How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 1 - Temperature Trend

Many of the strongest supporters of the global warming theory are nature lovers like myself. I am a long time birder and have participated in many Audubon Society Christmas Counts and May Migration Counts. Also, for the past 6 years I have held the position as a Regional Coordinator(the Poconos) for the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas. I love birds and nature and am outside in the woods just about everyday. Almost all of the nature organizations that I belong to support global warming. They often support it with bogus data and theories. My report below is a perfect example of the Scaring You About Nothing tactics that we have been pummeled with for years.

A few months ago I received the Pennsylvania Audubon Society Spring newsletter found here. The headline article is State Perspective - Bird Movements Reveal Global Warming Threat. The article summarizes the National Audubon Bird and Climate Report found here. The report summarizes on page 3 that "Analysis of four decades of Christmas Bird Count observations reveal that birds seen in North America during the first weeks of winter have moved dramatically northward—toward colder latitudes—over the past four decades. Significant northward movement occurred among 58% of the observed species—177 of 305."

On page 4 they show a graph to the right plotting January temperature across the lower 48 states from 1969 through 2006. They created that graph from NOAA National Climactic Data Center US temperature data found here. I recreated the same mean January temperature graph with trend line below to the right. The results are dramatic revealing a 1.63F/decade trend which means it if keeps going that way January temperature will rise 16.3F per century. That is a reason to be concerned! Now look at the graph to the left below which is for December average temperatures from 1966 to 2006. What you can see is that instead of the trend being 1.42F per decade it is only .56F per decade! Us birders know that the Christmas Count is from the 2nd weekend of December to the first weekend in January. We know that 90% of the data is collected in December! Yet Audubon used January temperatures and correlated that with data mostly collected in December. Why? Simply another slight of hand, they used the January temperature graph because it looked much worse than the December graph did!!! We know birds are smart about finding their way around, but do you think they know ahead of time what the temperature is "going to be". But no, the December graph isn't SCARY enough, you can see more huge downswings than the upswings in the January graph. Click graphs to enlarge.
















Sometimes a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and that is the case in the Audubon Birds and Climate - Ecological Disruption in Motion report. Here is the rest of the story...Many of us have been fooled by scientists using data from a specific or small time frame who then extrapolate that data forward. If you looked at past results of the stock market in 1999 it would have been obvious to you that the stock market was a good investment in the long run. Counting on past performance of the stock market for future returns was obviously a bad choice in 1999 for many of us. The same goes for climate.

Let's get back to using their January data. Instead of using the very short time span of forty years the NCDC allows us to go back to the late 1800's. To the right I have plotted the same January mean temperature from 1906-2009 and the mean tells a completely different story. What we find is that for the US(lower 48) January temperature have been basically flat for 103 years rising only at the rate of .12F/decade or 1.2F over the entire time frame from 1906-2006.



Now let's see if I can scare you in a different way. To the right I plotted the January mean temperature from 1953-1979 and you can see the downward trend of minus 1.75/decade or 17.5 per century. The downward January mean temperature trend for 26 years was even larger than the upward trend from 1966-2006.
During the late 70's we actually had a global cooling scare with many scientists and news agencies writing articles warning of impending doom. You can read Newsweek's 1975 article, The Cooling World, right here. I have to wonder if the National Audubon Society produced a report in the late 1970's warning about the impending doom from global cooling and pleaded with politicians across the globe to do something, because obviously global cooling would have had to have some effect on wintering bird population.

Now let's take a look at two more charts that plot US January mean temperature data for more recent time periods. You can click the charts to enlarge them for better viewing. The chart below to the left is for the past 19 January's and is completely FLAT! The chart below to the right is for the past 11 years and there is a downward trend. This time the trend is dramatic at 2.32F/decade which extrapolates to 23.2F per century. Now you can see that the National Audubon Society was cherry picking the years they used to create the chart at the top and that if you study all the charts of this page you can see that mean temperature has risen and fallen throughout the past century. Again, most recently, for the past 11 years we are falling again! You can reproduce all of these graphs yourself at the NCDC website.















And to prove to you that the goal of the National Audubon Society Birds and Climate report was to DELIBERATELY DECEIVE you look above at the January temperature for 2007, 2008 and 2009. You can see they were cold and well below the trend line. The report was 2/10/09 and those three January's were available for their chart. But they choose to stop their data at 2006 because that would make trend line higher and warmer! This is the same kind of data mining that we are being exposed on numerous fronts from numerous scientific agencies. They call it the "scientific consensus".

Back to the report. The cover subtitle states " A Briefing for Policymakers and Concerned Citizens on Audubon’s Analyses of North American Bird Movements in the Face of Global Warming", yet using the January mean temperature there is very little warming for the past 19 years. The temperature trend is essentially flat!

On page 2 of the Audubon Birds and Climate report we are instructed that "It will take action by America’s millions of self-proclaimed bird enthusiasts—and their elected representatives—to address the problem of climate change while there’s still time." Time for what? On page 9 they write "Scientists have long predicted dire consequences from global warming for birds and other species". But what do the scientists say if the world is cooling?

Here is how you have been duped. Actually, it is just one of the many, many ways in which you have been duped! To the right is a chart of mean annual US temperature from 1978-2009. Global temperature have risen and fallen throughout world history and this twenty year period was a period of rising temperature. We can all accept that . These rising temperatures gave birth to the doom and gloom theories that the temperature rise would continue forever, just like the stock markets of the late 1990's. But just like the stock market, temperatures have balanced and are returning to normal. To the right the graph depicts 11 years of US mean annual temperature now trending downward. And this year, 2009 is turning out to be another very cold year throughout the world, it is likely to add strongly to the downward trend, see here. In fact for my Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic friends, this June was the coldest in over 40 years in Central Park, NYC. It is now mid-July in Pennsylvania, when are we going to have summer?

Now that Audubon has us scared by cherry picking their data points and then forgetting to tell us that temperature has been actually trending downward they give a solution to the problem - Repower America with Clean and Efficient Energy. Below are a few pictures of their ecologic environmental actions that we need to take.

Now let's look at a wind project in my home state of Pennsylvania. To the right is a aerial photograph of the Allegheny Wind Farm in Blair and Cambria counties. This photo was taken by Save Our Allegheny Ridges, click here for website. You can count over half of the 40 wind turbines strung out along the forested ridges. These turbines are one recommendation that Audubon suggests to combat the the temperature problem they created above. These turbines are rated at 2MW for a nameplate capacity of 80MW, however wind turbines rarely create more energy than 30% of their rating. So these 40 - 2MW turbines will create about 24 MW of energy over a years time. The Susquehanna Nuclear plant at Berwick creates 2400 MW of energy in one year. We need 100 of these wind farms to equal the electricity output of one nuclear plant. And unfortunately, the wind blows only when it wants to, about 30% of the time, often at the wrong time of day or season, so we will never replace any coal or nuclear plants with wind. NONE!

As you can see all of the turbines are on our highest ridges and separated so as not to cause interference with each other. Each turbine requires about 4 acres of clear cut for their base and access roads which fragments the forest. Each of the 100 wind farms will need separate transformer stations and miles and miles of transmission lines to transport the power where it is needed. Look at the bottom of the Allegheny farm above and notice the how many acres of clear cut the set of transmission lines requires. We already have a power grid and lines, do we need many hundreds of miles more?

Each turbine will kill bats and birds and fragment the forest. If you are a nature lover, like I am, I strongly suggest you study this slide presentation (give it a few minutes to load) by Conservation Biologist, Dan Boone, which evaluates the environmental impact of wind farms on the mid-Atlantic region and specifically Pennsylvania. (it is a slow loader). Also, by placing literally thousands of turbines on forested ridges in Pennsylvania we will destroy the scenic beauty of our state forever!

And to top it all off, these turbines are nothing but a tax shelter project requiring enormous Federal and State subsidies and local tax breaks or they will not be constructed. This chart is found on page 6 here. Click to enlarge it and look at column 3 - Subsidies per Unit of Production($/MW). Coal received 44cents/MWproduced, Nat gas received 25 cents/MW, Nuclear received $1.59/MW, Wind received $23.37/MW.

Wind and solar get 50 time more Federal subsidies per MW of production than coal, 100 times more than Natural Gas per MW of production and about 16 times as much as nuclear. This is all added to the Federal deficit that our children will inherit from this boondoggle! There is so much more to why wind does not work and I refer you to other posts in my blog and website.

On page 13 of the report Audubon recommends a cap and trade program to prevent the temperature rising another 2F. What did they mean by that? The NOAA US temperature chart from 1998 reveals that our January temperature has already declined 2.32F in the past 11 years? Imagine that, worldwide CO2 emissions have continued to rise. Now I am mixed up, January temperature has declined 2.32F in the past 11 years while annual temperature declined .77F, which one are we to worry about rising 2F, and from when? From now or when they started to go down 11 years ago?
Part 2 - The Birds