Well, I warned everybody yesterday. That briefing was put together by Climate Nexus, an advocacy and communications group. An accompanying report on heat waves and climate change was released simultaneously at climatecommunication.org
The usual suspects put that document together. See below.
Expert Reviewers:
- Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
- Jerry Meehl, National Center for Atmospheric Research
- Jeff Masters, Weather Underground
- Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
Now with a telephone press conference, Climate Nexus seer Michael Oppenheimer says he knows “what global warming looks like”, and it apparently is a hazy yellow-orange.
“It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster… this provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.”
In Colorado, wildfires that have raged for weeks have killed four people, displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Because winter snowpack was lighter than usual and melted sooner, fire season started earlier in the US, with wildfires out of control in Colorado, Montana and Utah.
The high temperatures that are helping drive these fires are consistent with projections by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said this kind of extreme heat, with little cooling overnight, is one kind of damaging impact of global warming.
Others include more severe storms, floods and droughts, Oppenheimer said.
The stage was set for these fires when winter snowpack was lighter than usual, said Steven Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana.
Full article here h/t to reader Alwyn Poole.
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I wonder, did global warming look like this same yellow-orange hazy hellfire back in 1988 before Jim Hansen turned it into a cause?
Above – The Fires at Yellowstone National Park, 1988 when CO2 was at the “safe level” of approximately 350 parts per million according to Dr. James Hansen in this non peer reviewed declaration. Image from yellowstonecountry.org
The NPS talks about fire history of the region in the context on 1988:
Such wildfires occurred across much of the ecosystem in the 1700s. But that, of course, was prior to the arrival of European explorers, to the designation of the park, and the pattern established by its early caretakers to battle all blazes in the belief that fire suppression was good stewardship. Throughout much of the 20th century, park managers and visitors alike have continued to view fire as a destructive force, one to be mastered, or at least tempered to a tamer, more controlled entity. By the 1940s, ecologists recognized that fire was a primary agent of change in many ecosystems, including the arid mountainous western United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, national parks and forests began to experiment with controlled burns, and by the 1970s Yellowstone and other parks had instituted a natural fire management plan to allow the process of lightning-caused fire to continue influencing wildland succession.
We are living in the age of crazy.
UPDATE: Here is some important data to counter these crazy claims. From SOS Forests who writes:
The founder and purveyor of Watts Up With That, the premier climate realist website and blog (twice the winner of the Best Science Blog), the estimable Anthony Watts, has posted some of our fire graphs [here].
But they are outdated (my fault). Here are the latest:
Data are from the National Interagency Fire Center.
There are some evident trends.
1. Total acres burned has increased from the 1960’s to this Century, from an average of 4.6 million acres per year to 6.8 million acres per year.
2. Average acres per fire has also increased, from a low in the 1970’s of 21 acres per fire to 83 acres per fire in this Century.
3. Number of fires per year has decreased from a high (1975-1984) of nearly 190,000 fires per year to 83,000 fires per year this Century.
Fewer but larger fires this Century, and more acres burned in total.
To me this suggests a legacy of poor fuel management rather than “global warming”.
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@David Mk
It’s a semi valid point – sure, we don’t NEED to review the bat[snip] crazy claims as they are obviously (to anyone with a brain) stupid. However, it is important to know what kind of cr*p that these muppets are spreading and more importantly to counteract it with proper review/discussion with our fellow man.
At work or at play, I am sure we have all come across the blathermouth who ‘supports’ being green (whilst still driving his SUV!), etc, etc and who reckons ‘this and that’ but seemingly doesn’t understand squat about the subjetc – only what he has been spoonfed from the MSM ?
Whether we like it or not, we are duty bound (as responsible skeptics), to correct the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of science and to almost ‘prevent man’s self destruction’ via the CO2 scam, are we not?
The point being that in order to help the crazies, we do need to know what kind of crazy we are dealing with!
regards
Kev
“The high temperatures … are consistent with projections by the UN IPCC … ”
[patronising_tone] Yes, of course they are, Michael. As we’ve been told over and over, practically everything that happens is “consistent with projections by the IPCC”, if not downright “caused by CAGW”. But then, as every first-year philosophy student knows, when you start from a false premise you can correctly derive any statement you like from it, true or false. So please, Michael, go and learn a little science and basic logic, and stop trying to scare your classmates (and everyone else). [/patronising_tone]
The age of crazy? The age of looking utterly sincere while lying through your teeth, more like. Fully agree with the FAIL, though!
