A new study, which could help scientists model global change more accurately, finds that typhoons bury tons of carbon in the oceans

When typhoons and hurricanes sweep through mountainous areas, they cause more than human destruction. They also physically and chemically weather the mountains they pass, taking carbon with them and burying it in the oceans in the form of sediment. This in turn allows the planet to cool. While scientists have long predicted that extreme storms cause such effects, only recently have they been able to measure just how carbon much storms take away: tons. Researchers from Ohio State University who measured carbon while a typhoon was passing through in full force in Taiwan—essential since sediment washes away very quickly after a storm—found that more than 400 tons of carbon was being swept away for each square mile of watershed during the storm. A single typhoon in Taiwan, they determined, buries as much carbon in the ocean as all the rains combined in the country for that year.

Although the findings are preliminary and the carbon buried by storms won't alleviate global warming, the data could still be useful to scientists as a benchmark to calculate the Earth's carbon "budget," which is how much carbon is added and removed from the atmosphere overall. Right now, those numbers could be way off if accurate carbon data from storms are not considered.  Source

No single topic seems to arouse as much blog animosity as any discussion of Hansen’s projections. Although NASA employees are not permitted to do private work for their bosses off-hours (a currying favor prohibition, I suppose) - for example, secretaries are not supposed to do typing, over at realclimate, Gavin Schmidt, in his “private time”, which flexibly includes 9 to 5, has provided bulldog services on behalf of his boss, James Hansen, on a number of occasions.

In January 2008, I discussed here and here how Hansen’s projections compared against the most recent RSS and MSU data, noting a downtick which resulted in a spread not merely between observations and Scenario A, but between observations and Scenario B, sometimes said to have been vindicated. For my January 16, 2008 post, I used the then most recent RSS data (as well as UAH version which showed a lesser downtick. However, a few days later, RSS revised their data to be more in line with UAH. On January 23, 2008, I updated my graphic, using the revised RSS data, which caused a slight modification. Some blog commentators have suggested that I had made in error in my Jan 16, 2008, but these suggestions have no purpose other than defamation. I had used the then current data and promptly updated my graphic within a few days of RSS revising their data. In the latter post, I criticized RSS for not issuing a notice of the change.

Note: I don’t normally allow the discussion of things related to Nazi Germany here, including discouraging the use of the word “denier” due to it’s “Holocaust Denier” connotations. But this full page ad in the Sunday papers in Britain, touting “climate crime” and “climate cops” is just a bit over the top, and deserves some attention. It is particularly relevant since the sponsoring website climatecops.com has a teachers section, and we’ve just seen some sensibility from Schwarzenegger in Sacramento on this very issue.

I find this method of indoctrinating school children to normal everyday living being harmful to the earth with the “climate crime” connotation as distasteful and wrong headed. I have no problems with energy conservation, in fact I encourage it. But combining  such advice with a “climate cop” idea is the wrong way to get the message across. Can you imagine what sort of reaction the neigors will have to the kids hanging this door hanger on their front door? Will the result of this now be hiding your electric dryer behind false walls so the kids and neighbors don’t see it? 

[Emphasis added]  Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Time Magazine's enviro-alarmist Bryan Walsh is up to his usual scare tactics in the Aug. 4 issue, with an article entitled "Coral Reefs Face Extinction."

Sprinkled throughout the piece are phrases like 'under siege' and 'serious threats' and 'extinction', tossed around like croutons on a Caesar's salad.

There seems to be a rule in bad environmental journalism that if you write 'could' or 'might' or 'may', and predicate it before an overly-ambitious statement, then you're off the hook with your publication's fact-checkers.

Unfortunately, it's an abject lesson in how to 'cook' a piece. Here's how it looks:

I bet you thought EPA stands for Environmental Protection Agency.

Not according to the comedy team Penn & Teller, who during Thursday's "Being Green" installment of their hit television series on Showtime, tore Nobel Laureate Al Gore apart while referring to him as an "Egregiously Pushy A**hole."

To be frank, that's just one marvelous snippet from Thursday's evisceration of all things related to climate change hysteria. Here are a few more (video available here, h/t NBer PopTech, vulgarity alert):

PENN JILLETTE: Three decades ago, pretty much everybody thought we had f***ed up the earth with careless and selfish fossil fuel emissions. We were heading into an Ice Age. Today, the same fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming. Hey, no worries. You may be a carbon sinner, but now you can buy yourself a clean, green conscience for cash. It's a new craze based on eco-guilt, and it's....bullshit!

Every day, TV, newspapers, and the Internet bombard us with a message that we're destroying the earth. Ice caps are melting, rivers are dying, polar bears are drowning, and trees are doing something. We f***ed up the environment beyond repair, and now we must pay the piper. It's no wonder so many people are suffering from green guilt. [...]

