David Bellamy: a climate sceptic falls 11 May 05

I saw the original letter, and so was delighted to read Monbiot’s article yesterday. Sometimes you just have to make a fool look ridiculous.

so who cares what he thinks. According to the standards of some on this site, if he’s not a trained climatologist then his opinion holds no water anyway.

So who cares if his numbers are off. He’s a botanist and environmentalist. Past opinions of physics professors didn’t count on crucial studies so why should his opinion count? We need to keep our standards… don’t we?

Having seen the Channel 4 News debate between David Bellamy and George Monbiot I was saddened to witness the humiliation of David but grateful to George for the exposure of the ‘flakey’ evidence of David’s proposition that human-induced climate change is a myth.

It was obvious, during the debate, that David knew he’d been caught out in a fairly elementary error by failing to verify the validity and source of his evidence.

Sadly, notwithstanding George’s triumph, I fear that there will be those who will use Bellamy and his cohort to justify continued in-action on climate change.

CIWEM, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management -of which I am Executive Director – is firm in its belief that climate change is the biggest threat we face. But because we have a cacophony instead of a symphony of different messages on the issue, the public will be confused. The publicity that David Bellamy is getting is only making matters worse.

Your play on words made me laugh!

What is interesting to me is why we have to “make” a fool appear that way! Does a fool not look ridiculous just from their own efforts!

I will not elaborate any further because I may be mentioning names!

Thanks,

Dan

George clearly had got Bellamy on his typo of saying 555 glaciers were expanding rather than 55%. On the other hand that so many, or even close to so many, glaciers are expanding does tend to refute the GW theory. On the third hand Monbiot’s claim that “99.9%” of climate scientists believe in catastrophic global warming was clearly a flight of fancy (with the Oregon group alone having got 20,000 signatures this would mean there are at least 20 million climate scientists).

However Monbiot is a better speaker.

Neither Bellamy or ‘Moonbat’ are climatologists. Bellamy believes 3 billion years of climate change are due to natural events, Moonbat thinks climate change is anthropogenic. We are currently in an intergalcial period, so I would expect many glaciers to be melting. That said, undoubtably some are advancing. The complexities of climate change do not lend themselves to over-simplification. Anyone seen the peer reviewed paper on ‘pacific decadal oscillation’ ??? Interesting!

The Oregon Petition is completely discredited.

Douglas Coker

I googled to find the paper you rather enigmatically referred to. What a lot of hits. I skimmed a few sites and there is clearly a variety of evidence pointing at different conclusions. Have you reviewed them in detail or just picked one? Are you a “doubt sower”?

Douglas Coker

Doug:

anyone who cryptically posts stuff like this doesn’t know what they are talking about.

There are lots of papers on the PDO.

What is funny about the PDO is that the PseudoSeptics used the PDO curve to show natural cycles until a couple of years ago, now they no longer use it, except when rubes are recycling arguments, like the Oregon Petition.

Best,

D

There’s a big clue for you: when someone uses the Oregon Petition, they are utterly ignorant and can be ignored. Or used for humor, either way.

D

A Multi-Proxy Approach to Peat-Based Climate Reconstruction

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Reference Blundell, A. and Barber, K. 2005. A 2800-year palaeoclimatic record from Tore Hill Moss, Strathspey, Scotland: the need for a multi-proxy approach to peat-based climate reconstructions. Quaternary Science Reviews 24: 1261-1277. What was done Utilizing plant macrofossils, testate amoebae and degree of humification as proxies for environmental moisture conditions, the authors developed a 2800-year “wetness history” from a peat core extracted from Tore Hill Moss, a raised bog in the Strathspey region of Scotland.

What was learned Based on the results they obtained from the three proxies they studied, Blundell and Barber derived a relative wetness history that begins 2800 years ago and extends all the way to AD 2000. The most clearly defined and longest interval of sustained dryness of this entire history stretches from about AD 850 to AD 1080, coincident with the well known Medieval Warm Period, while the most extreme wetness interval occurred during the depths of the last stage of the Little Ice Age.

Also evident in their wetness history is a period of relative dryness centered on about AD 1550, which corresponds to a period of relative warmth that has previously been documented by several other studies and to which we have given the name Little Medieval Warm Period. In addition, preceding the primary Medieval Warm Period, Blundell and Barber’s hydro-climate reconstruction reveals a highly chaotic period of generally greater wetness that corresponds to the Dark Ages Cold Period. Also evident are dryness peaks representing the Roman Warm Period and two other periods of relative dryness located about 500 years on either side of its center.

What it means In local contradiction of the climate-alarmist claim that the late 20th century was the warmest period experienced by the globe over the past two millennia, the correlation this study demonstrates to exist between relative wetness and warmth in Scotland strongly suggests that the temperature of the late 20th century was nowhere near the highest of the past two millennia in that particular part of the world. In fact, it suggests there were five other periods over the past 2800 years that were considerably warmer. In addition, Blundell and Barber cite many studies that report findings similar to theirs throughout much of the rest of Europe and the North Atlantic Ocean. Consequently, the regional challenge this group of studies provides to the IPCC-endorsed hockeystick temperature history is substantial.

  Pacific Decadal Oscillation By Dr. Robert E. Davis  Published   05/12/2005 

In light of the general hysteria over global warming, it’s nice, once in a while, to be able to couch our current and ongoing climate changes into some larger perspective. We keep hearing about historically warm years, warm decades, or warm centuries, uncharacteristically long or severe droughts, etc. for which mankind’s striving for a high quality of life is to blame, via the internal combustion engine and its by-product, carbon dioxide. But in reality, in most cases, we have a tragically short record of good observations to really determine how much of a record we’re even close to setting.

