A Few More Stories From the “Green” Clowns And The (Man Made) Climate Change Hoax Camp

DELINGPOLE: ‘Penises Cause Climate Change’; Progressives Fooled by Peer-Reviewed Hoax Study

Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.

Now, a pair of enterprising hoaxers has proved it scientifically by persuading an academic journal to peer-review and publish their paper claiming that the penis is not really a male genital organ but a social construct.

The paper, published by Cogent Social Sciences – “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences” – also claims that penises are responsible for causing climate change.

The two hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics.

They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science.

So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Some of it was written with the help of the Postmodern Generator – “a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern ‘paper’ every time the page is reloaded.”

This paragraph, for example, looks impressive but is literally meaningless:

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action. The result of this trichotomy of roles is to place hypermasculine men both within and outside of competing discourses whose dynamics, as seen via post-structuralist discourse analysis, enact a systematic interplay of power in which hypermasculine men use the conceptual penis to move themselves from powerless subject positions to powerful ones (confer: Foucault, 1972).

None of it should have survived more than a moment’s scrutiny by serious academics. But it was peer-reviewed by two experts in the field who, after suggesting only a few changes, passed it for publication:

Cogent Social Sciences eventually accepted “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.

They didn’t accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences’ Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.” We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about “manspreading” (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and “dick-measuring contests.”

No claim made in the paper was considered too ludicrous by the peer-reviewers: not even the one claiming that the penis is “the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.”

You read that right. We argued that climate change is “conceptually” caused by penises. How do we defend that assertion? Like this:

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

The fact that such complete drivel was published in a social science journal, the hoaxers argue, raises serious questions about the value of fields like gender studies and the state of academic publishing generally:

“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” should not have been published on its merits because it was actively written to avoid having any merits whatsoever. The paper is academically worthless nonsense.

But they do not hold out much hope for it having any more effect on the bullshit in the social sciences industry than Sokal’s hoax did – because leftist stupidity in academe is so heavily entrenched.

As a matter of deeper concern, there is unfortunately some reason to believe that our hoax will not break the relevant spell. First, Alan Sokal’s hoax, now more than 20 years old, did not prevent the continuation of bizarre postmodernist “scholarship.” In particular, it did not lead to a general tightening of standards that would have blocked our own hoax. Second, people rarely give up on their moral attachments and ideological commitments just because they’re shown to be out of alignment with reality.

Ref.: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/05/20/delingpole-penises-cause-climate-change-progressives-fooled-by-peer-reviewed-hoax-study/

Hilarious Peer Reviewed Climate Hoax: “The conceptual penis as a social construct”

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

From the “phallic climate model” department, h/t James Delingpole / Breitbart – a pair of hoaxers have demonstrated that random garbage, some of it computer generated, can pass academic peer review – providing it seems to conform to left wing social prejudices about masculinity, capitalism and climate change.

THE CONCEPTUAL PENIS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: A SOKAL-STYLE HOAX ON GENDER STUDIES

The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

 “Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.”

“Climate change and the conceptual penis – Now here are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.”

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper waspublished in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

Manspreading — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide — is akin to raping the empty space around him.

This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Read more: http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/

The hoax paper contains a reference to climate change in the abstract, and a section on climate change;

Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

2.2. Climate change and the conceptual penis

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear. At best, climate change is genuinely an example of hyper-patriarchal society metaphorically manspreading into the global ecosystem.

The deep reason for this problematic trend is explained, in its essence, by McElwaine (1999), where he writes, “Pickett suggests that we have to choose between capitalist rationalism and cultural sub-capitalist theory” (Pickett, 1993). Contemporary capitalist theory, a.k.a. neocapitalist theory, derives its claim on rationalism directly from the hypermasculine focus in science and society that can best be accounted for by identification with the conceptual penis. Paxton and Scameron (2006) seem to agree, noting that, “neocapitalist materialist theory holds that reality comes from the collective unconscious, but only if the premise of dialectic objectivism is invalid; if that is not the case, sexuality has significance.” Toxic hypermasculinity derives its significance directly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to supporting neocapitalist materialism, which is a fundamental driver of climate change, especially in the rampant use of carbon-emitting fossil fuel technologies and careless domination of virgin natural environments. We need not delve deeply into criticisms of dialectic objectivism, or their relationships with masculine tropes like the conceptual penis to make effective criticism of (exclusionary) dialectic objectivism. All perspectives matter.

One practical recommendation that follows from this analysis is that climate change research would be better served by a change in how we engage in the discourses of politics and science, avoiding the hypermasculine penis-centric take whenever possible (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2013).

Read more: https://www.cogentoa.com/article/10.1080/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf

Archived Link (the journal link is likely be taken down very shortly): http://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf

The Postmodern-generator, the random nonsense computer used to generate much of the content of the hoax paper, is available here.

I have got to admit, I’m so used to wading through peer reviewed climate garbage, I would likely have accepted this study at face value. The hoax paper simply doesn’t stand out that much from other nonsensical peer reviewed rubbish written by climate and social studies academics – which of course is why it was accepted by the journal.

Ref.: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/20/hilarious-peer-reviewed-climate-hoax-the-conceptual-penis-as-a-social-construct/

Guardian’s Seed Nonsense

By Paul Homewood

Latest doommongering from the Guardian:

image

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts

The temperature record at Svalbard Airport only goes back to 1977, but the nearest long running station is at Tromo on the north coast of Norway.

Annual temperatures there were just as high in the 1930s.

station

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_634010250000_7_0_1/station.png

In particular, winter temperatures have been as high, and even higher, many times since 1921.

image

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_634010250000_1_0/station.txt

At Svalbard itself, the winter of 1985 was actually milder than this year’s.

But facts never bother the Guardian or its readers.

Ref.: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/guardians-seed-nonsense/

Official Climate Agenda is Always the Negative Side; Never Fair and Balanced

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

A recent article titled “Two Competing Narratives on Carbon Dioxide,” asks the question “Is carbon dioxide our friend or foe?” The official answer is “foe,” because of the predetermined assumption of those using climate for their political agenda that global warming was only bad. From 1985, when the foundation meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was held in Villach, Austria, to the present is 32 years and reflects how effective they have been in selling a totally one-sided argument. I know, because I received more angry responses when I dared to suggest global warming has benefits and is far less threatening than global cooling. What they could not allow was any research that identified or even hinted at any benefit to higher levels of atmospheric CO2. Or a warmer world.

From the start, the IPCC objective was deliberately and carefully orchestrated to demonize carbon dioxide. The larger structure saw Working Group I prove that the human portion of atmospheric carbon dioxide was causing global warming – they never even considered the null hypothesis. Working Groups II and III accepted that finding without question. The positive side of many variables was ignored. This includes the fact that while humans add carbon dioxide, they also remove an estimated 50 percent of what they add, but only the gross figure was ever used. This bias pervades all the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from the definition of climate change given to the IPCC to the standard environmental escape hatch of the precautionary principle identified as Principle 15 of Agenda 21.

A major vehicle to promote the validity of the IPCC was the so-called Stern Review. Commissioned by the Labour government of Gordon Brown, of which Stern was a member, it was an economic study that instead of doing a balanced cost/benefit analysis said,

“Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay.

All he had to do was look at the impact of cooling produced by people like Martin Parry for the World Meteorological Organization Stern’s work was completely in line with the bias applied to alternate energies. Only benefits were considered; balanced Cost/Benefit analyses were never applied. The perspective was further distorted by massive government subsidies at so many different levels that they became almost impossible. Stern’s work was given credibility within a year of releasing the Review in 2006, just like the Nobel Prize given to the IPCC, by making him Lord Stern in 2007. A strange reward for a socialist.

Every action, study, procedure, and policy was directed to one side of the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global warming (AGW) and it was all bad. Funding came mostly from government and was only given to research that proved the hypothesis.

Documentaries are carefully planned, scripted, and produced. Considerable thought is given to the message and the assumptions made to ensure it is effectively transmitted. The decisions determine what is included, but equally important what is omitted. The BBC publishes a very detailed list of Editorial Guidelines. In a section on “Accuracy,” they provide considerable latitude.

The requirements may even vary within a genre, so the due accuracy required of factual content may differ depending on whether it is, for example, factual entertainment, historical documentary, current affairs or news.

Accuracy is not simply a matter of getting facts right.  If an issue is controversial, relevant opinions as well as facts may need to be considered.  When necessary, all the relevant facts and information should also be weighed to get at the truth.

So, a producer can determine content and emphasis but must include sufficient evidence to support the veracity and credibility of the story. Presumably, this means any documentary will include fundamentals essential to understanding; one can expect coverage of certain pivotal information depending on the topic.

I was watching episode 9 of the BBC’s TV Life Series titled “Plants” narrated by David Attenborough. (The video has commercials, but you can skip most). I was waiting for the standard reference to global warming impact on plants. I thought it would come early in the discussion about the importance and uniqueness of photosynthesis defined as

“the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water. Photosynthesis in plants generally involves the green pigment chlorophyll and generates oxygen as a byproduct.”

There was no mention of photosynthesis – it was the first dog that did not barkin the night. Obviously, you can make a documentary about plants without mentioning photosynthesis as Attenborough has done but, frankly, I don’t understand how you can provide an overview of the history, evolution, role, and importance of plants in the Earth system without discussing it. The omission, especially in the context of other omissions in the program indicate it was a conscious decision. The question is why? The answer is it would speak to the benefits of increased CO2 levels.

The program spoke of the development of trees and their adaptation to life in some remarkable locations. It examined the various ways they sought light and water. It spent considerable time on the importance of nutrients, even having two segments on meat-eating plants, like the Venus Flytrap, which obtain them by catching and absorbing insects.

I thought they would bring up global warming at the end when they talked about the extent and importance of grasslands. They emphasized the importance of rice and wheat to human nutrition and advancing human societies, but still made no mention. Again, the dog did nothing in the night. Then I realized that not once in the entire documentary did they mention CO2 or even Oxygen. I watched it again to confirm that the dog wasn’t even there, let alone barking. The focus of the documentary was that

“Plants’ solutions to life’s challenges are as ingenious and manipulative as any animals.”

 

Surely nothing is more ingenious about plants and critical to their very existence than the presence of chlorophyll and its ability to combine sunlight and CO2 to produce nutrition. You don’t even need to include the by-product of oxygen that is essential to all animal life.

The documentary was released in 2009 when the political agenda of global warming was at a critical point. The “hockey stick” graph had been under intense scrutiny since the 2003 publication by McIntyre and McKitrick. Andrew Montford’s detailed and definitive exposé “The Hockey Stick Illusion” was due for publication in 2010. Concern about the production of policy based on deliberately corrupted science pushed somebody to leak 1000 emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the major climate research centre at East Anglia in November of 2009. The Kyoto Protocol, the major political vehicle dependent on the corrupted science was due for final approval at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP15) in December 2009. The hiatus, the levelling of temperatures after 1998, was reaching troubling lengths for promoters of the AGW claim. Weather patterns shifted so ordinary people were becoming skeptical, and promoters decided a change of terminology was required. A 2004 leaked CRU email from the Minns/Tyndall Centre on the UEA campus said,

“In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media.”

 

To which Swedish Chief Climate Negotiator Bo Kjellen replied,

“I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming.”

Apart from cold weather and a levelling temperature curve, the alarmists faced the problem that CO2 continued to rise. Skeptics were aware that this contradicted their basic assumption that a CO2 increase caused a temperature increase. Everything the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had done since its inception was to demonize CO2. Now, as people other than skeptics began to ask questions, there was the danger that people could learn that CO2 was essential to life and that plants especially benefitted from an atmospheric increase. Research started to appear from agencies NASA that anyone who studied long-term climate change and was familiar with palynology or plant physiology knew that plants thrive on higher CO2 levels.

The researchers looked at what was driving the increase in plant growth between 1982 and 2009 and found that CO2 was the main culprit, and that up to half the world’s land is becoming greener as a result.

Dr. Sherwood Idso studied and published on CO2 enhancement for years as his important website attests. He appeared in two classic documentaries on the subject, the first The Greenhouse Conspiracy as early as 1990 and later The Great Global Warming Swindle. When Patrick Moore, former co-founder of Greenpeace and a biologist, became active in the climate debate his first major campaign was about the benefits of increased CO2. It was the theme of a presentation to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2015.

