Climate

Yesterday I lamented the potential banning of fire. For those of you that don’t know, I live in a town that rivals Berkeley for nuttiness. Thanks to the progressive thinking fomented by Chico State University, Chico is often like an … Continue reading →

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Well, this has been a circuitous journey. I started out to research volcanoes. First I got distracted by the question of model sensitivity, as I described in Model Climate Sensitivity Calculated Directly From Model Results. Then … Continue reading →

Sure they’re bad for the environment, for human health, and for wildlife, but we rarely stop to wonder if the Alberta tar sands are in fact unconstitutional. But the constitutional standing of the tar sands – one of the world’s largest and most carbon-intensive energy projects – is just what’s at stake in a treaty rights claim the Beaver Lake Cree Nation (BLCN) is bringing against the Governments of Alberta and Canada in a case that promises to be one of the most significant legal and constitutional challenges to the megaproject seen in Canada to date. Signaling the high-stakes of the whole dispute, it has taken five years of beleaguered fighting just to have the case go to trial. Canada and Alberta – the defendants – fought tooth and nail during those five years to have the claim dismissed outright, saying the case put forward by the BCLN was “frivolous, improper and an abuse of process.” The BCLN is challenging these governments on the grounds of the cumulative impacts of the tar sands and has indicated some 19,000 ‘individual authorizations’ and 300 individual industrial projects in their claim. The governments of Alberta and Canada tried to have the case dismissed under Rule 3.68, a measure meant to protect defendants from cases that are…well…“frivolous, improper, and an abuse of process.” But this case isn’t one of those. Canada claimed the claim was “unmanageable” and “overwhelming,” suggesting the 19,000 authorizations were likely to have fallen within the relevant regulatory framework at the time of their approval and needn't be bothered with. But, as one judge stated, a claim cannot be dismissed based merely on its scope. The courts agreed, telling Canada that no further “delaying tactics” should be permitted in this litigation lest the entire claim be “stonewalled at an early stage through excessive particularization.” What is more, the court said Canada’s complaint “flies in the face of the Supreme Court of Canada” and its previous decisions, indicating Canada’s counsel was unsuccessful in its attempts to squeeze out of a tight legal position. Canada even sought to have its portion of the claim whittled down to “limit its exposure” in the case, a position the court said Canada’s “counsel candidly admitted to advancing…for strategic reasons.” On April 30th, 2013, the courts told Canada and Alberta they’d had enough of the bickering. “The parties will be well-served by returning to their case management judge for the implication plan to advance this litigation through trial,” they wrote. In other words: get your act together, you’re going to court. The Rights The Alberta Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold the claim against the crown, grants the BLCN the opportunity to argue the cumulative negative impacts of tar sands expansion may constitute a legal breach of the band’s historic Treaty 6 with the Canadian government, signed back in 1876. And the significance of this judgment cannot be overstated. The BLCN’s claim now stands as the first opportunity for legal consideration of the cumulative impacts of the tar sands on First Nation’s traditional territory and the implications of those impacts on the ability to uphold Treaty Rights. And First Nation’s Rights – enshrined as Aboriginal Rights in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 – are arguably some of the most important emerging rights on the Canadian legal landscape and certainly the most powerful environmental rights in the country. This, in part, has to do with the fact that what section 35 rights actually legally entail, is still being developed through case law. Dozens of important cases - like the precedent-setting R v. Gladstone and Mikisew v. Canada- have been decided by courts over the last 30 years, since the patriation of the Constitution, finding Canada in serious violation of the Constitution when it comes to treaty rights. Despite the emerging nature of these rights, one thing is clear – First Nations have the inalienable right to hunt, trap

by Jill and David Archer

Briffa’s new paper on Yamal is online today here, together with Supplementary Information here. Yamal has been a longstanding issue at Climate Audit. The new article appears to be their long awaited response to criticism from Climate Audit (though this criticism is not referred to anywhere in the aticle.) In resisting FOI requests for their withheld 2006 Yamal-Urals regional chronology, CRU said that it was incomplete, as they were continuing to work on its development. However, they did undertake to disclose the 2006 regional chronology as part of the present publication. On my first reading, instead of living up to their undertaking to develop a regional chronology, CRU has instead provided reasons against using a regional chronology and do not present one in the paper – instead focussing on a variation of the original Yamal chronology. In resisting the FOI, CRU said that production of the 2006 regional chronology would damage the reputation of CRU scientists. The 2006 version appears to be the “Urals raw” chronology illustrated in SM9 as Greater Urals (shown below), though it is not identified as such in my first reading. Readers can judge for themselves whether their foreboding was justified. Figure 1. Compare to GU2 top panel. Readers who are convinced by Briffa’s arguments against a regional chronology may well wonder whether, for example, the Avam-Taimyr regional chronology of Briffa et al 2008 would pass corresponding tests, since no similar analysis has ever appeared in Briffa articles in which he presented earlier regional chronologies. Or whether these tests only became of interest when the regional chronology went the wrong way. CA readers will recall the original controversy in September 2009 over the Schweingruber Khadyta River series in Yamal, a controversy on which I’ll review in the present context on a subsequent occasion. Leaving nothing on the table, Briffa excluded the Khadyta River from the present reconstruction, pointing out that recent trees in this area had been growing poorly (thereby lowering the late 20th century uptick.) They state: the site report (and statistical evidence) demonstrating the anomalous “signal” in the Khadytla data lead us to omit them from the new Yamal chronology constructed here (see SM5 for details)

From the Washington Times, idiocy only bureaucrats could muster: “Since man first rubbed a pair of sticks together to make a fire, we’ve gathered around a campfire to cook food, enjoy good company and bask in the warmth of the … Continue reading →

Roman Murieka has a great statistical analysis of the Cook ‘consensus’ paper over at Climate Audit. There’s a surprise result: The number of papers endorsing AGW is falling, while the number of papers with no position is increasing. Looks like … Continue reading →

Yet another propaganda essay masquerading as a scientific paper has been published (SI here) in the journal, Environmental Research Letters.   The latest entry, Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature, written by a team of activist bloggers led by John Cook of the antithetically named Skeptical Science blog,  attempts to further the meme of a 97% consensus of scientific support for a faltering Global Warming movement. There have been a number of posts, for example,  here, here and here at Lucia’s Blackboard or this one and that at WUWT which discuss the weak data gathering / data interpretation methodology and the truly incredible spin-one’s-head- around algorithm for generating a value of “97” which conveniently ignores a large proportion of the data.  My focus in this post will be to examine some of the other “quantifying” material. Given the virtual absolute absence  of available data and statistics in this paper, this will not be that easy a task.  The authors have apparently bought into the Climate Science tradition of why should I make the data available if you will only use it to prove me wrong.  I should point out that I have spent much of my academic career doing just that and become reasonably adept at recognizing situations where work might  be shoddy.  This is due to my experiences with consulting on academic research projects, Ph.D. and Master’s theses work as well as outside the university.  When  interviewing the researchers about their project, I would tell them that I would attempt to everything that was wrong with their planned research.  When it got to the point that this was no longer possible to do, I would be satisfied that the statistical aspects would be adequate for answering the questions that they wished to answer. One of the items that caught my eye was Figure 2b:  Percentage of self-rated endorsement, rejection and no position papers. This figure was discussed in the text of the paper: Figure 2(a) shows the level of self-rated endorsement in terms of number of abstracts (the corollary to figure 1(a)) and figure 2(b) shows the percentage of abstracts (the corollary to figure 1(b)). The percentage of self-rated rejection papers decreased (simple linear regression trend  -0.25% ±0.18% yr-1,  95% CI, R2 = 0.28; p =0.01, figure 2(b)). The time series of self-rated no position and consensus endorsement papers both show no clear trend over time. Figure 2(a) showed that the number of abstracts each year was increasing at a very high rate.  This implied that the variance of the percentages calculated for figure2(b) would change substantially from year to year.  Since a “simple linear regression” assumes homoscedasticity (i.e. equal variability) of the data from year to year, this would mean that the early years with very few abstracts would have an inordinately strong influence in the calculation of the parameter estimates as well as possibly distorting the interpretation of the significance of the results. As well, the model for this regression (which for convenience we will do for a probability rather than a percentage) looks like:  Pk = ? + ?Tk where Pk is the probability that a paper in year Tk will belong in the category for which the regression is being done (e.g. “rejection papers”).  An observation for that year will look like pk = nk / Nk where nk is the count of papers in years k and Nk is the total number of abstracts in that year.  One should note that pk is assumed to have a binomial distribution with parameters Nk and Pk.  The full model  becomes  pk = ? + ?Tk + ?k where ?k is a random variable with mean 0 and variance equal to Pk (1 – Pk ) / Nk . The data needed to create Figure 2(b) was, you guessed it, unavailable, so I digitized the data in the graph using a simple R programme.  The large symbols used in the graph were not helpful to the process, but I managed to get what appeared to be a very reasonable replica of the various plots. 

Guest essay by Nic Lewis The Otto et al. paper has received a great deal of attention in recent days. While the paper’s estimate of transient climate response was low, the equilibrium/effective climate sensitivity figure was actually slightly higher than … Continue reading →

Junkscience.com reports this is what the print copy looks like today for this article by Eugene Robinson. Note what looks like black unfiltered pollutants spewing skyward: But when you look at the original photo, you notice something different: The caption … Continue reading →