As the world's leading climatologist (and government officials who deal with such things) meet in Durban South Africa to hammer out another Kyoto protocol, feverishly working to avert the ravages of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, having mistaken a 300 year gradual global temperature emergence from the Little Ice Age of 0.7 Celsius per century, Mother Nature here in East Lansing gave us 7 inches of her Global Warming counter point. A picture out of our snug-in-a- bug condo window.
As we have a four pawed guest (Sadie) for the Holidays, she needs exercise like we all do so she and I took our usual 2 mile walk out around Bear Lake. Winter came before Fall officially left. Sadie and I break trail in the fresh snow, making our way around fallen limbs and some trees along the way.Today is one of my days to get Continuing Medical Education credits from Sparrow Hospital noon Critical Care Conference. I drove down Burcham Road, past the sledding hill filled with children and adults enjoying East Lansing School District's first snow day of the school year. It seems that the roads and sidewalks had not yet been cleared by
7 AM. Green has now become White: Go State!
Further along my journey, just after the University, heading towards the Capital on Michigan Avenue, a Volvo, with bumper stickers of GreenPeace & World Wildlife Foundation (the NGO environmentalism activist organizations that have contribute more than 1/2 the content and person power to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report #4 which Lisa Jackson, head of our US Environmental Protection Agency has used as the scientific basis for declaring carbon dioxide as a pollutant) was trying to straddle the icey roadway build-up, "slip sliding away", instead of choosing one or the other grooves that were wet but clear of ice. I can only surmise the driver was fearful of the left hand snowbanks made by the snowplows. When I moved around the car at a stop light with the Jeep Compass, I saw a women with a death grip on the steering wheel. I recon that she would have preferred some global warming right about then.
I have digressed from the main topic: our walking the unplowed trails. Sadie litterly was jumping in the air, charging back to me and then nipping at my shoes in her excitement. She buried her nose in the snow and then plowed forward. Suddenly she would be absolutely still, ears cocked forward, tail up, and listening, listening to the sounds of the woods.
For the picture at the right: "tennis anyone?"
5 comments:
Beautiful pictures, Rich! Almost like water color paintings. Greetings to Sadie! We are enjoying her "daddy's" company a great deal.;)
Hey dad, you saw this article, and accompanying research by your favorite climate skeptic, right? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html
From the article:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.
I suppose now its a retreat to the more safe emphasis on anthropogenic global warming, rather than denying the data itself :)
Hey dad you saw this piece in the Wall Street Journal by your favorite climate skeptic, right:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html
From the article:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.
I guess its a retreat to emphasis on human impact now, huh? ;)
RJ: I have read Richard Muller's oped from the Wall Street Journal. I am somewhat perplexed as he states that global warming is real. What the Berekeley Earth Surface Temberature paper, currently undergoing peer-review, reflects the land surface data, or about 30% of earth's surface. The other 70% of the surface of the earth is the oceans which are currently getting cooler and are not part of the BEST study. That BEST duplicates with its 39,000 station data vs the @7000 used for the current climate models. BEST did not find a Urban Heat Island effect one of the contentions by Anthony Watts who published a paper stating that 90% of US weather stations do not meet NOAA standards for siting or reliability. Richard Muller was never a skeptic, just appalled the climate scientists from Penn State, Colorado Climate Center, New York City and the University of East Anglia in the UK would delete tree ring data after 1960 because the tree rings data demonstrated a decline in global temperatures. What the BEST study also demonstrated was that there was a Little Ice Age 300 years ago and the Michael Mann's hockey stick graph airbrushed out the LIA. Mann also airbrushed out the Medieval Warming Period so the "handle" of the hockey stick looked flat. What BEST corroborated was that the land, primarily the Northern Hemisphere, station data could be represented by 7000 stations and that the other 32000 station data were similar. This of course was not surprising as all the weather station data is the same, it was just that 32000 station data was not used by climate modelers and not accounted for by climate models without explanation.
RJ,
I commented on Richard Muller's WSJ oped piece on my blog. There has been another email release from the University of East Anglia, currently dubbed ClimateGate 2.0. There are more bad behavior pieces on the part of a small group of climatologists which several blogs have published and made comments upon. Although surface temperature trends are interesting to talk and speculate about, the science of climatology remains unsettled and without very much confidence. Attribution declarations; i.e., man is responsible for 90% of current global warming lies outside of known reality. Climate sensitivity to increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 continues to be revised downward so that when the latest sensitivities are entered into the climate general circulation models, we get a temperature rise in 100 years of between 0.7 and 1.2 Celsius; very similar to the temperature trends over the past 300 years since emerging from the Little Ice Age. Skeptics call this global warming as "natural" and that CO2 is a minor player whose signal is lost in the "noise" of the data. The fundamental question is: How much will the temperature rise with a doubling of atmospheric CO2? The answer right now is: unknown.
You are in my heart and mind. Love DAD
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