By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
Judge Paul Peatross has ruled that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli cannot access the University of Virginia’s records in his inquiry into Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann’s claims made to obtain research funding. Judge Peatross’s ruling protects the University, Mann, and the Department of Environmental Sciences - at least for now.
I attended the hearing a week ago Friday, when the parties argued the University’s motion to dismiss. Beforehand, Peatross, in place of the vacationing chief judge, cited his wife’s 1982 degree in environmental science from UVA and asked counsel whether they believed it disqualified him from hearing the University’s motion.
That fact, apparently, was relevant. Okay.
But the fact that the judge’s wife previously worked in the Department of Environmental Sciences - the very department that stood to suffer had he ruled in favor of the attorney general - was somehow not worth disclosing to counsel. I learned of this only after the hearing from Ms. Peatross’s former coworkers, who were astonished that her husband would decide such a matter given his seeming lack of objectivity.
Also not worth disclosing was that Ms. Peatross’s relationships go much deeper, for she produced a book edited by the department’s then-chairman during Mann’s alleged hijinks, and, it appears, at least two of his papers. Yet the fact that she has a degree from the department merited consideration in determining the judge’s suitability to hear the case. And only that.
Amazing.
Charlottesville, where I live, is a company town - with UVA the company - as is surrounding Albemarle County. An adverse ruling leading to the release of Mann’s documents was the biggest possible black eye for a university that zealously promotes its prestige derived, in part, from Thomas Jefferson’s having founded it. It’s a history the school’s lawyers rather sadly invoked in their brief. They argued that, while some people are subject to laws, others simply cannot suffer the indignity.
It’s on Jefferson’s headstone, no doubt. But while that particular argument of “academic freedom” did not prevail, the University did manage to avoid letting the taxpayer discover whether the university, through Mann, engaged in fraud. Again, this is for now, as Attorney General Cuccinelli, according to press reports, intends to press on with a new civil investigative demand. It was not a complete victory for the university, but, if you attended argument and/or read the briefs, you know such an outcome was not a consideration.
However that turns out, this series of events gives the appearance of the judge’s failure to disclose. Indeed, it seems to rise to the level of a basis for the judge to recuse himself, instead of asking counsel, in his presence, whether they thought he was biased. The last thing our institutions of government need is more reason to question their operation. This is unfortunate and could easily have been avoided. See post here.
"Before becoming an expert on climate change communication, Ed Maibach went through a change of his own.
Back in 2005, Maibach and his wife joined some family members on an educational walking trip through the Dolomites in Italy. Members of the trip spent the mornings listening to leading climate scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the afternoons climbing mountains.
There, they became familiar with climate change basics. The dramatically rising level of CO2 in our atmosphere is rapidly destabilizing our climate. The world’s population - more than 6.5 billion people - is growing and modernizing rapidly, leading to greater use of fossil fuels and deforestation.
These events, in turn, accelerate climate destabilization and reduce the earth’s capacity to produce the food and fresh water needed to sustain the current human population, much less our rapidly expanding population of tomorrow. Soon, countless people around the world may lose access to the environmental conditions that sustain their existence.
“After listening to these lectures four mornings in a row, the epiphany struck,” says Maibach. “I finally made the connection between global warming and public health - “global warming is likely this century’s most profound threat to public health and well-being. When that epiphany struck, I realized exactly what I had to spend the rest of my life working on.”
In fall 2007, after joining Mason’s Department of Communication, Maibach founded the Center for Climate Change Communication and became its director.
The center is the first behavioral science research center in the United States dedicated solely to improving climate change public engagement methods.
Starting with the community he knew best, Maibach planned his first study, which was conducted in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, to be a national survey of public health department directors.
The research team was surprised to find that nearly 60 percent of local public health department directors nationwide reported that they were already seeing harmful health effects of climate change in their jurisdictions, yet few felt they had the capacity to respond.
In 2008, Maibach and a colleague at American University won a prestigious Health Policy Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This award funds their research intended to help health professionals more effectively communicate the health implications of climate change.
More recently, several of the center’s researchers were awarded a Climate Change Education Grant from the National Science Foundation to study the role TV meteorologists can play in educating the public on the local effects of climate change.
Center researchers have been actively sharing the fruits of their labor. Numerous organizations - from the local to the global - have sought their guidance, including Virginia state and local governments, environmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, federal agencies and even foreign embassies.
Last fall, Maibach was invited to Hollywood to brief several dozen writers, directors and producers on how to engage their audiences more effectively on climate change.”
(No doubt a certain James Cameron would have been there....)
Let’s look at the survey
Out of 2,296 members of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, they produced a sample size of 217, who were contacted. The responses were:
Take a running jump = 38
Refused to answer calls or e-mails = 46
This left 133, of whom 81, (61%), believed their jurisdiction had seen the effects of climate change in the last 20 years.
So the actual figure of 3.5% of 2,296 local public health department directors becomes “nearly sixty percent of local public health department directors nationwide.”
Yep, he’s made the connection alright, that’s a great way to communicate dodgy science and spin the results.
Oops, I forgot, you paid for it.
“The Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP) program seeks to establish a coordinated national network of regionally- or thematically-based partnerships devoted to increasing the adoption of effective, high quality educational programs and resources related to the science of climate change and its impacts.
Each CCEP is required to be of a large enough scale that they will have catalytic or transformative impact that cannot be achieved through other core NSF program awards. The CCEP program is one facet of a larger NSF collection of awards related to Climate Change Education (CCE) that has two goals:
(1) preparing a new generation of climate scientists, engineers, and technicians equipped to provide innovative and creative approaches to understanding global climate change and to mitigate its impact; and,
(2) preparing today’s U.S. citizens to understand global climate change and its implications in ways that can lead to informed, evidence-based responses and solutions.”
See more here.
Anna Petherick, Nature
With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.
Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.
“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jegu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”
With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.
The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers’ banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.
The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.
Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15C during the day fell to as low as 4C.
Hugo Mamani, head of forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia’s national weather centre, confirms that the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5C in 1955.
Dearth of surveys
But exactly how the cold temperatures caused such devastation remains a mystery. So far, there have been no rigorous surveys of the ecological damage, only anecdotal observations.
Fons Smolders, a fisheries scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is one expert who has visited the area and is keen for the phenomenon to receive proper study because such freak climatic events may become more common in the future.
Bolivia has a wealth of freshwater species, including the Arrau turtle (Podocnemis expansa). Often, when cold weather causes fish deaths in lakes, the mortalities are directly due to hypoxia, when oxygen levels are too low to supply the animals’ cells and tissues. This is because the colder surface temperatures can reduce mixing in the water column.
Because the deaths occurred mainly in rivers, Smolders suspects that they are linked to infection. “Some of the fish that I saw had white spots that may indicate disease. The cold probably made them very susceptible to all kinds of infections,” he explains.
“When fish die, it’s usually not a single stressor, but multiple stressors interacting,” agrees Steven Cooke, an aquatic ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, who last year wrote a review of cold shock in fish1. “So, if cold shock or cooler temperatures are being implicated in mortality, there’s probably something else going on as well.”
Most of the research in the field of cold shock in fish has been carried out on rivers in temperate climates, rather than tropical ones. For example, fish in temperate rivers often die when a power station pumping warm water into a river suddenly shuts down.
Jégu has another hypothesis. He thinks that the burning of farmland around Santa Cruz, a regular part of the farming cycle locally, has occurred at particularly high levels this year. That might have been a contributing factor in the fish deaths, possibly because the smoke added to river pollution.
“We hope to secure financing for these studies to find out why the fish are dying,” he says. With luck, and money, these will start in October.
References
Donaldson, M. R. et al. J. Fish Biol. 73, 1491-1530 (2008).
Read post here.
Jack Black commented on the post:
Climate Change Dictionary
PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.
SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.
DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.
CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to “Peace” in any meaningful way.
DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see “DENIER,” above.
CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.” Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.
JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge.