Environmental Talk

You celebrate your way, I’ll celebrate mine….

Dear Planet,

Please excuse Mark Jabo from Earth Hour this year. While he understands this is a great excuse for a party, he is a big basketball fan and is not willing to miss part of the UCLA-Xavier game based on the dubious goal of calling attention to climate change.

Mark is well aware that the climate has been changing for the past few billion years and fully agrees that it will continue to do so.

While the official Earth Hour policy is to urge people to replace standard bulbs with CFL bulbs, Mark would like to point out the dubious merits of taking a step against a projected climate threat and replacing it with the more immediate and proven danger of mercury contamination.

Mark is also a little ticked off at Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes for not laughing Al Gore off the program when he suggested that anyone who doubts climate change is man-made is akin to someone who still believes the Earth is flat.

Mark would suggest the more accurate analogy would be to compare the Church’s opposition to the science-based thinking of Galileo to the cult-like devotion of a politician who continues to cling to a rigid dogma and ignore all evidence that contradicts “what he knows in his heart to be true.”

Mark is somewhat amused that a guy who managed to pull gentleman’s Cs in college has become the evangelical spokesperson for a point of view that is challenged by hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists with advanced degrees in the topic.

Please accept this note as an excuse for future Earth Hour and Earth Day celebrations and also any Earth Nanoseconds or Earth Bicentennials planned in the future.

If there is a permission slip for the field trip to the rain forest, please be advised I will be happy to sign it because Mark thinks it would be really cool to see an anaconda.

Sincerely,

Mark’s Brain

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“Hey, gang! Next year let’s have a bad climate model party….”

Someone got me a subscription to E Magazine for Christmas. E Magazine is a lot like Parade Magazine except it features issues about the environment instead of ads for collectible hand-painted Garfield figurines.

The cover story of the first issue I ever received was “Losing Winter: As Climate Change Takes Hold, Our Coldest Season is the First Casualty.”

There were gloomy predictions of shortened snowboarding seasons and snowmobile makers going out of business. On the plus side, at least they were talking about people rather than worrying about polar bears.

Still, its hard to manufacture a crisis when the worst thing you can say about climate change is that it could limit your choice of leisure time activities.

The E Magazine article was full of people taking matters into their own hands. “Marshall Heaven of Greenwich, Connecticut got tired of waiting for the snow to fall, so he bought two Backyard Blizzard snowmakers and can now promise 15-foot drifts as early as late November.”

I guess it might be fun to confuse the crap out of the local squirrel population, but other than that it’s hard for me to fathom why someone would go to these kind of lengths to try to insure that every one of his winters always followed the same pattern.

What we’re finding out in the great global warming rhubarb is that all climate is local. While we’re lamenting lack of rain in Georgia, the Pacific Northwest is getting inundated with precipitation. While Artic ice is melting, ice in Antarctica is setting records for growth and coverage.

So, it’s probably not surprising that E Magazine went to great lengths to trumpet the fact we’re “Losing Winter,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came out with the following facts this week:

- The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001

- During January alone, 170 inches of snow fell at the Alta ski area near Salt Lake City, Utah, more than twice the normal amount for the month, eclipsing the previous record of 168 inches that fell in 1967

- Mountain snowpack exceeded 150 percent of average in large parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon at the end of February. Spring run-off from the above average snowpack in the West is expected to be beneficial in drought plagued areas

As the first buds of spring start to pop out here in the Northeast, many people will decide it’s a good time to put their sweaters in a plastic bin to be put in storage for another year.

If there’s room, you may want to throw some climate models and a couple of back issues of E Magazine in there, too.

Despite their repeated ability to forecast anything other than embarrassment for their designers, the models and the gloomy headlines are sure to be unpacked again next year.

Searching for truth…

As anyone who owns a dog knows, those plastic bags you get at the store are great for picking up behind your dog.

As it turns out, plastic bags are pretty good at picking up bullshit, too.

Remember how you’ve been hearing how plastic bags kill 100,000 marine mammals and over one million seabirds a year? Turns out these oft-quoted statistics have no basis in fact.

What they do offer is insight into the kind of misinformation and deliberate distortions that characterize the global warming debate.

It seems there was a study done in Canada which was published in 1987 that over a three-year period between 1981-1984 more than 100,000 marine mammals and birds were killed by discarded nets.

Fast forward to 2002. The Australian government commissioned a study on the effects of plastic bags. The authors of that study quoted the Canadian study as saying that plastic bags were responsible for the deaths.

Somehow discarded fishing nets became plastic bags, 100,000 animal deaths over three years became 100,000 marine mammal and 1,000,000 birds a year.

I don’t claim to be an expert on recruiting scientists for government studies but I would think that, at a minimum, you might want to hire a couple of guys who know enough math to know that adding an extra comma and three zeroes changes the meaning of 100,000.

You might even want consider hiring people who, when confronted with evidence, might be willing to admit their mistakes.

The authors of the Australian study left the “typo” uncorrected for four years and, when they finally did issue a correction, they corrected “plastic bags” to “plastic debris” and in a footnote, made mention the Canadian study referred to fishing nets.

Let me make one suggestion to any Australian government officials who are reading this. If you type in “fishing nets” into your computer and it comes out “plastic bags,” it may be time to get a new computer. Or some new researchers.

You know you’re on thin ice when Greenpeace is sprinting away from endorsing your study results. David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, noted, “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite.”

The London Times article characterizes the results of the Australian study as “a misinterpretation.”

That famous Londoner, Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Six years after this little “misinterpretation,” the truth is still looking for its jeans.