But if you want to do a show about the environment, you gotta start with that guy (Gore pictured on screen). It's an EPA thing. Not Environmental Protection Agency, Egregiously Pushy Asshole. You know who we're talking about.

Yes, we do. Watch the whole thing here. You won't be disappointed.  Source

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world. They are increasingly frantic over the opposition being voiced against global warming, one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history.

The Greens have bet everything on global warming as the reason for giving up the use of long established sources of energy such as oil, coal and natural gas. The object has been to slow everything the modern world calls progress.

In India, a spokesman for that nation of one billion people has flatly refused to accept the global warming hoax. China shows no sign of yielding to the global warming lies. The greatest agricultural and mercantile economy to have ever existed, the United States of America continues to thwart its own growth by yielding to the lies.

Recently the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said that “coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.”

Leadership: When it comes to giving relief at the pump by drilling for more oil, this is truly a "do-nothing" Democratic Congress. President Bush should give 'em hell like Harry Truman did.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution states that the president "may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses" of Congress. On more than two dozen occasions in our history, presidents have done just that, forcing the Senate and House of Representatives to meet on extraordinary matters of defense or economic peril.

Sixty years ago this month, President Truman called such a special session to shame into action what he labeled a "do nothing" Republican Congress. He dubbed it the Turnip Day Session, because of the day on which it began. According to folklore in Truman's native Missouri, "On the 25th of July, sow your turnips, wet or dry."

The Braes O'Doune windfarm towers over Stirling Castle. Click to see the BEFORE picture

Neighbours also claim that the constant hum and the loud "whooshing" sound made by the blades in high winds is destroying the value of their homes.

A survey of people whose homes are situated within 1.2 miles of turbines has shown that three-quarters of them feel that the noise has damaged their quality of life while four out of five say it has affected their health.

Those who said they were made ill by the sound of the wind farms, which are designed to benefit the environment, described conditions ranging from migraines and palpitations to depression.

The conjunction of the launches of ABC television's The Hollowmen and the Federal Government's response to climate change is spooky. The latter is starting to look a lot like the former, a "bold" response that will produce much activity but do little to address the problem or offend anyone too much. In public relations terms, this will make it a considerable success.

A few weeks ago, I suggested that the sort of prescriptions advocated by Ross Garnaut's draft report might harm the economy. But with the subsequent release of the Government's green paper by Senator Penny Wong, all of us - citizens and businesses - can sleep easy. There will be an emissions trading scheme, but, as some environmentalists have convincingly shown, it now looks like it will do little to reduce Australia's carbon emissions. The proposed measures are too modest, the exclusions and compensations too generous.

That's not to say there won't be a lot of talk and argument over the details: there will be enough marginal winners and losers for that. Indeed, the whole thing is a feast for the media and business lobbyists and parts of the legal and finance industries. But this activity should not be confused with reducing carbon emissions. The Government's policy is clear: do as much as is necessary to create the illusion of progress, but no more.

Art Raiche, former Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO, says the organisation’s fear-mongering over climate change can’t be trusted:

Sadly, over the last decade, CSIRO has transformed itself from a once-respected research institute into a highly centralised, government enterprise (oxymoron?), replete with intersecting layers of expensive management, focused on continual reorganisation.  Scientific independence has been lost…

For this reason CSIRO no longer attracts top young scientists except as an employer of last resort… It employs a much higher percentage of second and third rate people than was the case two decades ago.  In short, much of CSIRO can now be regarded as a sheltered workshop.

As an example, consider the Garnaut Report, possibly the longest economic suicide note in Australia’s history.  It is based on the dire predictions of CSIRO’ s modelling programs.  Consider the assessment from Prof Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the world’s most eminent physicists on these general circulation models upon which CSIRO’s predictions are based: 

“...The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”

In fact, more than 30,000 US scientists also have a jaundiced view of these climate modelling programs and have petitioned the US government against actions to mitigate CO2 emissions?  See http://www.petitionproject.org/

But CSIRO ignores these reservations and continues its role in hopes that they prove that organisation’s relevance by scaring the populace.

Raiche’s full email and rest of post here…

There is a point at which one’s contempt for the environmentalists and their allies is irredeemable. There is no longer the usual excuse that’s there’s room for argument or discussion regarding global warming. Having been labeled “deniers” for years, the sense that the end of this hoax is in sight brings no desire to forgive and forget.

Recently, Dr. Roy Spencer, an atmospheric scientist who formerly worked for NASA, testified before a Senate committee. Free now to speak without the impediments of bureaucratic oversight, Dr. Spencer told the committee, “I am pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research.

“Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…the warming we have experience in the last 100 years is mostly natural.”