For example, let’s take one fairly recent climate discovery called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. In the late 1990s, some west coast fisheries researchers noted cyclical behavior in the annual salmon harvest and tied it to a Pacific Ocean climate anomaly. It turns out that when the Pacific Ocean off of Southern California and the Baja Peninsula is warmer than normal at the water surface, temperatures are typically lower than normal in the north central Pacific well south of the Aleutians. This state, called the positive phase of the PDO, is also linked to dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies and above average rainfall in the Desert Southwest (see Figure1). In the opposite situation, negative PDO, you simply flip the sea-surface temperatures and precipitation patterns.     Figure 1. Climate patterns associated with the PDO in its positive phase. The patterns are reversed when the PDO is negative (Source: MacDonald and Case, 2005).   What’s interesting and potentially useful about the PDO is that it’s behavior is quasi-cyclic, as the name suggests—it oscillates from positive to negative back to positive every 50 to 70 years or so. Thus, the PDO should be a useful tool for forecasting water resources in the western U.S., where water is more precious than fresh salmon.   With the phenomenal accuracy afforded by hindsight, we now know that, sometime around 1977-78, our planet underwent an abrupt shift from one climatic state (generally cold) to another (warm), and much of the “action” was centered in PDO territory in the north Pacific Ocean. In the late 1970s, the PDO switched from negative to positive, and the snowpack in the northern Rockies hasn’t recovered.   Of course, this climate shift was retrospectively blamed on increasing greenhouse gases, because such dramatic and abrupt shifts just couldn’t be “natural.” Presumably Nature, left to her own devices, does not cotton to wild mood swings.   But is global warming really to blame? Not likely, based on some new analyses by UCLA geographers Glen MacDonald and Roslyn Case. Using tree rings gathered from a hydrologically sensitive species of pine in California and Alberta (near two of the centers of high and low rainfall associated with the PDO), MacDonald was able to reconstruct the PDO all the way back to 993 A.D. Now this is a long climate record.   Their reconstruction (see figure 2) has two very important implications on our understanding of contemporary climate. First, the “great” climate shift of the late 70s that sent climatologists ballistic pales in comparison to many of the changes observed over the past 1000 years or more. Based on this graphic, the PDO is diving and leaping more than an Italian midfielder during the World Cup. It’s awfully hard to see any evidence of global warming in the last 150 years of that record. Second, the 50 to 70-year quasi-periodicity of the PDO was not present in the 13th, 17th, and 18th centuries (also NOT related to greenhouse gases). It’s also interesting and supportive of their analysis that a medieval mega-drought in western and central North America from about 900 to 1300 A.D. is evident in the PDO record which was negative over that entire time period, and, of course, unrelated to greenhouse gases.  

  Figure 2. Reconstructed PDO index (Source: MacDonald and Case, 2005).   Several things we thought we knew about the PDO we do not, in fact, know at all. The unprecedented great Pacific climate shift of the late 1970s linked to global warming was, in fact, precedented and unrelated to global warming. And the useful predictability of the PDO for predicting west coast drought may not be useful at all, since the PDO will, apparently on a whim, suddenly become non-periodic for centuries at a time (unrelated to global warming).   The biggest problem with all of these somewhat cyclical climate shifts is that no one knows for sure that a shift has actually taken place until many years AFTER the event, when it’s too late to be useful. So be wary of global warming psychics warning us of unprecedented climate shifts - in most cases, they are only unprecedented because of the short life span of most scientists. Remember one of the absolutely fundamental and too-often unstated tenets of science - there’s little point in studying anything that doesn’t vary during a scientist’s lifetime.   The author is Associate Professor Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia.   Reference:   MacDonald, G.M. and R.A. Case, 2005. Variations in the Pacific Oscillation over the Past Millennium. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L08703,doi:10.1029/2005GL022478.

Look Paul, how do you hope to convince anyone with this sort of post? I googled Dr. Robert E. Davis. Guess what? I get pointed to Exxon Secrets. A few more clicks and I’m at Tech Central Station!

You’ve lifted his piece from there. And what do I see under his biog? A banner logo/ad for ESSO. I click on this and am taken to www.esso.com where I’m reminded that they are owned by, guess who, ExxonMobil who, if I’m not mistaken, are BIG OIL! I will be ignoring any further posts you put up here. Bye-bye.

Douglas Coker

Thanks for sharing the op-ed piece.

I always find it easier to read predigested information than to go to the actual primary source. It saves thinking energy that way.

Especially when that website is a lobbying site. Golly – I know it’s true when I read it on TCS. Haw.

Funny, lad. Yer a hoot.

Proper citations are a clue to research skills, son.

D

Boah,

You must think people who post here are gullible rubes, like the ones who are dumb enough to believe see-oh-too. The GLOBAL multiproxy reconstructions all say the same thing, including the latest, Moberg et al. The Baliunas and Soon fiasco paper at Clim Res said so too, for your underinformedness.

Anyone (esp. see-oh-too) can cherry-pick from a narrow geographic area, and cherry-picking see-oh-too tries to dupe the rubes by just focusing on the N Atl, which just so happened to be most affected by the LIA and MWP. Let’s find some China studies, or Korea, and have see-oh-too look at those. Oh wait: they only cherry-pick where their benefactors tell them to.

Go back to Powerline, troll. Your not-so-well-spent time is wasted here.

D