Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Super Pesky! New CO2 research
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.
The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.
This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.
So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.
Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.
SOURCE
The paper: "Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?" by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.
Airborne Fraction of Human CO2 Emissions Constant over Time
Another comment below on the findings above, noting that Joe Romm's empty assertions have been demolished again. I have just realized that I have the same initials as Joe Romm. How grievious! -- JR
A couple of months back, there was a discussion taking place over at Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress blog concerning a report that the earth’s ability to take-up atmospheric carbon dioxide was declining. A declining CO2 sink, of course, meant that things climatological were going to be even worse than expected, because a growing proportion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were going to remain in the atmosphere, thus pushing the rise of CO2 concentrations and the degree of climate change higher.
At the time, an alert reader pointed out to Joe Romm that there was in fact, no indication from data and observations that a larger percentage of human CO2 emissions were ending up in the atmosphere. In fact, the data showed that the fraction of CO2 emitted into the atmospheric by human activities has remained constant for the past 40 years.
This fact runs directly counter to the idea that the earth’s natural CO2 sinks are weakening—instead it indicates that natural sinks have been expanding as anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased. After all, in order to keep the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions constant over time, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be countered by an increasing CO2 sink.
Joe Romm was a bit dismissive (to say the least) of this line of argument. Here was one such exchange (Comment 13 of this thread):
Just in case JR (Dr. Romm) really is interested in what the latest scientific literature on the topic says, there is a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that directly examines this issue. The paper is by Wolfgang Knorr a senior researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the U.K’s University of Bristol, and is aptly titled with the question “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?”
Dr. Knorr carefully analyzed the record of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and anthropogenic land-use changes for the past 150 years. Keeping in mind the various sources of potential errors inherent in these data, he developed several different possible solutions to fitting a trend to the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. In all cases, he found no significant trend (at the 95% significance level) in airborne fraction since 1850. (Note: It is not that the total atmospheric burden of CO2 has not been increasing over time, but that of the total CO2 released into the atmosphere each year by human activities, about 45% remains in the atmosphere while the other 55% is taken up by various natural processes—and these percentages have not changed during the past 150 years)
The Abstract of the paper directly addresses Romm’s concerns, but, unfortunately, Knorr finds no support for Romm’s take on the issue:
....Further, Knorr noted that we still have a good bit of work to do to completely understand why this is the case, especially if we want to be able to predict the future course of atmospheric CO2 concentrations (a necessity if we want to predict future climate change). Knorr concludes:
In other words, like we have repeated over and over, if the models can’t replicate the past (for the right reasons), they can’t be relied on for producing accurate future projections. And as things now stand, the earth is responding to anthropogenic CO2 emissions in a different (and perhaps better) manner than we thought that it would. Despite what Joe Romm would have you believe.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
GERMANY’S GEO-RESEARCH INSTITUTES CRITICISE CLIMATE ALARMISM
By Reinhold Leinfelder (Leinfelder is a geoscientist. He is the director of Berlin's Natural History Museum and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Government on Global Climate Change)
What the heads of Germany’s major Geo-Research Institutes presented at a conference in Berlin last week was reminiscent of the climate debate a decade ago. It seems as if we have made a big step backwards.
The conference "Climate and the Earth System - Answers and Questions from the Earth Sciences" yielded no answers, but raised even more questions as well as strong criticism of the political focus on the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Reinhard Hüttl, the director of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam more or less accused climate researchers of being alarmist, but without offering clear evidence for it.
Many relationships within climate processes were not scientifically understood and natural factors should be much more considered, it was stressed at the conference, which was also supported by the Alfred Wegener Institute Foundation for Polar & Marine Research , Bremerhaven and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research in Frankfurt/Main. The audience was presented with talks about plate tectonics, land elevations after the Ice Age, cosmic rays, and even the earth's magnetic field was considered as climate-relevant. Only: hardly anything was said about the relevant time scales and extent, and their relevance to current climate change.
The truism was repeatedly emphasized that CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas - it is water vapour - or that current climate models fail to reproduce the global warming of 50 million years ago. The reason is that computer models underestimate the enormous heat dynamics in times of global warming, which is, in fact, anything but a reassuring message. And, even more a truism was the message that the climate has always been changing. That is what every geologist learns in the first semester.
Not mentioned, however, was the essential fact: the CO2 emitted by us is now gathering in the atmosphere, unlike other greenhouse gases over thousands of years, where it now exceeds all historical values for at least a million years. Therefore, the CO2 increase in the main driver of the processes warming.
Our civilization, based on agriculture, the division of labour and a vulnerable infrastructure, relies on a stable climate. So far, we have been lucky: In the last 5000 years, the climate at a global (not regional) level has only varied by a few tenths of a degree per 100 years. Only the 20th Century, with its warming of 0.8 degrees, is an exception.
Planet Earth did not care three million years ago that the climate was about three degrees warmer and sea level was 25 to 35 feet higher. For our civilization today, a rise by just one meter rise would have negative consequences. The objective of limiting global warming to a maximum rise of two degrees by 2100, is, scientifically speaking, a very reasonable upper limit. It minimises the risk of large and uncontrollable climate change. Only such a limit of global warming makes the technologies that were strongly advocated at the conference for adapting to climate change meaningful.
To demand more research on climate change and technological countermeasures, such as flood control, reforestation, or carbon capture and storage are an old hat yet necessary. But if these misleading claims are used in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit for the purpose of questioning the two-degree target and delaying science-based action now, it would be a disservice by geoscientists not only for themselves but for society as a whole .
SOURCE [transl. BJP]
India rejects Himalayan glacier panic
For the first time, the Indian government has challenged western research that says global warming has hastened the melting of Himalayan glaciers. On Monday, environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh released a paper saying there was no evidence of such a link.
V.K. Raina, a former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, wrote the paper, Himalayan Glaciers. "The health of Himalayan glaciers is poor," Ramesh said. "But according to the paper, the doomsday prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore is also not correct. I want scientists to critique the report."
The government’s view goes against the IPCC’s claims that most Himalayan glaciers will vanish by 2035. "Our prediction [in 2007] was based on government data, and a peer review was done by all countries before our report was released," IPCC chief R.K. Pachauri said. "I disagree that there’s no evidence of impact of global warming, but agree there’s a need to do more research on Himalayan glaciers."
The IPCC’s forecast was based on Indian Space Research Organisation data that said 1,000 Himalayan glaciers had retreated by 16 per cent between 1962 and 2004.
Raina’s paper is based on previously classified information — going back more than 100 years — that was provided to researchers recently to generate a debate on the state of Himalayan glaciers. "Nothing abnormal is happening to Indian glaciers," said Raina. "They’re retreating because of negative mass balance. There’s no evidence of climate change." Mass balance is primarily determined by annual snow precipitation. Raina could not give reasons for the decrease in snowfall in the Himalayas. "It is for the weather departments to tell," he said.
Government bodies such as the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, have blamed climate change as one of the reasons for weather changes in the Himalayas. "Our studies of glaciers in Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim over 10 years have shown that temperature rise (caused by climate change) is a big reason for the melting of glaciers," said Delhi-based glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain.
L.M.S. Pani, director, GB Pant Institute for Himalayan Environment and Development, Dehradun, said it was difficult to understand weather changes in the Himalayas when there was just one weather station (in J&K) for the 2,500-km-long range. The Himalayan range is said to have between 9,000 and 12,000 glaciers.
SOURCE
BritGov surrenders to reality
Ten nuclear stations to be built in bid to prevent energy shortage. But will they be ready in time?
Ten nuclear power stations are to be built in Britain at a cost of up to £50 billion as the Government tries to prevent the threat of regular power cuts by the middle of the coming decade. The nuclear industry welcomed the plans, but critics said that ministers had acted too late to avoid an energy crunch caused by the closure of ageing coal-fired stations.
Although the sites were known to be in line for development, the announcement signals the Government’s increasing ambition for nuclear power. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, intends that construction of the stations should be quick enough to help to meet Britain’s 2050 target of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent while bolstering energy security as North Sea gas supplies decline.
The announcement comes after a radical shake-up in planning laws. Under powers awarded to the Government last month, local authorities have been stripped of the right of veto over new nuclear plants and other key energy projects. Decisions will instead be taken by the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which was created to slash the period required to secure consent for energy projects from seven years to one year.
Mr Miliband said: "The current planning system is a barrier to this shift. It serves neither the interests of energy security, the interests of the low-carbon transition, nor the interests of people living in areas where infrastructure may be built."
The reactors should meet at least a quarter of electricity demand by 2025. "New nuclear is right for energy security and climate change and will be good for jobs too," Mr Miliband said. "The threat of climate change means we need to make a transition from a system that relies heavily on high-carbon fossil fuels to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewables and clean coal power."
None of the plants, which will cost at least £4 billion each, will be ready before 2017 — too late to replace eight coal-fired stations earmarked for closure by 2015.
Greg Clark, the Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, branded Mr Miliband’s statement a "declaration of a national emergency for our energy security". He said: "Every one of the measures contained in this statement should have been brought forward ten years ago when they had the chance to secure the investments that are so desperately needed to keep the lights on, keep prices down and cut carbon emissions. Why did they leave it so late?"
Last month Ofgem, the energy regulator, warned that Britain may face blackouts within four years owing to a supply shortage.
Sam Laidlaw, the chief executive of Centrica, owner of British Gas, which is a partner with EDF, welcomed the changes. He said: "Britain has a power generation gap looming from 2015 onwards which will need to be filled by new low-carbon replacements, particularly nuclear, and speed of decision making is very important. The current planning system has been a significant barrier so moves to streamline the process are welcome."
Each new reactor will generate up to 1.6 gigawatt-hours — enough to power a city the size of Manchester — and should last for 60 years. The first is likely to be built by EDF Energy at Hinkley Point, Somerset, and should come into service by the end of 2017. New reactors at Sizewell, Suffolk, Wylfa, Anglesey, and Oldbury, Gloucestershire, are also likely to be among the first wave. Hartlepool, Co Durham, Bradwell, Essex, Heysham, Lancashire and three sites near Sellafield, West Cumbria, were also named. Ministers have ruled out construction of a new plant at Dungeness, Kent, citing the risk it faced from rising sea levels.
Mr Miliband indicated three greenfield sites that might be suitable later on, although he cautioned that there were "serious impediments" to all of them. They are Kingsnorth, Kent, and Owston Ferry and Druridge Bay, both in the North East.
About 13 per cent of Britain’s electricity was generated from nuclear power reactors last year and the Government wants to raise this to 25 per cent by 2025.
Ben Ayliffe, the head of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, rejected the plans. "Miliband can name as many sites as he likes for new nuclear power stations, but the fact remains that the figures simply don’t add up," he said. "Our lawyers will be examining this announcement very closely. You can’t justify building more nuclear power stations when there is no solution to radioactive waste and when international regulators are saying there are huge uncertainties surrounding the basic safety of new reactor designs," he said.
A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change confirmed last night that the Government was studying an exemption for electricity produced from nuclear reactors from the Climate Change Levy, a tax on energy use imposed on industrial companies. The levy, which was introduced in 2001, raises an estimated £1 billion per year for the Treasury.
Jeremy Nicholson, a spokesman for the Energy Intensive Users Group, an industry association that has lobbied for the tax break, estimated an exemption would be worth between £160 and £300 million per year to the nuclear power industry. Last week EDF told The Times that it was unclear if the plants would be built without fresh government support.
SOURCE
At last I've been singled out by the PM
By Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia
I HAD no idea I was a corrupt, reckless, arrogant, dangerous and gutless conspirator who'd rather put my children in danger than help the Prime Minister stop global warming. But so Kevin Rudd has told the nation, naming me as one of just four Australians who've joined a global cabal plotting to stop him from saving you.
Never have I heard such a mad speech from a prime minister as the one Rudd gave on Friday at the Lowy Institute, when he exposed an alleged "legion of climate change sceptics" who were "active across the world" and had "tentacles" deep in the Opposition. These "deniers", now a "major force", "simply do not care" that "the clock is ticking for the planet" since "the vested interests at work are simply too great". So "well resourced" were we "political cowards" that we were "prepared to destroy our children's future".
And four times Rudd singled out the four villains at the heart of this plot, as in: "Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew and Janet - stop gambling with our future." From the left, that's Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull (actually a climate change dupe), Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, me and Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen.
Has any past prime minister singled out just four people - two mere journalists - as part of a conspiracy to hurt the Australian way of life? It is grotesque, a misuse of Rudd's authority. But it also shows how fatally weak is Rudd's reason - or at least his reason for wanting to hit us with a colossal tax on our emissions that will shut power stations, throw thousands out of work and yet do nothing to lower the world's temperatures.
Rudd's speech also confirmed he had no answer to my challenge last week: to tell us how much he'll pay of the $7 billion a year the United Nations asks from us under the draft Copenhagen treaty he wants to sign next month.
Let me make a few things clear to Rudd. First, no one pays me a cent to be sceptical; in fact, my boss suggests I "give the planet the benefit of the doubt". Your claim that I argue from just a "vested interest" is a despicable lie.
Second, the real "vested interests" in this debate are behind the alarmists, not the sceptics, which is why your Government has just given a $90 million grant to a trial "green" energy plant whose shareholders include doom-preacher Tim Flannery - even though all three wells of the company's first geothermal plant have broken down.
Third, what threatens my children's future is not my scepticism but your mad plans to waste billions of dollars on a threat that seems not to exist.
Fourth, you deceive when you say "4000 scientists" wrote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on which you base your claim man is heating the world to hell.
In fact, just 60 of those (actually fewer than 3000) scientists specifically endorsed that claim, and even they admitted they were just 90 per cent sure. Moreover, their finding has been rejected by petitions signed by thousands of other scientists.
Lastly, I'm in no conspiracy, and until a year ago fought almost alone here as a sceptic. The real "political cowards" are those of your own ministers who know your global warming plan is a hoax fix to a hoax scare, but dare not speak.
Now this, Prime Minister, is how to argue. By citing evidence. Checking predictions against reality. Your attempt to instead demonise me as a menace to even my own children proves nothing but that you have no facts to justify your megalomaniacal plan - and that you may be unworthy of your office.
SOURCE
Rudd's hysteria is certainly telling -- JR
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.
The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.
This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.
So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.
Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.
SOURCE
The paper: "Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?" by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.
Airborne Fraction of Human CO2 Emissions Constant over Time
Another comment below on the findings above, noting that Joe Romm's empty assertions have been demolished again. I have just realized that I have the same initials as Joe Romm. How grievious! -- JR
A couple of months back, there was a discussion taking place over at Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress blog concerning a report that the earth’s ability to take-up atmospheric carbon dioxide was declining. A declining CO2 sink, of course, meant that things climatological were going to be even worse than expected, because a growing proportion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were going to remain in the atmosphere, thus pushing the rise of CO2 concentrations and the degree of climate change higher.
At the time, an alert reader pointed out to Joe Romm that there was in fact, no indication from data and observations that a larger percentage of human CO2 emissions were ending up in the atmosphere. In fact, the data showed that the fraction of CO2 emitted into the atmospheric by human activities has remained constant for the past 40 years.
This fact runs directly counter to the idea that the earth’s natural CO2 sinks are weakening—instead it indicates that natural sinks have been expanding as anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased. After all, in order to keep the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions constant over time, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be countered by an increasing CO2 sink.
Joe Romm was a bit dismissive (to say the least) of this line of argument. Here was one such exchange (Comment 13 of this thread):
Comment 13. Chip Knappenberger says: Mr. Romm,
I am not sure how you justify this statement:
“At the same time that CO2 emissions are soaring, CO2 sinks are saturating.”
Take your numbers for the rate of CO2 increase each year and divide them by the numbers for the annual global CO2 emissions each year (available from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ ftp/ ndp030/ global.1751_2005.ems) and see what you get.
Hint: the ppm/emissions ratio shows no trend at all which means that there is no decline in the CO2 sink—otherwise, this ratio would be increasing.
-Chip Knappenberger
[JR: It is Dr. Romm, Chip, and, hint, it is what the scientific literature says. Try reading it, some time. Start with the Global Carbon Project.]
Just in case JR (Dr. Romm) really is interested in what the latest scientific literature on the topic says, there is a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that directly examines this issue. The paper is by Wolfgang Knorr a senior researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the U.K’s University of Bristol, and is aptly titled with the question “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?”
Dr. Knorr carefully analyzed the record of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and anthropogenic land-use changes for the past 150 years. Keeping in mind the various sources of potential errors inherent in these data, he developed several different possible solutions to fitting a trend to the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. In all cases, he found no significant trend (at the 95% significance level) in airborne fraction since 1850. (Note: It is not that the total atmospheric burden of CO2 has not been increasing over time, but that of the total CO2 released into the atmosphere each year by human activities, about 45% remains in the atmosphere while the other 55% is taken up by various natural processes—and these percentages have not changed during the past 150 years)
The Abstract of the paper directly addresses Romm’s concerns, but, unfortunately, Knorr finds no support for Romm’s take on the issue:
Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.
....Further, Knorr noted that we still have a good bit of work to do to completely understand why this is the case, especially if we want to be able to predict the future course of atmospheric CO2 concentrations (a necessity if we want to predict future climate change). Knorr concludes:
Given the importance of the [the anthropogenic CO2 airborne fraction] for the degree of future climate change, the question is how to best predict its future course. One pre-requisite is that we gain a thorough understand of why it has stayed approximately constant in the past, another that we improve our ability to detect if and when it changes. The most urgent need seems to exist for more accurate estimates of land use emissions. Another possible approach is to add more data through the combination of many detailed regional studies such as the ones by Schuster and Watson (2007) and Le Quéré et al. (2007), or using process based models combined with data assimilation approaches (Rayner et al., 2005). If process models are used, however, they need to be carefully constructed in order to answer the question of why the AF has remained constant and not shown more pronounced decadal-scale fluctuations or a stronger secular trend.
In other words, like we have repeated over and over, if the models can’t replicate the past (for the right reasons), they can’t be relied on for producing accurate future projections. And as things now stand, the earth is responding to anthropogenic CO2 emissions in a different (and perhaps better) manner than we thought that it would. Despite what Joe Romm would have you believe.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
GERMANY’S GEO-RESEARCH INSTITUTES CRITICISE CLIMATE ALARMISM
By Reinhold Leinfelder (Leinfelder is a geoscientist. He is the director of Berlin's Natural History Museum and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Government on Global Climate Change)
What the heads of Germany’s major Geo-Research Institutes presented at a conference in Berlin last week was reminiscent of the climate debate a decade ago. It seems as if we have made a big step backwards.
The conference "Climate and the Earth System - Answers and Questions from the Earth Sciences" yielded no answers, but raised even more questions as well as strong criticism of the political focus on the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Reinhard Hüttl, the director of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam more or less accused climate researchers of being alarmist, but without offering clear evidence for it.
Many relationships within climate processes were not scientifically understood and natural factors should be much more considered, it was stressed at the conference, which was also supported by the Alfred Wegener Institute Foundation for Polar & Marine Research , Bremerhaven and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research in Frankfurt/Main. The audience was presented with talks about plate tectonics, land elevations after the Ice Age, cosmic rays, and even the earth's magnetic field was considered as climate-relevant. Only: hardly anything was said about the relevant time scales and extent, and their relevance to current climate change.
The truism was repeatedly emphasized that CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas - it is water vapour - or that current climate models fail to reproduce the global warming of 50 million years ago. The reason is that computer models underestimate the enormous heat dynamics in times of global warming, which is, in fact, anything but a reassuring message. And, even more a truism was the message that the climate has always been changing. That is what every geologist learns in the first semester.
Not mentioned, however, was the essential fact: the CO2 emitted by us is now gathering in the atmosphere, unlike other greenhouse gases over thousands of years, where it now exceeds all historical values for at least a million years. Therefore, the CO2 increase in the main driver of the processes warming.
Our civilization, based on agriculture, the division of labour and a vulnerable infrastructure, relies on a stable climate. So far, we have been lucky: In the last 5000 years, the climate at a global (not regional) level has only varied by a few tenths of a degree per 100 years. Only the 20th Century, with its warming of 0.8 degrees, is an exception.
Planet Earth did not care three million years ago that the climate was about three degrees warmer and sea level was 25 to 35 feet higher. For our civilization today, a rise by just one meter rise would have negative consequences. The objective of limiting global warming to a maximum rise of two degrees by 2100, is, scientifically speaking, a very reasonable upper limit. It minimises the risk of large and uncontrollable climate change. Only such a limit of global warming makes the technologies that were strongly advocated at the conference for adapting to climate change meaningful.
To demand more research on climate change and technological countermeasures, such as flood control, reforestation, or carbon capture and storage are an old hat yet necessary. But if these misleading claims are used in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit for the purpose of questioning the two-degree target and delaying science-based action now, it would be a disservice by geoscientists not only for themselves but for society as a whole .
SOURCE [transl. BJP]
India rejects Himalayan glacier panic
For the first time, the Indian government has challenged western research that says global warming has hastened the melting of Himalayan glaciers. On Monday, environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh released a paper saying there was no evidence of such a link.
V.K. Raina, a former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, wrote the paper, Himalayan Glaciers. "The health of Himalayan glaciers is poor," Ramesh said. "But according to the paper, the doomsday prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore is also not correct. I want scientists to critique the report."
The government’s view goes against the IPCC’s claims that most Himalayan glaciers will vanish by 2035. "Our prediction [in 2007] was based on government data, and a peer review was done by all countries before our report was released," IPCC chief R.K. Pachauri said. "I disagree that there’s no evidence of impact of global warming, but agree there’s a need to do more research on Himalayan glaciers."
The IPCC’s forecast was based on Indian Space Research Organisation data that said 1,000 Himalayan glaciers had retreated by 16 per cent between 1962 and 2004.
Raina’s paper is based on previously classified information — going back more than 100 years — that was provided to researchers recently to generate a debate on the state of Himalayan glaciers. "Nothing abnormal is happening to Indian glaciers," said Raina. "They’re retreating because of negative mass balance. There’s no evidence of climate change." Mass balance is primarily determined by annual snow precipitation. Raina could not give reasons for the decrease in snowfall in the Himalayas. "It is for the weather departments to tell," he said.
Government bodies such as the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, have blamed climate change as one of the reasons for weather changes in the Himalayas. "Our studies of glaciers in Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim over 10 years have shown that temperature rise (caused by climate change) is a big reason for the melting of glaciers," said Delhi-based glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain.
L.M.S. Pani, director, GB Pant Institute for Himalayan Environment and Development, Dehradun, said it was difficult to understand weather changes in the Himalayas when there was just one weather station (in J&K) for the 2,500-km-long range. The Himalayan range is said to have between 9,000 and 12,000 glaciers.
SOURCE
BritGov surrenders to reality
Ten nuclear stations to be built in bid to prevent energy shortage. But will they be ready in time?
Ten nuclear power stations are to be built in Britain at a cost of up to £50 billion as the Government tries to prevent the threat of regular power cuts by the middle of the coming decade. The nuclear industry welcomed the plans, but critics said that ministers had acted too late to avoid an energy crunch caused by the closure of ageing coal-fired stations.
Although the sites were known to be in line for development, the announcement signals the Government’s increasing ambition for nuclear power. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, intends that construction of the stations should be quick enough to help to meet Britain’s 2050 target of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent while bolstering energy security as North Sea gas supplies decline.
The announcement comes after a radical shake-up in planning laws. Under powers awarded to the Government last month, local authorities have been stripped of the right of veto over new nuclear plants and other key energy projects. Decisions will instead be taken by the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which was created to slash the period required to secure consent for energy projects from seven years to one year.
Mr Miliband said: "The current planning system is a barrier to this shift. It serves neither the interests of energy security, the interests of the low-carbon transition, nor the interests of people living in areas where infrastructure may be built."
The reactors should meet at least a quarter of electricity demand by 2025. "New nuclear is right for energy security and climate change and will be good for jobs too," Mr Miliband said. "The threat of climate change means we need to make a transition from a system that relies heavily on high-carbon fossil fuels to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewables and clean coal power."
None of the plants, which will cost at least £4 billion each, will be ready before 2017 — too late to replace eight coal-fired stations earmarked for closure by 2015.
Greg Clark, the Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, branded Mr Miliband’s statement a "declaration of a national emergency for our energy security". He said: "Every one of the measures contained in this statement should have been brought forward ten years ago when they had the chance to secure the investments that are so desperately needed to keep the lights on, keep prices down and cut carbon emissions. Why did they leave it so late?"
Last month Ofgem, the energy regulator, warned that Britain may face blackouts within four years owing to a supply shortage.
Sam Laidlaw, the chief executive of Centrica, owner of British Gas, which is a partner with EDF, welcomed the changes. He said: "Britain has a power generation gap looming from 2015 onwards which will need to be filled by new low-carbon replacements, particularly nuclear, and speed of decision making is very important. The current planning system has been a significant barrier so moves to streamline the process are welcome."
Each new reactor will generate up to 1.6 gigawatt-hours — enough to power a city the size of Manchester — and should last for 60 years. The first is likely to be built by EDF Energy at Hinkley Point, Somerset, and should come into service by the end of 2017. New reactors at Sizewell, Suffolk, Wylfa, Anglesey, and Oldbury, Gloucestershire, are also likely to be among the first wave. Hartlepool, Co Durham, Bradwell, Essex, Heysham, Lancashire and three sites near Sellafield, West Cumbria, were also named. Ministers have ruled out construction of a new plant at Dungeness, Kent, citing the risk it faced from rising sea levels.
Mr Miliband indicated three greenfield sites that might be suitable later on, although he cautioned that there were "serious impediments" to all of them. They are Kingsnorth, Kent, and Owston Ferry and Druridge Bay, both in the North East.
About 13 per cent of Britain’s electricity was generated from nuclear power reactors last year and the Government wants to raise this to 25 per cent by 2025.
Ben Ayliffe, the head of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, rejected the plans. "Miliband can name as many sites as he likes for new nuclear power stations, but the fact remains that the figures simply don’t add up," he said. "Our lawyers will be examining this announcement very closely. You can’t justify building more nuclear power stations when there is no solution to radioactive waste and when international regulators are saying there are huge uncertainties surrounding the basic safety of new reactor designs," he said.
A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change confirmed last night that the Government was studying an exemption for electricity produced from nuclear reactors from the Climate Change Levy, a tax on energy use imposed on industrial companies. The levy, which was introduced in 2001, raises an estimated £1 billion per year for the Treasury.
Jeremy Nicholson, a spokesman for the Energy Intensive Users Group, an industry association that has lobbied for the tax break, estimated an exemption would be worth between £160 and £300 million per year to the nuclear power industry. Last week EDF told The Times that it was unclear if the plants would be built without fresh government support.
SOURCE
At last I've been singled out by the PM
By Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia
I HAD no idea I was a corrupt, reckless, arrogant, dangerous and gutless conspirator who'd rather put my children in danger than help the Prime Minister stop global warming. But so Kevin Rudd has told the nation, naming me as one of just four Australians who've joined a global cabal plotting to stop him from saving you.
Never have I heard such a mad speech from a prime minister as the one Rudd gave on Friday at the Lowy Institute, when he exposed an alleged "legion of climate change sceptics" who were "active across the world" and had "tentacles" deep in the Opposition. These "deniers", now a "major force", "simply do not care" that "the clock is ticking for the planet" since "the vested interests at work are simply too great". So "well resourced" were we "political cowards" that we were "prepared to destroy our children's future".
And four times Rudd singled out the four villains at the heart of this plot, as in: "Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew and Janet - stop gambling with our future." From the left, that's Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull (actually a climate change dupe), Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, me and Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen.
Has any past prime minister singled out just four people - two mere journalists - as part of a conspiracy to hurt the Australian way of life? It is grotesque, a misuse of Rudd's authority. But it also shows how fatally weak is Rudd's reason - or at least his reason for wanting to hit us with a colossal tax on our emissions that will shut power stations, throw thousands out of work and yet do nothing to lower the world's temperatures.
Rudd's speech also confirmed he had no answer to my challenge last week: to tell us how much he'll pay of the $7 billion a year the United Nations asks from us under the draft Copenhagen treaty he wants to sign next month.
Let me make a few things clear to Rudd. First, no one pays me a cent to be sceptical; in fact, my boss suggests I "give the planet the benefit of the doubt". Your claim that I argue from just a "vested interest" is a despicable lie.
Second, the real "vested interests" in this debate are behind the alarmists, not the sceptics, which is why your Government has just given a $90 million grant to a trial "green" energy plant whose shareholders include doom-preacher Tim Flannery - even though all three wells of the company's first geothermal plant have broken down.
Third, what threatens my children's future is not my scepticism but your mad plans to waste billions of dollars on a threat that seems not to exist.
Fourth, you deceive when you say "4000 scientists" wrote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on which you base your claim man is heating the world to hell.
In fact, just 60 of those (actually fewer than 3000) scientists specifically endorsed that claim, and even they admitted they were just 90 per cent sure. Moreover, their finding has been rejected by petitions signed by thousands of other scientists.
Lastly, I'm in no conspiracy, and until a year ago fought almost alone here as a sceptic. The real "political cowards" are those of your own ministers who know your global warming plan is a hoax fix to a hoax scare, but dare not speak.
Now this, Prime Minister, is how to argue. By citing evidence. Checking predictions against reality. Your attempt to instead demonise me as a menace to even my own children proves nothing but that you have no facts to justify your megalomaniacal plan - and that you may be unworthy of your office.
SOURCE
Rudd's hysteria is certainly telling -- JR
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
New geologic evidence of past periods of oscillating, abrupt warming, and cooling
Prof Easterbrook has emailed the following introduction to his recent paper. The email includes graphics which are not reproduced below but which can be obtained from the author at the email address given below or at dbunny14@yahoo.com
Two hundred years ago, Charles Lyell coined the phrase "The present is the key to the past." In today's highly contentious issues of global climate change, we might well add "The past is the key to the future, i.e., to forecast future geologic events, we must understand past climate changes. This paper documents past global climate changes in the geologic and historic past.
Recent laser imaging of the Earth's surface provides new evidence for abrupt, fluctuating, warm and cool climatic episodes that could not have been caused by changes in atmospheric CO2. In a paper presented at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, OR, Professor Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presented new data from airborne laser imagery showing well-defined, previously unknown, multiple moraines deposited by glaciers 11,700 to 10,250 years ago.
At least 9 significant, abrupt periods of warming that resulted in retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet are documented by moraines from successive glacial retreats in the Fraser Lowland of NW Washington l(Fig. 1). In addition, smaller multiple glacier recessions are found within the more prominent episodes of glacier retreat. As indicated by the amount of glacier recession between each of the successive moraines, the warming events were of greater magnitude than those observed in recent centuries....
What we can learn from this geologic climate changes is that the past is indeed the key to the future. In 1999, the year after the warmest year of recent times, I projected the climate pattern from the past century and past 500 years into the future and predicted that we would be due for 25-30 years of global cooling beginning about 2000. The PDO changed from its warm to cool mode in 1999 and since then we have had global cooling, quite moderate to flat (interrupted by two warm El Ninos) and intensifying since 2007.
Abstract of paper presented to Geological Society of America, Oct. 19, 2009:
THE ROLE OF THE OCEANS AND THE SUN IN LATE PLEISTOCENE AND HISTORIC GLACIAL AND CLIMATIC FLUCTUATIONS
EASTERBROOK, Don J., Dept. of Geology, Western Washington Univ, Bellingham, WA 98225, don.easterbrook@wwu.edu
Lidar imagery of the southern part of the Fraser Lowland in WA reveals previously unknown, multiple, latest Pleistocene (Sumas Stade) end moraines overlying Everson glaciomarine drift (gmd). Multiple marine shorelines extend from about 540' to about 100'above present sea level and are truncated by two of the oldest Sumas end moraines. These moraines are younger than the underlying Everson gmd, which is well dated at 11,700 14C yrs. B.P., and older than 11,400 14C yrs. B.P. basal bog dates behind the moraines. Recession of the ice from the outermost moraines was followed by building of at least nine end moraines, some of which clearly represent glacial readvances. Basal bog dates from a kettle in outwash from the youngest Sumas moraine has been dated at 10,250 14C yrs. B.P.
Isotope data from Greenland ice cores and historic atmospheric and oceanic temperature records show a consistent pattern of fluctuating 25-30-year warm and cool periods over the past 500 years. During the past century, five of these climate fluctuations can be tied to glacial oscillations, oceanic temperature changes, atmospheric temperature changes, and solar variation.
The question is-what drives these oscillations? The older fluctuations can be linked to changes in 14C and 10Be isotope production rates in the upper atmosphere, suggesting variation in cosmogenic radiation. Historic climatic and oceanic temperature fluctuations are associated with solar variations. The excellent correlation of glacial, climatic, oceanic, and solar variation strongly suggests cause and effect relationships. Past patterns of these variations allow projection into the future.
CLIMATE CHANGE THEORY IS IN DISARRAY
An email from hydrologist Will Alexander [alexwjr@iafrica.com]
The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon urged negotiators at December's Copenhagen talks to reach some kind of agreement. We must seal a deal in Copenhagen for a global, equitable and comprehensive deal for the future of humanity and the future of planet earth. CCNet 03 September. Is this noble objective achievable? I fear not.
We are now witnessing the collapse of climate change theory. It is caused by two concurrent events. These are the global economic crisis and the expectation that all nations of the world will jointly and concurrently agree to pass irreversible legislation to limit emissions of undesirable greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The fundamental assumption is that the increasing concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere will result in increases in global temperatures. These will result in increases in hydrological extremes, floods and droughts. These in turn will cause a serious damage and pose threats to national water supplies. There are also a number of lesser concerns such as environmental damage.
How should we test this theory? We are told that the theory is sound because it is the consensus view of hundreds of scientists. It is only the dumb and ill-informed who dare challenge it. However, there are three powerful tests that can be applied to test the theory.
The first is whether or not global temperatures are rising in parallel with rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. All the evidence is to the contrary. Global temperatures are falling, not rising. Several scientists have contested the scientific basis for the linkage between carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures.
The second test is to examine long hydrological records and search for evidence of increases in the hydrological extremes. This is what I have been doing for the past 30 years. There is simply no scientifically believable evidence at all of increases that can be attributed to global warming.
There is a third and more difficult test. There are very clear periodic anomalies in long hydro-meteorological records that are well documented in the hydrological literature. These are the Joseph Effect (droughts), Noah Effect (floods), and the Hurst Phenomenon (water resources). There are also the well-known cyclical phenomena such as the El Niño - La Nina effect, the Southern Oscillation Index, and others.
Some of these observed anomalies are synchronous with the double (not single) sunspot cycle, which in turn is related to the sun's wobble caused by the orbiting planets as the solar system moves through Galactic space. Other cyclical climatic phenomena are undoubtedly present on a number of time scales. The most likely causal mechanisms are a combination of cyclicity in the driving mechanisms, amplified by oscillations in the responding mechanisms.
There are many misconceptions regarding the solar linkage. Here are a few. It is the linkage with the double sunspot cycles not the single cycles that is statistically significant. The evenly numbered cycles are associated with more variable climate than the quieter responses associated with the following, odd numbered cycles. We have just entered a quieter cycle.
High flood sequences are associated with the acceleration of solar activity associated with the occurrence of the sunspot minima, and not the occurrence of sunspot maxima. The changes from drought sequences to flood sequences are sudden, not gradual. This indicates the role of instability phenomena. There are other examples. These changes are not amenable to mathematical descriptions. Because they are undetectable by conventional mathematical analyses, climate change scientists assume that they do not exist! They then continue to postulate that changes are the consequence of global warming. Much research has still to be done in this field but the observations of the presence of cyclical periodicity in the climatic processes are unequivocal.
The basic issue is climate CHANGE. It is obvious that any research in this field should commence with studies of the drivers and consequent behaviour of natural climate variability on which the effects of human activity have to be superimposed. This has not been done. The basic assumption made by climate change scientists is that global climate is a steady state phenomenon. This is simply not so as the above tests and many other examples demonstrate. All the IPCC's reports based on this assumption are clearly erroneous.
Why then have virtually all the nations of the world accepted climate change theory? The answer is obvious. The developing nations now smell blood in the form of financial reparations on the scale of the Marshall Plan after World War II as one commentator remarked. This is well illustrated in the recent reaction of the African Union as reported in CCNet of 04 September.
INTERPRETATION
It may seem strange that all nations have accepted climate change science with all its alarmist consequences without question. This is a fundamentally important political decision. The implication is that the affluent nations acknowledge that they are the major cause of climate-related damage up to this time. This is the basis for the African Union's claim for substantial, legally binding reparations from the developed countries for all climate-related damage.
They insist that there will be no compromises in principle although the amount as well as who pays and who receives have yet to be decided. This issue alone could potentially wreck the negotiations. Notice how Nicholas Stern supports this position. Notice also that this is quite apart from climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.
MITIGATION (PREVENTION)
Mitigation involves the prevention or reduction of discharges of greenhouse gas emissions on a scale required to stabilise or diminish carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere. This can only be achieved on the required scale by not building new coal-fired power stations, or by capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power stations, or building nuclear power stations. All the alternative measures, without exception, will result in substantial increases in the cost to consumers and thereby damage national prosperities unless these costs are recoverable from the affluent nations.
ADAPTATION
Adaptation is far more difficult to define. It will require a clear distinction between naturally occurring floods and droughts and those caused by climate change. As I demonstrate in my analyses there is no evidence at all of measurable effects of climate change on the hydro-meteorological processes.
We now have a situation where the affluent countries will have to pay threefold - reparation for damages already caused, as well as mitigation and adaptation costs to developing countries, and mitigation and adaptation costs in their own countries. Will their taxpayers be prepared to carry this additional burden? Will they start arguing about each claim? It cannot work.
BASIS FOR COMPENSATION
What will be the basis for Africa's claims for reparation, mitigation and adaptation? These will have to be debated and defined at Copenhagen. This is a near impossible task. For the first time in history, the world's most powerful nations will be held to ransom by the developing nations. I am one of those who can recall how the bravery of the few saved the United Kingdom during World War II. It is my belief that the economically disadvantaged countries of the world will unwittingly bring about the downfall of this whole climate change charade.
There is a very strong likelihood that conflicts of interest between the East and the West and between the rich and the poor nations will cause far more damage than the postulated consequences of climate change. Hopefully all the negotiators at Copenhagen will be aware of this.
ENERGY AND CLIMATE REALISM
The French Statesman Talleyrand once said "that speech is given to man to disguise his thoughts". In today's mass media democracies it could be translated into "speeches are made by politicians to disguise their intentions."
Gordon Browns apocalyptical warnings about the future of the planet if Copenhagen should fail can be interpreted as cry for help: Please make sure that we get a face saving agreement that can be presented as a success. And this is what will come to pass. With or without Barack Obama's presence - Copenhagen will be presented as a great success, like all the other global environmental conferences before.
But the conflict between the West and the new industrial powers cannot and will not be resolved. What we are seeing in the remaining weeks before the conference is an desperate attempt of all major players not to be seen as the culprit who will be blamed for the failure.
The original EU strategy was, we will set an example and go for binding cuts in green house gas emissions and the world will follow - clearly a naive approach, reminiscent of other unilateral intentions in the past.
But now, especially after the financial and economic crisis, this sort of climate unilateralism is untenable - it would mean a dramatic financial transfer from the west to the advantage of our competitors China and India which our economies can ill afford and our populations won't accept. Public opinion in Europe and America, according to the latest research, published by the Financial Times, is further hardening against any financial transfers.
As far as the ambitious targets of the UK and other EU states are concerned, Professor Roger Pielke Jr. is right when he points out that setting "unachievable targets is not a policy, it is an act of wishful thinking". He calls it "a politics of symbolism with no impact on real world outcomes." Pielke adds that the focus on "magical solutions" is leaving little room for the practical.
Leading business figures agree with this damning verdict. The CEO of Eon, Bernotat, said that the British politicians need "to stop misleading the public about what is achievable." He is scathing about the target of 30% electricity coming from renewables in 2020 and refers particularly to the plan to build 33 gigawatts of off shore wind power up from the present 0.6 gigawatt, a plan he calls naïve and unachievable. Of a similar opinion is Tony Hayward, CEO of BP.
There are too many illusions propagated and circling around alternative and renewable technologies: about their promise and potential, about the time frame, in which they can be introduced and changes be realized, about the jobs, that a new green Keynisanism can create and about the political impact of a radical green policy. Centre left politicians in Britain and Germany, the new leader of the German social democrats, Sigmar Gabriel and the Labour Ministers David and Ed Miliband seem seriously to believe that climate change will be the new mass mobilizing topic and will help saving their parties too. A more likely outcome is that this strategy will neither save the centre left nor will it help to save the planet. Such a strategy seems to drive away voters fearful of loosing the lifestyle of mobility, warmth and comfort.
The arguments against the extensive use of wind are well known. Wind is intermittent and needs conventional backup, the electricity it delivers is extremely expensive, feasible only with high subsidies. It won't even deliver the promise of jobs: Wind turbines can and will be more cheaply built in China, the same goes for solar panels, as Germany recently found out. In the UK, the closure of the turbine factory on the Isle of Wight was another example of the same trend.
This does not stop business to be keen on wind power. It is attracted by huge subsidies, offered by governments, driven by "the pressure of fashionable, green ideology", as James Lovelock writes in his latest book "The vanishing face of Gaia". Lovelocks judgement could not be clearer: "Europes massive use of wind as a supplement to baseload electricity will be remembered as one of the great follies of the twenty first century".
What ever happens, if the folly is continued or not, the next twenty years could be called "the new age of carbon." If the UK really intends to cut CO 2 emissions by 34% till 2022, the UK would need to build in the next 6 years the equivalent of 30 new nuclear power stations. The telling comment of the (Labour) chairman of the "Climate Change Committee" of the House of Commons: "Well beyond our political capacity to deliver".
More oil, gas and coal will be burned than ever before - and carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise. Renewables can't and won't deliver the scale of energy needed for a rising world population. For the time being only fossil fuels and nuclear power will be able to deliver the necessary energy. In the light of these facts it is especially sad that Britain and Germany, once leading nations in nuclear technology, have either neglected or given up on it completely and left the field to other, more farsighted nations like the French. 30 years ago Britain had 15 000 nuclear engineers, now the figure is just a tenth of that. Germany decided an atomic exit strategy which at least will be reverted now. But precious time has been lost.
We can call ourselves lucky that we have gained a bit of breathing space. The global warming trend has stopped, for the time being at least. Since 1998 global average temperatures have not risen. In fact, there has even been a slight fall - despite the fact that CO2 emissions have been rising relentlessly during this period, and in spite of the "binding" agreements in Kyoto to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The climate modellers of the IPCC did not foresee the halt in global warming. Professor Mojib Latif, one of the leading IPCC scientists, admitted to this inconvenient truth recently during a climate conference in Geneva and talked about "one or two decades more of cooling", before he expects the recommencement and continuation of the global warming trend.
One thing is clear. The belief in the accuracy of computer models has suffered. The science is not settled, as many climate researchers claimed in the past few years, a claim which goes against the essence of science and research and should never have been made in the first place.
We are faced with an awkward position. Nobody seems to know what the future holds; even if we are prepared to follow the lead of the IPCC, we are faced with huge, irreconcilable differences of opinion. Some school of thought predicts catastrophe, if not apocalypse, another forecasts at least a massive challenge to our usual way of life while some sceptics seem to suggest, that we will, in a few years time, wake up to the fact, that global warming was just another one of the many unfounded scares which modern mass media societies are prone to fall for.
What to do? Yes, we need more energy efficiency, we need to decarbonise our industries, we need to diversify our sources of energy as much as possible and we need new, clean technologies. We should start building nuclear power stations, at the moment the only effective way of producing carbon free electricity. At the same time we should avoid damaging our western economies, either by transferring too much money to our competitors or falling into the trap of the "green-industrial complex," about whose malign influence even James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia theory, of earth and biosphere being a self-regulating super-organism, and convinced that it is too late to stop 'global heating,' is scathing.
We should in future be more sceptical of computer-based predictions of climate change and focus more on observing what is actually happening in reality: Is there any sign that the rise of global temperature or the sea level is accelerating, for instance. We need to prepare for adaptation and on top of it all we need an insurance policy in form of geo-engineering, in case the worst predictions should come true. Some of the technologies are already available and geo-engineering might prove to be a significantly cheaper solution than the desperate attempt to mitigate climate change, by cutting emissions and creating economic hardship for billions of people.
SOURCE
IS GOVERNMENT ACTION WORSE THAN GLOBAL WARMING?
Will government solutions to global warming be worse than global warming itself? Remember that man-made global warming is a negative externality that occurs when burning fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Economists define negative externality as a spillover from an economic transaction that harms parties not directly involved in the transaction. In this case, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is thought to be boosting temperatures, raising sea levels, and having other effects on the climate that people must involuntarily pay to adapt to (more air conditioning, switching crops, and so forth). Thus, goes the argument, the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the full cost of consuming them.
Ideally, once the full costs of man-made global warming are calculated, consumers, businesses, governments, and international agencies can adopt policies to take such costs into account. The two policy options generally discussed in this light are cap-and-trade carbon markets and carbon taxes. The idea behind carbon markets is that governments ration how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases may be emitted by setting an overall limit on emissions. Emitters are then required to have a government-issued permit for each ton of carbon dioxide they release into the air. The total amount of permits cannot exceed the cap. Emitters that need to increase their emission allowance must buy permits from those who emit less, creating a market for carbon dioxide emissions permits. The goal of such a rationing scheme is to create a market that sets a price on the negative externalities imposed by burning fossil fuels.
Similarly, imposing a tax on emissions aims to correct the negative climate externalities produced by burning fossil fuels. A carbon tax is a Pigouvian tax (after the economist Arthur Pigou) levied on a market activity to take into account the negative externalities of that activity. In Pigou's formulation, negative externalities occur when the social cost of a market activity exceeds the private cost of the activity, which is another way of saying that the activities of some people are imposing uncompensated harms on other people. The result is that markets over-supply a good—in this case, the energy produced from fossil fuels. The goal is to set a tax equal to the cost of the negative externality, thus nudging markets to produce efficient amounts of a good.
The laudable goal of both carbon markets and carbon taxes is basically the same: make polluters pay for the costs they involuntarily impose on others. So all that remains is to calculate the costs and let policy makers impose either the appropriate markets or taxes. The problem is that in the real world things are never as simple as economic theory would have it. Estimates of the potential damage caused by global warming range widely, depending on estimates of how the climate is likely to react to extra carbon dioxide, future economic growth, and, most crucially, the discount rate.
That term refers to the fact that most people prefer to have a dollar today than a dollar a year from now. This means that current dollars are worth more than future dollars; that people discount the value of future dollars. In other words, a person might be willing to forego a dollar now, but only in exchange for more than a dollar next year. From this insight, economists have developed the concept of discount rates. Let's say someone is willing to forgo a dollar today in exchange for $1.10 next year. The discount rate would be 10 percent. So here's the question that bedevils those trying to calculate the future damages caused by climate change: How much is a dollar in 2100 worth in terms of dollars foregone today? Let's just say that experts have a wide range of opinions on what the proper discount rate should be.
What about the damage we can expect from man-made global warming versus the costs of taking action? According to one calculation performed by Yale economist William Nordhaus, the optimum path toward cooling the climate using a carbon tax would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage globally by $5.2 trillion over the next century. His calculation implies a globally harmonized carbon tax that rises in constant dollars from about $35 per ton in 2010, to $90 per ton in 2050, eventually reaching $200 per ton in 2100. In his recent comprehensive review of the literature on economic impacts of future climate change for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Dutch economist Richard Tol calculated that the optimal policy would be imposing the equivalent of a $0.50 per ton carbon dioxide tax rising at 5 percent per year for the next 90 years. This policy would yield $3 in benefits for every $2 spent. "Available estimates suggest that the welfare loss induced by climate change in the year 2100 is in the same order as losing a few percent of income," notes Tol. "That is, a century worth of climate change is about as bad as losing one or two years of economic growth."
On the other hand, there are a few studies that suggest the benefits of early steep reductions in carbon emissions will far outweigh the costs. A 2006 study by British economist Nicholas Stern found that spending 1 percent of GDP annually to achieve massive early reductions in carbon dioxide emissions is justified. Stern has now upped his estimate to 2 percent per year. Many economists, however, argue that Stern used an unrealistically low discount rate of 0.1 percent to achieve his results. A 0.1 percent discount rate implies that someone would forego $100 today in order to obtain $100.10 a year from now.
Looking at recent reports by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the activist group the Natural Resources Defense Council, U.S. GDP in 2100 is projected to be between 0.6 and 3.6 percent lower than it would otherwise have been. Assuming the $14 trillion U.S. economy grows at 2.5 percent per year, GDP in 2100 would be $130 trillion. If climate change damages push GDP 3.6 percent below what it would otherwise have been that means that GDP in 2100 would be about $125 trillion, or $5 trillion lower. That's not nothing, but the loss is more than double ($12 trillion) what would occur if U.S. economic growth were depressed from 2.5 to 2.4 percent per year between now and 2100.
Clearly, econometric models tell us that implementing smart policies could avoid some damage from climate change. But whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs depends entirely on the policies being optimally adopted. But will governments and international agencies be able to sustain smart policies over the next century? The tribulations of the European Union's cap-and-trade scheme and the current political jockeying over the 1,468-page Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the U.S. Congress are not promising. On the international level, rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil are refusing to accept limits on their greenhouse gas emissions.
Along similar lines, numerous econometric models project that while climate change will have relatively minor effects on developed countries it will significantly harm poor countries. One proposed policy soluton is to have rich countries that emit a disproportionate share compensate poor countries. While this idea might seem appealing to some, one must also consider the sorry 50-year record of wealth transfers in the form of foreign development aid. As development economist William Easterly has argued, most of the $2.3 trillion in aid that rich countries have poured into developing countries over the past half century has been wasted. Is there any reason to think that trillions in climate change aid would be any more effectively managed?
Man-made global warming may simply be a negative externality for which the transaction costs are too high. In other words, any benefits achieved from trying to mitigate global warming will most likely be swamped by the costs of distributing the corporate welfare used to buy the political acquiescence of various industries. As much as one might hope to implement good public policy to deal with the problem, policy nihilism might be the only rational response to global warming.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Three current articles below
Prime Minister Rudd's Chilling Speech
In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has given the most chilling speech (PDF here) with respect to open policy debate that I have ever heard from a leader of a democratic country. The focus of his speech is on "climate change deniers." Who are these people? They include people who are skeptical of climate change science, but remarkably, they also include people who believe that climate change is real and a problem, but disagree with the Prime Minister's preferred policy approach. Rudd states that "climate change deniers" fall into one of three categories:
· First, the climate science deniers.
· Second, those that pay lip service to the science and the need to act on climate change but oppose every practicable mechanism being proposed to bring about that action.
· Third, those in each country that believe their country should wait for others to act first.
He says of these groups: "As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change."
Rudd uses extremely strong terms to characterize those who disagree with his policy prescriptions:
Rudd explains why it is that the Copenhagen meeting may fail:
Rudd explains that there is no place in government for people holding these views, a position seemingly reinforced this week when the CSIRO stands accused of censoring a paper critical of the Australian ETS:
Can witch trials and pogroms be far behind? What bothers me about the speech is not so much the criticism of people who reject mainstream science. Fine, criticism of them as rolling the dice on a minority view is fair and appropriate. What bothers me is the explicit equation of people who question a policy's effectiveness or desirability with the idea of being a "denier" and thus being "dangerous." Rudd is openly conflating views on science with views on politics. Not only does this further the politicization of science, but it also make a mockery of democratic governance. Imagine if George W. Bush had given this same speech in 2003 but about people who deny the merits of his desired policy of going to war in Iraq. There would have been national and international outrage, and rightfully so.
Rudd may be trying to set the stage for domestic failure of the CPRS and more generally that in Copenhagen. But he is doing so in a way that stomps on the notion of democracy and the fact that people have different values and perspectives that can only be reconciled through the democratic process. An observer at the Lowy Institute (where the speech was given) said afterward:
That is a pretty good description of the climate debate. Demonizing one's opponents and calling their views "dangerous" is a first step down a path we don't want to go.
SOURCE
"Snouts in the Carbon Trough"
Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests”. That is the pot calling the kettle black. The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing. Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.
Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading. A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders - all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen - more snouts in the carbon trough. The rest of big business merely wants the “certainty” of free emission permits or other special exemptions denied to Joe the Plumber and Fred the Farmer.
Sceptics on the other hand do not have a mercenary army of academics, bureaucrats and publicists who can be bribed or bullied to produce scary climate forecasts or doomsdays ads on demand. Nor do sceptics have the power to silence or sack dissidents in their ranks. Nor do they have the pulpits and power of the UN which, having failed at “peace keeping”, sees “climate control” as its new business model.
The climate realists have only one big vested interest – the desire to live their lives free from the “certainty” of new taxes on everything they buy and new controls on everything they do. This is not about global pollution or global warming – it is about global energy taxes, global government and global redistribution.
SOURCE
Pervasive climate skepticism among Australian conservative politicians
LIBERAL Senate leader Nick Minchin's warning that a majority of the party does not believe in man-made climate change has emboldened Malcolm Turnbull's critics with fresh warnings today the partyroom may reject a deal on emissions trading.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong today challenged the Liberal leader to repudiate Senator Minchin's outspoken rejection of climate change science. She described Senator Minchin's comments as a “direct attack” on Mr Turnbull's leadership.
But today Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop joined the attack, backing Senator Minchin's outspoken comments on last night's Four Corners program, suggesting it was he and not Mr Turnbull who was speaking for the party. “I thought Nick Minchin put the position of the partyroom very well,” she told Sky News. “There is a belief that when we voted the legislation down last time that was the right thing to do. This is a tax that does not address the climate change problem one iota.”
The climate change stoush comes amid fresh speculation Joe Hockey is positioning himself for the leadership with a speech on God and religion. But the opposition Treasury spokesman today denied this was the case. “The leadership is not vacant,” he told ABC Radio today. “Malcolm has my very, very strong support.” Mr Hockey sidestepped questions about whether he wanted to be Liberal leader down the track. “I went into politics to serve my country, my party and my community, and Lord knows where that will take me,” he said. “If one day an opportunity came up then it would be up to others to determine that, not up to me.”
Earlier, Senator Wong conceded getting a deal through will be difficult with many in the Liberal Party convinced climate change is some sort of left-wing “conspiracy”. “It will be difficult. There are too many people in the Coalition who are not fair dinkum on climate change,” she said. “I think the question most Australians would have is who is speaking for the Liberal Party.”
Senator Wong also conceded what world leaders have been saying for weeks that a political agreement with goals and aspirations rather than a binding treaty to replace the Kyoto agreement on climate change is the most likely outcome of talks in Copenhagen. “What we need at Copenhagen is that effective political agreement,” she said. “Not every detail of the treaty is going to be sorted out by Copenhagen.”
Mr Turnbull said today that “good faith” negotiations were continuing with the Rudd government on emissions trading legislation ahead of the talks. “We are in good faith negotiations with the government. I'm not going to be deflected from those negotiations. They will have an outcome. At the end of that we will then decide whether we as a shadow cabinet agree with the outcome and then we will either recommend its acceptance or not to the partyroom,” he said.
“Now the fact of the matter is the Australian people expect us to take a constructive approach to this and that is exactly what we're doing. I mean the Prime Minister's outburst last week was not consistent with those good faith negotiations. But I can assure you we will not be deflected by him and the negotiations are continuing and they will have a conclusion and then we will consider it.”
SOURCE
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Prof Easterbrook has emailed the following introduction to his recent paper. The email includes graphics which are not reproduced below but which can be obtained from the author at the email address given below or at dbunny14@yahoo.com
Two hundred years ago, Charles Lyell coined the phrase "The present is the key to the past." In today's highly contentious issues of global climate change, we might well add "The past is the key to the future, i.e., to forecast future geologic events, we must understand past climate changes. This paper documents past global climate changes in the geologic and historic past.
Recent laser imaging of the Earth's surface provides new evidence for abrupt, fluctuating, warm and cool climatic episodes that could not have been caused by changes in atmospheric CO2. In a paper presented at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, OR, Professor Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presented new data from airborne laser imagery showing well-defined, previously unknown, multiple moraines deposited by glaciers 11,700 to 10,250 years ago.
At least 9 significant, abrupt periods of warming that resulted in retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet are documented by moraines from successive glacial retreats in the Fraser Lowland of NW Washington l(Fig. 1). In addition, smaller multiple glacier recessions are found within the more prominent episodes of glacier retreat. As indicated by the amount of glacier recession between each of the successive moraines, the warming events were of greater magnitude than those observed in recent centuries....
What we can learn from this geologic climate changes is that the past is indeed the key to the future. In 1999, the year after the warmest year of recent times, I projected the climate pattern from the past century and past 500 years into the future and predicted that we would be due for 25-30 years of global cooling beginning about 2000. The PDO changed from its warm to cool mode in 1999 and since then we have had global cooling, quite moderate to flat (interrupted by two warm El Ninos) and intensifying since 2007.
Abstract of paper presented to Geological Society of America, Oct. 19, 2009:
THE ROLE OF THE OCEANS AND THE SUN IN LATE PLEISTOCENE AND HISTORIC GLACIAL AND CLIMATIC FLUCTUATIONS
EASTERBROOK, Don J., Dept. of Geology, Western Washington Univ, Bellingham, WA 98225, don.easterbrook@wwu.edu
Lidar imagery of the southern part of the Fraser Lowland in WA reveals previously unknown, multiple, latest Pleistocene (Sumas Stade) end moraines overlying Everson glaciomarine drift (gmd). Multiple marine shorelines extend from about 540' to about 100'above present sea level and are truncated by two of the oldest Sumas end moraines. These moraines are younger than the underlying Everson gmd, which is well dated at 11,700 14C yrs. B.P., and older than 11,400 14C yrs. B.P. basal bog dates behind the moraines. Recession of the ice from the outermost moraines was followed by building of at least nine end moraines, some of which clearly represent glacial readvances. Basal bog dates from a kettle in outwash from the youngest Sumas moraine has been dated at 10,250 14C yrs. B.P.
Isotope data from Greenland ice cores and historic atmospheric and oceanic temperature records show a consistent pattern of fluctuating 25-30-year warm and cool periods over the past 500 years. During the past century, five of these climate fluctuations can be tied to glacial oscillations, oceanic temperature changes, atmospheric temperature changes, and solar variation.
The question is-what drives these oscillations? The older fluctuations can be linked to changes in 14C and 10Be isotope production rates in the upper atmosphere, suggesting variation in cosmogenic radiation. Historic climatic and oceanic temperature fluctuations are associated with solar variations. The excellent correlation of glacial, climatic, oceanic, and solar variation strongly suggests cause and effect relationships. Past patterns of these variations allow projection into the future.
CLIMATE CHANGE THEORY IS IN DISARRAY
An email from hydrologist Will Alexander [alexwjr@iafrica.com]
The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon urged negotiators at December's Copenhagen talks to reach some kind of agreement. We must seal a deal in Copenhagen for a global, equitable and comprehensive deal for the future of humanity and the future of planet earth. CCNet 03 September. Is this noble objective achievable? I fear not.
We are now witnessing the collapse of climate change theory. It is caused by two concurrent events. These are the global economic crisis and the expectation that all nations of the world will jointly and concurrently agree to pass irreversible legislation to limit emissions of undesirable greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The fundamental assumption is that the increasing concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere will result in increases in global temperatures. These will result in increases in hydrological extremes, floods and droughts. These in turn will cause a serious damage and pose threats to national water supplies. There are also a number of lesser concerns such as environmental damage.
How should we test this theory? We are told that the theory is sound because it is the consensus view of hundreds of scientists. It is only the dumb and ill-informed who dare challenge it. However, there are three powerful tests that can be applied to test the theory.
The first is whether or not global temperatures are rising in parallel with rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. All the evidence is to the contrary. Global temperatures are falling, not rising. Several scientists have contested the scientific basis for the linkage between carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures.
The second test is to examine long hydrological records and search for evidence of increases in the hydrological extremes. This is what I have been doing for the past 30 years. There is simply no scientifically believable evidence at all of increases that can be attributed to global warming.
