to the maximum height that the waves could have got to. This is the edge of the Atlantic Shelf where a lot of exploration is going on.
“These new figures are going to be quite significant. Engineers who are trying to design ships and oil platforms will have to think again.”

Emphasis mine. It’s another story that features what appear to be qualified researchers who are seemingly unaware of duplicate research in their own or related fields. It’s a phenomenon I first came across in the course of breeding dogs and tracking developments in genetic research – often, breeders have a better grasp on the current state of research in their breeds than the veterinary specialists they consult.
In July of 2004, I mentioned this item, “Seas Awash With Monster Waves”

Rogue waves that rise as high as 10-storey buildings and can sink large ships are far more common than previously thought, satellite images show.
Two European Space Agency (ESA) satellites have monitored the world’s oceans to test the frequency of monster waves that were once dismissed as a nautical myth.
Three weeks of data from the early months of 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe over 25 metres high.
Previously, ESA said, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years.
“Having proved they existed in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecasted,” said Dr Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research centre in Geesthacht, Germany.

One would think the existence of well-publicized data such as this would preclude statements that claim “discovery” – especially in an era when simply entering the words “monster waves” into a Google search can pull up multiple references.

We need a Paul Martin drinking game. I’d create one myself, but it’s been over thirteen years since my last drink so I’m a bit handicapped here. (I can’t even remember what rum tastes like.) Anyhow, the idea is to listen to Paul Martin on the news. If he says ‘very, very’, that’s one shot. If he blames the Conservative ‘hidden agenda’, that’s two shots.

And so on.

Does someone want to step up to the plate on this?

Not what you think this is about, either.
A few years ago, the paleoanthropologists got together with molecular geneticists and made a startling discovery – that all modern humans descend from a common female ancestor, who originated in Africa. They named her “Eve”, which, while not entirely original, was clever and easy to remember. (Though I wish I were a fly on the wall when the wailing began that the choice of this particular name might dovetail a little too conveniently with the competing theory in Genesis – but I digress…)
The discovery was based upon studies of mitochondrial dna – located outside the cell nucleus and inherited only from one’s mother. A more thorough discussion of mitochondrial dna and how it is used to track evolutionary branches is here. (Heh – check it out. I’m such a mind reader.)
Once the genetics geeks got their hands on mitochondrial dna they were hooked. In addition to finding “Eve”, they went to work on a timeline showing when dogs emerged from wolves, and wolves from older versions of wolves and so forth. They’ve been using it to plot these evolutionary timelines for species divergence, crime solving, disease research ever since. It’s a slick little tool.
Or it would be, if that part about “only inherited from the maternal ancestor line” were true.
Oops.

For decades biologists have assumed that mitochondria – the cells’ power stations – are inherited solely through the maternal line.
Mitochondria in the sperm from the father were presumed to be destroyed immediately after conception, leaving behind only those from the mother. But Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing from the University Hospital Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, have discovered that one of their patients inherited the majority of his mitochondria from his father.
[…]
The researchers think inheritance of paternal mitochondrial DNA is probably very rare. But the findings will have implications for a number of branches of biology. Evolutionary biologists often date the divergence of species by the differences in genetic sequences in mitochondrial DNA. Even if paternal DNA is inherited very rarely, it could invalidate many of their findings. It will also have implications for scientists investigating inherited metabolic diseases.

Damn. Well, that sucks, doesn’t it?
But let’s not let that get anyone down.. regroup, refocus and charge!

Using a computer model, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attempted to trace back the most recent common ancestor using estimated patterns of migration throughout history.
They calculated that the ancestor’s location in eastern Asia allowed his or her descendants to spread to Europe, Asia, remote Pacific Islands and the Americas. Going back a few thousand years more, the researchers found a time when a large fraction of people in the world were the common ancestors of everybody alive today – while the rest were ancestors of no one alive. That date was 5,353BC, the team reports in Nature.

No word on whether or not they’ve named the lucky dude, but I’m guessing “Adam” is high on the list.

Reuters:

Three weeks of imaging data by the agency’s satellites from early 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe of more than 25 metres in height. Previously, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years.

In related news…