Another overhyped global warming claim bites the dust

(Grammar edit)
Connecting CO2 with global warming, climate change, climate disruption, or whatever, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It is virtually impossible to find the needle in the haystack yet, they insist on spending billions of dollars and expending valuable resources looking for it, just so they can pin it on man, and make him pay dearly for it. Even if they found a connection, they probably would not like what they find in that, the connection would be of such insignificant consequence as to be considered lunacy, when trying to justify such a large expenditure.

Shucks…I can’t help it! Moderators, I apologize in advance, but this is just TOO appropriate:

alan neil ditchfield says: Wrote
January 13, 2011 at 2:54 pm
“WHY ENVIRONMENTAL FORTUNE-TELLING IS ACCEPTED
a.n.ditchfield
A recurrent thought of Nigel Lawson is that much of the current malaise in the West is due to the erosion of traditional religion and education. The West has lost its bearings. In this he echoes G.K. Chesterton: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything”. The epigram expresses what anthropologists have long known: that religiosity seems to be hardwired into the human brain; if suppressed in one form it returns in another.”
I believe the purpose of humans is to become as God is. Maybe that’s the hardwiring.
One Caviot;
Not everyone gets into the club, first you have to qualify.
I also believe God is not a singular entity in and of itself.

I used to be very ambivalent about tagging and collaring of wild animals for research purposes. As of today, I am fully opposed to it. And any biologist motivated to study such animals in this way in order to prove their pet theory of ‘the impact of AGW on wildlife’ must be opposed and condemned and their scientific funding cut.
Late last year WUWT reported a polar bear research that involved such collaring without much of a word whether such observation is appropriate:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/21/polar-bears-no-longer-on-thin-ice-researchers-say-polar-bears-could-face-brighter-future/
In that thread, I posted a BBC video from youtube that showed a similarly collared snow leopard apparently having difficulty hunting. The narrator is none other than David Attenborough: “Collaring a wild snow leopard is a remarkable breakthrough for science, but it leaves [a researcher] with mixed feelings.” Don’t you say? If you have a mixed feeling about it maybe it is not really a good idea, let alone a “remarkable breakthorugh for science”. However, a breakthrough for the careers of certain unscrupulous scientists, it certainly is. Here is the same video again:

Incidentally, for those who want to see the effects of such collaring in a fictional world, I’d strongly recommend an episode of an otherwise ordinary sci-fi television show, Star Trek: Voyager. This particular episode is called “Scientific Method”. In that episode, Voyager crew are being collared and tagged for research purposes by invisible aliens, making life very difficult for the crew. You really find yourselves in the shoes of -so to speak- penguins, and snow leopards, and polar bears, and dolphins and whales, and albatrosses. It is bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Method_%28Star_Trek:_Voyager%29

Mike D. says:
January 13, 2011 at 8:18 pm
Possible subtitle: When Wildlife Biologists Are Toxic To The Animals They Study
A common phenomenon. In Hawaii the USGS-BRD wye-byes “study” endangered birds (palila, Loxioides bailleui) by climbing ladders to nests and removing the chicks to weigh and measure them. Then they put the chicks back in the nests. Interestingly, 100% of the chicks thusly man-handled (and/or woman-handled) die within a few hours. Must be global warming, eh?
btw, the above is absolutely true. I know unimpeachable witnesses who were shocked and flabbergasted, but the “researchers” were oblivious. I can cite dozens of other cases where gummit wye-byes are extirpating the populations they “study”.

I’d certainly believe that.
I grew up in a neighbourhood that had many pigeon hobbyists. My elder brother was one, too. One of the very first thing any kid is taught is to be extremely careful handling these birds. They are a lot more delicate for manhandling than a cat, the top predator of the pigeons.
The second most important rule is to never handle an egg or a chick. The rationale for this was simple: parents abandon chicks that have been manhandled. Why this is the case, I don’t know.
But I grew up thinking that perhaps indelicate handling was to blame and that the mere contact with the chick for parental abandonment was an exaggeration. And that those who know about such things, such as biologists, are better informed than the pigeon hobbyists of my childhood. It turns out I might well have been wrong to think so highly of scientists vis a vis hobbyists.