There is a third and more difficult test. There are very clear periodic anomalies in long hydro-meteorological records that are well documented in the hydrological literature. These are the Joseph Effect (droughts), Noah Effect (floods), and the Hurst Phenomenon (water resources). There are also the well-known cyclical phenomena such as the El Niño - La Nina effect, the Southern Oscillation Index, and others.
Some of these observed anomalies are synchronous with the double (not single) sunspot cycle, which in turn is related to the sun's wobble caused by the orbiting planets as the solar system moves through Galactic space. Other cyclical climatic phenomena are undoubtedly present on a number of time scales. The most likely causal mechanisms are a combination of cyclicity in the driving mechanisms, amplified by oscillations in the responding mechanisms.
There are many misconceptions regarding the solar linkage. Here are a few. It is the linkage with the double sunspot cycles not the single cycles that is statistically significant. The evenly numbered cycles are associated with more variable climate than the quieter responses associated with the following, odd numbered cycles. We have just entered a quieter cycle.
High flood sequences are associated with the acceleration of solar activity associated with the occurrence of the sunspot minima, and not the occurrence of sunspot maxima. The changes from drought sequences to flood sequences are sudden, not gradual. This indicates the role of instability phenomena. There are other examples. These changes are not amenable to mathematical descriptions. Because they are undetectable by conventional mathematical analyses, climate change scientists assume that they do not exist! They then continue to postulate that changes are the consequence of global warming. Much research has still to be done in this field but the observations of the presence of cyclical periodicity in the climatic processes are unequivocal.
The basic issue is climate CHANGE. It is obvious that any research in this field should commence with studies of the drivers and consequent behaviour of natural climate variability on which the effects of human activity have to be superimposed. This has not been done. The basic assumption made by climate change scientists is that global climate is a steady state phenomenon. This is simply not so as the above tests and many other examples demonstrate. All the IPCC's reports based on this assumption are clearly erroneous.
Why then have virtually all the nations of the world accepted climate change theory? The answer is obvious. The developing nations now smell blood in the form of financial reparations on the scale of the Marshall Plan after World War II as one commentator remarked. This is well illustrated in the recent reaction of the African Union as reported in CCNet of 04 September.
INTERPRETATION
It may seem strange that all nations have accepted climate change science with all its alarmist consequences without question. This is a fundamentally important political decision. The implication is that the affluent nations acknowledge that they are the major cause of climate-related damage up to this time. This is the basis for the African Union's claim for substantial, legally binding reparations from the developed countries for all climate-related damage.
They insist that there will be no compromises in principle although the amount as well as who pays and who receives have yet to be decided. This issue alone could potentially wreck the negotiations. Notice how Nicholas Stern supports this position. Notice also that this is quite apart from climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.
MITIGATION (PREVENTION)
Mitigation involves the prevention or reduction of discharges of greenhouse gas emissions on a scale required to stabilise or diminish carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere. This can only be achieved on the required scale by not building new coal-fired power stations, or by capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power stations, or building nuclear power stations. All the alternative measures, without exception, will result in substantial increases in the cost to consumers and thereby damage national prosperities unless these costs are recoverable from the affluent nations.
ADAPTATION
Adaptation is far more difficult to define. It will require a clear distinction between naturally occurring floods and droughts and those caused by climate change. As I demonstrate in my analyses there is no evidence at all of measurable effects of climate change on the hydro-meteorological processes.
We now have a situation where the affluent countries will have to pay threefold - reparation for damages already caused, as well as mitigation and adaptation costs to developing countries, and mitigation and adaptation costs in their own countries. Will their taxpayers be prepared to carry this additional burden? Will they start arguing about each claim? It cannot work.
BASIS FOR COMPENSATION
What will be the basis for Africa's claims for reparation, mitigation and adaptation? These will have to be debated and defined at Copenhagen. This is a near impossible task. For the first time in history, the world's most powerful nations will be held to ransom by the developing nations. I am one of those who can recall how the bravery of the few saved the United Kingdom during World War II. It is my belief that the economically disadvantaged countries of the world will unwittingly bring about the downfall of this whole climate change charade.
There is a very strong likelihood that conflicts of interest between the East and the West and between the rich and the poor nations will cause far more damage than the postulated consequences of climate change. Hopefully all the negotiators at Copenhagen will be aware of this.
ENERGY AND CLIMATE REALISM
The French Statesman Talleyrand once said "that speech is given to man to disguise his thoughts". In today's mass media democracies it could be translated into "speeches are made by politicians to disguise their intentions."
Gordon Browns apocalyptical warnings about the future of the planet if Copenhagen should fail can be interpreted as cry for help: Please make sure that we get a face saving agreement that can be presented as a success. And this is what will come to pass. With or without Barack Obama's presence - Copenhagen will be presented as a great success, like all the other global environmental conferences before.
But the conflict between the West and the new industrial powers cannot and will not be resolved. What we are seeing in the remaining weeks before the conference is an desperate attempt of all major players not to be seen as the culprit who will be blamed for the failure.
The original EU strategy was, we will set an example and go for binding cuts in green house gas emissions and the world will follow - clearly a naive approach, reminiscent of other unilateral intentions in the past.
But now, especially after the financial and economic crisis, this sort of climate unilateralism is untenable - it would mean a dramatic financial transfer from the west to the advantage of our competitors China and India which our economies can ill afford and our populations won't accept. Public opinion in Europe and America, according to the latest research, published by the Financial Times, is further hardening against any financial transfers.
As far as the ambitious targets of the UK and other EU states are concerned, Professor Roger Pielke Jr. is right when he points out that setting "unachievable targets is not a policy, it is an act of wishful thinking". He calls it "a politics of symbolism with no impact on real world outcomes." Pielke adds that the focus on "magical solutions" is leaving little room for the practical.
Leading business figures agree with this damning verdict. The CEO of Eon, Bernotat, said that the British politicians need "to stop misleading the public about what is achievable." He is scathing about the target of 30% electricity coming from renewables in 2020 and refers particularly to the plan to build 33 gigawatts of off shore wind power up from the present 0.6 gigawatt, a plan he calls naïve and unachievable. Of a similar opinion is Tony Hayward, CEO of BP.
There are too many illusions propagated and circling around alternative and renewable technologies: about their promise and potential, about the time frame, in which they can be introduced and changes be realized, about the jobs, that a new green Keynisanism can create and about the political impact of a radical green policy. Centre left politicians in Britain and Germany, the new leader of the German social democrats, Sigmar Gabriel and the Labour Ministers David and Ed Miliband seem seriously to believe that climate change will be the new mass mobilizing topic and will help saving their parties too. A more likely outcome is that this strategy will neither save the centre left nor will it help to save the planet. Such a strategy seems to drive away voters fearful of loosing the lifestyle of mobility, warmth and comfort.
The arguments against the extensive use of wind are well known. Wind is intermittent and needs conventional backup, the electricity it delivers is extremely expensive, feasible only with high subsidies. It won't even deliver the promise of jobs: Wind turbines can and will be more cheaply built in China, the same goes for solar panels, as Germany recently found out. In the UK, the closure of the turbine factory on the Isle of Wight was another example of the same trend.
This does not stop business to be keen on wind power. It is attracted by huge subsidies, offered by governments, driven by "the pressure of fashionable, green ideology", as James Lovelock writes in his latest book "The vanishing face of Gaia". Lovelocks judgement could not be clearer: "Europes massive use of wind as a supplement to baseload electricity will be remembered as one of the great follies of the twenty first century".
What ever happens, if the folly is continued or not, the next twenty years could be called "the new age of carbon." If the UK really intends to cut CO 2 emissions by 34% till 2022, the UK would need to build in the next 6 years the equivalent of 30 new nuclear power stations. The telling comment of the (Labour) chairman of the "Climate Change Committee" of the House of Commons: "Well beyond our political capacity to deliver".
More oil, gas and coal will be burned than ever before - and carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise. Renewables can't and won't deliver the scale of energy needed for a rising world population. For the time being only fossil fuels and nuclear power will be able to deliver the necessary energy. In the light of these facts it is especially sad that Britain and Germany, once leading nations in nuclear technology, have either neglected or given up on it completely and left the field to other, more farsighted nations like the French. 30 years ago Britain had 15 000 nuclear engineers, now the figure is just a tenth of that. Germany decided an atomic exit strategy which at least will be reverted now. But precious time has been lost.
We can call ourselves lucky that we have gained a bit of breathing space. The global warming trend has stopped, for the time being at least. Since 1998 global average temperatures have not risen. In fact, there has even been a slight fall - despite the fact that CO2 emissions have been rising relentlessly during this period, and in spite of the "binding" agreements in Kyoto to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The climate modellers of the IPCC did not foresee the halt in global warming. Professor Mojib Latif, one of the leading IPCC scientists, admitted to this inconvenient truth recently during a climate conference in Geneva and talked about "one or two decades more of cooling", before he expects the recommencement and continuation of the global warming trend.
One thing is clear. The belief in the accuracy of computer models has suffered. The science is not settled, as many climate researchers claimed in the past few years, a claim which goes against the essence of science and research and should never have been made in the first place.
We are faced with an awkward position. Nobody seems to know what the future holds; even if we are prepared to follow the lead of the IPCC, we are faced with huge, irreconcilable differences of opinion. Some school of thought predicts catastrophe, if not apocalypse, another forecasts at least a massive challenge to our usual way of life while some sceptics seem to suggest, that we will, in a few years time, wake up to the fact, that global warming was just another one of the many unfounded scares which modern mass media societies are prone to fall for.
What to do? Yes, we need more energy efficiency, we need to decarbonise our industries, we need to diversify our sources of energy as much as possible and we need new, clean technologies. We should start building nuclear power stations, at the moment the only effective way of producing carbon free electricity. At the same time we should avoid damaging our western economies, either by transferring too much money to our competitors or falling into the trap of the "green-industrial complex," about whose malign influence even James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia theory, of earth and biosphere being a self-regulating super-organism, and convinced that it is too late to stop 'global heating,' is scathing.
We should in future be more sceptical of computer-based predictions of climate change and focus more on observing what is actually happening in reality: Is there any sign that the rise of global temperature or the sea level is accelerating, for instance. We need to prepare for adaptation and on top of it all we need an insurance policy in form of geo-engineering, in case the worst predictions should come true. Some of the technologies are already available and geo-engineering might prove to be a significantly cheaper solution than the desperate attempt to mitigate climate change, by cutting emissions and creating economic hardship for billions of people.
SOURCE
IS GOVERNMENT ACTION WORSE THAN GLOBAL WARMING?
Will government solutions to global warming be worse than global warming itself? Remember that man-made global warming is a negative externality that occurs when burning fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Economists define negative externality as a spillover from an economic transaction that harms parties not directly involved in the transaction. In this case, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is thought to be boosting temperatures, raising sea levels, and having other effects on the climate that people must involuntarily pay to adapt to (more air conditioning, switching crops, and so forth). Thus, goes the argument, the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the full cost of consuming them.
Ideally, once the full costs of man-made global warming are calculated, consumers, businesses, governments, and international agencies can adopt policies to take such costs into account. The two policy options generally discussed in this light are cap-and-trade carbon markets and carbon taxes. The idea behind carbon markets is that governments ration how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases may be emitted by setting an overall limit on emissions. Emitters are then required to have a government-issued permit for each ton of carbon dioxide they release into the air. The total amount of permits cannot exceed the cap. Emitters that need to increase their emission allowance must buy permits from those who emit less, creating a market for carbon dioxide emissions permits. The goal of such a rationing scheme is to create a market that sets a price on the negative externalities imposed by burning fossil fuels.
Similarly, imposing a tax on emissions aims to correct the negative climate externalities produced by burning fossil fuels. A carbon tax is a Pigouvian tax (after the economist Arthur Pigou) levied on a market activity to take into account the negative externalities of that activity. In Pigou's formulation, negative externalities occur when the social cost of a market activity exceeds the private cost of the activity, which is another way of saying that the activities of some people are imposing uncompensated harms on other people. The result is that markets over-supply a good—in this case, the energy produced from fossil fuels. The goal is to set a tax equal to the cost of the negative externality, thus nudging markets to produce efficient amounts of a good.
The laudable goal of both carbon markets and carbon taxes is basically the same: make polluters pay for the costs they involuntarily impose on others. So all that remains is to calculate the costs and let policy makers impose either the appropriate markets or taxes. The problem is that in the real world things are never as simple as economic theory would have it. Estimates of the potential damage caused by global warming range widely, depending on estimates of how the climate is likely to react to extra carbon dioxide, future economic growth, and, most crucially, the discount rate.
That term refers to the fact that most people prefer to have a dollar today than a dollar a year from now. This means that current dollars are worth more than future dollars; that people discount the value of future dollars. In other words, a person might be willing to forego a dollar now, but only in exchange for more than a dollar next year. From this insight, economists have developed the concept of discount rates. Let's say someone is willing to forgo a dollar today in exchange for $1.10 next year. The discount rate would be 10 percent. So here's the question that bedevils those trying to calculate the future damages caused by climate change: How much is a dollar in 2100 worth in terms of dollars foregone today? Let's just say that experts have a wide range of opinions on what the proper discount rate should be.
What about the damage we can expect from man-made global warming versus the costs of taking action? According to one calculation performed by Yale economist William Nordhaus, the optimum path toward cooling the climate using a carbon tax would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage globally by $5.2 trillion over the next century. His calculation implies a globally harmonized carbon tax that rises in constant dollars from about $35 per ton in 2010, to $90 per ton in 2050, eventually reaching $200 per ton in 2100. In his recent comprehensive review of the literature on economic impacts of future climate change for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Dutch economist Richard Tol calculated that the optimal policy would be imposing the equivalent of a $0.50 per ton carbon dioxide tax rising at 5 percent per year for the next 90 years. This policy would yield $3 in benefits for every $2 spent. "Available estimates suggest that the welfare loss induced by climate change in the year 2100 is in the same order as losing a few percent of income," notes Tol. "That is, a century worth of climate change is about as bad as losing one or two years of economic growth."
On the other hand, there are a few studies that suggest the benefits of early steep reductions in carbon emissions will far outweigh the costs. A 2006 study by British economist Nicholas Stern found that spending 1 percent of GDP annually to achieve massive early reductions in carbon dioxide emissions is justified. Stern has now upped his estimate to 2 percent per year. Many economists, however, argue that Stern used an unrealistically low discount rate of 0.1 percent to achieve his results. A 0.1 percent discount rate implies that someone would forego $100 today in order to obtain $100.10 a year from now.
Looking at recent reports by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the activist group the Natural Resources Defense Council, U.S. GDP in 2100 is projected to be between 0.6 and 3.6 percent lower than it would otherwise have been. Assuming the $14 trillion U.S. economy grows at 2.5 percent per year, GDP in 2100 would be $130 trillion. If climate change damages push GDP 3.6 percent below what it would otherwise have been that means that GDP in 2100 would be about $125 trillion, or $5 trillion lower. That's not nothing, but the loss is more than double ($12 trillion) what would occur if U.S. economic growth were depressed from 2.5 to 2.4 percent per year between now and 2100.
Clearly, econometric models tell us that implementing smart policies could avoid some damage from climate change. But whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs depends entirely on the policies being optimally adopted. But will governments and international agencies be able to sustain smart policies over the next century? The tribulations of the European Union's cap-and-trade scheme and the current political jockeying over the 1,468-page Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the U.S. Congress are not promising. On the international level, rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil are refusing to accept limits on their greenhouse gas emissions.
Along similar lines, numerous econometric models project that while climate change will have relatively minor effects on developed countries it will significantly harm poor countries. One proposed policy soluton is to have rich countries that emit a disproportionate share compensate poor countries. While this idea might seem appealing to some, one must also consider the sorry 50-year record of wealth transfers in the form of foreign development aid. As development economist William Easterly has argued, most of the $2.3 trillion in aid that rich countries have poured into developing countries over the past half century has been wasted. Is there any reason to think that trillions in climate change aid would be any more effectively managed?
Man-made global warming may simply be a negative externality for which the transaction costs are too high. In other words, any benefits achieved from trying to mitigate global warming will most likely be swamped by the costs of distributing the corporate welfare used to buy the political acquiescence of various industries. As much as one might hope to implement good public policy to deal with the problem, policy nihilism might be the only rational response to global warming.
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GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Three current articles below
Prime Minister Rudd's Chilling Speech
In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has given the most chilling speech (PDF here) with respect to open policy debate that I have ever heard from a leader of a democratic country. The focus of his speech is on "climate change deniers." Who are these people? They include people who are skeptical of climate change science, but remarkably, they also include people who believe that climate change is real and a problem, but disagree with the Prime Minister's preferred policy approach. Rudd states that "climate change deniers" fall into one of three categories:
· First, the climate science deniers.
· Second, those that pay lip service to the science and the need to act on climate change but oppose every practicable mechanism being proposed to bring about that action.
· Third, those in each country that believe their country should wait for others to act first.
He says of these groups: "As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change."
Rudd uses extremely strong terms to characterize those who disagree with his policy prescriptions:
"Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored. They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.
And the danger they pose is this by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel, that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.
And that is what they want, because they are driven by a narrowly defined self interest of the present and are utterly contemptuous towards our children's interest in the future.
This brigade of do nothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer. Our children. And our grandchildren.
Rudd explains why it is that the Copenhagen meeting may fail:
If Copenhagen does not deliver the outcome we so urgently need, no individual climate change skeptic will be responsible, but each of them will have played their part.
Rudd explains that there is no place in government for people holding these views, a position seemingly reinforced this week when the CSIRO stands accused of censoring a paper critical of the Australian ETS:
Climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals. They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence. The logic of these skeptics belongs in a casino, not a science lab, and not in the ranks of any responsible government.
Can witch trials and pogroms be far behind? What bothers me about the speech is not so much the criticism of people who reject mainstream science. Fine, criticism of them as rolling the dice on a minority view is fair and appropriate. What bothers me is the explicit equation of people who question a policy's effectiveness or desirability with the idea of being a "denier" and thus being "dangerous." Rudd is openly conflating views on science with views on politics. Not only does this further the politicization of science, but it also make a mockery of democratic governance. Imagine if George W. Bush had given this same speech in 2003 but about people who deny the merits of his desired policy of going to war in Iraq. There would have been national and international outrage, and rightfully so.
Rudd may be trying to set the stage for domestic failure of the CPRS and more generally that in Copenhagen. But he is doing so in a way that stomps on the notion of democracy and the fact that people have different values and perspectives that can only be reconciled through the democratic process. An observer at the Lowy Institute (where the speech was given) said afterward:
The implication was that these descriptions applied to anyone who opposed the Government's climate change agenda — the PM seemed to admit of no possibility that anyone of good will could be opposed to that agenda
That is a pretty good description of the climate debate. Demonizing one's opponents and calling their views "dangerous" is a first step down a path we don't want to go.
SOURCE
"Snouts in the Carbon Trough"
Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests”. That is the pot calling the kettle black. The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing. Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.
Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading. A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders - all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen - more snouts in the carbon trough. The rest of big business merely wants the “certainty” of free emission permits or other special exemptions denied to Joe the Plumber and Fred the Farmer.
Sceptics on the other hand do not have a mercenary army of academics, bureaucrats and publicists who can be bribed or bullied to produce scary climate forecasts or doomsdays ads on demand. Nor do sceptics have the power to silence or sack dissidents in their ranks. Nor do they have the pulpits and power of the UN which, having failed at “peace keeping”, sees “climate control” as its new business model.
The climate realists have only one big vested interest – the desire to live their lives free from the “certainty” of new taxes on everything they buy and new controls on everything they do. This is not about global pollution or global warming – it is about global energy taxes, global government and global redistribution.
SOURCE
Pervasive climate skepticism among Australian conservative politicians
LIBERAL Senate leader Nick Minchin's warning that a majority of the party does not believe in man-made climate change has emboldened Malcolm Turnbull's critics with fresh warnings today the partyroom may reject a deal on emissions trading.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong today challenged the Liberal leader to repudiate Senator Minchin's outspoken rejection of climate change science. She described Senator Minchin's comments as a “direct attack” on Mr Turnbull's leadership.
But today Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop joined the attack, backing Senator Minchin's outspoken comments on last night's Four Corners program, suggesting it was he and not Mr Turnbull who was speaking for the party. “I thought Nick Minchin put the position of the partyroom very well,” she told Sky News. “There is a belief that when we voted the legislation down last time that was the right thing to do. This is a tax that does not address the climate change problem one iota.”
The climate change stoush comes amid fresh speculation Joe Hockey is positioning himself for the leadership with a speech on God and religion. But the opposition Treasury spokesman today denied this was the case. “The leadership is not vacant,” he told ABC Radio today. “Malcolm has my very, very strong support.” Mr Hockey sidestepped questions about whether he wanted to be Liberal leader down the track. “I went into politics to serve my country, my party and my community, and Lord knows where that will take me,” he said. “If one day an opportunity came up then it would be up to others to determine that, not up to me.”
Earlier, Senator Wong conceded getting a deal through will be difficult with many in the Liberal Party convinced climate change is some sort of left-wing “conspiracy”. “It will be difficult. There are too many people in the Coalition who are not fair dinkum on climate change,” she said. “I think the question most Australians would have is who is speaking for the Liberal Party.”
Senator Wong also conceded what world leaders have been saying for weeks that a political agreement with goals and aspirations rather than a binding treaty to replace the Kyoto agreement on climate change is the most likely outcome of talks in Copenhagen. “What we need at Copenhagen is that effective political agreement,” she said. “Not every detail of the treaty is going to be sorted out by Copenhagen.”
Mr Turnbull said today that “good faith” negotiations were continuing with the Rudd government on emissions trading legislation ahead of the talks. “We are in good faith negotiations with the government. I'm not going to be deflected from those negotiations. They will have an outcome. At the end of that we will then decide whether we as a shadow cabinet agree with the outcome and then we will either recommend its acceptance or not to the partyroom,” he said.
“Now the fact of the matter is the Australian people expect us to take a constructive approach to this and that is exactly what we're doing. I mean the Prime Minister's outburst last week was not consistent with those good faith negotiations. But I can assure you we will not be deflected by him and the negotiations are continuing and they will have a conclusion and then we will consider it.”
SOURCE
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Monday, November 09, 2009
NEW PAPER SHOWS THAT PAST CO2 LEVELS WERE NOT AS LOW AS THE WARMISTS SAY
Germany's Dr. Ernst Beck some time ago questioned the practice of using proxy data as measures of past CO2 levels. The favoured ice-core proxies have many known problems. He pointed out that chemists have been making direct measurements of ambient CO2 way back into the 19th century and asks why that data is not used. That the direct measurements show much higher levels in the past than the Warmists claim was of course the obvious reason why they have been ignored. The direct measurements show a very different picture from the smooth rise in CO2 levels that the Warmists present.
Warmists have however tried to answer Beck on scientific grounds by alleging that the huge body of past CO2 measurements that he collected had sources of inaccuracy in it too. Prof. Beck has now answered his critics by doing a validation study of the direct measurements. He shows that the direct measurements correspond well to the best modern data. Bottom line: Beck's measurents are the best evidence for past CO2 levels and they show that modern changes in such levels are similar to normal oscillations of the past.
The new paper was presented at a recent climate science conference and was awarded as the best paper presented there. That implies a publication in the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management and a special book. Dr. Beck [egbeck@biokurs.de] was rather surprised to win and thinks that they may not have realized the full implications of his work. The paper is a huge and detailed one with many graphics so I have presented only the abstract and conclusions below. The full paper is however available here.
More HERE
We're doomed without a green religion
A British judge has recently ruled that Greenie beliefs are a religion. The Leftist author below is trying to come to terms with that. He concludes that people must be forced to obey what Warmists want even if Warmism does have an odious religious side. He thinks, probably rightly, that the religious nature of Warmism is a part of what makes it popular and he is on the whole happy about that
The justification for burning heretics was perfectly simple: dissent threatened the survival of society. Nothing was worse than anarchy. This is a viewpoint most people in the West today find pretty much incomprehensible. It is a self-evident truth to them that morality must be a matter of individual choice. And if you believe that, the arguments around the Tim Nicholson case are very difficult to resolve. If there is a moral imperative to preserve the human race, or as much of it as possible, collective consequences must follow. It is not enough for us to do the right thing. Others must as well. If you don't believe that, then there is no point in agitating for success in Copenhagen.
But if collective consequences follow, others must be forced to do things against their will by our moral imperatives. This is exactly the quality that is supposed to be so very obnoxious about religion.
The idea that morality is and must be a matter of individual choice is taken as axiomatic in these debates. It is thought true in the sense that it is held to describe a fact about the world. Very often the same people who believe this will also believe, and maintain with equal vehemence in other contexts the belief that morals are merely opinions, or at least that there couldn't in the nature of things be moral facts: true or false statements about whether something or someone is good or bad.
This was neatly if not nicely expressed by one of the commenters on Tim Nicholson's article here, who said: "You may believe less flying and driving, and more wind farms, and so on to be moral imperatives. I don't. You are entitled to your beliefs, and should not be persecuted for them. But they are just beliefs. You want to argue the politics of how to respond to climate change: great. But you can stop wrapping your proposed solutions up in 'moral imperative' cotton wool."
These are not the only confusions which the Nicholson case raises. Many people who are upset by the court's equating a scientific opinion with a religion belief suppose that science is true and rational, religion is false and irrational, and that this division of the world is itself factual and rational. If this is how the world appears to you, then there is no question that climate change is not a religion. That would mean that it wasn't really happening, and that we were free to ignore it. Both supporters and opponents of environmentalism can often agree both that it might be a religion and that would be a bad thing. This is why, in general, the people who maintain that environmentalism is like a religion are opposed to it; while those in favour deny it is anything like a religion. (A further complication is supplied by right-wing Christians like Daniel Johnson who maintain that religion is a good thing, but environmentalism is a false religion.)
But can this sharp distinction between truth and falsity, fact and value, actually describe the world? The unexamined assumption is that we can split the world into a sphere of facts and a sphere of opinions and that the facts will speak for themselves. And, as a matter of fact, that is false. I'm not caliming here that there are no facts, or that there are only opinions, or that science is only socially constructed. I just need to point out that fact and opinion are not two distinct substances.
Myles Allen wrote yesterday: "I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence." But while this is an admirable ideal, it is wholly impossible in practice. You cannot believe in science if you do not also believe in scientists. That is why the faking of results is such a terrible threat to the whole enterprise [And who are the ones doing the faking? Warmists like Briffa, Mann etc]. Nor is "evidence" a a simple thing visible to the naked eye. Without quite a specialised education, the nature and force of scientific evidence is quite literally invisible. Even when the evidence is overwhelming there will always be smart and otherwise well-educated people to ignore it if they have other more powerful reasons to do so. The instinct of most scientists is to suppose that this can be cured by teaching people science. But that's never going to work, however desirable it is for other reasons. Scientists want to be believed becasuse of the truth they are telling is so overwhelming as to make trust unnecessary, but in practice they will either be trusted or ignored.
There is a strand of atheism, or perhaps of anti-theism, which redefines "religion" to include all forms of collective faith, chiefly communism. Although this may have originated as a rhetorical move in order to deny that the communists who killed millions of Christians were actually atheists, it does express something deeper: a conviction that compulsion in the name of any belief is itself immoral. Now whether anyone actually truly and consistently believes this is another question. What matters in this context is that lots of people believe that they do believe it.
Climate change makes that position entirely incoherent. Because it is a global tragedy of the commons, individual action cannot be enough. I cannot ensure the survival of my grandchildren, nor even yours, without compelling you to behave in ways that science tells me are necessary. Not to act, not to coerce, itself becomes immoral.
There is a further twist to the argument. Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won't do it. People aren't made like that. They need to believe in what they are forced to do. They need idealism, and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion. But we can't engineer it. It can only arise spontaneously. Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth, and when they do that, they'll have lost. I just hope it doesn't happen too late.
SOURCE
The Dawn of Weimar Britain
An apparently Left-leaning sociologist below is not so happy with Warmism as a religion. He sees it as potentially leading to Nazism
Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less – or, should I say, no more? – than Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, a work whose authoritativeness matches that of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything in the history of science discipline. But that’s not really my point….
My point is to draw attention to the five criteria that the judge offered to expand the definition of ‘religious discrimination’ that may be invoked by others in the future in similar cases:
• The belief must be genuinely held.
• It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.
• It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life.
• It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.
• It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.
Humanism was given as an example meeting the criteria, while belief in a political party or the supreme nature of Jedi knights, from the Star Wars movies, were offered as ones that do not.
The general response to this ruling has been positive, with some lawyers seeing it as opening the door to the re-classification of stances like feminism, humanism and vegetarianism as protected religious beliefs. Even New Atheism might count!
I completely disagree with the ruling and the sentiment informing it. In fact, I published a letter in the Guardian the next day, which said: "Justice Burton’s ruling in favour of a green activist whose beliefs interfered with his job has the potential for becoming an epistemological nightmare. In particular, by raising what were previously treated as ‘political’ and ‘lifestyle’ choices to the status of ‘genuinely held beliefs’, the ruling effectively creates an incentive to be dogmatic in one’s opinions, simply in order to avoid forms of social intercourse that one finds disagreeable. After all, evidence of a changed mind is all that would be needed to lose one the protection afforded by the ruling."
A potential practical consequence of this ruling is complete social and political gridlock. It reminds me of Article 118 of the old Weimar Constitution, the first half of which reads as follows: "Every German is entitled, within the bounds set by general law, to express his opinion freely in word, writing, print, image or otherwise. No job contract may obstruct him in the exercise of this right; nobody may put him at a disadvantage if he makes use of this right."
What’s gone wrong here? Part of the answer lies in how ‘free individuals’ is conceptualised. The Weimar Constitution began with a majority principle based on the idea of a ‘German people’ whose common values uphold the constitution. One of those values, of course, is freedom of expression. But to enforce that freedom, the constitution then needs to allow for ‘minority rights’, whereby individuals with deeply held beliefs are allowed opt-out clauses from certain aspects of normal social life that inhibit their expression; otherwise, the majority principle would prove oppressive. Hans Kelsen, one of the great legal minds behind the Weimar Constitution, justifies all this (though without quite seeing its practical consequences) in On the Essence and Value of Democracy (1929).
In the Weimar period, ‘minority rights’ were normally understood in ethnic terms but of course this was also the time when feminism, vegetarianism, etc. start to be recognized as ‘identity politics’. In any case, the pernicious long-term consequence of this way of thinking about freedom of expression is that it encourages a hardening of one’s sense of identity in order to gain personal and political leverage. Of course, in the case of ethnic identity, such a move can be easily turned against oneself – as the Nazis showed all too well.
My own view is that liberal democratic societies should discourage the formation of strong identities – be they around blood or belief – otherwise they will end up undermining their own principles.
SOURCE
Non-believers fill the church of green gods
By Dominic Lawson, son of Nigel Lawson. Both are skeptical about Warmism
‘Al Gore, who art in thy fully offset private jet; Nobel-prized be thy name; thy carbon-free kingdom come; on planet Earth (otherwise known as Gaia) as it should be after Copenhagen; give us this day our daily meat-free diet; and forgive us our emissions, though we don’t forgive any other big fat Americans who emit against us; lead us not into exotic holiday flights; and deliver us from climate denial; for the science is settled. Amen.”
That lacks a certain resonance, I must admit; but now that a British judge has ruled that believers in man-made global warming catastrophe should be protected under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, we should try to come forward with some suitable prayers for this newly identified faith.
Mr Justice Burton, of the High Court, is the man behind the ruling. He found for a “sustainability officer” called Tim Nicholson, who claimed he had been made redundant by the property company Grainger because of his beliefs in imminent man-made climate catastrophe. To be precise, the judge did not say that Nicholson had actually been sacked for that reason; only that he had the right to sue for unfair dismissal under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations.
Why should Tim Nicholson (who looked sweet with his fold-up bicycle outside the High Court) have wanted to establish this as the reason for his dismissal? Possibly it was a desire to become an ecological hero; but I am equally inclined to see the hand of some very clever employment lawyers. In a “normal” redundancy, the departing employee is entitled only to a statutory minimum payoff together with anything already defined in his contract; but when a court finds that the employee has been sacked as a result of some form of discrimination, then there is no legal limit to the amount that can be claimed.
This is why there have been a number of multi-million-pound payouts for City women winning claims that they have been victims of sex discrimination at work. It may seem unlikely that Nicholson’s case, even if it ultimately succeeds at the forthcoming tribunal, will be followed by many others; but given the number of “sustainability officers” employed in the soon-to-be-cut-back public sector and the ingenious opportunism of employment lawyers, who knows?
The more perceptive environmental campaigners did not join in Nicholson’s rejoicing at his victory. They noted that in Burton’s judgment a belief qualified for protection only if it could be said to be “not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available”. In other words, said the judge, Nicholson’s views on man’s influence on climate — which had brought him into conflict with his chief executive over allegedly excessive air trips — went beyond evidence and were more a form of philosophy, or even faith.
Interestingly, Burton is the very same judge that two years ago found for a Kent school governor who brought a case against the government’s plans to supply every school with a DVD of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The judge agreed that the film was flawed. He decreed that it contained nine scientific errors and that the government should accompany any DVDs sent to schools with guidance pointing out, among other things, that polar bears are not drowning in the absence of sufficient quantities of ice. Put away those hankies, children: they’re going to be all right.
It’s one of the properties of established religions that people profess to believe even when they don’t, really. That may seem hypocritical, but social pressure is a powerful force that can make even the most independent minds quail. Richard Dawkins is probably right, for example, when he says there are many Americans who are privately atheist but find it much easier to pretend to be Christians. A similar point was made to me by one of the only five Conservative MPs to vote against the Climate Change Bill. When I told him I was surprised so many Tories felt the carbon cutbacks required by the bill were achievable, he laughed. “None of them do, but they want to be seen to be virtuous.”
A year or so ago, a couple of ministers, Ed Balls and Shaun Woodward, were observed travelling in separate chauffeur-driven cars from the same Downing Street meeting to the same dinner party, 150 yards away. Their chauffeurs waited outside and then after dinner drove the two ministers, again separately, to the Commons, all of 300 yards further on. Because the dinner party was for Labour donors, the Tories insisted that it had been inappropriate to use official limousines — at least for the first 150 yards. The more interesting point was that if Balls and Woodward truly believed — as the government claims — that millions of children yet unborn will die of thirst if we do not immediately check our excessive and avoidable CO2 emissions, they surely would not have condemned another suppositious baby African or two to death by choosing not to walk a quarter of a mile down Whitehall. As so often, it is our actions that reveal our thinking, rather than our words.
This has been made clear by the run-up to next month’s Copenhagen summit, which was supposed to supply the successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol, according mandatory CO2 emissions targets to all the nations of the world. Kyoto had excluded developing countries, and the US refuses to sign any treaty (Barack Obama is little different from George W Bush in this respect) unless such vast nations as China and India come on board. Almost every country pays lip-service to the view that an agreement in Copenhagen is necessary to “save the planet”, but it is now clear that no treaty will be agreed next month.
An article in Prospect magazine by one who had been attending the interminable meetings leading up to the Copenhagen summit reveals how this process really functions — or, rather, doesn’t. It points out that there will be at least 20,000 delegates flying into Copenhagen, but even the intermediate meetings of the relevant UN committee attract up to 10,000 delegates, producing negotiations described by one attendee as “complete unreality ... delegates just talk past each other”.
Apparently the most intractable delegation — and bear in mind that a deal requires complete consensus, not a mere majority — is the Saudi team, which has been arguing that a swingeing cutback on fossil fuels is “economic discrimination” against oil-exporting nations. Yes, Saudi Arabia is already an arid desert nation, but it is rich enough to keep its people supplied with irrigation: this makes the unfashionable point that it is not climate change that condemns Africans to early death, but poverty. The poorer nations understand this only too well, which is why they see Copenhagen as being about the transfer of vast sums of money from north to south: how much we also cut back our emissions is of much less importance to them.
This is not what adherents of the “catastrophic global warming” faith — the sort of people identified by Mr Justice Burton — want to hear. They believe that the wretched of the world’s poorest nations will not be saved unless we construct vast wind farms across the British countryside and give up generating electricity from coal and gas. In fact, given our own very small share of global emissions, such a policy might lead to the poorest Britons dying of hypothermia, while being of no perceptible benefit to the life of a single future African or Bangladeshi.
I hope that this is not what will happen, either here or there. If it does, perhaps some future traveller to Britain, centuries from now, will examine the excavated remnants of those giant wind turbines and speculate that they were the temples of some primitive faith. He would not be entirely mistaken.
SOURCE
Political climate constipation
Most of those concerned with climate have had their eyes on Barcelona this week, where delegates from 192 countries plus hundreds of observers, campaigners, lobbyists - and journalists - convened for the final session of preparatory talks before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
Barcelona talks: As I've reported, there's been a deal of tension between rich and poor - with the developing world accusing the developed world of forgetting about its needs, as rich nations refuse to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to stave off "dangerous" climate change (their view).
How much of the rancour turns out to be real and how much synthesized as a political bargaining tool we will find out in Copenhagen - although perhaps not until the last few days of that meeting.
What's certain is that unless the US comes forward with a pledge on reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, there will be no deal of any kind, legally binding or politically binding (whatever those phrases may mean precisely).
If the US does produce a figure, it can realistically be in no other ballpark than a 17-20% reduction from 2005 levels by 2020 - that's roughly what President Obama pledged before the election, and roughly what the Boxer-Kerry bill now going through the Senate would produce.
In a news conference here, US negotiator Jonathan Pershing reckoned this would put the US way ahead of the EU on ambition - the US would cut emissions faster that Europe over the next 11 years. The reason is that the EU has already cut emissions markedly between 1990 - the baseline that everyone else uses - and today. And against that baseline, the US pledge will only be about 4% - paltry beside the EU's 20-30% and Japan's 25%.
Mr Pershing may not want the administration to which he belongs to shoulder the burden of making cuts that the Bush government did not... but from the perspective of a developing country many miles away, the US is the US is the US, whoever is in charge at various times.
Is there a formula that everyone could live with? Will the EU consider 4% "comparable" to its own efforts? Would developing countries accept a US pledge as binding in the absence of Senate legislation - given that on the Kyoto Protocol, the US first signed, then declined to ratify, then withdrew?
Could money and technology bridge the gap? Is it, indeed, bridgeable?
Mr Pershing said it's not yet been decided whether the US will put forward a target in Copenhagen and one reason for the non-decision - if non-decision it is, rather than a decision that's been taken and is being kept under wraps - is presumably the sticky passage envisaged for the Boxer-Kerry bill.
Republican senators on the influential Environment and Public Works Committee decided to boycott discussions on the bill this week, saying that a full analysis of its financial costs and benefits was needed first. So committee chair - and bill sponsor - Barbara Boxer pushed it through the committee without debate - a procedure that's apparently rarely used. However, in a sign that not everything is going swimmingly well, senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham started working on a "parallel track" towards a bill that can get the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation in the full Senate. It's likely to include more support for nuclear power and perhaps for the oil and gas industry, while maintaining the cap-and-trade programme that is the current bill's centerpiece.
What this means for prospects of passing climate legislation isn't clear - perhaps not to anyone. But it doesn't exactly sound like a fast track - particularly as the further legislation evolves from the text that the House of Representatives passed in June, the harder it will be to reconcile the two.
Angela Merkel: A high-level European delegation was in Washington this week and although German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to Congress asking for more action on climate change was received with applause on the Democrat side, there was reportedly silence on the other side of the house - another indication that not all US lawmakers are convinced that their president is on the right track on climate change.
Other potentially significant moves this week include the meeting of G20 finance ministers - a meeting expressly charged at the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh with putting a new offer of climate finance on the table. Campaigners are urging them to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as soon as possible. To do so was a pledge made by governments at the G20 summit - it's also an agreed aim under the UN climate convention, which dates all the way back to 1992.
At the time of writing, the finance ministers' meeting is under way but nothing has yet emerged - you can follow my colleague Andrew Walker's reports on the BBC News website and we'll look at it again next week.
A conference will open in the Maldives next week of countries considered especially vulnerable to climate change. Governments invited include Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and a number of Caribbean and Pacific island states. What they'll come up with is likely to include demands for reducing greenhouse gas emissions further and faster than is currently envisaged under the UN process.
The UN texts, the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and some of the developed country targets are loosely aimed at keeping the rise in global average temperatures within 2C since pre-industrial times. The equations are inexact but that may roughly translate to keeping greenhouse gas concentrations below the equivalent of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. For the small island developing states (SIDS), that's too much. They want a maximum of 350ppm adopted as the benchmark.
Although on the surface politicians - especially from Europe - are trimming expectations for Copenhagen, behind the scenes they are also encouraging campaigners to step up the pressure in the intervening weeks.
SOURCE
A BOOK REVIEW of two books: "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" by Nigel Lawson and "Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity" by Nicholas Stern.
Review by MYRON EBELL
Both these books look comprehensively at global warming and cover much the same ground in much the same order. There the similarities end. First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.
That should not be surprising. Lawson was an active participant in the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, which took expert testimony from a wide range of scientists and economists. In 2005, the committee produced the best official report on global warming that has so far been done. Although leading peers from all three major parties were involved and agreed unanimously, their report has been ignored by all three major parties. Its conclusions, you see, were "sceptical".
Lawson's book is for the most part sceptical as well. And appropriately so: a healthy scepticism is a most reasonable attitude to take towards claims of intellectual and political authority. He argues that the rate of warming has been modest, the predictions from computer models of much faster rates in the future are not credible, and the possible adverse impacts are wildly exaggerated. Turning to policy, he argues that adapting to changing climate is much more sensible than trying to reduce drastically greenhouse gas emissions, which would be colossally expensive even if it were possible. Lawson observes that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the European Union's efforts to reduce emissions are not working and that a new international agreement to follow Kyoto that would include the US, China and India is almost certain to fail as well.
More speculatively, Lawson finds the attraction of pursuing energy-rationing policies that would cause much more harm than the potential global warming they are meant to prevent to be based on a quasi-religious enthusiasm. He shrewdly observes that this recent quasi-religious commitment to saving the planet from a harmless trace gas necessary for life, which is popular among the secularised chattering class, is encouraged by political leaders and government officials because it serves their interests by providing a new rationale for exercising their authority and expanding government control over people's lives.
Providing a rationale for more government is exactly what Lord Stern has done, first with the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, released in 2006, and now with his Blueprint for a Safer Planet. The then-Chancellor Gordon Brown commissioned the Review to provide support for government climate policy. It was researched by a large team of government economists led by Stern, a senior UK and international bureaucrat and, most conveniently, Labour Party loyalist. Stern, then plain Sir Nicholas, gave Brown and Prime Minister Blair exactly what they wanted and in so doing became a policy wonk celebrity. He was given a life peerage for his efforts.
Although the mammoth Review appears to be a most professional piece of work and contains an impressive economic apparatus, its methodology and analysis have been rubbished by leading resource economists. The include William Nordhaus of Yale, Richard Tol with multiple academic appointments, Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge, and a team headed by David Henderson, former chief economist at the OECD (to whom Lawson dedicates his book).
I expect many more people will buy Stern's new book than Lawson's, but I doubt that many will read much of it. It is dreary, tedious and full of humbug, but since it appears to confirm the conventional wisdom, buyers can feel reassured by having it on their shelves. The irony is that Lawson's understanding, if not his conclusions, is closer to the mainstream than Stern's. Although acclaimed as a pillar of the establishment view that global warming is a looming catastrophe that requires drastic and immediate action, he is in fact on the extreme fringe on both the science and the economics.
On the science, Stern claims that the case for alarm is indisputable. In fact, however, he does not base his case on scientific facts and observations but rather on the alarming predictions of computer models. As Lawson points out, this is a public relations con by the alarmist industry. The computer models have no forecasting ability, nor do United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists claim that they do, however much they give that impression.
On the economics, in a section titled "Why some economists got it so badly wrong", he dismisses in two pages the economists, more distinguished and expert in the field than he is, who criticised his Review. Rather than explaining why this consensus is wrong, Stern mounts his high horse and claims that the economists who disagree with him do so because they are morally obtuse. This is comical. Lawson aptly compares him to Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.
Stern speaks the language of international do-goodism as only a lifelong practitioner can. We must offer the world's poorest people a low-carbon path out of poverty. Development and saving the planet are not conflicting goals — they can only be accomplished simultaneously. All that is needed is a grand "global deal". This global deal merely requires international collaboration on an unprecedented scale, well-designed policies that are implemented with great care immediately and pursued with unwavering commitment for 40 years, and a vast redistribution of wealth from rich to poor countries. In short, international central planning run by people bearing a remarkable resemblance to Lord Stern.
Stern's global deal looks to me like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that must be made to run in perfect harmony. I'm not surprised that the Labour government finds it an alluring prospect, but I am disturbed that the intellectual adolescents now leading the Conservative Party have found an agreeable guru in Stern as well.
The Tories would in my view do much better if they listened to the sage advice of one of their soundest leaders of the past half century — the former Energy Secretary and Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.
But that may soon happen. Since the Tory leaders base their leadership on what the polls and focus groups tell them to do, even they will eventually recognise that the fad has peaked. Although global warning alarmism is still an article of faith for the chattering class, the general public have never been sold on it and are now becoming painfully aware of the staggering costs to them of reducing emissions.
SOURCE
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Germany's Dr. Ernst Beck some time ago questioned the practice of using proxy data as measures of past CO2 levels. The favoured ice-core proxies have many known problems. He pointed out that chemists have been making direct measurements of ambient CO2 way back into the 19th century and asks why that data is not used. That the direct measurements show much higher levels in the past than the Warmists claim was of course the obvious reason why they have been ignored. The direct measurements show a very different picture from the smooth rise in CO2 levels that the Warmists present.
Warmists have however tried to answer Beck on scientific grounds by alleging that the huge body of past CO2 measurements that he collected had sources of inaccuracy in it too. Prof. Beck has now answered his critics by doing a validation study of the direct measurements. He shows that the direct measurements correspond well to the best modern data. Bottom line: Beck's measurents are the best evidence for past CO2 levels and they show that modern changes in such levels are similar to normal oscillations of the past.
The new paper was presented at a recent climate science conference and was awarded as the best paper presented there. That implies a publication in the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management and a special book. Dr. Beck [egbeck@biokurs.de] was rather surprised to win and thinks that they may not have realized the full implications of his work. The paper is a huge and detailed one with many graphics so I have presented only the abstract and conclusions below. The full paper is however available here.
Accurate estimation of CO2 background level from near ground measurements at non-mixed environments
Authors: Dr. Francis Massen, Dipl. Biol. Ernst-Georg Beck
Abstract
Atmospheric CO2 background levels are sampled and processed according to the standards of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Earth System Research Laboratory mostly at marine environments to minimize the local influence of vegetation, ground or anthropogenic sources. Continental measurements usually show large diurnal and seasonal variations, which makes it difficult to estimate well mixed CO2 levels
Historical CO2 measurements are usually derived from proxies, with ice cores being the favorite. Those done by chemical methods prior to 1960 are often rejected as being inadequate due too poor siting, timing or method. The CO2 versus wind speed plot represents a simple but valuable tool for validating modern and historic continental data. It is shown that either a visual or a mathematical fit can give data that are close to the regional CO2 background, even if the average local mixing ratio is much different......
Conclusion
It has been shown that the CO2 versus wind-speed plot can represent a valuable tool to estimate continental local background CO2 levels despite of distorted mixing ratios or local influences. Applying the procedure to recent well known data gives results that are relatively close to the yearly average of the observational data at Mauna Loa and suggest a maximum difference of about 10 ppm with the global CO2 background as given by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
A validation check has been made for 3 historical CO2 series. The overall impression is one of continental European historic regional CO2 background levels significantly higher than the commonly assumed global ice-core proxy levels.
The CO2 versus wind-speed plot seems to be a good first level validation tool for historical data. With the required caveats it could deliver a reasonable approximation of past regional and possibly past global CO2 background levels.
More HERE
We're doomed without a green religion
A British judge has recently ruled that Greenie beliefs are a religion. The Leftist author below is trying to come to terms with that. He concludes that people must be forced to obey what Warmists want even if Warmism does have an odious religious side. He thinks, probably rightly, that the religious nature of Warmism is a part of what makes it popular and he is on the whole happy about that
The justification for burning heretics was perfectly simple: dissent threatened the survival of society. Nothing was worse than anarchy. This is a viewpoint most people in the West today find pretty much incomprehensible. It is a self-evident truth to them that morality must be a matter of individual choice. And if you believe that, the arguments around the Tim Nicholson case are very difficult to resolve. If there is a moral imperative to preserve the human race, or as much of it as possible, collective consequences must follow. It is not enough for us to do the right thing. Others must as well. If you don't believe that, then there is no point in agitating for success in Copenhagen.
But if collective consequences follow, others must be forced to do things against their will by our moral imperatives. This is exactly the quality that is supposed to be so very obnoxious about religion.
The idea that morality is and must be a matter of individual choice is taken as axiomatic in these debates. It is thought true in the sense that it is held to describe a fact about the world. Very often the same people who believe this will also believe, and maintain with equal vehemence in other contexts the belief that morals are merely opinions, or at least that there couldn't in the nature of things be moral facts: true or false statements about whether something or someone is good or bad.
This was neatly if not nicely expressed by one of the commenters on Tim Nicholson's article here, who said: "You may believe less flying and driving, and more wind farms, and so on to be moral imperatives. I don't. You are entitled to your beliefs, and should not be persecuted for them. But they are just beliefs. You want to argue the politics of how to respond to climate change: great. But you can stop wrapping your proposed solutions up in 'moral imperative' cotton wool."
These are not the only confusions which the Nicholson case raises. Many people who are upset by the court's equating a scientific opinion with a religion belief suppose that science is true and rational, religion is false and irrational, and that this division of the world is itself factual and rational. If this is how the world appears to you, then there is no question that climate change is not a religion. That would mean that it wasn't really happening, and that we were free to ignore it. Both supporters and opponents of environmentalism can often agree both that it might be a religion and that would be a bad thing. This is why, in general, the people who maintain that environmentalism is like a religion are opposed to it; while those in favour deny it is anything like a religion. (A further complication is supplied by right-wing Christians like Daniel Johnson who maintain that religion is a good thing, but environmentalism is a false religion.)
But can this sharp distinction between truth and falsity, fact and value, actually describe the world? The unexamined assumption is that we can split the world into a sphere of facts and a sphere of opinions and that the facts will speak for themselves. And, as a matter of fact, that is false. I'm not caliming here that there are no facts, or that there are only opinions, or that science is only socially constructed. I just need to point out that fact and opinion are not two distinct substances.
Myles Allen wrote yesterday: "I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence." But while this is an admirable ideal, it is wholly impossible in practice. You cannot believe in science if you do not also believe in scientists. That is why the faking of results is such a terrible threat to the whole enterprise [And who are the ones doing the faking? Warmists like Briffa, Mann etc]. Nor is "evidence" a a simple thing visible to the naked eye. Without quite a specialised education, the nature and force of scientific evidence is quite literally invisible. Even when the evidence is overwhelming there will always be smart and otherwise well-educated people to ignore it if they have other more powerful reasons to do so. The instinct of most scientists is to suppose that this can be cured by teaching people science. But that's never going to work, however desirable it is for other reasons. Scientists want to be believed becasuse of the truth they are telling is so overwhelming as to make trust unnecessary, but in practice they will either be trusted or ignored.
There is a strand of atheism, or perhaps of anti-theism, which redefines "religion" to include all forms of collective faith, chiefly communism. Although this may have originated as a rhetorical move in order to deny that the communists who killed millions of Christians were actually atheists, it does express something deeper: a conviction that compulsion in the name of any belief is itself immoral. Now whether anyone actually truly and consistently believes this is another question. What matters in this context is that lots of people believe that they do believe it.
Climate change makes that position entirely incoherent. Because it is a global tragedy of the commons, individual action cannot be enough. I cannot ensure the survival of my grandchildren, nor even yours, without compelling you to behave in ways that science tells me are necessary. Not to act, not to coerce, itself becomes immoral.
There is a further twist to the argument. Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won't do it. People aren't made like that. They need to believe in what they are forced to do. They need idealism, and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion. But we can't engineer it. It can only arise spontaneously. Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth, and when they do that, they'll have lost. I just hope it doesn't happen too late.
SOURCE
The Dawn of Weimar Britain
An apparently Left-leaning sociologist below is not so happy with Warmism as a religion. He sees it as potentially leading to Nazism
Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less – or, should I say, no more? – than Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, a work whose authoritativeness matches that of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything in the history of science discipline. But that’s not really my point….
My point is to draw attention to the five criteria that the judge offered to expand the definition of ‘religious discrimination’ that may be invoked by others in the future in similar cases:
• The belief must be genuinely held.
• It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.
• It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life.
• It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.
• It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.
Humanism was given as an example meeting the criteria, while belief in a political party or the supreme nature of Jedi knights, from the Star Wars movies, were offered as ones that do not.
The general response to this ruling has been positive, with some lawyers seeing it as opening the door to the re-classification of stances like feminism, humanism and vegetarianism as protected religious beliefs. Even New Atheism might count!
I completely disagree with the ruling and the sentiment informing it. In fact, I published a letter in the Guardian the next day, which said: "Justice Burton’s ruling in favour of a green activist whose beliefs interfered with his job has the potential for becoming an epistemological nightmare. In particular, by raising what were previously treated as ‘political’ and ‘lifestyle’ choices to the status of ‘genuinely held beliefs’, the ruling effectively creates an incentive to be dogmatic in one’s opinions, simply in order to avoid forms of social intercourse that one finds disagreeable. After all, evidence of a changed mind is all that would be needed to lose one the protection afforded by the ruling."
A potential practical consequence of this ruling is complete social and political gridlock. It reminds me of Article 118 of the old Weimar Constitution, the first half of which reads as follows: "Every German is entitled, within the bounds set by general law, to express his opinion freely in word, writing, print, image or otherwise. No job contract may obstruct him in the exercise of this right; nobody may put him at a disadvantage if he makes use of this right."
What’s gone wrong here? Part of the answer lies in how ‘free individuals’ is conceptualised. The Weimar Constitution began with a majority principle based on the idea of a ‘German people’ whose common values uphold the constitution. One of those values, of course, is freedom of expression. But to enforce that freedom, the constitution then needs to allow for ‘minority rights’, whereby individuals with deeply held beliefs are allowed opt-out clauses from certain aspects of normal social life that inhibit their expression; otherwise, the majority principle would prove oppressive. Hans Kelsen, one of the great legal minds behind the Weimar Constitution, justifies all this (though without quite seeing its practical consequences) in On the Essence and Value of Democracy (1929).
In the Weimar period, ‘minority rights’ were normally understood in ethnic terms but of course this was also the time when feminism, vegetarianism, etc. start to be recognized as ‘identity politics’. In any case, the pernicious long-term consequence of this way of thinking about freedom of expression is that it encourages a hardening of one’s sense of identity in order to gain personal and political leverage. Of course, in the case of ethnic identity, such a move can be easily turned against oneself – as the Nazis showed all too well.
My own view is that liberal democratic societies should discourage the formation of strong identities – be they around blood or belief – otherwise they will end up undermining their own principles.
SOURCE
Non-believers fill the church of green gods
By Dominic Lawson, son of Nigel Lawson. Both are skeptical about Warmism
‘Al Gore, who art in thy fully offset private jet; Nobel-prized be thy name; thy carbon-free kingdom come; on planet Earth (otherwise known as Gaia) as it should be after Copenhagen; give us this day our daily meat-free diet; and forgive us our emissions, though we don’t forgive any other big fat Americans who emit against us; lead us not into exotic holiday flights; and deliver us from climate denial; for the science is settled. Amen.”
That lacks a certain resonance, I must admit; but now that a British judge has ruled that believers in man-made global warming catastrophe should be protected under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, we should try to come forward with some suitable prayers for this newly identified faith.
Mr Justice Burton, of the High Court, is the man behind the ruling. He found for a “sustainability officer” called Tim Nicholson, who claimed he had been made redundant by the property company Grainger because of his beliefs in imminent man-made climate catastrophe. To be precise, the judge did not say that Nicholson had actually been sacked for that reason; only that he had the right to sue for unfair dismissal under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations.
Why should Tim Nicholson (who looked sweet with his fold-up bicycle outside the High Court) have wanted to establish this as the reason for his dismissal? Possibly it was a desire to become an ecological hero; but I am equally inclined to see the hand of some very clever employment lawyers. In a “normal” redundancy, the departing employee is entitled only to a statutory minimum payoff together with anything already defined in his contract; but when a court finds that the employee has been sacked as a result of some form of discrimination, then there is no legal limit to the amount that can be claimed.
This is why there have been a number of multi-million-pound payouts for City women winning claims that they have been victims of sex discrimination at work. It may seem unlikely that Nicholson’s case, even if it ultimately succeeds at the forthcoming tribunal, will be followed by many others; but given the number of “sustainability officers” employed in the soon-to-be-cut-back public sector and the ingenious opportunism of employment lawyers, who knows?
The more perceptive environmental campaigners did not join in Nicholson’s rejoicing at his victory. They noted that in Burton’s judgment a belief qualified for protection only if it could be said to be “not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available”. In other words, said the judge, Nicholson’s views on man’s influence on climate — which had brought him into conflict with his chief executive over allegedly excessive air trips — went beyond evidence and were more a form of philosophy, or even faith.
Interestingly, Burton is the very same judge that two years ago found for a Kent school governor who brought a case against the government’s plans to supply every school with a DVD of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The judge agreed that the film was flawed. He decreed that it contained nine scientific errors and that the government should accompany any DVDs sent to schools with guidance pointing out, among other things, that polar bears are not drowning in the absence of sufficient quantities of ice. Put away those hankies, children: they’re going to be all right.
It’s one of the properties of established religions that people profess to believe even when they don’t, really. That may seem hypocritical, but social pressure is a powerful force that can make even the most independent minds quail. Richard Dawkins is probably right, for example, when he says there are many Americans who are privately atheist but find it much easier to pretend to be Christians. A similar point was made to me by one of the only five Conservative MPs to vote against the Climate Change Bill. When I told him I was surprised so many Tories felt the carbon cutbacks required by the bill were achievable, he laughed. “None of them do, but they want to be seen to be virtuous.”
A year or so ago, a couple of ministers, Ed Balls and Shaun Woodward, were observed travelling in separate chauffeur-driven cars from the same Downing Street meeting to the same dinner party, 150 yards away. Their chauffeurs waited outside and then after dinner drove the two ministers, again separately, to the Commons, all of 300 yards further on. Because the dinner party was for Labour donors, the Tories insisted that it had been inappropriate to use official limousines — at least for the first 150 yards. The more interesting point was that if Balls and Woodward truly believed — as the government claims — that millions of children yet unborn will die of thirst if we do not immediately check our excessive and avoidable CO2 emissions, they surely would not have condemned another suppositious baby African or two to death by choosing not to walk a quarter of a mile down Whitehall. As so often, it is our actions that reveal our thinking, rather than our words.
This has been made clear by the run-up to next month’s Copenhagen summit, which was supposed to supply the successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol, according mandatory CO2 emissions targets to all the nations of the world. Kyoto had excluded developing countries, and the US refuses to sign any treaty (Barack Obama is little different from George W Bush in this respect) unless such vast nations as China and India come on board. Almost every country pays lip-service to the view that an agreement in Copenhagen is necessary to “save the planet”, but it is now clear that no treaty will be agreed next month.
An article in Prospect magazine by one who had been attending the interminable meetings leading up to the Copenhagen summit reveals how this process really functions — or, rather, doesn’t. It points out that there will be at least 20,000 delegates flying into Copenhagen, but even the intermediate meetings of the relevant UN committee attract up to 10,000 delegates, producing negotiations described by one attendee as “complete unreality ... delegates just talk past each other”.
Apparently the most intractable delegation — and bear in mind that a deal requires complete consensus, not a mere majority — is the Saudi team, which has been arguing that a swingeing cutback on fossil fuels is “economic discrimination” against oil-exporting nations. Yes, Saudi Arabia is already an arid desert nation, but it is rich enough to keep its people supplied with irrigation: this makes the unfashionable point that it is not climate change that condemns Africans to early death, but poverty. The poorer nations understand this only too well, which is why they see Copenhagen as being about the transfer of vast sums of money from north to south: how much we also cut back our emissions is of much less importance to them.
This is not what adherents of the “catastrophic global warming” faith — the sort of people identified by Mr Justice Burton — want to hear. They believe that the wretched of the world’s poorest nations will not be saved unless we construct vast wind farms across the British countryside and give up generating electricity from coal and gas. In fact, given our own very small share of global emissions, such a policy might lead to the poorest Britons dying of hypothermia, while being of no perceptible benefit to the life of a single future African or Bangladeshi.
I hope that this is not what will happen, either here or there. If it does, perhaps some future traveller to Britain, centuries from now, will examine the excavated remnants of those giant wind turbines and speculate that they were the temples of some primitive faith. He would not be entirely mistaken.
SOURCE
Political climate constipation
Most of those concerned with climate have had their eyes on Barcelona this week, where delegates from 192 countries plus hundreds of observers, campaigners, lobbyists - and journalists - convened for the final session of preparatory talks before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
Barcelona talks: As I've reported, there's been a deal of tension between rich and poor - with the developing world accusing the developed world of forgetting about its needs, as rich nations refuse to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to stave off "dangerous" climate change (their view).
How much of the rancour turns out to be real and how much synthesized as a political bargaining tool we will find out in Copenhagen - although perhaps not until the last few days of that meeting.
What's certain is that unless the US comes forward with a pledge on reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, there will be no deal of any kind, legally binding or politically binding (whatever those phrases may mean precisely).
If the US does produce a figure, it can realistically be in no other ballpark than a 17-20% reduction from 2005 levels by 2020 - that's roughly what President Obama pledged before the election, and roughly what the Boxer-Kerry bill now going through the Senate would produce.
In a news conference here, US negotiator Jonathan Pershing reckoned this would put the US way ahead of the EU on ambition - the US would cut emissions faster that Europe over the next 11 years. The reason is that the EU has already cut emissions markedly between 1990 - the baseline that everyone else uses - and today. And against that baseline, the US pledge will only be about 4% - paltry beside the EU's 20-30% and Japan's 25%.
Mr Pershing may not want the administration to which he belongs to shoulder the burden of making cuts that the Bush government did not... but from the perspective of a developing country many miles away, the US is the US is the US, whoever is in charge at various times.
Is there a formula that everyone could live with? Will the EU consider 4% "comparable" to its own efforts? Would developing countries accept a US pledge as binding in the absence of Senate legislation - given that on the Kyoto Protocol, the US first signed, then declined to ratify, then withdrew?
Could money and technology bridge the gap? Is it, indeed, bridgeable?
Mr Pershing said it's not yet been decided whether the US will put forward a target in Copenhagen and one reason for the non-decision - if non-decision it is, rather than a decision that's been taken and is being kept under wraps - is presumably the sticky passage envisaged for the Boxer-Kerry bill.
Republican senators on the influential Environment and Public Works Committee decided to boycott discussions on the bill this week, saying that a full analysis of its financial costs and benefits was needed first. So committee chair - and bill sponsor - Barbara Boxer pushed it through the committee without debate - a procedure that's apparently rarely used. However, in a sign that not everything is going swimmingly well, senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham started working on a "parallel track" towards a bill that can get the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation in the full Senate. It's likely to include more support for nuclear power and perhaps for the oil and gas industry, while maintaining the cap-and-trade programme that is the current bill's centerpiece.
What this means for prospects of passing climate legislation isn't clear - perhaps not to anyone. But it doesn't exactly sound like a fast track - particularly as the further legislation evolves from the text that the House of Representatives passed in June, the harder it will be to reconcile the two.
Angela Merkel: A high-level European delegation was in Washington this week and although German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to Congress asking for more action on climate change was received with applause on the Democrat side, there was reportedly silence on the other side of the house - another indication that not all US lawmakers are convinced that their president is on the right track on climate change.
Other potentially significant moves this week include the meeting of G20 finance ministers - a meeting expressly charged at the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh with putting a new offer of climate finance on the table. Campaigners are urging them to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as soon as possible. To do so was a pledge made by governments at the G20 summit - it's also an agreed aim under the UN climate convention, which dates all the way back to 1992.
At the time of writing, the finance ministers' meeting is under way but nothing has yet emerged - you can follow my colleague Andrew Walker's reports on the BBC News website and we'll look at it again next week.
A conference will open in the Maldives next week of countries considered especially vulnerable to climate change. Governments invited include Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and a number of Caribbean and Pacific island states. What they'll come up with is likely to include demands for reducing greenhouse gas emissions further and faster than is currently envisaged under the UN process.
The UN texts, the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and some of the developed country targets are loosely aimed at keeping the rise in global average temperatures within 2C since pre-industrial times. The equations are inexact but that may roughly translate to keeping greenhouse gas concentrations below the equivalent of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. For the small island developing states (SIDS), that's too much. They want a maximum of 350ppm adopted as the benchmark.
Although on the surface politicians - especially from Europe - are trimming expectations for Copenhagen, behind the scenes they are also encouraging campaigners to step up the pressure in the intervening weeks.
SOURCE
A BOOK REVIEW of two books: "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" by Nigel Lawson and "Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity" by Nicholas Stern.
Review by MYRON EBELL
Both these books look comprehensively at global warming and cover much the same ground in much the same order. There the similarities end. First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.
That should not be surprising. Lawson was an active participant in the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, which took expert testimony from a wide range of scientists and economists. In 2005, the committee produced the best official report on global warming that has so far been done. Although leading peers from all three major parties were involved and agreed unanimously, their report has been ignored by all three major parties. Its conclusions, you see, were "sceptical".
Lawson's book is for the most part sceptical as well. And appropriately so: a healthy scepticism is a most reasonable attitude to take towards claims of intellectual and political authority. He argues that the rate of warming has been modest, the predictions from computer models of much faster rates in the future are not credible, and the possible adverse impacts are wildly exaggerated. Turning to policy, he argues that adapting to changing climate is much more sensible than trying to reduce drastically greenhouse gas emissions, which would be colossally expensive even if it were possible. Lawson observes that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the European Union's efforts to reduce emissions are not working and that a new international agreement to follow Kyoto that would include the US, China and India is almost certain to fail as well.
More speculatively, Lawson finds the attraction of pursuing energy-rationing policies that would cause much more harm than the potential global warming they are meant to prevent to be based on a quasi-religious enthusiasm. He shrewdly observes that this recent quasi-religious commitment to saving the planet from a harmless trace gas necessary for life, which is popular among the secularised chattering class, is encouraged by political leaders and government officials because it serves their interests by providing a new rationale for exercising their authority and expanding government control over people's lives.
Providing a rationale for more government is exactly what Lord Stern has done, first with the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, released in 2006, and now with his Blueprint for a Safer Planet. The then-Chancellor Gordon Brown commissioned the Review to provide support for government climate policy. It was researched by a large team of government economists led by Stern, a senior UK and international bureaucrat and, most conveniently, Labour Party loyalist. Stern, then plain Sir Nicholas, gave Brown and Prime Minister Blair exactly what they wanted and in so doing became a policy wonk celebrity. He was given a life peerage for his efforts.
Although the mammoth Review appears to be a most professional piece of work and contains an impressive economic apparatus, its methodology and analysis have been rubbished by leading resource economists. The include William Nordhaus of Yale, Richard Tol with multiple academic appointments, Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge, and a team headed by David Henderson, former chief economist at the OECD (to whom Lawson dedicates his book).
I expect many more people will buy Stern's new book than Lawson's, but I doubt that many will read much of it. It is dreary, tedious and full of humbug, but since it appears to confirm the conventional wisdom, buyers can feel reassured by having it on their shelves. The irony is that Lawson's understanding, if not his conclusions, is closer to the mainstream than Stern's. Although acclaimed as a pillar of the establishment view that global warming is a looming catastrophe that requires drastic and immediate action, he is in fact on the extreme fringe on both the science and the economics.
On the science, Stern claims that the case for alarm is indisputable. In fact, however, he does not base his case on scientific facts and observations but rather on the alarming predictions of computer models. As Lawson points out, this is a public relations con by the alarmist industry. The computer models have no forecasting ability, nor do United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists claim that they do, however much they give that impression.
On the economics, in a section titled "Why some economists got it so badly wrong", he dismisses in two pages the economists, more distinguished and expert in the field than he is, who criticised his Review. Rather than explaining why this consensus is wrong, Stern mounts his high horse and claims that the economists who disagree with him do so because they are morally obtuse. This is comical. Lawson aptly compares him to Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.
Stern speaks the language of international do-goodism as only a lifelong practitioner can. We must offer the world's poorest people a low-carbon path out of poverty. Development and saving the planet are not conflicting goals — they can only be accomplished simultaneously. All that is needed is a grand "global deal". This global deal merely requires international collaboration on an unprecedented scale, well-designed policies that are implemented with great care immediately and pursued with unwavering commitment for 40 years, and a vast redistribution of wealth from rich to poor countries. In short, international central planning run by people bearing a remarkable resemblance to Lord Stern.
Stern's global deal looks to me like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that must be made to run in perfect harmony. I'm not surprised that the Labour government finds it an alluring prospect, but I am disturbed that the intellectual adolescents now leading the Conservative Party have found an agreeable guru in Stern as well.
The Tories would in my view do much better if they listened to the sage advice of one of their soundest leaders of the past half century — the former Energy Secretary and Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.
But that may soon happen. Since the Tory leaders base their leadership on what the polls and focus groups tell them to do, even they will eventually recognise that the fad has peaked. Although global warning alarmism is still an article of faith for the chattering class, the general public have never been sold on it and are now becoming painfully aware of the staggering costs to them of reducing emissions.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Sunday, November 08, 2009
No Consensus about Anthropogenic Global Warming
By S. Fred Singer
There is a general impression, based on flawed analyses [Oreskes in Science 2004] that scientists support nearly unanimously the so-called scientific consensus on AGW. But more than 31,000 scientists and engineers disagree and have signed a petition that affirms their disbelief in AGW [for a listing of names see pp. 745-855, in Climate Change Reconsidered, available at www.NIPCCreport.org]
There is even widespread belief that major scientific societies, like the American Geophysical Union (AGU), have polled their membership before issuing formal Statements which essentially endorse the IPCC conclusion that the temperature rise of the past 50 years has been caused by human activity – and more specifically by the emission of greenhouse (GH) gases. Not so: This false impression seems to be due to a misleading survey result published in an AGU journal [P. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman, Eos 90, 20 Jan 2009, pp 22-23].
We will discuss this survey here and the question of bias and confounding factors. The Eos authors report the response of 3146 earth scientists to two questions:
1. Has the climate warmed, cooled, or remained constant -- compared to pre-1800?
Regardless of what one may believe about the causes of climate change, the answer must be: 'Warming.' Pre-1800 refers to the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1800. [If the question were changed to 'compared to 1998,' then the answer would be 'Cooling.']
2. Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing global mean temperature?
Here the answer will depend on what is meant by 'significant' -- and whether 'human activity' should include urbanization, land changes, agriculture, irrigation, deforestation, etc. Many might answer 'Yes' – even if they don't think that GH gases are a significant factor in climate change.
The authors report that their selection involved faculty in relevant academic departments and employees of government establishments. Presumably, they did not include retirees or those in the private sector. The authors claim that known dissenters were included. But my casual inquiries did not find anyone who participated.
Most of the responders described themselves as geochemists; only 5% claimed to be 'climate scientists.' (But where are the 'atmospheric scientists'?)
The widely quoted result of the survey is a 97.4% 'Yes' to question #2; it is based on a sample of only 77 responses from 'actively publishing climate scientists.' Disregarding the claimed accuracy, what can we deduce from this response? That these are likely individuals who derive large research grants and contracts from a federal budget that almost exclusively supports research designed to affirm AGW. [Of this same group, only 96.2% (rather than 100%) thought that the climate had warmed since 1800. It would be interesting to learn who these individuals are.]
By contrast, on question #2, less than half of 'economic geologists' (103 responses) said 'Yes' and slightly more than one-third of 'meteorologists' (36 responses) said 'No.'
The American Physical Society (APS) in 2007 published a position statement enthusiastically endorsing AGW, without reference to the views of its members. Recently, some 200 APS members and Fellows have petitioned the APS Council to change or withdraw the Statement, in view of scientific evidence that is counter to AGW. Perhaps there will develop a similar initiative within the AGU.
SEPP Science Editorial #35-2009 (11/7/09)
Warmists creating Green jobs -- in China
Evergreen Solar Inc. reported a 21 percent sequential rise in revenue in the third quarter on brisk sales of its solar panels, but the company confirmed speculation that they will be moving the production of panels out of its Devens plant. The Marlborough-based solar panel maker said that it would refocus the Devens plant, built in 2007, to production of the solar wafers but it would construct panels in China through a contract manufacturing agreement with Jaiwei Solarchina Co. Ltd.
A Boston Business Journal article in June indicated that company officials were considering such a move if solar panel prices fell sharply and the company was unable to cut labor costs fast enough.
On Wednesday, Evergreen CEO Richard Feldt said in a statement those factors ultimately came into play in the decision. “Panel prices have fallen 30 percent since mid-2008, making it very difficult for manufacturers located in high-cost regions to remain price competitive. Therefore, we are accelerating our strategic initiative of increasing the focus on our unique wafer manufacturing technology, and we will begin to transition our Devens-based panel assembly to China in mid-2010,” he said.
The announcement comes as Evergreen Solar appears to have regained some financial footing after the steep dropoff in solar demand earlier this year. It posted third quarter revenue of $77.7 million compared with revenue of $63.8 million last quarter and $17.8 million for the same quarter a year ago. Yet despite narrowing operating losses year over year by 73 percent to $6 million, a heavy tax hit resulted in Evergreen posting a net loss of $82.4 million.
SOURCE
More “work” for the president
The Obama administration takes aim at climate scientists
In the blame game, the Obama administration isn't about to stop with Fox News. Instead, it's moving on to lowly scientists. Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying "those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary." Then, the president talked tough, saying, "We'll just have to deal with those people," language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.
This surely isn't the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end.
The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it's pretty cold). The earth's surface is dominated by two very different substances — uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans — so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well.
Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so — a common occurrence — temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there's a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken.
Finally, there's carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved.
And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide–induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century.
What you can say is happening to the climate depends on the period you choose to study. Using the surface-temperature record that scientists cite the most, you will find a significant cooling trend after 2000. You'll find no significant trend whatsoever if you start in any year between 1996 and 2000. Beginning your trend before 1996 will yield you significant warming. And so forth. It's therefore not surprising that anyone can see anything on the climate Ouija board.
In fact, though, there's only one thing that is clear: For the last decade and a half, our climate has not behaved in accordance with the predictions of most climate models. They just don't predict such a long hiatus in warming even as carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity continue to climb.
Note to the president: I do not say that to "defeat or delay" your policies on climate change. The fact is that the U.S. Senate is likely to do that anyway, with or without this information. Early on Election Day, the GOP boycotted a session of the Environment and Public Works Committee in protest of a climate-change bill's costs, and Democrats were split on the legislation as well. Tuesday's election results are likely to give Blue Dog Democrats further pause.
If the Senate does not pass a climate bill that is acceptable to the president, Obama is almost certain to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions that he can take to the Copenhagen climate conference next month as evidence of America's efforts. These will then be used to extract some vague concessions on the part of the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, and the Copenhagen Protocol will be hailed as a major victory over global warming.
Of course, it will be no such thing. If the EPA does issue global-warming regulations, it will have to defend the science that it uses to raise the price of virtually everything. And it is true, Mr. President, that people will use the inconvenient facts of recent climate behavior to defeat or delay the "change" the EPA commands. The administration may respond by "working on" the global-warming people it doesn't like, but it can't "work on" the obvious and growing disconnect between what was forecast and what is happening.
The administration did a great job of increasing the ratings of Fox News. Maybe it can do the same for dissident scientists.
SOURCE
Renewable Banality: The Latest British Export
I loved the true story of the Nigerian energy worker who, having received a pay check for $900, amended the figure to read $9,000. As the reporter wittily put it, “The check fraud proved entirely successful ... right up to the point where he attempted to cash it.” That’s kind of how I feel about the renewable energy revolution. It will prove entirely successful in the eyes of the public and media -- right up to the point where the lights start going out. And those lights will soon start going out, according to a new report.
I fully understand the romantic attraction of the clean energy revolution and the rush to replace ‘dirty’ fossil fuels. In the light of the war on carbon it’s a no brainer, right? Which is precisely why, just as diminishing EU and UK subsidies are prompting an industry exodus westward, the British renewables industry may be about to be given an unexpected investment shot in the arm from some of the world’s biggest multinational companies in one of the biggest analogs to the adage “I gave at the church,” in this case the environmentalism church. Companies, it seems, in their rush to appear politically correct are oblivious to how that renewable revolution is ushering in a new dark age in Britain.
Why the multinationals?
Speaking at a UK Confederation of British Industries (CBI) conference in October, the Bank of America’s head of power and utilities, John Lynch, named companies like Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and IKEA (the Swedish home goods company) as being potential new investors for Britain’s offshore wind industry. “This is the technology that the UK is leading in, and these companies are looking at ways to get involved,” Lynch told his CBI audience, “because it meets their own corporate social responsibility objectives.” Enthusing over the prospect of a massive new injection of funds for British industry, Lynch noted how the Crown Estate (which owns the UK seabed) had launched the offshore program specifically to enable Britain to meet its target of 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 compared with 1990 levels. Clearly nobody had told Lynch that in recent weeks the leaders of Britain’s biggest energy companies privately warned the government that its climate targets, contingent upon renewable sources replacing hydrocarbon fuels, are “illusory” and “delusional.”
Not that the sudden growing corporate sense of responsibility should be seen in entirely philanthropic terms. The greater motivating factor is the spectre of national climate bills, post-Copenhagen in December, when their low carbon commitments will need to be demonstrated. And what could be more credible than investing in the world’s premier energy experiment?
But I wonder if the promoters of renewables might not think twice given so many UK energy insiders are predicting an impending national energy crisis? A crisis brought on by a UK energy policy based on achieving the economically non-viable, the geographically unacceptable, and, ultimately and most crucially, the mathematically impossible.
As regards to the economically-non-viable, we might begin by noting there would be no renewable energy revolution at all if it were not for government subsidies fuelling it. Quite simply, no business or private equity investor in his right mind would invest in a loss-making business with such an appallingly poor rate of return.
That is why, just a few weeks ago the UK saw its only turbine manufacturer close the door of a major plant, citing low demand, public opposition and diminishing government revenue. Note how public opposition – the geographical unacceptability – has seen UK land-based wind farm applications mired in planning battles, leaving only the even more expensive offshore option. What does this presage for those nations with less available seabed, I wonder? More generally, the non-viability of renewables, and wind power specifically, as a serious commercial proposition has been demonstrated time and again. Wind’s unreliability, its need for (mostly gas turbine) back-up facilities, the problem of storage in times of over-capacity and the fact that it will not save at all on natural gas use, combine to present a formidable technological obstacle.
But while the, oft-hidden, costs associated with all renewable energies on closer inspection should prove prohibitive and potentially economy-busting, the intellectual axe for the renewables revolution finally falls when basic math proves that it makes no economic sense at all. In his brilliant essay Understanding E=mc2, William Tucker helpfully applies the understanding of energy = mass to the issue of renewables. Above all he demonstrates why renewables, and wind and water specifically, are mathematically unable to produce the industrial scale energy power essential to keeping the lights on in any industrialized society.
Tucker explains, “Wind and water are matter in motion that we harness to produce energy.” In a nutshell, what Tucker shows is that the density of mass in both wind and water, being critically far less than oil, coal and gas, is simply unable to produce anything approaching a reasonable energy output. Tucker calculates, for instance, that a land mass of about 375 square miles with around 660 widely spaced windmills would be necessary to get a power return of just 1,000MW, the production capacity of one large hydrocarbon-powered facility. (With offshore wind turbines associated problems of distance, leakage and maintenance costs must all be significantly scaled up.) Put bluntly, Tucker shows that industrial scale renewable energy is, realistically and mathematically, an economic non-starter.
Ironically, just as UK and European subsidy opportunities are dwindling and the revolution faltering, the retail multinationals may be about to reinvigorate the flagging UK program. And as the economic cost of renewables is being counted across Europe, Britain’s energy-climate policy is likely to be touted increasingly as the blueprint for others to follow. A rash of UK studies continue to sound alarm bells over the government’s current energy direction and, one of these, just published, should do the same well beyond UK shores.
Does it really take an Einstein?
In October, the UK energy regulator, Ofgem (The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets), warned that Britain was facing 1970s style power blackouts within just four years – a much shorter timescale than previously thought. Project Discovery cited the British government’s failure to renovate its “crumbling power infrastructure” due to compliance with new EU rules that will force the closure of a quarter of the country’s power stations by 2015. In a typically British understatement, Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem’s chief executive warned, “There could be a potential shortfall in the period 2013-18 ... Life might be pretty cold.” Buchanan’s assessment is that only an “involuntary curtailment of demand” – power cuts – can conserve household supplies, unless the government acts urgently to upgrade its nuclear plants. Jeremy Nicholson, of the Energy Intensive Users Group, representing some of Britain’s biggest manufacturers, said that power cuts that hit UK business first would present a “material threat to heavy industry.” Nicholson also warned that once the crisis hit the 60 percent hike in British energy bills currently being acknowledged by the government will, more realistically, hit the 120 percent mark.
Bottom line? If Einstein’s E=mc2 as it applies to renewable energy doesn’t cut the intellectual ice for prospective investors and foreign governments alike, perhaps another will. Try this: UK energy-climate policy, circa 2009 = a blueprint for black-outs. See what I mean about a fraudulent check being entirely successful right up to the point of cashing it?
SOURCE
Freaking Out over Global Warming
One of the ugliest battles in the blogosphere climate wars has involved the newly released Superfreakonomics, sequel to the best-selling Freakonomics. In their new book's final chapter,Download PDF economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner set out to challenge the view that massively restricting carbon emissions is the only hope for averting planetwide catastrophe. Some of the most outspoken advocates for immediate "carbon legislation," such as Joe Romm and Paul Krugman, were appalled by the chapter.
I can't do Levitt and Dubner's presentation justice here; I encourage the interested reader to read the chapter. To summarize very briefly, they argue that if global warming really is a threat, then it does not follow that governments need to enforce draconian cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, which would cost many trillions of dollars over the next few decades.
Instead, a "geoengineering" solution could be adopted to keep the earth cool despite increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Perhaps the most fanciful idea is to suspend a hose using helium balloons, in order to pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This would reflect some of the incoming sunlight and arrest (or even reverse) global warming, just as occurred after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Best of all, this particular approach would only cost about $250 million total — less than what Al Gore's foundation is spending just to "raise awareness" about climate change.
Naturally, the proponents of massive government interventions into the economy were furious at Levitt and Dubner's claims. Physicist and Clinton administration Department of Energy official Joe Romm got the ball rolling with this fiery post in which he accused the Superfreakonomics writers not merely of being incredibly sloppy in their summary of the climate science but also of consciously distorting the views of the scientists they quoted.
Romm's frequent ally in such matters, Paul Krugman, soon followed suit and claimed that the authors horribly mischaracterized the views of leading climate economists in the chapter. Dubner defended himself and co-author Levitt against Romm's accusations of intentional distortion in this post, and physicist (and all-around guru) Nathan Myhrvold, one of the primary sources for the chapter, defended himself from Romm's accusations of ignorance here....
In a series of posts (one, two, and three), DeLong heaps extreme criticism on our authors. Under normal circumstances, DeLong's criticisms would be described as "scathing," yet compared to Romm's treatment, it's kid-glove stuff. For our purposes here, I want to focus on just two of DeLong's (many) complaints. First, DeLong quotes Levitt who said (during an NPR interview): "If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…."
DeLong is astounded by this claim, and responds, "That's just not economics: economics is that incentives change, and as incentives change people's behavior changes."
DeLong is right: what Levitt said is "not economics." Rather, it's a historical claim. Maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong, but DeLong can't trump it by citing a tautology from microeconomics. I am sure that Levitt would concede the narrow point that if governments around the world instituted a massive carbon tax, and enforced it with draconian penalties for evasion, then global emissions would indeed fall quickly.
But one of Levitt's main points is that governments around the world are not going to do this — that it is naive to expect them to sacrifice their own economies when (in Levitt's opinion) the climate science is not nearly certain enough to justify this painful step.
Levitt is making a prediction — based on his interpretation of history — that if man-made global warming really does require drastic measures in the next few decades, the response will involve various forms of geoengineering, which (Levitt predicts) will cost a tiny fraction of what the carbon mitigation proposals would require. To repeat, I'm not saying I necessarily endorse Levitt's glib proclamations on these points, but DeLong is wrong to dismiss them as somehow "not economics."
Finally let's deal with another point on which DeLong completely misses Levitt's valid argument. He first quotes Levitt: "Now, in the long run, perhaps you'll want to deal with the [high] carbon [dioxide] issue [even with geoengineering] because we're going to have acidification of the oceans and the coral reefs will die if we don't do something about the carbon. But if you just buy the time to keep the Earth cool for a while longer, I am certain that if we invest we will come up with technology that will allow us much more effectively in the future to pull carbon out of the air than we currently have…."
DeLong points out that whatever mechanism our descendants use to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will require power generation. He then argues: "So now we have (a) our normal power plants to power our civilization, plus (b) our atmosphere carbon-scrubbing industry, which is (c) powered by even more carbon power plants to generate the power to break the carbon-oxygen bonds that our first set of power plants made. But plants (c) put more carbon into the atmosphere than plants (a) did. I know, says Steve Levitt, we can power our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) by power plants (c) that use nuclear or solar or… But then why not power our original civilization-sustaining power plants (a) by nuclear or solar or whatever?"
Now this is frankly silly. Let's be clear, I think Levitt and Dubner made some major goofs in their chapter, and DeLong (as well as Romm and Krugman) nailed them. But here DeLong is making an obvious mistake. He is neglecting the fact that it will be much, much cheaper to engage in carbon-free energy production the longer we wait. Does DeLong really not see this elementary point and how it makes Levitt's argument perfectly sensible?
For an analogy, consider people who contract a terminal illness and then elect to have their bodies cryonically frozen so that they can be resuscitated and cured in the future. Now maybe that's a good idea or maybe it's not, but it wouldn't really make sense for someone to say, "That's just bad economics! Why go to the trouble of having your cancer cured in the future? Just do it now." Yet that is exactly the argument DeLong has deployed against Levitt.
Conclusion
There is a reason that the energy infrastructure in today's market economies is so heavily based upon fossil fuels: they are by far the cheapest, most reliable forms of energy, given the needs of modern society. Regardless of their (alleged) sloppy scholarship, Levitt and Dubner raise an interesting possibility that deserves careful scrutiny, not ridicule: even if it turns out that unfettered use of fossil fuels will spell unacceptable climate damages to future generations, it does not follow that the only solution is immediate and drastic reductions in carbon emissions.
Another possibility is to buy a few decades' worth of "breathing room" (Myhrvold's phrase in the book) through pumping SO2 into the stratosphere, for example, and then make the transition to carbon-free energy production when it will not be so terribly costly.
It's surprising that some of the people who warn that the fate of the planet itself is it stake are so dismissive of what could be a crucial component of humanity's response to the very dangers of which they're warning.
More HERE (See the original for links)
Britain's already bled-dry taxpayers owe lots more again, according to Warmists
Should a country that cannot even staff its hospitals adequately be sending billions to African dictators? Reality-challenged Warmists say YES!
Britain owes developing countries "climate compensation" of more than £17 billion a year for its contribution to climate change, according to a report by anti-poverty groups. The UN estimates more than £250 billion a year will be needed in coming decades to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. Based on the UK's emissions, Britain is responsible for providing six per cent of the total.
The report also attacked the government's climate finance proposals as "grossly inadequate" to tackle the scale of the problem. The proposals, which look as though they will dominate this weekend's G20 talks, are more likely to increase third world debt.
The World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign warned the issue of climate debt will be a "Copenhagen deal-breaker" for developing countries. Report author Tim Jones said: "It's incredibly alarming that cash the government claims will help developing countries cope with climate change will actually increase their unfair debts. "This is a huge injustice because we owe a much bigger debt to compensate developing countries for climate change.
"The UK government needs to realise that the issue of climate debt will be a Copenhagen-deal breaker," he continued. "If rich countries refuse to recognise it, deeply rooted inequality and injustice will be locked in for decades to come."
The report criticises the UK's policy of channelling climate aid through the World Bank, which comes under fire for distributing finance through loans instead of aid, and for not insisting the money funds low carbon energy investment. The campaigners recommend grants be used in place of loans, and for climate finance to be dispersed through the UN.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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By S. Fred Singer
There is a general impression, based on flawed analyses [Oreskes in Science 2004] that scientists support nearly unanimously the so-called scientific consensus on AGW. But more than 31,000 scientists and engineers disagree and have signed a petition that affirms their disbelief in AGW [for a listing of names see pp. 745-855, in Climate Change Reconsidered, available at www.NIPCCreport.org]
There is even widespread belief that major scientific societies, like the American Geophysical Union (AGU), have polled their membership before issuing formal Statements which essentially endorse the IPCC conclusion that the temperature rise of the past 50 years has been caused by human activity – and more specifically by the emission of greenhouse (GH) gases. Not so: This false impression seems to be due to a misleading survey result published in an AGU journal [P. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman, Eos 90, 20 Jan 2009, pp 22-23].
We will discuss this survey here and the question of bias and confounding factors. The Eos authors report the response of 3146 earth scientists to two questions:
1. Has the climate warmed, cooled, or remained constant -- compared to pre-1800?
Regardless of what one may believe about the causes of climate change, the answer must be: 'Warming.' Pre-1800 refers to the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1800. [If the question were changed to 'compared to 1998,' then the answer would be 'Cooling.']
2. Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing global mean temperature?
Here the answer will depend on what is meant by 'significant' -- and whether 'human activity' should include urbanization, land changes, agriculture, irrigation, deforestation, etc. Many might answer 'Yes' – even if they don't think that GH gases are a significant factor in climate change.
The authors report that their selection involved faculty in relevant academic departments and employees of government establishments. Presumably, they did not include retirees or those in the private sector. The authors claim that known dissenters were included. But my casual inquiries did not find anyone who participated.
Most of the responders described themselves as geochemists; only 5% claimed to be 'climate scientists.' (But where are the 'atmospheric scientists'?)
The widely quoted result of the survey is a 97.4% 'Yes' to question #2; it is based on a sample of only 77 responses from 'actively publishing climate scientists.' Disregarding the claimed accuracy, what can we deduce from this response? That these are likely individuals who derive large research grants and contracts from a federal budget that almost exclusively supports research designed to affirm AGW. [Of this same group, only 96.2% (rather than 100%) thought that the climate had warmed since 1800. It would be interesting to learn who these individuals are.]
By contrast, on question #2, less than half of 'economic geologists' (103 responses) said 'Yes' and slightly more than one-third of 'meteorologists' (36 responses) said 'No.'
The American Physical Society (APS) in 2007 published a position statement enthusiastically endorsing AGW, without reference to the views of its members. Recently, some 200 APS members and Fellows have petitioned the APS Council to change or withdraw the Statement, in view of scientific evidence that is counter to AGW. Perhaps there will develop a similar initiative within the AGU.
SEPP Science Editorial #35-2009 (11/7/09)
Warmists creating Green jobs -- in China
Evergreen Solar Inc. reported a 21 percent sequential rise in revenue in the third quarter on brisk sales of its solar panels, but the company confirmed speculation that they will be moving the production of panels out of its Devens plant. The Marlborough-based solar panel maker said that it would refocus the Devens plant, built in 2007, to production of the solar wafers but it would construct panels in China through a contract manufacturing agreement with Jaiwei Solarchina Co. Ltd.
A Boston Business Journal article in June indicated that company officials were considering such a move if solar panel prices fell sharply and the company was unable to cut labor costs fast enough.
On Wednesday, Evergreen CEO Richard Feldt said in a statement those factors ultimately came into play in the decision. “Panel prices have fallen 30 percent since mid-2008, making it very difficult for manufacturers located in high-cost regions to remain price competitive. Therefore, we are accelerating our strategic initiative of increasing the focus on our unique wafer manufacturing technology, and we will begin to transition our Devens-based panel assembly to China in mid-2010,” he said.
The announcement comes as Evergreen Solar appears to have regained some financial footing after the steep dropoff in solar demand earlier this year. It posted third quarter revenue of $77.7 million compared with revenue of $63.8 million last quarter and $17.8 million for the same quarter a year ago. Yet despite narrowing operating losses year over year by 73 percent to $6 million, a heavy tax hit resulted in Evergreen posting a net loss of $82.4 million.
SOURCE
More “work” for the president
The Obama administration takes aim at climate scientists
In the blame game, the Obama administration isn't about to stop with Fox News. Instead, it's moving on to lowly scientists. Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying "those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary." Then, the president talked tough, saying, "We'll just have to deal with those people," language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.
This surely isn't the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end.
The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it's pretty cold). The earth's surface is dominated by two very different substances — uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans — so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well.
Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so — a common occurrence — temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there's a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken.
Finally, there's carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved.
And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide–induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century.
What you can say is happening to the climate depends on the period you choose to study. Using the surface-temperature record that scientists cite the most, you will find a significant cooling trend after 2000. You'll find no significant trend whatsoever if you start in any year between 1996 and 2000. Beginning your trend before 1996 will yield you significant warming. And so forth. It's therefore not surprising that anyone can see anything on the climate Ouija board.
In fact, though, there's only one thing that is clear: For the last decade and a half, our climate has not behaved in accordance with the predictions of most climate models. They just don't predict such a long hiatus in warming even as carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity continue to climb.
Note to the president: I do not say that to "defeat or delay" your policies on climate change. The fact is that the U.S. Senate is likely to do that anyway, with or without this information. Early on Election Day, the GOP boycotted a session of the Environment and Public Works Committee in protest of a climate-change bill's costs, and Democrats were split on the legislation as well. Tuesday's election results are likely to give Blue Dog Democrats further pause.
If the Senate does not pass a climate bill that is acceptable to the president, Obama is almost certain to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions that he can take to the Copenhagen climate conference next month as evidence of America's efforts. These will then be used to extract some vague concessions on the part of the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, and the Copenhagen Protocol will be hailed as a major victory over global warming.
Of course, it will be no such thing. If the EPA does issue global-warming regulations, it will have to defend the science that it uses to raise the price of virtually everything. And it is true, Mr. President, that people will use the inconvenient facts of recent climate behavior to defeat or delay the "change" the EPA commands. The administration may respond by "working on" the global-warming people it doesn't like, but it can't "work on" the obvious and growing disconnect between what was forecast and what is happening.
The administration did a great job of increasing the ratings of Fox News. Maybe it can do the same for dissident scientists.
SOURCE
Renewable Banality: The Latest British Export
I loved the true story of the Nigerian energy worker who, having received a pay check for $900, amended the figure to read $9,000. As the reporter wittily put it, “The check fraud proved entirely successful ... right up to the point where he attempted to cash it.” That’s kind of how I feel about the renewable energy revolution. It will prove entirely successful in the eyes of the public and media -- right up to the point where the lights start going out. And those lights will soon start going out, according to a new report.
I fully understand the romantic attraction of the clean energy revolution and the rush to replace ‘dirty’ fossil fuels. In the light of the war on carbon it’s a no brainer, right? Which is precisely why, just as diminishing EU and UK subsidies are prompting an industry exodus westward, the British renewables industry may be about to be given an unexpected investment shot in the arm from some of the world’s biggest multinational companies in one of the biggest analogs to the adage “I gave at the church,” in this case the environmentalism church. Companies, it seems, in their rush to appear politically correct are oblivious to how that renewable revolution is ushering in a new dark age in Britain.
Why the multinationals?
Speaking at a UK Confederation of British Industries (CBI) conference in October, the Bank of America’s head of power and utilities, John Lynch, named companies like Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and IKEA (the Swedish home goods company) as being potential new investors for Britain’s offshore wind industry. “This is the technology that the UK is leading in, and these companies are looking at ways to get involved,” Lynch told his CBI audience, “because it meets their own corporate social responsibility objectives.” Enthusing over the prospect of a massive new injection of funds for British industry, Lynch noted how the Crown Estate (which owns the UK seabed) had launched the offshore program specifically to enable Britain to meet its target of 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 compared with 1990 levels. Clearly nobody had told Lynch that in recent weeks the leaders of Britain’s biggest energy companies privately warned the government that its climate targets, contingent upon renewable sources replacing hydrocarbon fuels, are “illusory” and “delusional.”
Not that the sudden growing corporate sense of responsibility should be seen in entirely philanthropic terms. The greater motivating factor is the spectre of national climate bills, post-Copenhagen in December, when their low carbon commitments will need to be demonstrated. And what could be more credible than investing in the world’s premier energy experiment?
But I wonder if the promoters of renewables might not think twice given so many UK energy insiders are predicting an impending national energy crisis? A crisis brought on by a UK energy policy based on achieving the economically non-viable, the geographically unacceptable, and, ultimately and most crucially, the mathematically impossible.
As regards to the economically-non-viable, we might begin by noting there would be no renewable energy revolution at all if it were not for government subsidies fuelling it. Quite simply, no business or private equity investor in his right mind would invest in a loss-making business with such an appallingly poor rate of return.
That is why, just a few weeks ago the UK saw its only turbine manufacturer close the door of a major plant, citing low demand, public opposition and diminishing government revenue. Note how public opposition – the geographical unacceptability – has seen UK land-based wind farm applications mired in planning battles, leaving only the even more expensive offshore option. What does this presage for those nations with less available seabed, I wonder? More generally, the non-viability of renewables, and wind power specifically, as a serious commercial proposition has been demonstrated time and again. Wind’s unreliability, its need for (mostly gas turbine) back-up facilities, the problem of storage in times of over-capacity and the fact that it will not save at all on natural gas use, combine to present a formidable technological obstacle.
But while the, oft-hidden, costs associated with all renewable energies on closer inspection should prove prohibitive and potentially economy-busting, the intellectual axe for the renewables revolution finally falls when basic math proves that it makes no economic sense at all. In his brilliant essay Understanding E=mc2, William Tucker helpfully applies the understanding of energy = mass to the issue of renewables. Above all he demonstrates why renewables, and wind and water specifically, are mathematically unable to produce the industrial scale energy power essential to keeping the lights on in any industrialized society.
Tucker explains, “Wind and water are matter in motion that we harness to produce energy.” In a nutshell, what Tucker shows is that the density of mass in both wind and water, being critically far less than oil, coal and gas, is simply unable to produce anything approaching a reasonable energy output. Tucker calculates, for instance, that a land mass of about 375 square miles with around 660 widely spaced windmills would be necessary to get a power return of just 1,000MW, the production capacity of one large hydrocarbon-powered facility. (With offshore wind turbines associated problems of distance, leakage and maintenance costs must all be significantly scaled up.) Put bluntly, Tucker shows that industrial scale renewable energy is, realistically and mathematically, an economic non-starter.
Ironically, just as UK and European subsidy opportunities are dwindling and the revolution faltering, the retail multinationals may be about to reinvigorate the flagging UK program. And as the economic cost of renewables is being counted across Europe, Britain’s energy-climate policy is likely to be touted increasingly as the blueprint for others to follow. A rash of UK studies continue to sound alarm bells over the government’s current energy direction and, one of these, just published, should do the same well beyond UK shores.
Does it really take an Einstein?
In October, the UK energy regulator, Ofgem (The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets), warned that Britain was facing 1970s style power blackouts within just four years – a much shorter timescale than previously thought. Project Discovery cited the British government’s failure to renovate its “crumbling power infrastructure” due to compliance with new EU rules that will force the closure of a quarter of the country’s power stations by 2015. In a typically British understatement, Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem’s chief executive warned, “There could be a potential shortfall in the period 2013-18 ... Life might be pretty cold.” Buchanan’s assessment is that only an “involuntary curtailment of demand” – power cuts – can conserve household supplies, unless the government acts urgently to upgrade its nuclear plants. Jeremy Nicholson, of the Energy Intensive Users Group, representing some of Britain’s biggest manufacturers, said that power cuts that hit UK business first would present a “material threat to heavy industry.” Nicholson also warned that once the crisis hit the 60 percent hike in British energy bills currently being acknowledged by the government will, more realistically, hit the 120 percent mark.
Bottom line? If Einstein’s E=mc2 as it applies to renewable energy doesn’t cut the intellectual ice for prospective investors and foreign governments alike, perhaps another will. Try this: UK energy-climate policy, circa 2009 = a blueprint for black-outs. See what I mean about a fraudulent check being entirely successful right up to the point of cashing it?
SOURCE
Freaking Out over Global Warming
One of the ugliest battles in the blogosphere climate wars has involved the newly released Superfreakonomics, sequel to the best-selling Freakonomics. In their new book's final chapter,Download PDF economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner set out to challenge the view that massively restricting carbon emissions is the only hope for averting planetwide catastrophe. Some of the most outspoken advocates for immediate "carbon legislation," such as Joe Romm and Paul Krugman, were appalled by the chapter.
I can't do Levitt and Dubner's presentation justice here; I encourage the interested reader to read the chapter. To summarize very briefly, they argue that if global warming really is a threat, then it does not follow that governments need to enforce draconian cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, which would cost many trillions of dollars over the next few decades.
Instead, a "geoengineering" solution could be adopted to keep the earth cool despite increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Perhaps the most fanciful idea is to suspend a hose using helium balloons, in order to pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This would reflect some of the incoming sunlight and arrest (or even reverse) global warming, just as occurred after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Best of all, this particular approach would only cost about $250 million total — less than what Al Gore's foundation is spending just to "raise awareness" about climate change.
Naturally, the proponents of massive government interventions into the economy were furious at Levitt and Dubner's claims. Physicist and Clinton administration Department of Energy official Joe Romm got the ball rolling with this fiery post in which he accused the Superfreakonomics writers not merely of being incredibly sloppy in their summary of the climate science but also of consciously distorting the views of the scientists they quoted.
Romm's frequent ally in such matters, Paul Krugman, soon followed suit and claimed that the authors horribly mischaracterized the views of leading climate economists in the chapter. Dubner defended himself and co-author Levitt against Romm's accusations of intentional distortion in this post, and physicist (and all-around guru) Nathan Myhrvold, one of the primary sources for the chapter, defended himself from Romm's accusations of ignorance here....
In a series of posts (one, two, and three), DeLong heaps extreme criticism on our authors. Under normal circumstances, DeLong's criticisms would be described as "scathing," yet compared to Romm's treatment, it's kid-glove stuff. For our purposes here, I want to focus on just two of DeLong's (many) complaints. First, DeLong quotes Levitt who said (during an NPR interview): "If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…."
DeLong is astounded by this claim, and responds, "That's just not economics: economics is that incentives change, and as incentives change people's behavior changes."
DeLong is right: what Levitt said is "not economics." Rather, it's a historical claim. Maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong, but DeLong can't trump it by citing a tautology from microeconomics. I am sure that Levitt would concede the narrow point that if governments around the world instituted a massive carbon tax, and enforced it with draconian penalties for evasion, then global emissions would indeed fall quickly.
But one of Levitt's main points is that governments around the world are not going to do this — that it is naive to expect them to sacrifice their own economies when (in Levitt's opinion) the climate science is not nearly certain enough to justify this painful step.
Levitt is making a prediction — based on his interpretation of history — that if man-made global warming really does require drastic measures in the next few decades, the response will involve various forms of geoengineering, which (Levitt predicts) will cost a tiny fraction of what the carbon mitigation proposals would require. To repeat, I'm not saying I necessarily endorse Levitt's glib proclamations on these points, but DeLong is wrong to dismiss them as somehow "not economics."
Finally let's deal with another point on which DeLong completely misses Levitt's valid argument. He first quotes Levitt: "Now, in the long run, perhaps you'll want to deal with the [high] carbon [dioxide] issue [even with geoengineering] because we're going to have acidification of the oceans and the coral reefs will die if we don't do something about the carbon. But if you just buy the time to keep the Earth cool for a while longer, I am certain that if we invest we will come up with technology that will allow us much more effectively in the future to pull carbon out of the air than we currently have…."
DeLong points out that whatever mechanism our descendants use to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will require power generation. He then argues: "So now we have (a) our normal power plants to power our civilization, plus (b) our atmosphere carbon-scrubbing industry, which is (c) powered by even more carbon power plants to generate the power to break the carbon-oxygen bonds that our first set of power plants made. But plants (c) put more carbon into the atmosphere than plants (a) did. I know, says Steve Levitt, we can power our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) by power plants (c) that use nuclear or solar or… But then why not power our original civilization-sustaining power plants (a) by nuclear or solar or whatever?"
Now this is frankly silly. Let's be clear, I think Levitt and Dubner made some major goofs in their chapter, and DeLong (as well as Romm and Krugman) nailed them. But here DeLong is making an obvious mistake. He is neglecting the fact that it will be much, much cheaper to engage in carbon-free energy production the longer we wait. Does DeLong really not see this elementary point and how it makes Levitt's argument perfectly sensible?
For an analogy, consider people who contract a terminal illness and then elect to have their bodies cryonically frozen so that they can be resuscitated and cured in the future. Now maybe that's a good idea or maybe it's not, but it wouldn't really make sense for someone to say, "That's just bad economics! Why go to the trouble of having your cancer cured in the future? Just do it now." Yet that is exactly the argument DeLong has deployed against Levitt.
Conclusion
There is a reason that the energy infrastructure in today's market economies is so heavily based upon fossil fuels: they are by far the cheapest, most reliable forms of energy, given the needs of modern society. Regardless of their (alleged) sloppy scholarship, Levitt and Dubner raise an interesting possibility that deserves careful scrutiny, not ridicule: even if it turns out that unfettered use of fossil fuels will spell unacceptable climate damages to future generations, it does not follow that the only solution is immediate and drastic reductions in carbon emissions.
Another possibility is to buy a few decades' worth of "breathing room" (Myhrvold's phrase in the book) through pumping SO2 into the stratosphere, for example, and then make the transition to carbon-free energy production when it will not be so terribly costly.
It's surprising that some of the people who warn that the fate of the planet itself is it stake are so dismissive of what could be a crucial component of humanity's response to the very dangers of which they're warning.
More HERE (See the original for links)
Britain's already bled-dry taxpayers owe lots more again, according to Warmists
Should a country that cannot even staff its hospitals adequately be sending billions to African dictators? Reality-challenged Warmists say YES!
Britain owes developing countries "climate compensation" of more than £17 billion a year for its contribution to climate change, according to a report by anti-poverty groups. The UN estimates more than £250 billion a year will be needed in coming decades to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. Based on the UK's emissions, Britain is responsible for providing six per cent of the total.
The report also attacked the government's climate finance proposals as "grossly inadequate" to tackle the scale of the problem. The proposals, which look as though they will dominate this weekend's G20 talks, are more likely to increase third world debt.
The World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign warned the issue of climate debt will be a "Copenhagen deal-breaker" for developing countries. Report author Tim Jones said: "It's incredibly alarming that cash the government claims will help developing countries cope with climate change will actually increase their unfair debts. "This is a huge injustice because we owe a much bigger debt to compensate developing countries for climate change.
"The UK government needs to realise that the issue of climate debt will be a Copenhagen-deal breaker," he continued. "If rich countries refuse to recognise it, deeply rooted inequality and injustice will be locked in for decades to come."
The report criticises the UK's policy of channelling climate aid through the World Bank, which comes under fire for distributing finance through loans instead of aid, and for not insisting the money funds low carbon energy investment. The campaigners recommend grants be used in place of loans, and for climate finance to be dispersed through the UN.
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Saturday, November 07, 2009
Experts say that fears surrounding climate change are overblown
Alarming predictions that climate change will lead to the extinction of hundreds of species may be exaggerated, according to Oxford scientists. They say that many biodiversity forecasts have not taken into account the complexities of the landscape and frequently underestimate the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in their environment. “The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed. We’re going to lose five or six species due to climate change, not hundreds,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the article.
Professor Willis warned that alarmist reports were leading to ill-founded biodiversity policies in government and some major conservation groups. She said that climate change has become a “buzz word” that is taking priority while, in practice, changes in human use of land have a greater impact on the survival of species. “I’m certainly not a climate change denier, far from it, but we have to have sound policies for managing our ecosystems,” she said.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature backed the article, saying that climate change is “far from the number-one threat” to the survival of most species. “There are so many other immediate threats that, by the time climate change really kicks in, many species will not exist any more,” said Jean Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN species program, which is responsible for compiling the international Redlist of endangered species. He listed hunting, overfishing, and destruction of habitat by humans as more critical for the majority of species.
However, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds disagreed, saying that climate change was the single biggest threat to biodiversity on the planet. “There’s an absolutely undeniable affect that’s happening now,” said John Clare, an RSPB spokesman. “There have been huge declines in British sea birds.”
The article, published today in the journal Science, reviews recent research on climate change and biodiversity, arguing that many simulations are not sufficiently detailed to give accurate predictions. In particular, the landscape is often described at very low resolution, not taking into account finer variations in vegetation and altitude that are vital predictors for biodiversity.
In one analysis of the likelihood of survival of alpine plant species in the Swiss Alps, the landscape was depicted with a 16km by 16km (10 miles by 10 miles) grid scale. This model predicted that all suitable habitats for alpine plants would have disappeared by the end of the century. When the simulation was repeated with a 25m by 25m (82ft by 82ft) scale, the model predicted that areas of suitable habitat would remain for all plant species.
The article suggests that migration to new regions and changes in living patterns of species would take place but that actual extinction would be rare.
Other studies comparing predictions of extinction rates with actual extinction rates have come to similar conclusions. According to a high-profile paper published in the journal Nature in 2004, up to 35 per cent of bird species would be extinct by 2050 due to changes in climate. To be on track to meet this figure, Professor Keith Bennett, head of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, calculated that about 36 species would have to have become extinct each year between 2004 and 2008. In reality, three species of bird became extinct.
He said that many species are far more versatile than some prediction models give them credit for. “If it gets a couple of degrees warmer than they’re comfortable with, they don’t just die, they move,” he said.
SOURCE
All hope is lost for Copenhagen climate treaty, British officials say
A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.
British officials preparing for next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make “political agreements” on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments.
At pre-summit talks in Barcelona, the officials said the final agreement would not emerge until at least six months after the Copenhagen summit, which ends on December 17. They said they hoped another meeting would be convened by next December to allow leaders to sign the treaty.
The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change. The Global Humanitarian Forum, based in Geneva, has estimated that more than 300,000 people are killed each year by climate change, nearly all of them in poor countries.
Delegates from 190 countries are now trying to agree a new timetable for signing a treaty but it is likely to be vague and contain no clear deadline. Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, told the House of Commons yesterday that little progress was being made in Barcelona, where delegates are discussing more than the 1,000 remaining disagreements over wording. He said: “The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well. We would have preferred a full legal treaty, it has to be said. I think the important thing about the agreement we now seek in December is that while it may be a political agreement it must lead, on a very clear timetable, to a legally binding treaty.”
Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission’s negotiator on climate change, said in Barcelona that the absence of commitment from the United States on emission cuts was a key factor contributing to the delay, although other countries were also to blame. He said that without a treaty the EU would agree to cut its 1990 emissions by only 20 per cent by 2020, whereas with a treaty it would agree to a 30 per cent cut. Cuts of 25-40 per cent are needed by developed countries if a dangerous rise in global temperatures is to be avoided, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-appointed group of more than 2,000 scientists.
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has also failed to announce targets. It has promised to cut carbon dioxide emisissions per unit of GDP but has not said by how much.
Benedict Dempsey, Save the Children’s humanitarian policy officer, said: “The cost of any delay to a climate deal will be counted in children’s lives. Save the Children estimates that 250,000 children could be killed by climate change next year. “Negotiators must realise that the world’s poorest communities can’t afford to wait.”
Joss Garman, of Greenpeace UK, said the EU should put more pressure on the US to agree targets. Copenhagen was the best chance to slash emissions, he said, but added “politicians seem determined to blow it”. He said that the US, influenced by “Big Carbon special interests”, was “a dead weight” on the talks.
SOURCE
The Quiet Death of the Kyoto Protocol
Reading the climate-change news in recent weeks, one might wonder who won the last election. The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.
This is not how it was supposed to be. Among all the things that President Bush did to infuriate environmentalists, none was more inexcusable than his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and it was assumed that Obama’s election meant a triumphant American return to the Kyoto fold—symbolically, at least, if not literally. Backed by large majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama was widely expected to quickly pass a Kyoto-style domestic cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, positioning America to take the moral high ground in Copenhagen, thus luring (or compelling) China and India to accept emissions targets.
The story, at least on the international side, is complicated by our actual history with Kyoto, which is not as simple as some greens would portray it today. Rejection of Kyoto—in 1997, three years before Bush’s election—was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on climate policy; the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against its basic tenets, and the Clinton-Gore administration never submitted it for ratification. (Even a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.)
The treaty’s fundamental flaws were well understood: It set very ambitious—and costly—targets for the United States while allowing emissions from the developing world to continue to rise unchecked. (And indeed today, despite Kyoto’s ratification, China has become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.) Americans don’t mind contributing to a solution, but Kyoto asked a lot of sacrifice for little reward.
Despite that moment of bipartisan consensus on Kyoto, the election of George W. Bush quickly made opposition to Kyoto indefensible among all right-thinking environmentalists; Kyoto’s genuine structural flaws were excused, if not forgotten, by all but a few. And instead of it being Al Gore’s fault for agreeing a pie-in-the-sky treaty in defiance of a unanimous vote of the Senate, Kyoto’s demise was blamed on Bush for his more forthright refusal in 2001 to seek ratification. This is natural in politics, of course, but the cost was a loss of focus on the need for effective alternatives to Kyoto.
While Barack Obama did not explicitly campaign on a pledge to ratify Kyoto, his hope-and-change message was clear: Elect me and America will no longer be an outcast on climate policy; I will lead the charge for a new, Kyoto-style agreement in Copenhagen. And President-elect Obama’s first statement on climate change was a bold pledge: “Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.” In retrospect, the commitment seems a bit vague, but his audience has no doubt what he meant. As one British newspaper breathlessly reported:
Prospects for success in the world's struggle to combat global warming have been transformed at a stroke after U.S. President-elect Barack Obama made it clear that America would play its full part in renewing the Kyoto Protocol climate-change treaty. His words, in effect, brought an end to eight years of willful climate obstructionism by the administration of George Bush, who withdrew the U.S. from Kyoto in March 2001, thus doing incalculable damage to the efforts of the international community to construct a unified response to the threat.
Eleven months later, the dream of a successful global climate policy seems as far out of reach as ever, and America continues to have profound disagreements over climate policy with much of the world. In the good old days of the bad old Bush administration, it was easy to paper over the profoundly complicated and difficult obstacles to effective national and international climate agreements; “Blame Bush!” was a cry greens could all rally around. Today, the inconvenient truth of the matter is harder to hide, and to a surprising degree, the rallying cry for the rest of the world remains “Blame America!”
How did we reach this point, less than a year into the Obama administration? There are different dynamics at work: undue deference to Congress on domestic legislation, and insufficient leverage in international negotiations to overcome vastly dissimilar national interests and abilities.
As he has with a number of key issues, President Obama has let Congress largely take the lead in crafting domestic climate legislation—to his regret, one must imagine, seeing the results. The bill that passed the House by the narrowest of margins was a monstrosity by any measure, hailed even by its most fervent supporters as a detestable mess. Progress in the Senate has been far slower, and it is increasingly clear that no bill will pass this year. Hopes for action on climate will have carry over to 2010—a contentious election year, at a time when unemployment may well top 10 percent and polling suggests that public concern about climate change is falling dramatically. The prospects for a bill in 2010 are not good—and Democrats are likely to lose seats in those elections, leaving them poorly positioned to pass legislation in 2011–12 as the next presidential election approaches.
Less than a year into Obama’s first term, it seems plausible that no climate bill will pass before 2013 at the earliest, and that the Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012 without a comprehensive successor agreement to take its place.
Having promised to lead the Copenhagen negotiations to a successful conclusion, Obama now finds himself in a bind: Unable to get a bill through Congress, he doesn’t want to repeat Gore’s mistake of letting Europeans pressure him into signing a treaty the Senate won’t ratify while sanctioning unrestricted emissions from the developing world. Since treaties require the support of two-thirds of the Senate, ratification will be more difficult than passage of domestic legislation. So the administration’s draft implementing agreement submitted to the UN in May specified that emissions reductions would be subject to “conformity with domestic law.” In other words, whatever is agreed to here doesn’t mean a thing if the Senate doesn’t agree. As Jonathan Pershing, a top State Department negotiator, remarked at the recent climate negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet.”
This position protects Obama from the danger of getting ahead of the Senate—while infuriating Europe and developing nations that consider strong American action on climate long overdue. As an anonymous European Commission official remarked in September, climate negotiations are “not going well”:
European Union officials have grown increasingly frustrated at the U.S. stance, saying it has fallen short on both its level of ambition to reduce emissions and on offering aid to developing nations. “So far, we thought the basic problem was the Chinese and the Indians. But now I think the problem appears to lie most clearly with the U.S.”
The China-India problem remains unsolved as well, and Obama clearly is not blind to the serious political, economic, and environmental problems with any treaty that reaffirms Kyoto’s sanction of unrestricted emissions from developing countries. Climate advocates have long argued that the key to overcoming developing world resistance to emissions limits is American leadership; if we go first, China and India will follow. Skeptics note that what we gain in credibility we may lose in leverage needed to force a deal in Copenhagen. In any case, Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position: No new treaty without developing world participation. As NPR recently reported, Kyoto will be allowed to expire after 2012. “The United States never ratified the agreement because it doesn't require any action from the developing world, including China, the world’s largest emitter. The Bush administration considered that a fatal flaw. And so does the Obama White House.”
This is the crux of the argument: The crucial feature of the deal that Gore struck in Kyoto was its exemption of the developing world from emissions reduction obligations. Without that concession, the developing world would never have accepted the treaty—but with it, the treaty was almost worthless (particularly since, as a political matter, that provision precluded American participation). This was the fatal flaw of Kyoto—and, having established that exemption, it will be doubly hard to persuade developing nations to undo it.
Obama apparently hopes to finesse these issues by reaching bilateral agreements with China and India, although critics complain that doing so would potentially undermine the multilateral architecture of the prospective Copenhagen treaty. But recent reports that no bilateral agreement will be announced during Obama’s visit to China in November suggest that a deal by Copenhagen is unlikely. China and India are both under enormous international pressure to accept emissions limits—and even greater domestic pressure to maintain a strong rate of economic growth. Both countries have so far firmly resisted calls for binding emissions caps, although President Hu Jintao has said that China will cut its emissions relative to economic growth—that is, the greenhouse-gas “intensity” of the Chinese economy, not total emissions—by a “notable” margin by 2020.
Meanwhile, to its credit, the administration is taking a surprisingly hard line with developing countries. State Department envoy Todd Stern recently called on developing nations to make significant, binding commitments to emissions reductions, remarking: "We don’t in the U.S. deny that we have real historical responsibility but the IEA [International Energy Agency] in Paris will tell you that 97 percent of the growth in emissions between now and 2050 will come from the developing world. The U.S. has to act and the EU and Japan but also the developing countries. It’s the only way to solve this problem."
This is strong stuff—and it runs contrary to much conventional liberal wisdom in the United States, Europe, and particularly in the developing world, which holds that the nations most responsible for past emissions should be primarily responsible for mitigation. If climate change is a moral issue (as most liberals insist), then the polluter responsible for past emissions should be on the hook for their consequences today; if we see the issue purely in pragmatic terms, then responsibility must be shared significantly with the major developing economies. The insistence that developing nations make credible commitments to emissions reductions has been a core conservative principle on climate; seeing Obama pick up that torch is encouraging—it is vital to crafting any true, effective global agreement—but it remains to be seen whether any combination of pressure and persuasion will be sufficient to strike a deal on those terms.
What should we make of the surprising Bushification of these aspects of Obama’s climate policy? It is too soon to say. It is easy to see these events as a series of failures, yet they may still prove to be the first steps to success if the president is committed to crafting real alternatives. Certainly the first step to success lies in rejecting the failed approaches of the past—and inadvertently or not, Obama has moved further in that direction than might have been expected a year ago. On the international side, he has taken a surprisingly reformist stance. But building a new architecture for domestic and international climate policy would be an enormous undertaking.
Doing so would require a willingness to challenge the cherished assumptions of many environmental advocates, a risky proposition for a president who has been increasingly forced to rely on his base for support. Yet the potential rewards are also great: if ever an issue cried out for a sensible, centrist approach, it is climate change.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the President Bush’s climate policy was not its substantive flaws (although there were many), but rather that the president was such an inarticulate advocate for it. The president’s greatest power is the bully pulpit, and if he uses it wisely, he can change the way America, and even the world, thinks about a complex issue like climate change. President Bush had that opportunity and squandered it; President Obama is better positioned to tackle the task, but healthcare and other matters have, so far, come first. The question is whether, as the president retrenches following a disappointing first year in office, he will be willing to take a gamble on a new approach to climate.
The odds against that scenario are tall; the smart—or at least, natural—political move for Obama would be to simply blame Republicans for blocking the climate bill, an easy charge to make, and both parties appear willing to take their positions to the voters. Yet a new approach to climate policy will require a willingness to somehow rise above politics to challenge conventional liberal wisdom on key aspects of climate policy. Doing so would not be easy for Obama in this intensely partisan time. But with polls indicating dwindling support for him from independents and Republicans, a creative, centrist approach to climate could be the key to turning that trend around.
There is a credible body of serious, creative work exploring different approaches to both domestic and international climate change issues; if, in the face of gridlock in Congress and the collapse of the Kyoto system, Obama chooses to make this issue a top priority, a fresh start on climate policy could still earn bipartisan support. Alas, what we have heard so far from President Obama is merely a pledge to “redouble” his efforts to strike a deal in Copenhagen—or, at least, to create a “framework for progress”—without acknowledging the genuinely thorny issues that have precluded agreement to date. Admitting failure is the first step to success—yet it violates the first rule of politics. Obama campaigned on a promise to change politics as usual in Washington and around the world. Can he do it on climate? Some commentators argue that the only problem with the legislation being considered by Congress is that it lacks sufficient votes for passage; in fact, its political problems are rooted in its structural flaws, not vice versa. An acknowledgment from President Obama that a new approach is needed would start a fresh conversation on climate that is long overdue.
SOURCE
Red-faced Times abandons fishy eco ad
The Times newspaper says it won't be repeating an advertisement that contained a false and misleading piece of environmental alarmism. The advert, part of a series boasting its eco-credentials, claimed that the world's oceans would be free of fish by 2048. But the prediction was debunked when it was made three years ago, and the academic responsible has since joined forces with his critics to disown his earlier claim.
The paper has told fishing industry journal Intrafish that it wouldn't be repeating the advert, which was created to show that The Times was the only national paper with an Ocean correspondent. Last month we reported how The Times had claimed in advertisements that the North East Passage - a commercial trade route open since 1934 - had just been "opened" for the first time by global warming. Again, it used an assertion to justify its, er... brilliant environmental reporting credentials.
Maritime conservation researcher Boris Worm had made the claim in a 2006 paper in Science, which despite its reputation as a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, has a weakness for publishing shoddy junk science on environmental subjects. In a note accidentally sent to the press, Worm had said the attention grabbing claim could be an effective "news hook to get people's attention."
The Worm has since turned: revising his earlier view. According to Intrafish, Times correspondent Frank Pope contacted the paper's marketing department.
But if there's one thing dumber than environment reporters, it's environmentally "aware" celebrities. This summer Greta Scacchi was one of several celebrities to pose nude with a cod, to draw attention to the cause. Richard E. Grant, Terry Gilliam and Lenny Henry also stripped off. A documentary called The End Of The Line also makes the "No Fish by 2048" claim. The film has been described as the equivalent of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for fishing. Which says it all, really.
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A Rational Look at Sea Level Rise
The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.
This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge.
Consider the dire warning that anthropogenic climate change is going to lead to a global food crisis. This scenario is predicated upon the “dumb farmer scenario” in which agriculturists around the fail to respond to changing climate conditions, and instead hold on to old, failing ways, as the climate changes around them. The “dumb farmer” scenario, should more aptly be termed the “dumb forecaster” scenario, because such an assumption illustrates a glaring disconnect between theory and reality. People adapt to change.
Another grossly inaccurate claim which totally ignores our adaptive response involves sea level rise. Al Gore likes to show maps of what coastal areas look like presently, and what they would look like assuming a multi-meter sea level rise. A dramatic section of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth showed some before and afters of coastal locations under Gore’s scenario of a 20 foot sea level rise that would happen “[i]f Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea—or half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea.” For a dose of reality, a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters pegged the current rate of sea level rise contributed by Antarctica and Greenland combined at 6 inches/century. How inconvenient.
No matter what, is that Gore’s pictures will never represent reality for the simple reason that we won’t let them. Do you really think that the powers that be will let a large portions of Manhattan Island sink beneath the waves like Gore depicts? Of course not. Instead, appropriate responses will take place to protect the high-priced development there. This will happen not only in Manhattan, but in most places where we have already invested a lot of time, effort, and money.
This was the conclusion recently reached by a team led by EPA sea level rise researcher Jim Titus, who has been working with land-use planners up and down the eastern seaboard to determine how various areas along the coast will be impacted by sea level rise—whatever the magnitude.
Titus’s team categorized all the dry land along the East Coast that is within 1 meter of sea level into four categories—developed, intermediate (likely to be developed), undeveloped, and protected from development. The first two categories were considered land-use types that would be largely protected from sea level rise by human intervention—raising of the land, or holding back the sea. These categories make up about 60% of the low-lying coastal land area between Florida and Massachusetts.
The remaining 40% of the low-lying land area is potentially flooded by rising oceans at some point in time. This is considered good by Titus et al. because it allows for natural processes to respond to rising sea levels (i.e., letting ecosystems migrate inland). But only about one-quarter of it is currently protected by conservation requirements. The other 3/4th (or 30% of the total land area within 1 meter of sea level) is currently unprotected. Titus et al. would like to see as much of this unprotected land as possible left alone (or moved into conservation).
The major point Titus et al. are trying to make is that now is the time to be thinking about the how to designate land use for the future in light of rising ocean levels. This sounds like a pretty rational approach because, it is virtually certain that sea levels will continue to rise into the future. Starting to talk about how to best prepare for this eventuality is a good thing.
Contrast this with the irrational approach that shows urban areas under 20 feet of water and demands that human greenhouse gas emissions need to be immediately curtailed to prevent this.
Here is what Titus et al. have to say about that favorite technique of the Al Gores on the world: "We hope that [our work] can help to change the way people think about rising sea level. Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future. Our maps show some of the choices coastal residents face, but losing Manhattan is not one of them."
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Australia: Sea rise much slower than predicted
SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the New South Wales Government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees Government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.
However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged. According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.
By comparison, the NSW Government's projections - based on global modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as CSIRO regional analysis - equate to a future rise of about 6.6mm a year. Such a projection has caused widespread concern for landowners and developers, derision from "climate sceptics" within the scientific community and even some head-scratching from Wollongong locals such as Kevin Court, 80.
"I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here," Mr Court said yesterday as he emerged from the surf at Wollongong's North Beach, just a short paddle from the Port Kembla gauging station. "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "A few years ago part of the bank at the back of the beach was eroded. But you look at it now, and all the grass has grown back over it. The water hasn't washed back there for years. "And that's nature. It's up and down, it comes and goes in cycles - nothing dramatic."
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Alarming predictions that climate change will lead to the extinction of hundreds of species may be exaggerated, according to Oxford scientists. They say that many biodiversity forecasts have not taken into account the complexities of the landscape and frequently underestimate the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in their environment. “The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed. We’re going to lose five or six species due to climate change, not hundreds,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the article.
Professor Willis warned that alarmist reports were leading to ill-founded biodiversity policies in government and some major conservation groups. She said that climate change has become a “buzz word” that is taking priority while, in practice, changes in human use of land have a greater impact on the survival of species. “I’m certainly not a climate change denier, far from it, but we have to have sound policies for managing our ecosystems,” she said.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature backed the article, saying that climate change is “far from the number-one threat” to the survival of most species. “There are so many other immediate threats that, by the time climate change really kicks in, many species will not exist any more,” said Jean Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN species program, which is responsible for compiling the international Redlist of endangered species. He listed hunting, overfishing, and destruction of habitat by humans as more critical for the majority of species.
However, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds disagreed, saying that climate change was the single biggest threat to biodiversity on the planet. “There’s an absolutely undeniable affect that’s happening now,” said John Clare, an RSPB spokesman. “There have been huge declines in British sea birds.”
The article, published today in the journal Science, reviews recent research on climate change and biodiversity, arguing that many simulations are not sufficiently detailed to give accurate predictions. In particular, the landscape is often described at very low resolution, not taking into account finer variations in vegetation and altitude that are vital predictors for biodiversity.
In one analysis of the likelihood of survival of alpine plant species in the Swiss Alps, the landscape was depicted with a 16km by 16km (10 miles by 10 miles) grid scale. This model predicted that all suitable habitats for alpine plants would have disappeared by the end of the century. When the simulation was repeated with a 25m by 25m (82ft by 82ft) scale, the model predicted that areas of suitable habitat would remain for all plant species.
The article suggests that migration to new regions and changes in living patterns of species would take place but that actual extinction would be rare.
Other studies comparing predictions of extinction rates with actual extinction rates have come to similar conclusions. According to a high-profile paper published in the journal Nature in 2004, up to 35 per cent of bird species would be extinct by 2050 due to changes in climate. To be on track to meet this figure, Professor Keith Bennett, head of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, calculated that about 36 species would have to have become extinct each year between 2004 and 2008. In reality, three species of bird became extinct.
He said that many species are far more versatile than some prediction models give them credit for. “If it gets a couple of degrees warmer than they’re comfortable with, they don’t just die, they move,” he said.
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All hope is lost for Copenhagen climate treaty, British officials say
A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.
British officials preparing for next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make “political agreements” on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments.
At pre-summit talks in Barcelona, the officials said the final agreement would not emerge until at least six months after the Copenhagen summit, which ends on December 17. They said they hoped another meeting would be convened by next December to allow leaders to sign the treaty.
The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change. The Global Humanitarian Forum, based in Geneva, has estimated that more than 300,000 people are killed each year by climate change, nearly all of them in poor countries.
Delegates from 190 countries are now trying to agree a new timetable for signing a treaty but it is likely to be vague and contain no clear deadline. Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, told the House of Commons yesterday that little progress was being made in Barcelona, where delegates are discussing more than the 1,000 remaining disagreements over wording. He said: “The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well. We would have preferred a full legal treaty, it has to be said. I think the important thing about the agreement we now seek in December is that while it may be a political agreement it must lead, on a very clear timetable, to a legally binding treaty.”
Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission’s negotiator on climate change, said in Barcelona that the absence of commitment from the United States on emission cuts was a key factor contributing to the delay, although other countries were also to blame. He said that without a treaty the EU would agree to cut its 1990 emissions by only 20 per cent by 2020, whereas with a treaty it would agree to a 30 per cent cut. Cuts of 25-40 per cent are needed by developed countries if a dangerous rise in global temperatures is to be avoided, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-appointed group of more than 2,000 scientists.
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has also failed to announce targets. It has promised to cut carbon dioxide emisissions per unit of GDP but has not said by how much.
Benedict Dempsey, Save the Children’s humanitarian policy officer, said: “The cost of any delay to a climate deal will be counted in children’s lives. Save the Children estimates that 250,000 children could be killed by climate change next year. “Negotiators must realise that the world’s poorest communities can’t afford to wait.”
Joss Garman, of Greenpeace UK, said the EU should put more pressure on the US to agree targets. Copenhagen was the best chance to slash emissions, he said, but added “politicians seem determined to blow it”. He said that the US, influenced by “Big Carbon special interests”, was “a dead weight” on the talks.
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The Quiet Death of the Kyoto Protocol
Reading the climate-change news in recent weeks, one might wonder who won the last election. The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.
This is not how it was supposed to be. Among all the things that President Bush did to infuriate environmentalists, none was more inexcusable than his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and it was assumed that Obama’s election meant a triumphant American return to the Kyoto fold—symbolically, at least, if not literally. Backed by large majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama was widely expected to quickly pass a Kyoto-style domestic cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, positioning America to take the moral high ground in Copenhagen, thus luring (or compelling) China and India to accept emissions targets.
The story, at least on the international side, is complicated by our actual history with Kyoto, which is not as simple as some greens would portray it today. Rejection of Kyoto—in 1997, three years before Bush’s election—was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on climate policy; the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against its basic tenets, and the Clinton-Gore administration never submitted it for ratification. (Even a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.)
The treaty’s fundamental flaws were well understood: It set very ambitious—and costly—targets for the United States while allowing emissions from the developing world to continue to rise unchecked. (And indeed today, despite Kyoto’s ratification, China has become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.) Americans don’t mind contributing to a solution, but Kyoto asked a lot of sacrifice for little reward.
Despite that moment of bipartisan consensus on Kyoto, the election of George W. Bush quickly made opposition to Kyoto indefensible among all right-thinking environmentalists; Kyoto’s genuine structural flaws were excused, if not forgotten, by all but a few. And instead of it being Al Gore’s fault for agreeing a pie-in-the-sky treaty in defiance of a unanimous vote of the Senate, Kyoto’s demise was blamed on Bush for his more forthright refusal in 2001 to seek ratification. This is natural in politics, of course, but the cost was a loss of focus on the need for effective alternatives to Kyoto.
While Barack Obama did not explicitly campaign on a pledge to ratify Kyoto, his hope-and-change message was clear: Elect me and America will no longer be an outcast on climate policy; I will lead the charge for a new, Kyoto-style agreement in Copenhagen. And President-elect Obama’s first statement on climate change was a bold pledge: “Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.” In retrospect, the commitment seems a bit vague, but his audience has no doubt what he meant. As one British newspaper breathlessly reported:
Prospects for success in the world's struggle to combat global warming have been transformed at a stroke after U.S. President-elect Barack Obama made it clear that America would play its full part in renewing the Kyoto Protocol climate-change treaty. His words, in effect, brought an end to eight years of willful climate obstructionism by the administration of George Bush, who withdrew the U.S. from Kyoto in March 2001, thus doing incalculable damage to the efforts of the international community to construct a unified response to the threat.
Eleven months later, the dream of a successful global climate policy seems as far out of reach as ever, and America continues to have profound disagreements over climate policy with much of the world. In the good old days of the bad old Bush administration, it was easy to paper over the profoundly complicated and difficult obstacles to effective national and international climate agreements; “Blame Bush!” was a cry greens could all rally around. Today, the inconvenient truth of the matter is harder to hide, and to a surprising degree, the rallying cry for the rest of the world remains “Blame America!”
How did we reach this point, less than a year into the Obama administration? There are different dynamics at work: undue deference to Congress on domestic legislation, and insufficient leverage in international negotiations to overcome vastly dissimilar national interests and abilities.
As he has with a number of key issues, President Obama has let Congress largely take the lead in crafting domestic climate legislation—to his regret, one must imagine, seeing the results. The bill that passed the House by the narrowest of margins was a monstrosity by any measure, hailed even by its most fervent supporters as a detestable mess. Progress in the Senate has been far slower, and it is increasingly clear that no bill will pass this year. Hopes for action on climate will have carry over to 2010—a contentious election year, at a time when unemployment may well top 10 percent and polling suggests that public concern about climate change is falling dramatically. The prospects for a bill in 2010 are not good—and Democrats are likely to lose seats in those elections, leaving them poorly positioned to pass legislation in 2011–12 as the next presidential election approaches.
Less than a year into Obama’s first term, it seems plausible that no climate bill will pass before 2013 at the earliest, and that the Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012 without a comprehensive successor agreement to take its place.
Having promised to lead the Copenhagen negotiations to a successful conclusion, Obama now finds himself in a bind: Unable to get a bill through Congress, he doesn’t want to repeat Gore’s mistake of letting Europeans pressure him into signing a treaty the Senate won’t ratify while sanctioning unrestricted emissions from the developing world. Since treaties require the support of two-thirds of the Senate, ratification will be more difficult than passage of domestic legislation. So the administration’s draft implementing agreement submitted to the UN in May specified that emissions reductions would be subject to “conformity with domestic law.” In other words, whatever is agreed to here doesn’t mean a thing if the Senate doesn’t agree. As Jonathan Pershing, a top State Department negotiator, remarked at the recent climate negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet.”
This position protects Obama from the danger of getting ahead of the Senate—while infuriating Europe and developing nations that consider strong American action on climate long overdue. As an anonymous European Commission official remarked in September, climate negotiations are “not going well”:
European Union officials have grown increasingly frustrated at the U.S. stance, saying it has fallen short on both its level of ambition to reduce emissions and on offering aid to developing nations. “So far, we thought the basic problem was the Chinese and the Indians. But now I think the problem appears to lie most clearly with the U.S.”
The China-India problem remains unsolved as well, and Obama clearly is not blind to the serious political, economic, and environmental problems with any treaty that reaffirms Kyoto’s sanction of unrestricted emissions from developing countries. Climate advocates have long argued that the key to overcoming developing world resistance to emissions limits is American leadership; if we go first, China and India will follow. Skeptics note that what we gain in credibility we may lose in leverage needed to force a deal in Copenhagen. In any case, Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position: No new treaty without developing world participation. As NPR recently reported, Kyoto will be allowed to expire after 2012. “The United States never ratified the agreement because it doesn't require any action from the developing world, including China, the world’s largest emitter. The Bush administration considered that a fatal flaw. And so does the Obama White House.”
This is the crux of the argument: The crucial feature of the deal that Gore struck in Kyoto was its exemption of the developing world from emissions reduction obligations. Without that concession, the developing world would never have accepted the treaty—but with it, the treaty was almost worthless (particularly since, as a political matter, that provision precluded American participation). This was the fatal flaw of Kyoto—and, having established that exemption, it will be doubly hard to persuade developing nations to undo it.
Obama apparently hopes to finesse these issues by reaching bilateral agreements with China and India, although critics complain that doing so would potentially undermine the multilateral architecture of the prospective Copenhagen treaty. But recent reports that no bilateral agreement will be announced during Obama’s visit to China in November suggest that a deal by Copenhagen is unlikely. China and India are both under enormous international pressure to accept emissions limits—and even greater domestic pressure to maintain a strong rate of economic growth. Both countries have so far firmly resisted calls for binding emissions caps, although President Hu Jintao has said that China will cut its emissions relative to economic growth—that is, the greenhouse-gas “intensity” of the Chinese economy, not total emissions—by a “notable” margin by 2020.
Meanwhile, to its credit, the administration is taking a surprisingly hard line with developing countries. State Department envoy Todd Stern recently called on developing nations to make significant, binding commitments to emissions reductions, remarking: "We don’t in the U.S. deny that we have real historical responsibility but the IEA [International Energy Agency] in Paris will tell you that 97 percent of the growth in emissions between now and 2050 will come from the developing world. The U.S. has to act and the EU and Japan but also the developing countries. It’s the only way to solve this problem."
This is strong stuff—and it runs contrary to much conventional liberal wisdom in the United States, Europe, and particularly in the developing world, which holds that the nations most responsible for past emissions should be primarily responsible for mitigation. If climate change is a moral issue (as most liberals insist), then the polluter responsible for past emissions should be on the hook for their consequences today; if we see the issue purely in pragmatic terms, then responsibility must be shared significantly with the major developing economies. The insistence that developing nations make credible commitments to emissions reductions has been a core conservative principle on climate; seeing Obama pick up that torch is encouraging—it is vital to crafting any true, effective global agreement—but it remains to be seen whether any combination of pressure and persuasion will be sufficient to strike a deal on those terms.
What should we make of the surprising Bushification of these aspects of Obama’s climate policy? It is too soon to say. It is easy to see these events as a series of failures, yet they may still prove to be the first steps to success if the president is committed to crafting real alternatives. Certainly the first step to success lies in rejecting the failed approaches of the past—and inadvertently or not, Obama has moved further in that direction than might have been expected a year ago. On the international side, he has taken a surprisingly reformist stance. But building a new architecture for domestic and international climate policy would be an enormous undertaking.
Doing so would require a willingness to challenge the cherished assumptions of many environmental advocates, a risky proposition for a president who has been increasingly forced to rely on his base for support. Yet the potential rewards are also great: if ever an issue cried out for a sensible, centrist approach, it is climate change.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the President Bush’s climate policy was not its substantive flaws (although there were many), but rather that the president was such an inarticulate advocate for it. The president’s greatest power is the bully pulpit, and if he uses it wisely, he can change the way America, and even the world, thinks about a complex issue like climate change. President Bush had that opportunity and squandered it; President Obama is better positioned to tackle the task, but healthcare and other matters have, so far, come first. The question is whether, as the president retrenches following a disappointing first year in office, he will be willing to take a gamble on a new approach to climate.
The odds against that scenario are tall; the smart—or at least, natural—political move for Obama would be to simply blame Republicans for blocking the climate bill, an easy charge to make, and both parties appear willing to take their positions to the voters. Yet a new approach to climate policy will require a willingness to somehow rise above politics to challenge conventional liberal wisdom on key aspects of climate policy. Doing so would not be easy for Obama in this intensely partisan time. But with polls indicating dwindling support for him from independents and Republicans, a creative, centrist approach to climate could be the key to turning that trend around.
There is a credible body of serious, creative work exploring different approaches to both domestic and international climate change issues; if, in the face of gridlock in Congress and the collapse of the Kyoto system, Obama chooses to make this issue a top priority, a fresh start on climate policy could still earn bipartisan support. Alas, what we have heard so far from President Obama is merely a pledge to “redouble” his efforts to strike a deal in Copenhagen—or, at least, to create a “framework for progress”—without acknowledging the genuinely thorny issues that have precluded agreement to date. Admitting failure is the first step to success—yet it violates the first rule of politics. Obama campaigned on a promise to change politics as usual in Washington and around the world. Can he do it on climate? Some commentators argue that the only problem with the legislation being considered by Congress is that it lacks sufficient votes for passage; in fact, its political problems are rooted in its structural flaws, not vice versa. An acknowledgment from President Obama that a new approach is needed would start a fresh conversation on climate that is long overdue.
SOURCE
Red-faced Times abandons fishy eco ad
The Times newspaper says it won't be repeating an advertisement that contained a false and misleading piece of environmental alarmism. The advert, part of a series boasting its eco-credentials, claimed that the world's oceans would be free of fish by 2048. But the prediction was debunked when it was made three years ago, and the academic responsible has since joined forces with his critics to disown his earlier claim.
The paper has told fishing industry journal Intrafish that it wouldn't be repeating the advert, which was created to show that The Times was the only national paper with an Ocean correspondent. Last month we reported how The Times had claimed in advertisements that the North East Passage - a commercial trade route open since 1934 - had just been "opened" for the first time by global warming. Again, it used an assertion to justify its, er... brilliant environmental reporting credentials.
Maritime conservation researcher Boris Worm had made the claim in a 2006 paper in Science, which despite its reputation as a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, has a weakness for publishing shoddy junk science on environmental subjects. In a note accidentally sent to the press, Worm had said the attention grabbing claim could be an effective "news hook to get people's attention."
The Worm has since turned: revising his earlier view. According to Intrafish, Times correspondent Frank Pope contacted the paper's marketing department.
But if there's one thing dumber than environment reporters, it's environmentally "aware" celebrities. This summer Greta Scacchi was one of several celebrities to pose nude with a cod, to draw attention to the cause. Richard E. Grant, Terry Gilliam and Lenny Henry also stripped off. A documentary called The End Of The Line also makes the "No Fish by 2048" claim. The film has been described as the equivalent of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for fishing. Which says it all, really.
SOURCE
A Rational Look at Sea Level Rise
The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.
This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge.
Consider the dire warning that anthropogenic climate change is going to lead to a global food crisis. This scenario is predicated upon the “dumb farmer scenario” in which agriculturists around the fail to respond to changing climate conditions, and instead hold on to old, failing ways, as the climate changes around them. The “dumb farmer” scenario, should more aptly be termed the “dumb forecaster” scenario, because such an assumption illustrates a glaring disconnect between theory and reality. People adapt to change.
Another grossly inaccurate claim which totally ignores our adaptive response involves sea level rise. Al Gore likes to show maps of what coastal areas look like presently, and what they would look like assuming a multi-meter sea level rise. A dramatic section of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth showed some before and afters of coastal locations under Gore’s scenario of a 20 foot sea level rise that would happen “[i]f Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea—or half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea.” For a dose of reality, a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters pegged the current rate of sea level rise contributed by Antarctica and Greenland combined at 6 inches/century. How inconvenient.
No matter what, is that Gore’s pictures will never represent reality for the simple reason that we won’t let them. Do you really think that the powers that be will let a large portions of Manhattan Island sink beneath the waves like Gore depicts? Of course not. Instead, appropriate responses will take place to protect the high-priced development there. This will happen not only in Manhattan, but in most places where we have already invested a lot of time, effort, and money.
This was the conclusion recently reached by a team led by EPA sea level rise researcher Jim Titus, who has been working with land-use planners up and down the eastern seaboard to determine how various areas along the coast will be impacted by sea level rise—whatever the magnitude.
Titus’s team categorized all the dry land along the East Coast that is within 1 meter of sea level into four categories—developed, intermediate (likely to be developed), undeveloped, and protected from development. The first two categories were considered land-use types that would be largely protected from sea level rise by human intervention—raising of the land, or holding back the sea. These categories make up about 60% of the low-lying coastal land area between Florida and Massachusetts.
The remaining 40% of the low-lying land area is potentially flooded by rising oceans at some point in time. This is considered good by Titus et al. because it allows for natural processes to respond to rising sea levels (i.e., letting ecosystems migrate inland). But only about one-quarter of it is currently protected by conservation requirements. The other 3/4th (or 30% of the total land area within 1 meter of sea level) is currently unprotected. Titus et al. would like to see as much of this unprotected land as possible left alone (or moved into conservation).
The major point Titus et al. are trying to make is that now is the time to be thinking about the how to designate land use for the future in light of rising ocean levels. This sounds like a pretty rational approach because, it is virtually certain that sea levels will continue to rise into the future. Starting to talk about how to best prepare for this eventuality is a good thing.
Contrast this with the irrational approach that shows urban areas under 20 feet of water and demands that human greenhouse gas emissions need to be immediately curtailed to prevent this.
Here is what Titus et al. have to say about that favorite technique of the Al Gores on the world: "We hope that [our work] can help to change the way people think about rising sea level. Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future. Our maps show some of the choices coastal residents face, but losing Manhattan is not one of them."
SOURCE
Australia: Sea rise much slower than predicted
SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the New South Wales Government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees Government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.
However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged. According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.
By comparison, the NSW Government's projections - based on global modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as CSIRO regional analysis - equate to a future rise of about 6.6mm a year. Such a projection has caused widespread concern for landowners and developers, derision from "climate sceptics" within the scientific community and even some head-scratching from Wollongong locals such as Kevin Court, 80.
"I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here," Mr Court said yesterday as he emerged from the surf at Wollongong's North Beach, just a short paddle from the Port Kembla gauging station. "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "A few years ago part of the bank at the back of the beach was eroded. But you look at it now, and all the grass has grown back over it. The water hasn't washed back there for years. "And that's nature. It's up and down, it comes and goes in cycles - nothing dramatic."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Friday, November 06, 2009
Gore abandons science-talk for theology
The science is too pesky and he was after all a divinity student once
Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward....
Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.
“He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore.”
Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies – published only last week – that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. “Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.
The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power. On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.
But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action. The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change. Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.
More HERE
Damn this false God! How in the name of sanity can being green be a religion?
Have you ever noticed how closely green zealotry resembles religious fanaticism? Well, now the law has, in effect, recognised environmentalism as a religion. An employee who claimed his boss showed 'contempt' for his green beliefs has won the right to seek unlimited damages for unfair dismissal. In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Barton found in favour of Tim Nicholson, who was made redundant by the property company he worked for. The judge argued that a 'philosophical belief which is based on science' should receive the same protection as religious beliefs.
Some of us would question whether the more extreme opinions of green activists have any basis in science at all. For example, their violent opposition to nuclear power runs against the tide of scientific opinion.
Climate change is a contentious issue, yet green activists brook no opposition to their views that unless we give up air travel, throw away our lightbulbs and slaughter every cow, the world is doomed.
But Mr Justice Barton is profoundly mistaken to suppose that, just because greens often behave like zealots, therefore their beliefs amount to a religion. A political ideology, such as environmentalism, is not a religion. Only totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia try to turn politics into a religion - with disastrous consequences for human freedom.
The whole of Western civilisation has Jewish and Christian roots, without which it cannot thrive. There is no comparison between the fundamental role of Christianity in our history and that of ephemeral red or green political fashions. In our militantly secular society, however, official recognition of people's religious convictions - especially Christian ones - is being constantly eroded. For example, a Christian registrar in Islington, North London, was sacked because she felt unable to conduct civil partnership ceremonies at her register office, arguing that homosexuality runs contrary to Christian morality. An even more notorious case was that of the British Airways check-in worker who was suspended for wearing a crucifix.
That well-worn prophecy attributed to G.K. Chesterton - 'When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything' - now seems more pertinent than ever.
It appears that no fashionable nostrum, from Madonna's Kabbalah to Carole Caplin's crystals, is too fatuous. Today, the chattering classes might more accurately be called the credulous classes. They hold everything sacred up to ridicule, while treating as sacred all that is most ridiculous.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
It seems the only religion that is still sometimes granted unqualified respect and cast-iron protection in Britain is Islam. Our bold secularists are unaccountably timid when it comes to offending Muslim sensibilities. But nobody is afraid of trampling over the rich legacy that Christianity has bequeathed to our civilisation.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
The European Court of Human Rights has this week ordered Italy, the heartland of Catholicism, to remove crucifixes from classrooms on the bizarre grounds that these traditional symbols are a violation of pupils' religious and educational liberties. The secularists who are behind such aggressive campaigns want nothing less than to extinguish Europe's Christian identity.
What will replace Judaeo-Christian morality, based on the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount? We have only to look at the horrors on our streets and our sink estates to see how the vacuum created by secularism is being filled by an amoral morass of lawlessness.
Green zealotry is one of the most influential of the pseudo-religions that today substitute for Christianity. It offers a view of the world in which the true believer in, say, manmade global warming can feel morally superior to the sceptic.
One of the arguments by which Mr Nicholson persuaded Mr Justice Barton was his claim that he no longer travels by aircraft, because air travel produces carbon emissions. Yet the prejudice against air travel is preposterous humbug. Not only do the most zealous advocates of extreme environmentalism, such as Al Gore, turn out to have the largest 'carbon footprint', but the entire green movement, not to mention such global jamborees as next month's Copenhagen climate change summit, is made possible only by air travel.
Mr Nicholson and others who share his views are entitled to do without air travel. That is their right in a free society. But they are not entitled to bully others who wish to fly abroad for work or pleasure. Yet that is the consequence of elevating their zealotry into a legally protected realm. How many employers will discipline an employee who tries to make colleagues feel guilty every time they take a trip by air?
Mr Justice Barton has contributed to placing the greens above the law. In doing so, he is following a trend. Last year, six Greenpeace activists were cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at Kingsnorth in Kent, the first of a new generation of coal-fired power stations. The Greenpeace zealots persuaded the court at Maidstone that they were entitled to damage the power station - which they claimed was causing climate change - because climate change might cause even greater damage to the planet. This dangerous verdict, which legitimised violent protests, has now been reinforced by Mr Justice Barton's ruling that green politics should enjoy the status of a religion.
SOURCE
ELECTION DEFEATS MAKE DEMOCRATS NERVOUS ABOUT OBAMA'S CLIMATE AGENDA
Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races may make some congressional Democrats more leery of backing key elements of President Barack Obama's agenda because of the political price they could pay, analysts said.
Democrats in competitive House districts, many of them already cautious about Obama's push to overhaul the U.S. health- care system and curb emissions blamed for global warming, might be more resistant to move ahead on the measures and face attacks from a newly energized Republican Party, the analysts said.
The Nov. 3 election results are "a real warning bell for moderate Democrats," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of communications at Boston University. "They are not going to think twice about their vote on health care. They're going to think five times."
David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester in New York, said Democrats in competitive districts may demand more concessions in exchange for their votes on contentious legislation.
The election "may make it harder to swing moderates on the fence in favor of Obama's proposals, for fear of being made examples in the midterm elections," Primo said. "The results may increase the price those on the fence charge for their support."
More HERE
WHY RUSSIANS ARE LAUGHING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring into Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar ice caps melt any further, Russia would be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil-fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.
To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997, during negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol (the international treaty on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions). Because Russia is the world's third largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emissions allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments.
As a U.N. official who participated in the talks put it, "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations - and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) - to get the country to ratify the deal. How the world will persuade Russia to take an active part in the upcoming climate-change summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 2 remains to be seen.
More HERE
Forests in the desert: the answer to climate concerns?
CO2 levels could be reduced by a staggeringly ambitious plan to plant the Sahara desert and Australian outback with trees. But it's unlikely to be a destructive enough policy for the Greenies. They will probably say that it threaten the habitat of the desert rat, or some-such
Some talk of hoisting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, while others want to cloud the high atmosphere with millions of tonnes of shiny sulphur dust. Now, scientists could have dreamed up the most ambitious geoengineering plan to deal with climate change yet: converting the parched Sahara desert to a lush forest. The scale of the ambition is matched only by the promised rewards – the scientists behind the plan say it could "end global warming".
The scheme has been thought up by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, together with Igor Aleinov and David Rind, climate modellers at Nasa. The trio have outlined their plan in a new paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change, and they modestly conclude it "probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming".
Under the scheme, planted fields of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus would cover the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback, watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. The new blanket of tree cover would bring its own weather system and rainfall, while soaking up carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere. The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. Sounds expensive? The researchers say it could be more economic than planned global investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).
"The costs are enormous but the scale of the problem is enormous," says Ornstein, who is best known for pioneering a cell biology technique called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in the 1950s. "It's a serious suggestion in that I believe it is the most promising and practical option in terms of current technology to solve the biggest parts of the problem."
The scheme could cost $1.9tn a year, he says. "When that's compared to figures like estimates of $800bn per year for CCS, our plan looks like a loser. But CCS can address only about 20% of the problem at the $800bn price. Mine addresses the whole thing. And CCS would involve a network of dangerous high-pressure pipelines coursing through the most developed neighbourhoods of our civilisations, compared to relatively benign water aqueducts in what are presently virtually uninhabited deserts."
Planting trees to combat rising carbon dioxide levels is controversial on a large scale, because most places where it has been suggested, such as Canada and Siberia, are in the northern hemisphere where the resulting change in surface colour, from predominantly light snow and rock to predominantly dark trees, could soak up more sunlight and cancel out the cooling benefit. Ornstein says subtropical regions, such as the Sahara and the Australian outback, do not have this problem. The areas have only minimal "human occupation, agricultural food and fibre resources and competing natural biomes" the team says. "We must bite the bullet, global warming will not go away by itself ... solar, geothermal and wind power can make modest contributions. All of these are other parts of a fix. But the quicker a forest can be grown, the more time will be available to choose among and to implement such adjustments, and perhaps to develop more attractive substitutes."
Ornstein says several desert-heavy countries are suitable, including large chunks of Saudi Arabia and a string of African nations west of Egypt. The scheme would provide jobs and investment, he says, as well as a long-term source of sustainable wood that could be used as a biofuel to replace fossil fuels. Other plans for the desert region, such as the installation of giant arrays of mirrors and solar panels to generate electricity would not be affected, he says. Tree-planters, and the resulting clouds, would stick to the flatter regions further south.
Since the paper was published a few weeks ago, Ornstein has attempted to seed serious discussions on specialist websites, with little success. Critics have pointed out that the deserts are not total wildernesses, but rich and diverse ecosystems in their own right, which would be destroyed. Ornstein says: "If sacrifices are required to stem global warming, the almost non-existent ecosystems of the central Sahara and the outback seem like reasonable candidates compared to the alternatives."
The scheme does have some support. "It is incredibly important and definitely worth taking seriously," says Rick Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "While there are many practical and political difficulties of afforestation of regions this large, the benefits could be enormous and go well beyond carbon sequestration."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
*****************************************
The science is too pesky and he was after all a divinity student once
Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward....
Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.
“He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore.”
Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies – published only last week – that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. “Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.
The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power. On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.
But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action. The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change. Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.
More HERE
Damn this false God! How in the name of sanity can being green be a religion?
Have you ever noticed how closely green zealotry resembles religious fanaticism? Well, now the law has, in effect, recognised environmentalism as a religion. An employee who claimed his boss showed 'contempt' for his green beliefs has won the right to seek unlimited damages for unfair dismissal. In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Barton found in favour of Tim Nicholson, who was made redundant by the property company he worked for. The judge argued that a 'philosophical belief which is based on science' should receive the same protection as religious beliefs.
Some of us would question whether the more extreme opinions of green activists have any basis in science at all. For example, their violent opposition to nuclear power runs against the tide of scientific opinion.
Climate change is a contentious issue, yet green activists brook no opposition to their views that unless we give up air travel, throw away our lightbulbs and slaughter every cow, the world is doomed.
But Mr Justice Barton is profoundly mistaken to suppose that, just because greens often behave like zealots, therefore their beliefs amount to a religion. A political ideology, such as environmentalism, is not a religion. Only totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia try to turn politics into a religion - with disastrous consequences for human freedom.
The whole of Western civilisation has Jewish and Christian roots, without which it cannot thrive. There is no comparison between the fundamental role of Christianity in our history and that of ephemeral red or green political fashions. In our militantly secular society, however, official recognition of people's religious convictions - especially Christian ones - is being constantly eroded. For example, a Christian registrar in Islington, North London, was sacked because she felt unable to conduct civil partnership ceremonies at her register office, arguing that homosexuality runs contrary to Christian morality. An even more notorious case was that of the British Airways check-in worker who was suspended for wearing a crucifix.
That well-worn prophecy attributed to G.K. Chesterton - 'When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything' - now seems more pertinent than ever.
It appears that no fashionable nostrum, from Madonna's Kabbalah to Carole Caplin's crystals, is too fatuous. Today, the chattering classes might more accurately be called the credulous classes. They hold everything sacred up to ridicule, while treating as sacred all that is most ridiculous.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
It seems the only religion that is still sometimes granted unqualified respect and cast-iron protection in Britain is Islam. Our bold secularists are unaccountably timid when it comes to offending Muslim sensibilities. But nobody is afraid of trampling over the rich legacy that Christianity has bequeathed to our civilisation.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
The European Court of Human Rights has this week ordered Italy, the heartland of Catholicism, to remove crucifixes from classrooms on the bizarre grounds that these traditional symbols are a violation of pupils' religious and educational liberties. The secularists who are behind such aggressive campaigns want nothing less than to extinguish Europe's Christian identity.
What will replace Judaeo-Christian morality, based on the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount? We have only to look at the horrors on our streets and our sink estates to see how the vacuum created by secularism is being filled by an amoral morass of lawlessness.
Green zealotry is one of the most influential of the pseudo-religions that today substitute for Christianity. It offers a view of the world in which the true believer in, say, manmade global warming can feel morally superior to the sceptic.
One of the arguments by which Mr Nicholson persuaded Mr Justice Barton was his claim that he no longer travels by aircraft, because air travel produces carbon emissions. Yet the prejudice against air travel is preposterous humbug. Not only do the most zealous advocates of extreme environmentalism, such as Al Gore, turn out to have the largest 'carbon footprint', but the entire green movement, not to mention such global jamborees as next month's Copenhagen climate change summit, is made possible only by air travel.
Mr Nicholson and others who share his views are entitled to do without air travel. That is their right in a free society. But they are not entitled to bully others who wish to fly abroad for work or pleasure. Yet that is the consequence of elevating their zealotry into a legally protected realm. How many employers will discipline an employee who tries to make colleagues feel guilty every time they take a trip by air?
Mr Justice Barton has contributed to placing the greens above the law. In doing so, he is following a trend. Last year, six Greenpeace activists were cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at Kingsnorth in Kent, the first of a new generation of coal-fired power stations. The Greenpeace zealots persuaded the court at Maidstone that they were entitled to damage the power station - which they claimed was causing climate change - because climate change might cause even greater damage to the planet. This dangerous verdict, which legitimised violent protests, has now been reinforced by Mr Justice Barton's ruling that green politics should enjoy the status of a religion.
SOURCE
ELECTION DEFEATS MAKE DEMOCRATS NERVOUS ABOUT OBAMA'S CLIMATE AGENDA
Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races may make some congressional Democrats more leery of backing key elements of President Barack Obama's agenda because of the political price they could pay, analysts said.
Democrats in competitive House districts, many of them already cautious about Obama's push to overhaul the U.S. health- care system and curb emissions blamed for global warming, might be more resistant to move ahead on the measures and face attacks from a newly energized Republican Party, the analysts said.
The Nov. 3 election results are "a real warning bell for moderate Democrats," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of communications at Boston University. "They are not going to think twice about their vote on health care. They're going to think five times."
David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester in New York, said Democrats in competitive districts may demand more concessions in exchange for their votes on contentious legislation.
The election "may make it harder to swing moderates on the fence in favor of Obama's proposals, for fear of being made examples in the midterm elections," Primo said. "The results may increase the price those on the fence charge for their support."
More HERE
WHY RUSSIANS ARE LAUGHING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring into Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar ice caps melt any further, Russia would be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil-fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.
To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997, during negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol (the international treaty on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions). Because Russia is the world's third largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emissions allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments.
As a U.N. official who participated in the talks put it, "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations - and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) - to get the country to ratify the deal. How the world will persuade Russia to take an active part in the upcoming climate-change summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 2 remains to be seen.
More HERE
Forests in the desert: the answer to climate concerns?
CO2 levels could be reduced by a staggeringly ambitious plan to plant the Sahara desert and Australian outback with trees. But it's unlikely to be a destructive enough policy for the Greenies. They will probably say that it threaten the habitat of the desert rat, or some-such
Some talk of hoisting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, while others want to cloud the high atmosphere with millions of tonnes of shiny sulphur dust. Now, scientists could have dreamed up the most ambitious geoengineering plan to deal with climate change yet: converting the parched Sahara desert to a lush forest. The scale of the ambition is matched only by the promised rewards – the scientists behind the plan say it could "end global warming".
The scheme has been thought up by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, together with Igor Aleinov and David Rind, climate modellers at Nasa. The trio have outlined their plan in a new paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change, and they modestly conclude it "probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming".
Under the scheme, planted fields of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus would cover the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback, watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. The new blanket of tree cover would bring its own weather system and rainfall, while soaking up carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere. The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. Sounds expensive? The researchers say it could be more economic than planned global investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).
"The costs are enormous but the scale of the problem is enormous," says Ornstein, who is best known for pioneering a cell biology technique called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in the 1950s. "It's a serious suggestion in that I believe it is the most promising and practical option in terms of current technology to solve the biggest parts of the problem."
The scheme could cost $1.9tn a year, he says. "When that's compared to figures like estimates of $800bn per year for CCS, our plan looks like a loser. But CCS can address only about 20% of the problem at the $800bn price. Mine addresses the whole thing. And CCS would involve a network of dangerous high-pressure pipelines coursing through the most developed neighbourhoods of our civilisations, compared to relatively benign water aqueducts in what are presently virtually uninhabited deserts."
Planting trees to combat rising carbon dioxide levels is controversial on a large scale, because most places where it has been suggested, such as Canada and Siberia, are in the northern hemisphere where the resulting change in surface colour, from predominantly light snow and rock to predominantly dark trees, could soak up more sunlight and cancel out the cooling benefit. Ornstein says subtropical regions, such as the Sahara and the Australian outback, do not have this problem. The areas have only minimal "human occupation, agricultural food and fibre resources and competing natural biomes" the team says. "We must bite the bullet, global warming will not go away by itself ... solar, geothermal and wind power can make modest contributions. All of these are other parts of a fix. But the quicker a forest can be grown, the more time will be available to choose among and to implement such adjustments, and perhaps to develop more attractive substitutes."
Ornstein says several desert-heavy countries are suitable, including large chunks of Saudi Arabia and a string of African nations west of Egypt. The scheme would provide jobs and investment, he says, as well as a long-term source of sustainable wood that could be used as a biofuel to replace fossil fuels. Other plans for the desert region, such as the installation of giant arrays of mirrors and solar panels to generate electricity would not be affected, he says. Tree-planters, and the resulting clouds, would stick to the flatter regions further south.
Since the paper was published a few weeks ago, Ornstein has attempted to seed serious discussions on specialist websites, with little success. Critics have pointed out that the deserts are not total wildernesses, but rich and diverse ecosystems in their own right, which would be destroyed. Ornstein says: "If sacrifices are required to stem global warming, the almost non-existent ecosystems of the central Sahara and the outback seem like reasonable candidates compared to the alternatives."
The scheme does have some support. "It is incredibly important and definitely worth taking seriously," says Rick Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "While there are many practical and political difficulties of afforestation of regions this large, the benefits could be enormous and go well beyond carbon sequestration."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Thursday, November 05, 2009
IPCC CHAIRMAN DR PACHAURI
An email from Henry Geraedts [arbutuspoint@gmail.com] below
I was with growing disbelief that I read the Times of India article "IPCC CHAIRMAN TAKES UP POST AS CHINESE GOVERNMENT'S CLIMATE ADVISOR" followed by the AFP article "THE NEW IPCC CONSENSUS: CHINA, INDIA SHOULD SHAME RICH COUNTRIES INTO WEALTH TRANSFER".
The UN's IPCC's Chairman Pachauri acting as climate advisor to the Chinese government, no less? And the same "climate advisor" stating in Beijing that China and India should "shame" developed economies into "wealth transfer"? Based on evidence, taking Pachauri aside and explaining the fundamentals of conflict of interest to him would likely be an exercise in futility.
Two things have at least been achieved by Pachauri's actions: One, any pretence that may have remained about the IPCC as a "scientific" "intergovernmental" advisory body has been removed, hopefully once and for all.
And two, confirmation by Pachauri himself of what AGW/ACC really has been about all along: a 20 year campaign of fearmongering, orchestrated to trigger massive wealth transfer by the developed economies to the rest of the world, managed by an "appropriate global governance structure" - as explained by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's last week - without any accountability, of course.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (1)
An email from Wayne Richards [theamazingrichards@gmail.com] below:
I've reached my own personal tipping point. I've heard once too often that the Arctic ice melt of 2007 was unprecedented, that it's going to happen again, only worse, and that we're all doomed. Including the polar bears. Never before in history...etc.
Less than a half mile from my home in Vancouver, B.C. sits the RCMP Vessel Saint Roch. She's been declared a national monument or some such designation, and for good reason. In the early 1940's she traversed the Northwest Passage. Then she did it again. Then again, in the other direction. Three times, three times.
She's a small thing, but sturdily built. At a little over a hundred feet long, she displaces about 325 tons. She was powered by some small auxiliary sails and a piddling 150 hp.diesel engine. And she's not steel. She's built of good British Columbia Douglas fir, externally sheathed with Australian gumwood (thank you, Aussies). Mind you, her bow had some metal on it, whether iron or steel I do not know.
This small, woefully underpowered vessel was the first to traverse the Northwest Passage west to east, was the first to traverse it more than once, was the first to traverse it in both directions, and was the first to circumnavigate North America (using the Panama Canal at the small end).
But she was not the first in recorded history to traverse the Northwest Passage. In 1906 Roald Amundsen ran it from east to west in his even smaller (76ft) sloop "Gjoa". It may have been all sail; if it had an auxiliary motor I do not know of it.
The log books of neither the Gjoa nor the St. Roch record any drowning polar bears.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (2)
Note that there is a slight rising trend but that it was happening long before the late 20th century and the era of widespread industrialization
Obama "Bailing Out" Al Gore and Utilities
Obama Rewards Companies Supporting Cap-and-Trade with Over $600,000,000 Million in Grants
Today's page one New York Times story on Al Gore profiting from global warming advocacy illustrates how taxpayer money is being used to reward businesses that support Obama's energy agenda, says Tom Borelli Ph.D., director of the Free Enterprise Project. Gore's venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will benefit from the Department of Energy grants to support the development of the so-called smart grid, according to the Times. "The Department of Energy is doling out $3.4 billion in smart grid grants and some of these funds are being steered to "friends of Obama," said Borelli.
The Department of Energy (DOE) funds were part of the "American Reinvestment and Recovery Act" – President Obama's economic stimulus plan. According to the Times, $560 million in grants were awarded to utilities that had contracts with Silver Spring Networks – a company that Gore's firm has invested in. Silver Spring Networks develops technologies to increase the efficiency of the electricity grid.
John Doerr, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. "Grants to Gore, unfortunately, are only the tip of the global warming iceberg. The big money is going to companies that are lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation," added Borelli.
Utilities lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation are recipients of over $600,000,000 in DOE grants. Duke Energy, FPL Group and Exelon are members of the United States Climate Action Partnership -- a lobbying group seeking a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. DOE awarded the following grants:
Duke Energy Carolinas $3,927,899
Duke Energy Business Services LLC $200,000,000
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) $200,000,000
PECO Energy Company (Exelon) $ 200,000,000
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is going to corporations that have their own resources. Clearly, it pays to be on team Obama. No wonder Exelon is turning in its membership with the U.S Chamber of Commerce and Duke Energy left the National Association of Manufactures," said Borelli. "These trade associations are opposing the global warming bill moving through Congress."
SOURCE
Al Gore the new Madoff?
Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies. Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology. The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is. "Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?" Mr. Gore said. "I am proud of it. I am proud of it."
SOURCE
Africans balking at climate proposals too
African countries boycotted meetings at U.N. climate talks Tuesday, saying that industrial countries had set carbon-cutting targets too low for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The action forced several technical meetings to be canceled at this week's U.N. climate talks in Barcelona. Delegates warned that, unless the African protest was settled, it could set back the timetable for concluding a new climate change pact at a major U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen.
The 50 or so African countries said they would only discuss pledges submitted by wealthy countries, and that talks on other issues including carbon offsets and action by developing countries should not move forward until there is full commitment by industrial countries. "I don't think we can get to a result in the way we're going now," said Algerian negotiator Kamel Djemouai, who chairs the Africa group. "We cannot prejudge what will happen next until we see the reactions of others."
It was the first time the Africans have taken such concerted action at the U.N. climate talks, but they have been coordinating their position over the past year to ensure unity in the final lead-up to the Copenhagen conference, said Antonio Hill, of Oxfam International. Scientists say industrial countries should reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, but targets announced so far amount to far less than the minimum.
The African walkout stymied only part of the talks, which operate in two parallel bodies. Negotiations on the overall shape of a deal and on financing for poor countries continued uninterrupted.
European delegates met leaders of the African group for two hours, but failed to persuade them to return to the committee rooms. A broader meeting was called to try to break the impasse....
More HERE
American Agri-Women honor skeptical Meteorologist
American Agri-Women (AAW) will present their highest honor, the Veritas Award, to Oregon Meteorologist George Taylor, at their 34rd annual convention in Salem, Oregon, November 13. The Veritas Award is given to individuals who have been public witness to the “pursuit of truth” in accordance with the principles expressed in the AAW statement of philosophy. Of specific interest are personalities of importance to agriculture, or responsible media coverage of agricultural issues and events.
George Taylor has been working in the field of meteorology and climatology for over 34 years. Taylor, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, served for 19 years as Oregon’s climatologist and was elected president of the American Association of Climatologists in 1998. He now runs his own business, Applied Climate Service.
Through his research over the years Taylor has shown that global warming is a natural occurrence with minimal influence by man and that by looking back further than the past few decades, the data shows that warming and cooling periods are common. Taylor continually works to keep the public informed of the effects climate has on their lives by publishing over 200 reports, books and articles, and by writing a bi-weekly column in two local newspapers. He is also a popular speaker, standing up for what he knows to be the truth, even when it disagrees with the prevailing opinion. AAW president Marcie Williams notes that, “George Taylor’s credentials and his courage in speaking out makes him an outstanding Veritas Award winner and we are excited to be able to honor him in this way.”
Past Veritas recipients include Paul Harvey, Michael DeBakey, Julia Child, Dr. C. Everett Koop, and John Stossel, to name a few.
Come to the AAW convention to hear these informative and entertaining speakers. For information about the convention, or agenda and registration form, visit the American Agri-Women website at www.americanagriwomen.org.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
*****************************************
An email from Henry Geraedts [arbutuspoint@gmail.com] below
I was with growing disbelief that I read the Times of India article "IPCC CHAIRMAN TAKES UP POST AS CHINESE GOVERNMENT'S CLIMATE ADVISOR" followed by the AFP article "THE NEW IPCC CONSENSUS: CHINA, INDIA SHOULD SHAME RICH COUNTRIES INTO WEALTH TRANSFER".
The UN's IPCC's Chairman Pachauri acting as climate advisor to the Chinese government, no less? And the same "climate advisor" stating in Beijing that China and India should "shame" developed economies into "wealth transfer"? Based on evidence, taking Pachauri aside and explaining the fundamentals of conflict of interest to him would likely be an exercise in futility.
Two things have at least been achieved by Pachauri's actions: One, any pretence that may have remained about the IPCC as a "scientific" "intergovernmental" advisory body has been removed, hopefully once and for all.
And two, confirmation by Pachauri himself of what AGW/ACC really has been about all along: a 20 year campaign of fearmongering, orchestrated to trigger massive wealth transfer by the developed economies to the rest of the world, managed by an "appropriate global governance structure" - as explained by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's last week - without any accountability, of course.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (1)
An email from Wayne Richards [theamazingrichards@gmail.com] below:
I've reached my own personal tipping point. I've heard once too often that the Arctic ice melt of 2007 was unprecedented, that it's going to happen again, only worse, and that we're all doomed. Including the polar bears. Never before in history...etc.
Less than a half mile from my home in Vancouver, B.C. sits the RCMP Vessel Saint Roch. She's been declared a national monument or some such designation, and for good reason. In the early 1940's she traversed the Northwest Passage. Then she did it again. Then again, in the other direction. Three times, three times.
She's a small thing, but sturdily built. At a little over a hundred feet long, she displaces about 325 tons. She was powered by some small auxiliary sails and a piddling 150 hp.diesel engine. And she's not steel. She's built of good British Columbia Douglas fir, externally sheathed with Australian gumwood (thank you, Aussies). Mind you, her bow had some metal on it, whether iron or steel I do not know.
This small, woefully underpowered vessel was the first to traverse the Northwest Passage west to east, was the first to traverse it more than once, was the first to traverse it in both directions, and was the first to circumnavigate North America (using the Panama Canal at the small end).
But she was not the first in recorded history to traverse the Northwest Passage. In 1906 Roald Amundsen ran it from east to west in his even smaller (76ft) sloop "Gjoa". It may have been all sail; if it had an auxiliary motor I do not know of it.
The log books of neither the Gjoa nor the St. Roch record any drowning polar bears.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (2)
Note that there is a slight rising trend but that it was happening long before the late 20th century and the era of widespread industrialization
Obama "Bailing Out" Al Gore and Utilities
Obama Rewards Companies Supporting Cap-and-Trade with Over $600,000,000 Million in Grants
Today's page one New York Times story on Al Gore profiting from global warming advocacy illustrates how taxpayer money is being used to reward businesses that support Obama's energy agenda, says Tom Borelli Ph.D., director of the Free Enterprise Project. Gore's venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will benefit from the Department of Energy grants to support the development of the so-called smart grid, according to the Times. "The Department of Energy is doling out $3.4 billion in smart grid grants and some of these funds are being steered to "friends of Obama," said Borelli.
The Department of Energy (DOE) funds were part of the "American Reinvestment and Recovery Act" – President Obama's economic stimulus plan. According to the Times, $560 million in grants were awarded to utilities that had contracts with Silver Spring Networks – a company that Gore's firm has invested in. Silver Spring Networks develops technologies to increase the efficiency of the electricity grid.
John Doerr, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. "Grants to Gore, unfortunately, are only the tip of the global warming iceberg. The big money is going to companies that are lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation," added Borelli.
Utilities lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation are recipients of over $600,000,000 in DOE grants. Duke Energy, FPL Group and Exelon are members of the United States Climate Action Partnership -- a lobbying group seeking a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. DOE awarded the following grants:
Duke Energy Carolinas $3,927,899
Duke Energy Business Services LLC $200,000,000
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) $200,000,000
PECO Energy Company (Exelon) $ 200,000,000
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is going to corporations that have their own resources. Clearly, it pays to be on team Obama. No wonder Exelon is turning in its membership with the U.S Chamber of Commerce and Duke Energy left the National Association of Manufactures," said Borelli. "These trade associations are opposing the global warming bill moving through Congress."
SOURCE
Al Gore the new Madoff?
Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies. Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology. The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is. "Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?" Mr. Gore said. "I am proud of it. I am proud of it."
SOURCE
Africans balking at climate proposals too
African countries boycotted meetings at U.N. climate talks Tuesday, saying that industrial countries had set carbon-cutting targets too low for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The action forced several technical meetings to be canceled at this week's U.N. climate talks in Barcelona. Delegates warned that, unless the African protest was settled, it could set back the timetable for concluding a new climate change pact at a major U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen.
The 50 or so African countries said they would only discuss pledges submitted by wealthy countries, and that talks on other issues including carbon offsets and action by developing countries should not move forward until there is full commitment by industrial countries. "I don't think we can get to a result in the way we're going now," said Algerian negotiator Kamel Djemouai, who chairs the Africa group. "We cannot prejudge what will happen next until we see the reactions of others."
It was the first time the Africans have taken such concerted action at the U.N. climate talks, but they have been coordinating their position over the past year to ensure unity in the final lead-up to the Copenhagen conference, said Antonio Hill, of Oxfam International. Scientists say industrial countries should reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, but targets announced so far amount to far less than the minimum.
The African walkout stymied only part of the talks, which operate in two parallel bodies. Negotiations on the overall shape of a deal and on financing for poor countries continued uninterrupted.
European delegates met leaders of the African group for two hours, but failed to persuade them to return to the committee rooms. A broader meeting was called to try to break the impasse....
More HERE
American Agri-Women honor skeptical Meteorologist
American Agri-Women (AAW) will present their highest honor, the Veritas Award, to Oregon Meteorologist George Taylor, at their 34rd annual convention in Salem, Oregon, November 13. The Veritas Award is given to individuals who have been public witness to the “pursuit of truth” in accordance with the principles expressed in the AAW statement of philosophy. Of specific interest are personalities of importance to agriculture, or responsible media coverage of agricultural issues and events.
George Taylor has been working in the field of meteorology and climatology for over 34 years. Taylor, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, served for 19 years as Oregon’s climatologist and was elected president of the American Association of Climatologists in 1998. He now runs his own business, Applied Climate Service.
Through his research over the years Taylor has shown that global warming is a natural occurrence with minimal influence by man and that by looking back further than the past few decades, the data shows that warming and cooling periods are common. Taylor continually works to keep the public informed of the effects climate has on their lives by publishing over 200 reports, books and articles, and by writing a bi-weekly column in two local newspapers. He is also a popular speaker, standing up for what he knows to be the truth, even when it disagrees with the prevailing opinion. AAW president Marcie Williams notes that, “George Taylor’s credentials and his courage in speaking out makes him an outstanding Veritas Award winner and we are excited to be able to honor him in this way.”
Past Veritas recipients include Paul Harvey, Michael DeBakey, Julia Child, Dr. C. Everett Koop, and John Stossel, to name a few.
Come to the AAW convention to hear these informative and entertaining speakers. For information about the convention, or agenda and registration form, visit the American Agri-Women website at www.americanagriwomen.org.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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