Dang. Looking at that picture, it must have really been a downer to be a dinosaur. Breathing smoke all the time and seeing that cruddy orange stuff in the air. No wonder they went extinct.
It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. 🙂
Well, if you want to know how the world looks with uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, look no further than Monet’s views of the Houses of Parliament”. The last time Eli saw this effect (which is what the picture Prof. Oppenheimer showed shows) was in Erfurt Germany in the early 90s, a relic of what doing everything for industry and nothing for the environment, although the same was available in places in the US before the Clean Air Act.
Of course, sand storms caused by terrible ag practices dominated the sky during the Dust Bowl era, reaching as far as the east coast.
NOTE: Eli Rabett is actually Joshua Halpern of Howard University
Smokey Bear says: Only a reduction in CO2 can prevent forest fires.
Knowing how the True Believers like to sometimes alter photographs to drive home their bogus points, I found it ironically amusing to see the ‘Photo Shop’ in the picture from Yellowstone Park.
My father and older brother were there, during the fire. Even then, I heard that it was because of disallowing clearing away dead material, that helped bring about that massive fire. At least someone in those days knew it was environmental extremist views that brought it about…
Would wide fire-stop lanes be of some help in the overall situation?
I don’t get it.
Why doesn’t the EPA just legislate against these sorts of fire…
that is the power they think they have, isn’t it…
it is certainly its the type of power that they WANT!!!
pat wrote:
quote
Like the artificially managed forests in California, often Eucalyptus and non native pines rather than the indigenous oak, these forests are dangerous in summer.
unquote
I’ve seen the aftermath of fires in Spain where the eucalyptus send out fire-starting leaves and bark into the surrounding pine forests. When the inevitable happens and the forest burns down, the next year the whole area is covered with eucalyptus seedling and the burned trunks of the parent trees are bursting into full leaf. The eucalyptus controls its competition by burning it.
In Madeira we saw the local ecological park with one end burnt out: guess which foreign tree was responsible. It’s always easy to cry ‘climate change’, much easier than getting work gangs in to clear the invader and restore the natural species mix: even then, of course, it may be a fire-managed ecosystem which will be difficult to explain to those who want something to blame. Otherwise they’d have to learn that Nature is sometimes cruel.
But surely the forests burning in the US now are natural, just preserved from burning in the usual, natural way. No-one would plant a dry area with acres of eucalyptus, would they?
JF
Someone should tell them there’s no fuel like an old fuel.
From the caption:
“… human-caused climate change…”
Did I miss something?
No more “warming”, “catastrophe” or “doom”?
Humans causing a… a… change? 50:50? Wowww! In which direction?
Isn’t always anything in change?
What a ridiculous article.
One useful piece of data missing was the total area forested over the years. Has this increased, as I suspect it has, or decreased, in which case there maybe a problem but with forest management not climate.
Not so much climate change as dumb people living in dumb places.
Or if you live next to a forest, expect a fire, near the sea, expect the tide to come in, near a river, expect a flood etc…
Get over it!
How did humans get so dumb so quick?
Once we would have accepted nature’s wrath, now we need to blame someone when it rains too much or not enough, or when it’s a bit too warm or too cold. All the time there’s more of us moving into places where we shouldn’t be, places where nature will remind us of that fact in so many ways.
As I pointed out yesterday in several peer reviewed research papers:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/27/more-heated-media-prepping-tomorrow/#comment-1020170
It is important, very important, to understand that the Colorado fires are arson, not “climate change”.- up to two new fires a day for the past week. While conditions are good for a burn, they have not been good for a natural start. There is further reason to be concerned that the fires are terrorist driven, based on recent publications from the middle east which exhort certain “lone wolf” efforts, including the settings of forest fires, in the US. Trenberth et al need to be fully castigated for trying to profit on the tragedy of their neighbours for what is most likely criminality, not nature, as if Trenberth understood anything about nature at all.
