Earth ChangesS


Phoenix

US: Wildfires force state of emergency in California county

California's Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi declared a state of emergency Friday in Santa Cruz county, where wildfires have burned for three days, prompting the evacuation of 2,000 people.

"A major fire has engulfed Santa Cruz county, and they are in great need of resources to bolster what is being done at the local level to fight these fires," he said in a statement.

"I have toured the damage and visited the operational center, and this fire is far from over," he added.

California's fire prevention agency Calfire said on its website Friday that Santa Cruz county, 560 kilometers (348 miles) northwest of Los Angeles, had ordered the evacuation of between 2,200 and 2,400 people and that more than 250 homes were threatened by the flames in the communities of Swanton and Bonny Doon.

Fish

Millions of salmon fail to turn up in Canada

Image
Millions of salmon have mysteriously failed to turn up in a Canadian river as part of their annual spawning, leaving experts baffled and the local fishing industry in despair.

The Canadian government's Department of Fisheries and Oceans projected that between six and 10 million sockeye salmon would return to the Fraser river this month.

But the official count for the annual 'summer run' -- by far the largest of four salmon migrations that see millions of fish return to Canada's lakes and rivers from the Pacific each year from June to late August -- is now just 600,000.

Arrow Up

Study Finds Big Storms on a 1,000-Year Rise

The North Atlantic Ocean has spawned more hurricanes and tropical storms over the last decade than it has since a similarly stormy period 1,000 years ago, according to a new study.

The research, published yesterday in the journal Nature, tries to trace the pattern of storms along North America's Atlantic and Gulf coasts back to A.D. 500, well before humans were recording weather observations.

The study's lead author, climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, said finding a reliable way to reconstruct centuries of past hurricane activity could help scientists tease out whether future climate change will alter storm patterns.

Mr. Potato

We Lost The original Data - British Climatic Research Unit

dog eats homework
© unknown

Steve McIntyre, of Climate Audit, is a determined individual. While this may be no fun for those who fall under his focus and happen to have something to hide, more sunlight on climate science cannot be a bad thing.

Lately Steve has been spearheading an effort to get the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia to release the data that underlie its analysis of global temperature trends. Such a request should not at all be controversial. Indeed the atmospheric sciences community went to great lengths in the 1990s to ensure that such data would be openly available for research purposes, culminating in World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Resolution 40 on the international exchange of meteorological and related data and products. The Resolution states:
Members should provide to the research and education communities, for their non-commercial activities, free and unrestricted access to all data and products exchanged under the auspices of WMO . . .

Briefcase

McIntyre versus Jones: climate data row escalates

Many of our readers will no doubt be aware of the long-standing dispute between Steve McIntyre and members of the climate science community whose data McIntyre is keen to get hold of.

For those of you less familiar with the story, here's some background. McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to create the 'hockey stick' graph. The 'hockey stick' is the graph that illustrates the past 1000 years of climate based on palaeo proxy data and was published by Penn state climatologist Michael Mann and co-authors in Nature back in 1998.

More recently, McIntyre has turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature data held by institutes such as NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU , extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850.

Since 2002, McIntyre has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of CRU, for access to the HadCRU data. Although the data are made available in a processed gridded format that shows the global temperature trend, the raw station data are currently restricted to academics. While Jones has made data available to some academics, he has refused to supply McIntyre with the data. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own.

Evil Rays

The British Climatic Research Unit Gong Show: Refusing Ross McKitrick

Today brought in some CRU refusals- their rejections of Ross Mc, Roman M, myself. (They're going to have to re-do their Roger Pielke rejection, since they replied to the wrong request in his case.) Each one deserves to be savored. So today I'll post up their obstruction of Ross McKitrick.

FOI officer Palmer denied the request on the grounds that the request is "manifestly unreasonable" as the data is "available elsewhere", that its disclosure would have an "adverse effect on international relations" and would have an adverse impact on the institutions supplying the data.

CA readers will recall that I requested the same version of CRU station data as was sent to Peter Webster and that they refused on the grounds that they had "confidentiality agreements" (all of which have been destroyed or lost other than stale agreements with Norway and Bahrain and and an agreement with Spain that does not require confidentiality) with parties that they can no longer identify, but the one thing that they were certain of was that these agreements prohibited the delivery of the data to a "non-academic".

Magnify

Nature Reports on British Climatic Research Unit Stonewalling

Nature reported today on the CRU data requests. I was interviewed at length last Thurs, followup Friday by Olive Heffernan of Nature. They even asked for a photograph. I haven't seen the article yet. More after I see the story.

Info

British Climatic Research Unit: The "Confidentiality Agreements"

CRU refused my FOI request for CRU data stating that:
Regulation 12(5)(f) applies because the information requested was received by the University on terms that prevent further transmission to non-academics.
I asked to see the precise language of the underlying agreements because I very much doubted that agreements specifically prohibited "further transmission to non-academics". If there were such a term in an agreement, it seemed far more likely that the term would be for "academic use" or something like that, and, given that my interest was scholarly rather than commercial, I doubted that the language of any applicable agreement would be applicable.

CRU has only managed to locate three documents pertaining to their agreements with NMSs: an application to Spain and letters from Norway and Bahrain, all from 1993-4. They also include a letter from CRU to the Met Office and, inexplicably, a copy of a current webpage from NERC governing Met Office data.

Magnify

Sea Level In The Southwest Pacific Is Stable

Southwest Pacific Sea Level sites
© unknownThe sites of sea level monitoring stations.

"Graphs of sea level for twelve locations in the southwest Pacific show stable sea level for about ten years over the region. The data ... suggest that any rise of global sea level is negligible.....

Sea level studies have not been carried out for very long, but they can indicate major tectonic components such as isostatic rebound in Scandinavia.

Cloud Lightning

Do Clouds Come From Outer Space?

Solar storm
© ESA/NASACloud killer? Research suggests that solar storms interfere with cloud formation on Earth.

Most of Earth's clouds get their start in deep space. That's the surprising conclusion from a team of researchers who argue that interstellar cosmic rays collide with water molecules in our atmosphere to form overcast skies.

As common as clouds are on Earth, the processes that produce them are not well understood. Scientists think particles of dust or pollen can serve as nuclei for water droplets, which in turn gather by the trillions into clouds. That would help explain how clouds form over urban areas: Fine particles called aerosols are emitted from the exhaust pipes of millions of vehicles and work their way into the atmosphere, where they are thought to attract water molecules. But it doesn't explain how clouds formed in preindustrial society--or how they form today over vast stretches of rainforest and ocean.

That's where cosmic rays come in. The idea goes like this: High-speed cosmic ray particles--protons and neutrons of still-mysterious origins that travel at nearly the speed of light--collide with water molecules in the atmosphere, stripping away electrons from those molecules and converting them into electrically charged ions. The ions then begin attracting other water molecules, which eventually form clouds.

The theory seems to hold water in the lab. In 2006, physicist Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and colleagues produced aerosols artificially in an atmospheric chamber by bombarding water molecules with a particle beam. "More ions resulted in more aerosols," Svensmark says.