Philgrim’s Blogress

Yesterday I came across a news story about an invasive plant called the Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum).  Then this evening CTV News had a story about the Giant Hogweed.  It sounds like a nasty weed, partly because of its effect on the native ecosystems but also for health reasons, and it is spreading across Canada.

This species has been beneath my radar all these years, but I thought the pictures looked familiar.

Sure enough, it’s in the same genus as Cow Parsnip (Heracleum maximum).  That’s the species that grew in the bush down the hill from our house near Shell Lake when I was a kid.  Having a hollow stem, it made great pea-shooters.  Or chokecherry shooters.  I remember some chokecherry wars involving my brothers Marv and Dan together with our cousins Dennis, Dave and Ken.  They were brutal, but fun.  I also remember how angry Mom was the day I filled the pocket of my good shirt full of ripe chokecherries and stained it beyond the power of any detergent.

But getting back to the Giant Hogweed … it too has a hollow stem, but the sap is toxic.  I don’t know if its range has expanded to Shell Lake, but obviously using it for chokecherry wars would not be a good idea.

Another thing I discovered in the news article linked above is that the band Genesis had a 1971 song about the Giant Hogweed.

These have been a couple of days of botanical discoveries.

CBC News is reporting that some Saskatchewan rural municipalities are declaring themselves “agricultural disaster areas” because it’s too wet for the farmers to complete their seeding.  I think my brother-in-law Gary is still only half finished seeding and might agree that the Birch Hills area could fit in that category.

This map from Agriculture Canada gives the story about the amount of precipitation our area has received this spring.

The dark blue colour represents areas that have received more than twice as much precipitation as normal since April 1.  Click on the image for legend and more graphs from Agriculture Canada (ironically in a section they call Drought Watch).

While on the topic of weather, apparently this spring (March though May according to Environment Canada) was the warmest spring on record across Canada, following after the warmest winter on record.

I find local weather a fascinating subject.  Perhaps equally as fascinating as global climate.

Spend any amount of time surfing the web for information about Canada’s annual seal hunt, and you will find statements such as:

• The harvest is unsustainable and is endangering the harp seal population
• The seal harvest provides such low economic return for sealers that it is not an economically viable industry.
• The seal harvest is loosely monitored and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) doesn’t punish illegal hunting activity or practices.
• The Canadian government allows sealers to harvest whitecoat seals.
• There is no relationship between the seal population and the abundance of cod stocks.
• Seals are being skinned alive
• The club – or hakapik – is an inhumane tool that has no place in today’s world.
• Fisheries and Oceans Canada provides subsidies for the seal harvest.
• Canadian harvesting practices are worse and more inhumane compared to other countries.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has responses to those claims here, as well as a lot of other information about the seal harvest at their “Seals and Sealing in Canada” website.

It’s been a couple of months since I posted anything about climate change, so I guess it’s about time.

In January, NASA released its analysis of land and ocean temperature analysis for 2009, and declared the year in a statistical tie for the 2nd-warmest year on record, and the period 2000-2009 the warmest decade on record.  Unlike my post of December 15 I haven’t bothered to produce my own updated graph, but here is one produced by NASA.  (Instead of absolute temperature this shows temperature anomaly, where zero is the average for the period 1951 to 1980).

Maybe I’m missing something, but it certainly appears to me that a warming trend is occurring.

However, Les MacPherson wrote in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix a few days ago, “Even the leading alarmists now are compelled to admit what already was apparent to anyone who looked at the record, namely that there has been no global warming for the last 15 years.”

Les MacPherson has confirmed to me by email that the “leading alarmists” referred to is Dr. Phil Jones, one of the climate change researchers whose emails were hacked at the University of East Anglia recently, and the admission was made in a  BBC interview.  Here is what was actually said:

Q – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

A – Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

I’m not going to get into the concept of statistical significance, whether at the 95% or any other level, and perhaps Les MacPherson is being totally without guile in his interpretation, but I would respectfully suggest that not everyone examining the record is  finding it “apparent” that “there has been no global warming for the last 15 years.”

I’m siding with the scientist rather than the opinion columnist on this one.

In the weeks since the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK was hacked into, a lot of pundits  have been declaring the stolen emails to be the final nail in the coffin of climate change science.

One of the most damning emails was sent in November 1999 by Dr. Phil Jones, where he discusses using a “trick”,

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

As shocking as that revelation is, Oxford University Press actually published a textbook in 2002 with the title, “Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks” (click on image at left for more information or to order).

There must be a word ending in -gate to describe this statistical skulduggery.

With the bone-chilling cold snap that we’ve been having here in the Canadian Prairies for most of December, it is obvious that the earth is cooling.  Here is a graph that I produced using NASA data, that provides all the proof needed:

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But on second thought, I’m remembering that November was an unusually warm month.  So the earth was obviously warming back then.

But on third thought, maybe both of the above statements are confusing weather with climate, if we accept the following definition:

Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.

If climate requires averaging over decades, perhaps graphing four years isn’t enough.  I’ve decided to add on another 124 years:

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Maybe I’ll stop worrying about that global cooling trend.