Poor forest policy is making conflagrations all over California the new norm as forest thinning and logging was halted decades ago.

Blaming climate change for the recent California fires and the state’s water woes appear to be like the kid blaming his dog for eating his homework.

The reality of climate change isn’t the issue. The earth’s climate has warmed and cooled since the beginning of time. Mankind’s impact on climate change remains debatable and laced with hyperbole that does little to solve problems but much to perpetuate political agendas and poor public policy.

Not to be out done, President Trump jumped into the mix recently with a typical tweet that cast the blame on state officials for taking water that otherwise could be used to extinguish fires. While California and the feds seem to be in the business of banning human access to fresh water, that’s not the issue.

Decades ago a hue and cry went out across the U.S. that the timber industry was killing the Northern Spotted Owl, and to end this, logging had to stop. A major California newspaper did a series of stories on logging that used hyperbole and exaggerations, along with some very good photography, to sell this point and win a Pulitzer Prize.

Logging was stopped. Small towns crumbled, and forests became so overgrown that they began to die. Too many trees then competed for a finite amount of water that fell on the forests during the winter months. A northern California rancher once told me that streams and springs he knew as a child dried up because of this competition for water.

This forced deer and elk migrations to change and further changed natural patterns in the forest that exacerbated the problem. Voter-approved ESA-like protections given to the mountain lion didn’t help as the large predators decimate deer herds that once foraged on the forest. We’ve now introduced wolves that will further cause declines in deer and elk populations and force ranchers grazing their cattle on public lands to relocate them.

Stressed trees became fodder for the bark beetle that also killed vast forest vistas. The view from highways connecting places like Susanville and Red Bluff, or Chester and Quincy bear this out. Forest Service policies of squashing just about every lightning-sparked fire compounded the issue as fire has always been a natural part of the forest ecosystem. It is now virtually impossible to have a small, controllable fire anymore.

The consequences of decisions like these are legion, and expensive. Lives and property are lost and destroyed as millions of dollars in fire suppression costs, infrastructure repair and insurance claims are racked up annually because of mankind’s mismanagement of forests.

Public policy is not going to reverse heating and cooling cycles that moved the planet in and out of ice ages. We are likely at the apex of a warm cycle and, according to information I’ve heard, some scientists believe a cyclical change in sunspot patterns may soon move us into a period of cooling.

ICECAP NOTE: Todd is living the story in California. See this rebuttal that supports Todd’s message here.

Meteorological summer (June, July and August) is now over and it’s time to check how the summer temperatures compare with other years.  For a research project a few years ago we developed a statewide summer temperature index for four 100-mile diameter regions centered on the major cities of the state, Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville going back to 1883.  This summer will go down in that database and in NOAA’s official records as being slightly cooler than average.

Somewhat related to this, a reader sent me a link to a New York Times interactive website that claims to provide the number of days above 90F each year for cities across the country.  The results are produced for the Times by an outfit (some might call it an environmental pressure group) called the Climate Impacts Lab.

Since I build numerous datasets of this type, I took a look.  The website asks you for the town and year in which you were born, then provides a time series purportedly showing the number of 90F days per year since your birth and how that has increased.

Though a native of California, I have lived in Huntsville more years than any other place, so I put in my birth year and Huntsville as my hometown.  Immediately I became suspicious when their dataset started only recently in 1960 (and a few years after my birth!) Evidently the Times and the Climate Impacts Lab don’t want to deal with folks older than 58.

For Huntsville and Montgomery, here are their results - kind of scary.  It appears that the number of 90F days has risen to their highest levels ever.  I’m told that in 1960 Huntsville had about 45 days above 90F but by 2017 it was 57 days and rising.

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Then, to make matters even scarier, they use climate model projections to 2090 to tell me that when I’m “80” in 2040, there will be 73 such hot days in Huntsville as seen below.  Yikes!

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Before you sell your house and move to Canada, let’s take a look at the real story.  Having built many climate datasets of Alabama, some starting as early as 1850, I knew the Times story was designed to create alarm and promote the claim that humans who use carbon-based energy (gasoline, natural gas, coal) to help them live better lives are making our summers ever more miserable.  Be aware reader, this webtool is not designed to provide accurate information.

First of all, climate data for Alabama began in the 19th century, not 1960.  In 2016 Dr. Richard McNider (Alabama’s former State Climatologist) and I published a carefully constructed time series of summer temperatures for the state starting from 1883 that utilized numerous station records, some that even the federal government had not archived into its databases (which is the most common source for outfits like the Climate Impacts Lab.) I’ve updated that work to include summer temperatures through 2018 - the result is below.  Not only are summer daytime temperatures not rising, they have actually fallen over the last 136 years.  Hmmm… after looking at the graph, why do you suppose the Climate Impacts Lab decided to start their charts in 1960?

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We went a step further in that paper and demonstrated that climate models failed completely to replicate the downward temperature trend in Alabama over the past 120 years - 76 different models with a 100% failure rate.  Would you trust these same models to tell you about the future as the Times does?  Why did they not check the models for validity?

Now, what about the number of “hot” (or in Alabama we would say ‘typical") 90F days?  For Alabama and the nation, I’ve calculated the average value per station each year since 1895.  The results below speak for themselves (there is no increase of days hotter than 90F) and expose the misinformation provided through the Times.

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Providing accurate information on Alabama’s climate is what we do in our office.  In fact, using real data, I can’t even come close to reproducing the images that the Climate Impacts Lab did which show 2010’s as having the most 90F days in Alabama - I’m guessing they are using some theoretical output rather than sticking with observations. Notice how smooth their graph is compared to real data - it doesn’t look real to me.  I’ll check and follow-up as I can, but something is fishy. 

This is a great state in which people can enjoy life and in which businesses can operate - and our climate resources are one of the reasons we are doing so well in recruitment.  Occasionally though the time comes when I must address claims made by those whose intention is not to inform but to promote false alarm - this usually happens when an environmental pressure group generates a press release whose dramatic statements are published by a willing media (without any fact-checking.) This is one of those times, and I’m sure it will not be the last.

Citation:

Christy, J.R. and R.T. McNider, 2016: Time series construction of summer surface temperatures for Alabama, 1883-2014, and comparisons with tropospheric temperature and climate model simulations.  J. Applied Meteor. Climatology, DOI: 10.1175/JAMC-D-15-0287.1.

Data from the New York Times website accessed on 5 and 6 September, 2018.

Looks good to us.

An article today in The Australian concerning the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef and the exhortation that something must be done is interesting not for its bloated and deceitful content but for the comments that follow it. The writer, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, is the director of something called The Global Change Institute at the university of Queensland.

“The Global Change Institute (GCI) at The University of Queensland is an independent source of innovative research, ideas, policy and advice for addressing the challenges of a changing world.”

In other words, do-gooders who managed to wrangle themselves sweet funding under the guise of ‘the end of the world is nigh!’ (Notice how you don’t see those crazy guys holding placards outside dusty train stations anymore? They’re all employed in the climate scam industry.)

The crux of the scaremongering in the article comes down to this bit:

“The changes are being driven by the climate, which is the reef’s most significant threat. The Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report, produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, makes that clear, as does the Reef 2050 Plan, the overarching framework for protecting and managing it developed by the commonwealth and Queensland governments. It tells us that a lack of action on climate change will see our reef disappear, along with other vital ecosystems.”

Get that? The reef will disappear! (Waves arms and runs around in circles whilst making the boogy-man noise).

The comments that follow the article are uniform in their scorn and ridicule for the false message that the climate doomsters have been predicting for so long now. What a turnaround from just a few years ago when the majority of comments would have elicited tones of deep concern and shock that such a great tragedy was about to befall our nation and our world.

That’s what an increase of over 500% on domestic energy prices will do to your message of doom.

Scientists have sure been banging on for quite some time now about a variety of doomsday disasters caused by us human folk that somehow have all failed to materialize as predicted. We were going to run out of oil, copper, gold, gas and just about every other resource you could poke a stick at by the 1980s. The world was going to be consumed by horrible famines caused by overpopulation, while instead we’re now producing so much food that we’re using the leftovers to fuel vehicles. There was going to be a new ice age, then it was global warming, and finally they hit upon the singular brilliant tautology of climate change.

That last one is indeed true because the climate is not static. Way to go scientists; you got one right! (Not.)

There has been so much scientific bullshit that people are becoming somewhat inured to what so-called scientists claim. James Delingpole just doesn’t trust scientists anymore:

“It’s not science they distrust so much as scientists - especially ones in more nebulous, activism-driven fields like ecology or sociology. As Cofnas told Campus Reform, a site that exposes left-wing bias at universities: ‘Conservatives are right to be sceptical. Take any politicised issue that is connected to some disagreement about scientific fact. I do not believe there is a single case in the last couple of decades where a major scientific organisation took a position that went against the platform of the Democratic party.’ He added: ‘What an odd coincidence that “science” always, without exception, supports the liberal worldview.’”

The politicization of science, the substitution of scientody for scientistry, is in of itself inherently unscientific as it relies on some sort of left-leaning democratic process. To get ahead in this rigged game, people pretending to be scientists have to make things up. How else can one explain the appalling revelation that less than 50% of scientific studies can be replicated.

“Six such projects, including the SSRP, have now been completed. Between them, they’ve successfully replicated just 87 out of 190 studies, for an overall rate of 46 percent.”

No doubt many of these bogus studies were cited in peer-reviewed journals and used to badger dim and corrupt politicians into squandering the resources and wealth of their countries into placating the great climate god Ghia.

But the people aren’t believing it anymore. I’ve been bashing heads with climate change idiots online and in real life for over 10 years, but the turnaround in attitude that we’re now seeing really does underline the fact that the general public isn’t buying it anymore.

Which is too bad for science. You can only cry wolf so many times before the public no longer believes you. And if then a real calamity should present itself, a calamity that only science could identify, predict or solve; what then?

Science. Just one more part of our civilization that the prog army of darkness has successfully destroyed.

THEN THE RAINS CAME

It has been a changeable and at time extreme spring and summer. The cold and snow of March gave way to a cold April and some very chilly days well into the spring. Warmth with some very hot days followed in the early to mid summer. Then the rains came with strong thunderstorms. The wet August spell put an end to a borderline droughty spell the last few years. It became very muggy, keeping nighttime temperatures up and air conditioners on.

The changes all have to do with the wind direction. The jet stream brought chilly air masses (and snow) into eastern Canada even into June. The winds around these cool air masses turn to the northeast here in New England coming in off cool land and water.  Then increasingly warm air masses built north into the Canadian prairies and came east. The surface winds turned northwesterly. In summer, warm air crossing the Appalachians and sinking down into the Merrimack Valley and coast heats by compression 5F or more. Our hottest days come with these ‘downslope winds’.  Historically all the 100F days come with a west to northwest wind.

When late July and August came, our surface winds turned southwesterly.

This change was caused by a sharp cooling of the subtropical Atlantic Ocean waters relative to 2017.

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The Atlantic cool subtropical pattern leads to that stronger than normal Atlantic high pressure called the ‘Bermuda High’. In these patterns, this regular feature of our climate expands south and west and acts as a pump for moisture much like we see in the southeastern and eastern Asia monsoon flow. This causes nights to be warm and muggy, and days very warm and showery here in the east.

Uncomfortable yes, unprecedented heat no.  You may be surprised that most of the extreme heat records for the region, country and world occurred in the early 20th century or earlier. The 1930s was the record decade in the United States as a whole. For the east, the 1950s was the warmest but extreme heat has occurred even in cold periods.

July 1911 was an incredible hot month in the northeast with the northwest wind coming off a warm dry Canada where prairie fires reigned. Read about it on the New England Historical Society site here.

For the region and nation (all stations) the number of 90, 95 and 100F all continue the downtrend since the 1930s. Nights are warmer thanks to the fact most observations are now in urban centers or airports, which hold the daytime heat.

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EFFECT ON THE HURRICANE SEASON

As a general rule, when the subtropical Atlantic is warm, we have more hurricane activity, when it is cool, we have fewer storms. A measure of how much tropical activity energy there was over the season is the ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) Index. See how last year when the subtropical Atlantic was very warm, ranked behind only 1893, 1926, 1933, 1995, 2004 and 2005 in total storm energy (and impact).. It featured major hurricanes that slammed the islands, Florida and Texas.

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With the sub-tropical Atlantic cold this year and El Nino trying to come on in the Pacific, it is likely we will have a quiet year with fewer named storms and less than half the storm energy than last year. See all the cool Atlantic year shown in yellow (most in the 1970s to early 1990s).

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Solid evidence shows there is no “bee-pocalypse,” but alarmists allege new pesticide threats

“Baby boomers” will remember Gilder Radner’s Saturday Night Live character from the ‘70s - Emily Litella, who would launch into hilarious rants against perceived problems, only to discover that she had completely misconstrued what she was fuming about.

“What’s all this fuss about endangered feces?” she asked in one. “How can you possibly run out of such a thing?” Then, after Jane Curtain interrupted to tell her “It’s endangered species,” she meekly responded with what became the iconic denouement of the era: “Ohhhh. Never mind.”

The Sierra Club and “invertebrate-protecting” Xerces Society recently had their own Emily Litella moment, over an issue they both have been hyperventilating about for years: endangered bees. For over half a decade, both organizations have been raising alarms about the imminent extinction of honeybees and, more recently, wild bees - allegedly due to the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides.

These are advanced-technology crop protection compounds, originally developed and registered as “reduced-risk” pesticides. Applied mostly as seed treatments, neonicotinoids get taken up into the tissue of crop plants, where they control pests that feed on and destroy the crops, while minimizing insecticide exposure to animals, humans and beneficial species like bees.

But not according to the Sierra Club! It campaigned incessantly for years on the claim that neonicotinoids would drive honeybees into extinction. For instance, in March 2015 the Sierra Club of Canada launched a nationwide “Protect the Pollinators Tour,” as part of its #SaveTheBees project.

“Ironically, the justification for this chemical madness is the same desire to produce enough food to feed everyone,” it said. “The chemical industry wants us to believe we have no choice; it’s their way or the highway. But the science tells us otherwise - that farmers don’t need these chemicals at all! The science also tells us we’re not just killing bees and pollinators, but other insects too. And we’re also killing birds and aquatic life. The scientists tell us we could be creating a Second Silent Spring. It’s madness.”

A year later, the Maryland Sierra Club did its own fulminating, urging the state’s legislature to pass a “Pollinator Protection Act. “Help STOP Pollinator Deaths from Neonic Pesticides!” it exhorted.

“Toxic Neonic pesticides kill and harm bees and other pollinators, like butterflies and birds. Continued, unchecked use poses a serious threat to our food supply, public health and environment. Ask lawmakers to help keep Maryland pollinators safe and healthy - by curbing consumer use of toxic pesticides.”

In December 2016, the Sierra Club was out raising more money by sounding phony alarms about Trump appointees “denying the science” that supposedly links neonic pesticides to alleged bee declines:

“Bees had a devastating year. 44% of colonies killed.... And Bayer and Syngenta are still flooding our land with bee-killing toxic ‘neonic’ pesticides - now among the most widely used crop sprays in the country. Now, Myron Ebell - Donald Trump’s pick to lead the EPA transition team - denies the science that links neonics and bee death...”

Why would they make such false claims? Well, as Sierra Club officer Bruce Hamilton once admitted: “It’s what works. It builds the Sierra Club. The fate of the Earth depends on whether people open that envelope and send in that check” (or click on the ever-present online Donate Now button).

However, a few weeks ago, a Sierra Club blog post started singing a different tune:

“Save the bees’ is a rallying cry we’ve been hearing for years now… But honeybees are at no risk of dying off.  While diseases, parasites and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century. ‘Honeybees are not going to go extinct,’ says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society. ‘We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had, and that’s simply because we manage honeybees.
Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save birds ... [since] honeybees are not all that different from livestock.”

So, Never mind. Finally, after all these years, the Sierra Club (and Xerces Society) admit that honeybees are not going extinct. It would appear as well that neonic pesticides can’t be causing a honeybee apocalypse - because there isn’t one!

But in the eco-alarmism world, every silver cloud has a dark lining! This time, it’s wild bees, also called “native” bees, whose allegedly looming demise is the imminent ecological cataclysm du jour.

Honeybees are not native to North America; they were first brought here by colonists in 1622. Now - according to the Sierra Club anyway - these non-native bees pose a threat to wild bees and other native pollinators. New research, it says, “shows managed honeybees can negatively impact native bees.”

Varroa mites, deformed wing virus and other problems from commercial hives (the real causes of honeybee declines in recent years) “can be transferred to wild species when populations feed from the same flowers.” In fact, the rusty patched bumblebee, “which was listed as endangered in early 2017 after declining more than 90 percent over the last decade, may owe that disappearance to diseases spread by commercial bees.” And the RPB is not the only threatened or endangered wild bee species.

Many native bees - of which there are over 20,000 species globally, in various sizes, shapes and colors - “are experiencing incredible losses,” says a Sierra Club blog. “Of the nearly 4,000 native bee species in the United States alone, four native bumblebee species have declined 96 percent in the last 20 years, and three others are believed to have gone extinct. In the last 100 years, 50 percent of Midwestern native bee species disappeared from their historic ranges.”

Now the blog doesn’t claim all these supposed wild bee declines are due to neonic exposure. At least it doesn’t say so just yet, leaving that inference to your imagination. However, the Sierra Club is likely just as wrong about wild bee species being in trouble, as it was during its previous years of railing about the causes and reality of honeybees going extinct.

First, the overwhelming majority of wild bee species, at least in North America, never get any exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides, because they are desert species ‘ with habitats typically tens or hundreds of miles away from croplands.

Second, the overwhelming majority of those wild bee species are specialists. They feed exclusively on the pollen and/or nectar of one or a very few plant species ‘ and their life-cycles are tied inextricably to the flowering cycle of the (mainly desert) plants they pollinate.

They typically emerge from the ground prompted by the same natural signals (rains) that awaken the cacti and other plants. They then live just long enough to produce larvae and stock the larval nests with food (pollen and/or nectar) from the plants they pollinate before they die. This cycle is completed in days - and pesticide exposure is virtually impossible given the environments where it takes place.

All this is not to say that wild bees don’t play any role in crop pollination. Some do.

However, 59 scientists published a three-year study in Nature, concluding that only 2% of wild bee species provide “almost 80% of the wild bee crop pollination.” They also found that “the species currently contributing most to pollination service delivery are generally regionally common species, whereas threatened species contribute little, particularly in the most agriculturally productive areas.”

In other words, the handful of wild bee species that contribute the lion’s share of wild bee crop pollination - and thus are most exposed to neonic and other pesticides - are abundant and not threatened or at risk, certainly not from pesticide exposure.

This jibes with the observations by Sam Droege, the U.S. Geologic Survey’s wild bee expert whose surveys indicate that most wild bee species are doing just fine.
It’s encouraging that the Sierra Club and Xerces Society have finally acknowledged that the “honeybee apocalypse” - which they used for years to demonize neonic manufacturers and raise millions of dollars - was pure fiction. Eventually, perhaps, we hope (fat chance) they’ll admit their exaggerated claims and half-truths about wild bees are equally phony and misleading.

It’s a real pity that so much public hysteria - and pressure on politicians and regulators to combat fictitious bee problems - was generated in the process. That was especially true in Europe, where regulators gave in to agitator pressure and misrepresentations, and banned neonics this year. Now farmers will have to spray crops with pesticides that really are harmful to bees, or will lose more to voracious insects.

Environmental activists always claim to be pushing for better public policies, to “Save the Earth.” Misdiagnosing and misrepresenting non-existent ecological crises is precisely the road to the hell of bad public policy. And it’s not always paved with good intentions.

At least when it comes to claims about another “bee-pocalypse,” it’s time to say, Never mind.

Paul Driessen is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books and articles on energy, climate change and environmental activism.