Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Emperor penguins threatened by climate scientists

The judgment of climate scientists is apparently suffering from the fact that they are drowning in grant money to promote the idea of a global crisis. Try to make sense of these two headlines in recent days:

July 6 NPR Headline: "Study Shows Penguins Endangered By Waning Antarctic Ice." This is priceless. If you look at the interview of Hal Caswell, the author of this "study," what you notice is he never says that the penguins are actually endangered now (nor does the abstract of the study itself). It's all his "anticipation." This is all, he says, in the interest of getting Emperor penguins on the endangered species list which "would provide more impetus to take action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing or halting climate change." The very impetus of the study is political.

But what is all this about "waning Antarctic Ice"? which brings us to the second headline:

July 5 Daily Mail: "Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea ice hits new record high with 2.1 million square miles more than is usual for time of year." What was that about "waning ? Yup: An area the size of Greenland, which is normally open water, is frozen. And this isn't just an anomaly. This has apparently been the trend in recent years--not only in Antarctica, but the entire southern hemisphere.

And as we know, climate scientists always have an escape hatch. Here is Caswell talking about the poor penguins, who lose no matter what happens:

So this species breeds in colonies on sea ice. They make this long march from the edge of the ocean to breed in the middle of the winter. So if there's too much sea ice, that trudge to bring food to the chicks gets longer and more energetically expensive for the penguins, and this cuts down on their breeding success. On the other hand, if there's too little sea ice, then the basis of the Antarctic food web is not as productive.

They can't win! The climatologists have them coming and going. They don't stand a chance. But it saves climate scientists in the end because (just as both cold and warm weather confirm their theory) it keeps their theory unfalsifiable.

No comments: