marko86 wrote: 
STOP STOP STOP STOP! Stop, I tell you, confusing the ideologues with facts and reasoned conclusions! Don't you know how damned quivering with anger it makes the likes of (_____________________) when you present facts, instead of tripe designed to buttress up their collective asses sticking just out of the  sand, directly above their buried heads? Why, they will rant and rave and shake their virtual fists in the air and slather and froth and sputter and cough the platitudes regurgitated from their spoon-feeding handlers. These fractious modern day flat-worlders are sure to refuse, rebuke and reflexively rejoin in remand to the higher authority of Fox and God, who gave them domination over this fair planet and its Nielsen ratings, any suggestion that they may have personal and collective anything, let alone responsibility, for the travesty that is occurring even as their candle sputters into darkness, if not insignificance.

The gritty details regarding the Amazon rain study:

Up is Down, Brown is Green (with apologies to Orwell)

In the alternate universe of Fox News, Anthony Watts, and many others, up is down. Now, it appears, brown is green. Following the total confusion over the retraction of a paper on sea level, claims of another "mistake" by the IPCC are making the rounds of the blogosphere. This time, the issue is the impact of rainfall changes on the Amazon rainforest.Geophysical Research Letters

A study in 2007 showed that the forest gets greener when it rains less. A new study, by Samanta et al. in shows that the earlier work was flawed. Aided by an apparently rather careless press release, this is being used as evidence that the Amazon is less sensitive to rainfall changes than the IPCC claimed. But the Samanta et al. paper actually does not address the central questions at all. It only addresses whether a single anomalous rainfall year had an impact that is measureable and interpretable from a satellite sensor. The conclusion is that they could not detect a change. As noted in a commentary from Simon Lewis, University of Leeds, "the critical question is how these forests respond to repeated droughts, not merely single-year droughts."

Lewis - a broadly published expert on tropical forests - makes a number of additional important points in his commentary below. Bottom line: IPCC gets it right as usual.

——-
Guest Commentary by Simon Lewis, University of Leeds, UK

The new Samanta et al. study uses sensors on satellites to assess the colour of the rainforest canopy in the dry season of the year 2005, compared to the dry seasons of the years 2003 and 2004. More detected green colour in 2005 may suggest that the forest is being more productive (more green leaves photosynthesising), or more brown colours may suggest leaves dying and less productivity, than the previous years. The results show that 2005 was little different to the previous years, despite the strong drought.

This is important new information, as in 2007, a paper using broadly the same satellite-based method showed a strong ‘greening-up' of the Amazon in 2005, suggesting tolerance to drought (Saleska et al. 2007, Science). The new study shows that those results were not reproducible, but also highlight the extreme caution that should be attached to satellite studies generally in this field, with instruments in space collecting data which is then used to infer subtle changes in the ecology of tropical forests.

In contrast to the 2007 paper, Oliver Phillips, myself, and others, published a paper in Science last year, using ground observations from across the Amazon, showing that while the 2005 drought did not dramatically change the growth of the trees compared to a normal year, as Samanta et al. also show, the deaths of trees did increase considerably. The new study of Samanta et al. does not contradict the Phillips et al. study, which itself shows the Amazon is vulnerable to drought via impacts on tree mortality. The Phillips et al. paper showed that remaining Amazon forest trees changed from absorbing nearly 2 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually over recent decades, as tree growth has been exceeding mortality, to being a large, but temporary, source of over 3 billion tonnes, from the elevated tree mortality associated with the 2005 drought event.

The evidence for the possibility of a major die-back of the Amazon rainforest is due to two factors,

1. That climate change induced decreases in rainfall in the dry season occur, and

2. The trees cannot tolerate these reductions in rainfall.

The Samanta paper does not directly address the first point; this is addressed using global circulation models (of which some, but not all, show a strong drying trend for the east of the Amazon over the 21st century). The second point is only addressed in a limited way. The critical question is how these forests respond to repeated droughts, not merely single-year droughts. The forests are of course able to withstand these single droughts (otherwise there would be no rainforest!) - it is their ability to survive an increased frequency of the most severe droughts that is critical to answer. Drought experiments, where a roof is built under the forest canopy to reduce rainfall, show that most forest trees survive a single year's intense drought, in agreement with the ground observations in the 2005 drought, but can't persist with repeated years of drought. The Samanta study does not address this point at all.

In conclusion, the new Samanta et al. study lends further weight to the emerging picture of the impact of the 2005 drought: that tree growth was relatively unaffected, but tree mortality increased, contributing temporarily to accelerating the rate of climate change, rather than as usual reducing it, via additions of carbon to the atmosphere from the dead trees. The mortality was far from catastrophic, but the impact on the carbon cycle was globally significant. This is hardly the ‘no impact' of the 2005-drought on the forest suggested in various news reports.

 Atman wrote: 
On the plus side, there's all that Frozen Tundra to convert to growing hops. 

 Inamorato wrote: 

World's Top Scientists to Scrutinize Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The IPCC report at issue concluded that changes in the atmosphere, the oceans, glaciers and ice caps show "unequivocally" that the Earth is warming.

Approved after a line by line review by representatives of 113 governments, the IPCC report on climate change science by 600 authors from 40 countries, states that the observed increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1750 is the result of human activities.

Contrary to what the global warming *disinformers* say about the recent temperature record, it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

*Beaks*

 Atman wrote: 
I wish you were closer. I'd love to buy your produce!

 Leslie wrote: 
Do you like organic vegetables? I got fresh picked raspberries, strawberries, many kinds of root vegetables. Perhaps a freshly picked salad?

 Atman wrote: 
I don't think you could pay me what I'm getting now, but I'd be glad to do it in my spare time.

 Leslie wrote: 
Thank you dear, I think it's fixed now.

Can I hire you to follow me around and correct all my mistakes, I really need that.

 Atman wrote: 
I don't think you actually got the link in there. Check your html.

Climate change depresses beer drinkers

Here's something that I think is going to created some converts!

 manbirdexperiment wrote: 

What is FB?

 Atman wrote: 
Me neither!

 helenofjoy wrote: 
No I'm not. How about you?

 Atman wrote: 
Are you married?

 RichardPrins wrote: 
that's goin' up on my FB page

 Atman wrote: 
by 2030 we'll need the land to grow crops to feed the exploding population...

 Atman wrote: 
That would really piss off some of the more religious climate change denial crowd!

Thank you islander. Maybe by 2030 it could be a hemp farm.