Tag: Alabama

Yet Another Darter-fish Invented to Stop Development

Way down in Bessemer, Alabama, the development of a huge data center is being fought with a time-tried and proven tactic :  invent a new species of the darter-fish and declare it at once “endangered”.  According to locals and environmental activists the new development would certainly spell doom for the little discovered-just-in-time new darter – this one declared to be the “Birmingham darter” or Etheostoma birminghamense. 

From Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen

Way down in Bessemer, Alabama, the development of a huge data center is being fought with a time-tried and proven tactic :  invent a new species of the darter-fish and declare it at once “endangered”.  According to locals and environmental activists the new development would certainly spell doom for the little discovered-just-in-time new darter – this one declared to be the “Birmingham darter” or Etheostoma birminghamense. 

A team of biologists headed by Chase D. Brownstein at Yale University determined the new species “using genomic analyses.” and counting “the numbers of scale rows and fin elements from each specimen and performed principal component analysis (PCA) of the meristic traits…”  Of course, there were many differences between the individual fish of these “meristic traits”, so the authors classified them into “new” species based on average values for those counted traits, in some cases using mean values, in other the modal number.

Yet, the definition of “meristic traits” is generally this:

“Meristic traits are characteristics of organisms that can be counted and are expressed as whole numbers. These traits are discrete, meaning they have distinct, countable categories rather than a continuous range of values. Examples include the number of fins, scales, or vertebrae in an organism.”

The terminology used in the table is “average number of lateral line spines”, “modal number of first dorsal fine spines” and the “mean value of genealogical divergence index”. 

These are not simple counts, though two are presented as whole numbers (allowed by the use of the mode, instead of the mean).  These fish, claimed as distinct species, all have between 46 and 49 lateral line scales (individuals in each species having differing counts around the average).  Each of the new species consists of fish with dorsal fin spines equally varied around 10 or 11, and the same for pectoral fin rays, around 13 or 14.    

In this we find the fine art of the Species Splitters,  a term:

“…introduced more widely by George G. Simpson in his 1945 work The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. As he put it:

“splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera … and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. … Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat.”  [ wiki ]

Minor differences number of scales and fin elements, that vary from individual-to-individual as well as between very localized and somewhat isolated populations seem to have been exaggerated in importance to create new species. 

None of these newly declared species have been official designated as “Endangered Species”, but the paper, Brownstein et al. [2025], labels them “imperiled”.

Purposefully invented imperiled species?  Who can say? …but certainly convenient to the anti-development activists in Alabama. 

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Author’s Comment:

Successful ploys are always tried again and again.  The famous snail darter was used to delay the building of the Tellico Dam for years.  We can look forward to the anti-data-center activists in Alabama using The Science [purpose?] produced by Brownstein et al. to attempt to stop or delay approvals for construction.

As is almost always true, activists are not interested in the new Birmingham Darter – they just want to stop the building of the data center.  Same old same old.

Thanks for reading.

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The Washington Post Sinks Even Lower, Falsely Reporting Southern Coastal Sea Level Rise

The Washington Post (WaPo) ran a story recently saying that sea level rise has become unprecedented on the east and southeast coast of the United States. This can be seen in the map in the screen capture above. The story is extremely misleading when not outright false. WaPo fails to explain that the areas it highlights are naturally unstable with their shores waxing and waning regularly. There is no long-term consistent trend of rapidly rising sea levels.

Dauphin Island, Alabama

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

The Washington Post (WaPo) ran a story recently saying that sea level rise has become unprecedented on the east and southeast coast of the United States. This can be seen in the map in the screen capture above. The story is extremely misleading when not outright false. WaPo fails to explain that the areas it highlights are naturally unstable with their shores waxing and waning regularly. There is no long-term consistent trend of rapidly rising sea levels.

The story THE DROWNING SOUTH – WHERE SEAS ARE RISING AT ALARMING SPEED by Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, Kevin Crowe and John Muyskens makes some highly questionable claims:

One of the most rapid sea level surges on Earth is besieging the American South, forcing a reckoning for coastal communities across eight U.S. states, a Washington Post analysis has found.

