BOMBSHELL: GERMANY'S CLIMATE POLICY IN FREE-FALL AS MERKEL QUESTIONS KYOTO PROTOCOL

Angela Merkel, the Chancellor candidate of Germany's conservative party [i.e. Germany's likely next Prime Minister], announced a radical change in Germany's energy policy in the event of an election victory. She plans to significantly ease restrictions on power station operators and the energy industry. "There will be significant corrections, if we receive the confidence of the popular vote", Merkel said on Wednesday in Berlin.

The high energy prices have became a "growth risk" for the German economy. Among other things, Merkel promised to reduce the burden posed by the eco-tax. The boss of the CDU wants to correct substantial projects of the red-green energy policy on emission trading, nuclear energy, climate change and the promotion of renewable energies. Above all, the operators of coal and nuclear power stations would profit most from such changes.

In addition, Merkel plans to scrutinise the targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions set by the Kyoto Protocol: "We need a Kyoto plus." The US, who do not want to limit their emissions, would have to be included. According to Merkel, the red-green plans for stricter targets of the emission trade starting from 2008 would be also changed. Only Germany and Great Britain have committed themselves to lower their greenhouse gas output in this context. This, however, represents a competitive disadvantage.

"National politics are not the correct answer to globalisation and global challenges," said Merkel with regard to CO2 emissions in developing countries..

More here (In German)





COLD SNAP SWEEPS MUCH OF EUROPE: MUST BE GLOBAL WARMING!

It's nearly summertime -- and the living is chilly across much of Europe. Fresh snow fell Wednesday on parts of Austria -- so much in some places that authorities closed roads to cars without tire chains -- and temperatures dipped below freezing in corners of Croatia and Scotland, fouling moods and spoiling picnic plans.

The unseasonably cold June has even caused headaches in Italy, a country that's normally balmy at this time of year: Officials say cooler-than-usual temperatures and hailstorms have inflicted millions of euros (dollars) in damage on crops. In agricultural areas near Verona in northeastern Italy -- one of the hardest-hit areas -- between 30 and 40 percent of peaches and apples were lost after the hail pummeled trees, according to Coldiretti, an Italian farmers' association. Heavy rains and strong winds flooded some of Rome's cobblestone streets overnight, uprooting trees and forcing authorities to close several roads to traffic. The gusts continued Wednesday, rustling Pope Benedict XVI's white vestments during his open-air audience in St. Peter's Square and forcing the pontiff to take off his skullcap.

Parts of Austria's Alps were blanketed with up to 40 centimeters (nearly 16 inches) of fresh snow early Wednesday, and the country's automobile club said numerous tow trucks were called to aid stranded motorists. No injuries were reported. Although the snow was limited to higher elevations, temperatures have dipped to 7 degrees Celsius (44 degrees Fahrenheit) in Vienna. Austrians call the late spring chill "Schafskaelte," or sheep's cold -- invoking the image of sheep shivering in the fields after being shorn of their first wool of the season.

To be sure, not all of Europe was chilly. In three of Portugal's northern districts, firefighters were on maximum alert Wednesday as a heat wave sharply increased the risk of forest fires. But in Croatia, a few centimeters (inches) of snow fell overnight on the southern mountain of Biokovo, where the mercury plunged to minus-3 degrees C (37 degrees F) Wednesday morning, officials said.

It's been a far colder than usual in parts of Germany, where overnight temperatures recently have dropped as low as 2 degrees C (35 degrees F) in the east, and in neighboring Switzerland, where high winds swept away several tents at a fairground last weekend.

Many parts of Britain also have had an unusually cold June. Temperatures fell below freezing on Tuesday, with thermometers in the village of Aboyne, Scotland, recording minus-1.1 degrees C (30 degrees F), the Meteorological Office said, predicting more chilly nights this week. The Royal Air Force base at Benson in Oxfordshire notched its lowest June temperature ever at minus-0.3 degrees C (31.46 degrees F) on Tuesday, beating the zero degrees C (32 degrees F) mark recorded in June 1962.

From CNN, 8 June 2005





A SYSTEMATIC REPLY TO THE GOVERNATOR'S FANTASIES

What he put forward were goals with no proposals about how to achieve them so it is probably just hot air to please the voters in America's weirdest state but in case he meant it seriously.....