“Garr says:
January 13, 2011 at 10:52 pm
I’m surprised no one has considered that the banded group may be self-selecting, i.e., they were weaker, more stupid, or otherwise less fit to begin with. After all, the scientists were able to trap them and band them. The fitter penguins may have been better able to avoid the scientists or already had higher perches that the scientists didn’t bother climbing up to.”
Garr, that’s very funny. I guess, by that reckoning, any scientist that fell and broke an arm and a leg while chasing these birds could equally be considered “weaker, more stupid, or otherwise less fit to begin with”.
In case people may get confused, they ought to be reminded that only half the number of penguins that were caught were tagged on the wings in the old fashioned way:
“…French and Norwegian scientists reported that they took 100 king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus), selected at random on Possession Island on the Crozet archipelago, a sub-Antarctic group in the southern Indian ocean.
All were tagged with a minute, electronic transponder that was implanted under the skin, which can only be read by using specialist equipment placed close to the bird. Fifty of the 100 birds were additionally given a flipper band.”

“Eduardo Ferreyra says:
January 13, 2011 at 6:21 pm
If penguins are dying because warming, how come they to mate and breed to a much warmer place tha the Peininsula? They go to the biggest breeding and mating place in the world, Punta Tombo, in Patagonia where they share territory with guanacos (and toursits in shorts!)”
There are about 17 species of penguins. Only one, Magellanic Penguin Spheniscus magellanicus, breeds at Punta Tombo, and this species does not breed in Antarctica. Different species have different habitat requirement. Punta Tombo is unique by the way in being the only large penguin colony on the mainland of a continent. Usually such sites are on islands where there are no mammalian predators.
The tourists are probably not much of a problem since most penguins are utterly unafraid of humans (the Yellow-eyed Penguin Megadyptes antipodes is an exception). By the way, much of the time I would not recommend wearing shorts at Punta Tombo,

“The second most important rule is to never handle an egg or a chick. The rationale for this was simple: parents abandon chicks that have been manhandled. Why this is the case, I don’t know.”
I have no experience specifically with pigeons, but generally speaking birds are not sensitive to handling of eggs or chicks. This can be a problem with mammals who react strongly to scent, but birds have little sense of smell. There have been large scale studies on the effect of banding of nestling birds which have shown no significant effects compared with unbanded nestlings.
On a more anecdotal level I remember a thrush nest in my garden that blew down in a windstorm. One of the three nestligs was killed, but the other two were unhurt, so I took the remains of the nest, put it back in place (and wired it in place for security). I then put the nestlings back. The parent birds had of course been quite agitated while this was going on, but they resumed feeding the young even before I had taken away the ladder, and both subsequently fledged successfully.

OK, so the banded penguins can’t swim as fast.
What were those bands for again? Oh yes, to pick out specific penguins from the over all crowd of penguins.
Makes you wonder what things sound like over in the Sea Lion colony:
Grizzled Old Sea Lion: Listen up cubs, I’m gonna splain to ya the most important huntin’ skill there be. Identifying the slowest moving ones outa the bunch. Thems the ones ya want to chase for lunch.
Young Smart Aleck Sea Lion; Get with the modern times gramps. The slow ones come with these easy to spot arm bands…

Dr. Mann produced some data a couple of years ago that proved Antarctic warming. The temperature data came from surface stations it was said. It turned out that Mann could not find most of the stations, due to snow cover, and his data set actually came from a GCM model run. How easily these people are fooled by the virtual GCM world and still fail to take any actual observations.

Alan Neil Ditchfield,
Some people may have religiosity wired into their brains, some may not.
It is true that much of the modern Western malaise may be due to the loss of traditional values, and to the rapid change in the way of life.
It is NOT true, though, that, once we ditched old fairy tales, we must hide again under their skirts, instead of trying to adapt to reality.