At more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina, sea levels are at least 6 inches higher than they were in 2010 — a change similar to what occurred over the previous five decades.

In the story, WaPo presents this table:

Figure 1 – Table from WaPo

One of the featured places by WaPo is Dauphin Island, Alabama, which is a good example to demonstrate how WaPo has presented misleading and outright false information.

Figure 2. Dauphin Island, Alabama

Dauphin Island is essentially a sand bar, a barrier island indicated by its elongated shape. Barrier islands, by definition are fragile, being affected by many things, according to HowStuffWorks:

  • Waves – Waves continually deposit and remove sediments from the ocean side of the island.
  • Currents – Longshore currents that are caused by waves hitting the island at an angle can move the sand from one end of the island to another. For example, the offshore currents along the east coast of the United States tend to remove sand from the northern ends of barrier islands and deposit it at the southern ends.
  • Tides – The tides move sediments into the salt marshes and eventually fill them in. Thus, the sound sides of barrier islands tend to build up as the ocean sides erode.
  • Winds – Winds blow sediments from the beaches to help form dunes and into the marshes, which contributes to their build-up.
  • Sea level changes – Rising sea levels tend to push barrier islands toward the mainland.
  • Storms – Hurricanes and other storms have the most dramatic effects on barrier islands by creating overwash areas and eroding beaches as well as other portions of barrier islands.

It is misleading that WaPo doesn’t point out how tenuous the existence and stability of places like Dauphin Island are. Here’s what WaPo claims is happening there:

Figure 3. The WaPo’s graph claiming accelerating sea level rise on Dauphin Island.
SOURCE: Washington Post

Note that WaPo claims 6.7 inches of sea level rise since 2010. However, here’s what National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) data says about the sea level rise on Dauphin Island:

Figure 4. NOAA relative sea level trend, Dauphin Island, Alabama. SOURCE: NOAA

Note that WaPo hasn’t displayed the last part of the data for 2024 in their Figure 3 graph, stopping at 2023. 2024 data shows that Dauphin Island sea level rates are back to historical norms. But, even without that omission, it is easy to show how WaPo has presented a false claim with simple math.

WaPo claims that 6.7 inches of sea level rise since have occurred between 2010 ending in 2023 – fourteen calendar years. If that were true, the NOAA data would support it, but it doesn’t.

NOAA’s actual data from the full dataset says the sea level trend is 4.41 millimeters/year at Dauphin Island and it returned to that level in 2024 after a short increase in trend the years before. From NOAA’s data page on Dauphin Island:

The relative sea level trend is 4.41 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.55 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1966 to 2023 which is equivalent to a change of 1.45 feet in 100 years.

Let’s do the math:

4.41 mm/year x 14 years = 61.74 mm

61.74mm = 2.43 inches, not 6.7 inches, just over a third of the amount of sea level rise WaPo claimed for Dauphin Island. Why the huge discrepancy?

It is simple – WaPo used a sleight of hand in presenting their findings to the public. Instead of using the actual data to calculate the sea level rise between 2010 and 2023, WaPo used the short-term trend to calculate the rise during that period. The short-term trend of 0.48 inches per year, multiplied by 14 years gives a value of 6.72 inches.

In essence, WaPo used a trick to present short-term trend data, rather than trends calculated from all the data, making the public think the sea level rise is three times higher than it actually was. They presented their trend calculation as actual sea level rise. That’s not a poor use of statistics, that’s lying.

Another factor WaPo ignored in its reporting contributing to sea level rise in the areas mentioned is higher rates of subsidence in coastal areas where wetlands have been removed, population has increased, land has compacted, and ground water withdrawals have contributed to sinking. Climate Realism has discussed each of these factors in multiple stories debunking previous media claims of a recent change in rapid sea level rise on America’s southern coasts, here, here, and here, for instance.

This sort of journalistic malfeasance is not just false, but despicable. Even giving WaPo the benefit of the doubt that this was some mistake, it is unlikely the four authors for the article plus the editors and fact checkers that WaPo employs would not catch the flaws in the story and the known factors that contribute to measure sea level rise, if they were actually doing their jobs as journalists to report the truth.

This sort of fake news article deserves a retraction and an apology from WaPo to its readers.