Schwarzenegger's plan calls for the virtual elimination of GHG emissions in California over the next few decades. This alone should give people pause, as the only way to achieve such large GHG reductions is to drastically curtail the use of fossil fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and natural gas.

True Lies

With the Governor calling for such a radical reorganization of Californians' lives, we need to ask what problem Schwarzenegger and his environmentalist allies are trying to solve. The Governor's executive order claims human-caused climate change threatens to increase California's air pollution, reduce its water supplies, increase heat-related mortality, infectious diseases and asthma, harm the state's agricultural industry, and flood the state's 1,100 miles of coastline.

This isn't the place for a treatise on climate change science and health impacts. But even a cursory survey of the research literature should make everyone queasy about using the claim of human-induced climate change as the pretext for forcing a drastic reorganization of human economies. First, rising temperatures will at worst have no effect on heat-related mortality. Urban temperatures have been rising for decades, probably due to an expanding urban heat island effect. Nevertheless, between the 1960s and the 1990s, the rate of heat-related mortality declined more than 75 percent in U.S. cities. No matter. Environmentalists and politicians continue to claim that climate change will increase heat deaths.

But perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on environmentalists and politicians. They get help from scientists who lend credibility to their false claims. For example, despite large observed declines in heat-related mortality, a group of scientists recently published a study in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claiming that rising temperatures will increase future heat-related deaths in California. Several authors of the PNAS study are also the authors of Union of Concerned Scientists climate change reports.

Likewise, regardless of whether temperatures rise in the future, this will not increase air pollution. For particulate matter, higher temperatures are associated with lower pollution levels. For ozone, most ozone-forming pollutants will be eliminated over the next 20 years, making future climate virtually irrelevant for ozone levels. Observations of the recent past should also put to rest any concerns about future air pollution levels in a changing climate. Despite rising urban temperatures over the last few decades, air pollution of all kinds has drastically declined.

Schwarzenegger's asthma-air pollution link is also spurious. Asthma prevalence has more than doubled in the U.S. since the early 1980s, but during the same period, air pollution of all kinds declined.

We could also use a bit more skepticism regarding claims about human contributions to climate change. These claims depend on the output of climate models that purport to demonstrate a causal link between the observed atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and surface temperatures. But these models do a poor job of reproducing the Earth's actual climate. For example:

* Climate models predict that rising atmospheric CO2 should cause temperatures in the lower atmosphere to increase more rapidly than at the surface. But just the opposite has happened. Surface, balloon, and satellite temperature trend data show no change in lower atmosphere temperatures during the last few decades, even as surface temperatures have risen. One potential explanation is that the surface temperature increases may be largely due to increasing urban heat island effects, rather than to greenhouse-gas buildup.

* Understanding clouds is key to predicting climate change, because clouds can cool or warm the atmosphere depending on their structure and location. A recent study compared measurements of cloudiness with predictions of ten climate models. The study reported both large variations between models -- as large as a factor of four for predictions of some types of clouds -- and large discrepancies between the models and the observations.

* Climate models predict that greenhouse-gas induced climate change should be most salient at the Earth's poles. But Antarctica is not cooperating. The southernmost continent has been cooling for decades, and sea ice and snowpack have been increasing. The increasing Antarctic snowpack is also reducing sea levels, because the snow ultimately comes from evaporation of ocean water.

These are just a few among many examples of how climate models fail to represent the Earth's actual climate and of how the Earth's climate doesn't behave in accord with the predictions of human-induced-greenhouse theory. Despite the inability of climate models to accurately represent global climate, this hasn't stopped scientists from using these same models to make precise predictions about the ostensible effects of human-induced climate change on relatively small regions of the Earth, such as California. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists states without qualification "rising temperatures, possibly exacerbated by declining winter precipitation, will severely reduce snowpack in the Sierra Nevada" causing a substantial reduction in California's water supplies.

UCS makes this claim based on the same PNAS study cited above. But the study's conclusions are based on the output of a climate model that does no better than a table of random numbers in predicting measured U.S. temperatures during the 20th Century. Furthermore, the model results don't appear to jibe with other key data. For example, data for the last hundred years show no correlation between average winter temperatures in California and subsequent Sierra Nevada water runoff during the spring. There's also no correlation between average temperatures and average winter precipitation in California. And despite rising temperatures during the late 20th Century, the last decade has had the wettest California winters of any decade during the last 50 years, and the 3rd wettest of the last 100 years.

