Another warming contrarian who can’t/won’t shoot straight

Joanne Nova is, I gather, a former television personality in Australia now blogging away against science and the study of climate change at JoNova.  Here’s how far off the track she is:  She’s been sucked in by Monckton,  as some great scientist and hero — he whose biggest achievements are to call scientists “bedwetters” and attack the reputations of famous dead women (what is it about Monckton and dead women?).

Her latest post is a hoot. She’s claiming that the case for global warming is coming apart.  She illustrates it with this PhotoShop™ masterpiece (note the “JoNova” in the lower lefthand corner, and note it well):

JoNova defaces photo of Glen Canyon Dam. Original photo copyright by Wild Nature Images.

Glen Canyon Dam poses problems for serious advocates of environnmental protection for many reasons, not the least being the death of Glen Canyon.  This dam represents one of the greatest losses of the environmental movement.  That’s not why Nova chose the photos, I’m sure — I’d be surprised if she could find Glen Canyon on a map, and I’m all but certain she’s clueless about the controversy about the dam (don’t even wonder whether she’s ever read Ed Abbey).

Regardless where one stands on the issues around Glen Canyon Dam, one cannot look at this photo without seeing the white stripe from the water behind the dam, running about 50 feet up the canyon walls.

Check out the original, copyrighted photo here, at WildNatureImages.com (and maybe buy a copy — it’s a great photo of the dam, Lake Powell and the area; no bluer sky anywhere).  I presume that, even with the huge “JoNova” on it, Nova will allow free duplication of her original work; but why didn’t she credit the guy who took the photo (Ron Niebrugge) and the people who put it on the internet for her (WildNatureImages.com)?  Update:  Nova is giving credit, now.

The original, without comment, is at once more beautiful, more awe-striking, and more accurate a portrayal of the effects of climate than Nova’s doctored version:

Glen Canyon Dam, photo by Ron Niebrugge, at WildNatureImages.com. Displayed here with express written permission.

See, climate change is thought to be one of the culprits for that white line. Glen Canyon Dam is in straits right now, as is the Colorado River Compact that created the legal justification for constructing the dam, because precipitation in the mountains where the Colorado River is born has fallen dramatically in the past couple of decades — and Lake Powell has shrunk to a vestige of its former self, of its planned extent, of the extent hoped for in cooler times.

Lake Powell's drop, circa 2008, photo by Marco Ammannati via National Parks Traveler. Caption from National Parks Traveler: "At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, years of drought, possibly an indicator of climate change, have revealed Lake Powell's bathtub walls. Spring runoff, however, could soon make those bathtub walls vanish."

JoNova uses a photograph showing the harms of climate change, to claim that climate change does not occur.

Is this the stupidest anti-climate change statement ever made?

Offer your candidates for dumber or stupider claims below.  It’s time we started counting and cataloging.

More:

• Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West, James Lawrence Powell, University of California Press 2009. Review of Dead Pool by David Jenkins at Electronic Green Journal. Note at USC News. Note from Lawrence at the UC Press site.
• Down to the Wire:  Confronting Climate Collapse, David Orr, Oxford University Press 2009.
• Press release from National Parks Traveler, April 7, 2008, “Lake Powell expected to rise 50 feet this summer,” noting that record snowfalls were expected to refill Lake Powell partially.  (See the editorial linked below — 50 feet wasn’t enough.)
• “Lakes Mead and Powell could run dry by 2021,” Christian Science Monitor, February 13, 2008; cites study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Scripps Institution press release on the study; the paper was published in Water Resources Research, a peer-reviewed journal.
• “Desert mirage,” editorial discussion of Lake Powell’s climate-change-fueled dropping levels threatening a water project for St. George, Utah, with discussion of U.S. Research Council report on future levels of Lake Powell; Salt Lake Tribune, January 6, 2010.  “Lake Powell’s current water level is 59 percent of capacity. The lake level, around 20 million acre-feet in 2000, dropped to about 8 million acre-feet by 2005. Water levels rebounded a bit over the next two years, but the U.S. National Research Council predicted in 2007 that the American West could see worse droughts in the future than the one Utahns experienced from 1998 to 2005. In fact, the early 20th century, when the Colorado compact was negotiated, was an anomaly, a relatively wet period for an otherwise historically much drier area.”