The BBC “Plants” documentary lists three technical advisors or staff members of The Open University, “is the UK’s largest academic institution.” Mike Dodd is identified as an ecologist, David Robinson as a zoologist and Janet Sumner as a geologist with specialization in volcanology. All three must know about CO2 and its role in plant growth, but Sumner likely knew more about its atmospheric effects because of specialized work in volcanic degassing.

The documentary ends with an addendum on the process and techniques of slow motion filming used to produce the film. This is remarkable, and the visual results are stunning and revealing, but growth at any speed is not possible without photosynthesis. Its omission in this documentary is the dog that did not bark in the night because they couldn’t allow it to bark.

Ref.: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/20/official-climate-agenda-is-always-the-negative-side-never-fair-and-balanced/

Why Solar Power Is So Cheap!

By Paul Homewood

h/t Joe Public

We keep hearing how cheap solar power is becoming. I’ve found out why!

image

https://www.energyjobline.com/job/218755/solar-engineer/

They must have got Diane Abbott to work out the costings.

Ref.: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/why-solar-power-is-so-cheap/

Oh noes! Antarctica ‘greening’ due to climate change

From the “greening of the planet must be a bad thing” department and the UNIVERSITY OF EXETER comes this breathless missive. Note: one species of moss is not equal to the implied “all plant life” in their sub-headline. Additionally, sampling only three sites isn’t necessarily a representative sample of Antarctica.

PUBLIC RELEASE: 18-MAY-2017

Antarctica ‘greening’ due to climate change

Plant life on Antarctica is growing rapidly due to climate change, scientists have found.

This is a Green Island moss bank with icebergs. CREDIT Matt Amesbury

Few plants live on the continent, but scientists studying moss have found a sharp increase in biological activity in the last 50 years. A team including scientists from the University of Exeter used moss bank cores — which are well preserved in Antarctica’s cold conditions — from an area spanning about 400 miles.

They tested five cores from three sites and found major biological changes had occurred over the past 50 years right across the Antarctic Peninsula.

“Temperature increases over roughly the past half century on the Antarctic Peninsula have had a dramatic effect on moss banks growing in the region,” said Dr Matt Amesbury, of the University of Exeter.

“If this continues, and with increasing amounts of ice-free land from continued glacier retreat, the Antarctic Peninsula will be a much greener place in the future.”

Recent climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula is well documented, with warming and other changes such as increased precipitation and wind strength.

Weather records mostly began in the 1950s, but biological records preserved in moss bank cores can provide a longer-term context about climate change.

The scientists analysed data for the last 150 years, and found clear evidence of “changepoints” – points in time after which biological activity clearly increased — in the past half century.

“The sensitivity of moss growth to past temperature rises suggests that ecosystems will alter rapidly under future warming, leading to major changes in the biology and landscape of this iconic region,” said Professor Dan Charman, who led the research project in Exeter. “In short, we could see Antarctic greening to parallel well-established observations in the Arctic.

“Although there was variability within our data, the consistency of what we found across different sites was striking.” The research team, which included scientists from the University of Cambridge and British Antarctic Survey, say their data indicate that plants and soils will change substantially even with only modest further warming.

The same group of researchers published a study focussing on one site in 2013, and the new research confirms that their unprecedented finding can be applied to a much larger region.

Plant life only exists on about 0.3% of Antarctica, but the findings provide one way of measuring the extent and effects of warming on the continent.

The paper, published in the journal Current Biology, is entitled: “Widespread biological response to rapid warming on the Antarctic Peninsula.”

The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The researchers now plan to examine core records dating back over thousands of years to test how much climate change affected ecosystems before human activity started causing global warming.

Ref.: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/18/oh-noes-antarctica-greening-due-to-climate-change/

From 28. apr. 2017

Eco-Terrorists target Christy and Spencer

Eco-Terrorists have targeted Professor John Christy and Professor Roy Spencer’s offices. Seven 5.7mm bullets peppered the wall and smashed windows next to Christy’s office, only a few hours after a large “Earth Day” march, organised by fanatical climate fascists passed by these offices – it was supposedly a “March for Science”.


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