According to a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters ice melting in the Arctic Ocean will cause a large decline in winter rain and snowpack in California, resulting in future water shortages. These results were based solely on the output of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's climate model. Unfortunately, the authors of that research didn't check their modeled results against actual data. If they had, they would have found that there is no correlation between the amount of Arctic sea ice and winter precipitation in the western U.S. In fact, even as global-average surface temperatures have risen during the last few decades, U.S. precipitation has been rising as well. Once again, these problems with regional impacts studies are just the tip of the iceberg. Climate modelers admit privately that global climate models are not capable of providing accurate predictions of regional climate.

Governor Schwarzenegger justifies his call for a near elimination of California's GHG emissions with scary stories about future human-wrought climate disasters. But the only "evidence" for these upcoming disasters is the output of computer models that don't jibe with reality. This is not evidence, but nonsense.

Collateral Damage

The case for reducing GHGs depends on whether GHG emissions are changing the climate in ways that harm human health. But the evidence for GHG-induced climate change is weak. Regardless of whatever harms might be caused by future human-induced climate change, measures to reduce GHG emissions will likely cause much greater harm.

The federal Energy Information Administration, the Department of Energy's independent research arm, recently provided a reality check on the costs of GHG reduction requirements. EIA estimated that reducing national GHG emissions 11 percent below business-as-usual by 2025 would cost a total of $620 billion nationwide during the next 20 years. California has a somewhat different GHG mix than the nation, but assuming similar unit costs for California, the state's pro-rated cost would be about $40 billion, or an average of $2 billion per year.

Schwarzenegger wants to achieve by 2020 more than twice the percentage reduction in GHGs that EIA evaluated for 2025. Marginal costs increase with each increment of GHG reduction. California also has relatively low per-capita GHG emissions compared to the national average, due largely to a mild climate and virtually no use of coal for electricity. As a result, the state's unit GHG reduction costs will likely be greater than the national average. Thus, even getting the state's GHG emissions down to 1990 levels is likely to cost at least several billion dollars per year, or several hundred dollars per year for each California household. Achieving the Governor's 2050 goal is simply a pipe dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). While reducing GHG emissions to 1990s levels would impose hardship, attempting to reduce GHGs 80 percent below 1990 levels would amount to destroying California in order to purport to save it.

More here





NICE TO HAVE THE REALITY OF SCIENTIFIC DISHONESTY DOCUMENTED

It's not the stuff of headlines, like fraud. But more mundane misbehavior by scientists is common enough that it may pose an even greater threat to the integrity of science, a new report asserts. One-third of scientists surveyed said that within the previous three years, they'd engaged in at least one practice that would probably get them into trouble, the report said. Examples included circumventing minor aspects of rules for doing research on people and overlooking a colleague's use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data. Such behaviors are "primarily flying below the radar screen right now," said Brian C. Martinson of the HealthPartners Research Foundation in Minneapolis, who presents the survey results with colleagues in a commentary in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Scientists "can no longer remain complacent about such misbehavior," the commentary says.

But "I don't think we've been complacent," said Mark S. Frankel, director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility & Law Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Frankel, who wasn't involved in the survey, said its results didn't surprise him. But he said that the survey sampled only a slice of the scientific community and shouldn't be taken as applying to all scientists.

The survey included results from 3,247 scientists, roughly 40 percent of those who were sent the questionnaire in 2002. They were researchers based in the United States who'd received funding from the National Institutes of Health. Most were studying biology, medicine or the social sciences, with others in chemistry and a smaller group in math, physics or engineering. Of the 10 practices that Martinson's study described as the most serious, less than 2 percent of respondents admitted to falsifying data, plagiarism or ignoring major aspects of rules for conducting studies with human subjects. But nearly 8 percent said they'd circumvented what they judged to be minor aspects of such requirements.

Nearly 13 percent of those who responded said they'd overlooked "others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data," and nearly 16 percent said they had changed the design, methods or results of a study "in response to pressure from a funding source." Martinson said the first question referred to other researchers in their own lab, and the second question referred to pressure from companies funding their work.

But David Clayton, vice president and chief scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which focuses on biomedical research, said he found both questions worded so vaguely that they could be referring to perfectly acceptable activities.

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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