Hopefully, Mann’s new book, which is an adaptation of 1491 with pictures and aimed at a youth audience, will be more popular with the mass market. Maybe a video game would help as well!

Terry

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“Ecosystem engineering and niche construction are part of what humans have always done. Brand makes an emphatic case for tending the wild, for people being densely involved with nature. ‘It’s all gardening’ is the chapter heading. Restoration is part of it, but so is agriculture which merges with the practices of tending the wild.”

Additional historical evidence of this is highlighted in the current SLDI Newsletter:

Deepening Perspectives on Sustainable Land Development
http://www.sldi.org/newService/SLDIJan2010.html

“Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world’s land as possible in a putatively intact state. But ‘intact’, if the new research is correct, means ‘run by human beings for human purposes.’ Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world’s largest garden.” – Charles C. Mann in 1491

Terry Mock
Executive Director
Sustainable Land Development International
http://www.SLDI.org

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“Catastrophe Cancelled.”

Steve, so far as I can see the Muir-Wood paper was referred to in a short section of Chapter 1 of the Working Group 2 report which was about economic losses attributed to natural disasters. WG2 deals with the impacts of climate change, not with the physical science. Muir-Wood’s paper has to do with the cost of the impact of extreme events. The Times on Line article appears to have confused the economic cost of extreme events with their frequency (I trust not deliberately, but seemingly sloppily). The section in the IPCC report itself reads pretty cautiously to me, so you may not want to look at it, but if you do you’ll find it here on page 110. The final paragraph reads:

“Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year (see Supplementary Material Figure SM1.1). However, for a number of regions, such as Australia and India, normalised losses show a statistically significant reduction since 1970. The significance of the upward trend is influenced by the losses in the USA and the Caribbean in 2004 and 2005 and is arguably biased by the relative wealth of the USA, particularly relative to India.”

For IPPCC comment on the frequency of extreme events you need to look at the work of Working Group 1. A convenient summary may be seen in this opening paragraph from their Frequently Asked Questions section (page 107), responding to the question: Has there been a change in extreme events?

“Since 1950, the number of heat waves has increased and wide¬spread increases have occurred in the numbers of warm nights. The extent of regions affected by droughts has also increased as precipitation over land has marginally decreased while evaporation has increased due to warmer conditions. Generally, numbers of heavy daily precipitation events that lead to flooding have increased, but not everywhere. Tropical storm and hurricane frequencies vary considerably from year to year, but evidence suggests substantial increases in intensity and duration since the 1970s. In the extratropics, variations in tracks and intensity of storms reflect variations in major features of the atmospheric circulation, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation.”

Sorry Steve, it looks as if another drive-by shooting has missed the target. But let me know if I’ve misread the evidence.

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off you go, steve. your work here is done, right?

hopefully that’s the last we’ll hear from him…

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http://sciblogs.co.nz/code-for.....e-natural/

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A case built on sand it seems:
“THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough. ”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....000063.ece
Catastrophe Cancelled.

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