The idiots here in the USA are planning on planting winter hardy GMO eucalyptus!!
Oppenheimer is a Principal Investigator with the Carbon Mitigation Initiative which is sponsored by BP and the Ford Motor Company.
http://cmi.princeton.edu/about/sponsors.php
“In 2010 Princeton received $11 million from BP to support the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, adding to the $19 million it has received over the last decade through CMI’s partnership with the oil company.
“Oppenheimer said, “I thought long and hard about whether to continue accepting that support… He eventually determined that “the benefits of the research outweigh any gain that could be gotten by declining the research support,” which he said would amount to “taking a stand that the next day everyone would forget about.”
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/11/19/26951/
The color of dollars is green.
In 2011 marc Morano wrote an article about Oppenheimer, his political activism and predictions:
“He served as an adviser to former Vice President Al Gore on his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and he has consistently defended the accuracy’s of Gore’s film.
“Oppenheimer personally donated to the group (Scientists and Engineers for Change), which was so partisan it encouraged visitors to their Web page to “get involved” in defeating President Bush by playing a game called “Whack-a-Bush.”
Oppenheimer predicted: “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers,” Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
http://www.newsmax.com/MarcMorano/Michael-Oppenheimer-U-NIPCC/2011/01/05/id/381916
Oppenheimer worked for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), “a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oppenheimer
Individual donor advised fund accounts are invested in mutual funds…:
Vanguard LifeStrategy Income Fund
Oppenheimer Portfolio Series Conservative Investor Fund
Vanguard LifeStrategy Conservative Growth Fund
Oppenheimer Portfolio Series Moderate Investor Fund
Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund
Oppenheimer Portfolio Series Active Allocation Fund
Vanguard Social Fund & GNMA Fund
http://cleartheair.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=14949
This is good news bearing in mind there are more people, more campfires and more arsonists (I speculate here). It’s better than we thought!!!
Well, they’re half right.
Primarily, this year’s fires are bad because we’re in one of those stuck phases of the jet stream, just like the 1930’s. Dry areas stay dry too long, wet areas stay wet too long. Nothing to do with ‘Global Warming’ in the usual sense of the word.
Secondarily, this year’s fires are worse than usual because Global Warming pseudoscience, along with Biodiversity pseudoscience, has caused a drastic drop in logging. Since the usual sense of ‘Global Warming’ means a wildly false pseudoscience that maximizes Wall Street profits, the attribution to ‘Global Warming’ is technically correct for this part of the cause.
Devastating as those wildfires in Colorado clearly are, you might have a teeny thought for us in the dear old UK, barely scraping 60 degrees (F) at the back end of June, serious flash floods in the northeast of England; and depression after depression rolling in off the Atlantic….
All of course due to global warming, or whatever its called this week….
My brother and sister-in-law live in Colorado Springs and their house was a mere 2 – 3 miles from the eastern edge of the Waldo Canyon fire. Fortunately, as of this morning, it looks like their house will be spared (fire is now 15% contained).
I consider people like Oppenheimer, Trenberth, Masters, Meehl, et al. to be filthy vultures for using the extreme misery and loss of others to advance their political agendas. I will stop here before I say what I really think of them…
Paul Coppin says: June 29, 2012 at 3:58 am
It is important, very important, to understand that the Colorado fires are arson, not “climate change”.- up to two new fires a day for the past week.
I don’t think so. The High Park Fire was lightening caused. There are a total of ten active fires in Colorado. You can check out all the fires here:
http://inciweb.org/state/6/
Pielke Sr. points out that the current USA drought pattern is what existed during the last century when the PDO was cool and the AMO was warm – the current situation; the drought has nothing to do with global warming. (He also mentions WUWT.)
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/perspective-on-the-hot-and-dry-continental-usa-for-2012-based-on-the-research-of-judy-curry-and-of-mccabe-et-al-2012/
the australian eucalypyus tree loves a fire after it is burnt it regrows a stronger tree the old ones may die but they make way for new trees your pine trees do not like very hot fires, I said in last post lightning strikes sorted this problem by burning out the under litter ,I can blame the green water mellon heads for all the problems we now face