Tag: Richard Alley

Core blimey, Easterbrook’s at it again

Don Easterbrook’s strange obsession with the Greenland temperature record and the GISP2 ice core data series continues. Despite his last effort having been shown to be completely clueless (though still good enough for Bob Carter and “potty peer” Chris Monckton to reference approvingly), he continues to (snow)plough a lonely furrow. This time it’s in a guest post at µWatts headlined (rather poorly) Easterbrook on the magnitude of Greenland GISP2 ice core data. It’s BIG data, obviously, for Don, but sadly he shows no signs of actually doing any proper research, or developing any real understanding of the issues he feels so free to write about.

So where are the errors this time?

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Easterbrook’s wrong (again)

Over the holiday period I’ve had a number of people point me at the latest “essay” by Don “Cooling-gate” Easterbrook — it was featured in full at µWatts, translated into German and Dutch, and made headline material for Morano: Geologist: 9,099 Of Last 10,500 Years Warmer Than 2010. I was a little surprised. I thought that recent temperatures were the warmest for at least hundreds, and probably thousands of years. But this is Easterbrook, and he’s up to his old tricks. He’s “hiding the incline” in temperatures by mangling the data from Greenland ice cores. Has he learned nothing since I last looked at his “work”? Apparently not.

Easterbrook’s argument is so flimsy and his presentation of data so dodgy that even the normally uncritical crowd at µWatts voiced grave doubts about his analysis. But there were a number of loose ends left over from my last look at Greenland ice core data, and so I took the opportunity to do a little more research. Playing fast and loose with the facts, and making schoolboy errors in the process, is not a good look for a professor emeritus. But that’s what Easterbrook’s been doing…

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Would you give this man any creedence?

It’s YouTube weekend chez Hot Topic: Sunday’s offering is the Two-Mile Time Machine man and all-round ice expert, Dr Richard B Alley, giving a (ahem) creditable rendering of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, with a message about coal and climate.

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(Full story of Alley’s rock videos at Dot Earth). [References]

Alley’s riffing on coal captures the zeitgeist, what with Greenpeace campaigners in the UK escaping conviction for vandalising a coal-burning power station chimney by painting UK PM Gordon Brown’s name on it (over here they’d fall foul of the Electoral Finance Act), thanks in no small part to testimony by James Hansen (testimony (pdf), recent paper).

Way off-topic, but I can’t let this video weekend pass without mentioning the Large Hadron Rap. Damn catchy, and didactic to boot – even features a guest appearance from MC Hawking. New frontiers in science communication…

Ice ice baby

CTarctic4808.jpg The fat lady’s not yet in the building, but her limo’s outside the theatre. There’s another five or six weeks of melting to go, but there’s more than just sea ice melting in the Arctic, and more than my few meagre wagers riding on how summer turns out ‘oop North. Here’s a compendium of interesting recent stuff…

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Swell maps, and other stories

GoogleBAS.jpg Time for another round up of climate-related news. Hot on the web today (for cartophiles, at least) is that Google Earth has gained a swag of new climate change related information, the result of collaboration between Google, the UK Government, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey. The Climate Change in Our World project, launched at the Google Zeitgeist conference by UK PM Gordon Brown offers two new layers based on Hadley Centre predictions, BAS research in Antarctica, and impacts worldwide. You can animate global temperature changes, visit crumbling ice shelves, and view climate change impacts around the world. Google Earth blog here, download .kmz files here. Hours of geographical fun are guaranteed.

  • A major new study finds strong links between recent climate change and large scale changes in the planet’s natural systems. It’s our fault, in other words [Nature (behind a paywall), BBC, Science Daily News, Guardian]. Lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York told the BBC “…look at all the effects this relatively low amount of warming has had. It reveals the sensitivity to relatively low amounts of warming in many physical and biological systems.” A key point for anyone who thinks that “only a few degrees” won’t make much difference.
  • The growing number of humans on the planet is having a dramatic impact on wildlife populations, according to the Living Planet Index compiled by WWF and the Zoological Society of London. Populations of land-based species have fallen by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29% since 1970. We’re losing about 1% of all other species every year, and one of the “great extinction episodes” in the Earth’s history is under way, the index finds. [BBC, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph].
  • More bad wildlife news: the 2008 Bird Red List “warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional stress on key habitats,” according to the BBC. “The assessment lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction – one-in-eight of all bird species.“
  • RNZ National’s science programme Our Changing World is always worth a listen, but last week’s (15/5/08) was a cracker. Ice core expert Richard Alley on Antarctica’s future, an update on the University of Waikato’s UltraCommuter EV, and one of the most cogent overviews of biofuel options I’ve ever heard from Doug Cameron, Chief Scientific Officer of Khosla Ventures, the Californian clean tech company. If those streaming links expire, podcast versions are available here, and the programme’s archive is here.
  • Wired reports on Renault’s plans to make EVs for Israel, and then the world, and EcoGeek discovers that Audi intends to have EVs in production in ten years. They might have to hurry… (my son announced yesterday that “one day’ he intends to own a Porsche. I’m willing to bet that by the time he can afford one (if ever) it’ll be a hybrid or EV).
  • #35 with a bullet! Tim Selwyn’s latest NZ blogosphere survey (at Tumeke!) finds that Hot Topic has moved up from #68 in February to #35 in March/April. I’d like to thank The Listener for making it all possible… 😉