"THE TIMES" TRASHES BRITISH CLIMATE POLICY TOO

Befuddled by the fog of Kyoto, Britain's environmental policy is a costly shambles based on dubious predictions about the future

The Government has not the foggiest notion what Britain's self-imposed and hugely ambitious target of cutting C02 emissions to 60 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050 will cost. The estimates range from anywhere between 60 and 400 billion pounds in today's money - and the lower figure assumes, totally implausibly, that costs up to 2020 will be negligible because the emissions targets can be met merely through more efficient use of energy.

Gordon Brown has correctly observed that finance ministries need to be involved as deeply in climate change policy as are environmental departments. Yet in Britain, Defra rules OK; and the approach of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is that the anticipated reduction in UK growth rates is trivial, by comparison with the (presumed) returns in reduced environmental risk. As the committee observes, "no other item of government expenditure is treated in this way. If it were, it would be easy to justify almost any large scale item." The Treasury has not even done an overall cost-benefit analysis of the returns to be expected from the emissions-reduction strategy - and because Britain's emissions are a minute fraction of the global total, the truthful answer would be high cost for zero benefit, should other countries not follow "the British lead". No wonder the report calls for a complete overhaul of government policy.

Mr Blair should, however, swallow hard and push this report as hard as he can into the international domain, because it poses questions of the first magnitude about the faulty and, in some cases seriously misleading economic "scenarios", produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), on which not only Britain's but other countries' policies are being based. The committee accepts that the uncertainties that still surround the science of global warming do not constitute a justification for doing nothing; "the issue is how to behave in the face of that uncertainty", and it must be right to take out insurance against the worst risks. But not "at any cost" - particularly when the estimates of the impact of global warming vary enormously, are even more highly speculative than the science of climate change and may heavily overestimate the damage, particularly when some parts of the world would actually benefit from a warmer climate - something that the IPPC has consistently underplayed.

The major point this report makes is that the links between economic growth and global warming have "not been sufficiently rigorously explored". Put less gently, some of the IPPC "scenarios" - including the ones that predict global warming in excess of 5C - are based on fantasy.

Climate change modelling involves combining scientific data, observed and projected through models, with economic forecasts. Assumptions about per capita emissions of greenhouse gases, for example, are critically affected by things such as the future size of the world's population, global growth rates, energy efficiency, and the prospects of developing new technologies that reduce future reliance on fossil fuels. The IPPC's "high end scenarios" assume not only that carbon and methane emissions rise steeply, when they are currently stable or actually shrinking, but artificially inflate the magnitude of global warming by assuming that the world's population will be half as large again 2100 as it is expected to be. The IPPC also consistently factors in global growth rates that are far higher than those historically recorded.

These "worst-case scenarios" are constantly cited, erroneously, as forecasts, and they are seriously distorting policy. It is urgent to arrive at more realistic estimates, to be clearer about the trade-offs involved and to be more honest about the high costs that generations now living will asked to bear, for benefits that lie far in the future.

More thought, the report says, also needs to be given to the merits of adapting to climate change, given that some measure of global warming is unavoidable. Adaptation is "the Cinderella" of climate change policy. "Nearly all of the public debate . . . is about mitigation - reducing emissions - rather than about . . . assisting the most vulnerable societies in the world to adapt to the risk they may face." With or without global warming, for example, water scarcity may affect as many as six billion people by 2080.

How might governments get themselves off the Kyoto hook? By focusing on incentives rather than imposed targets. The goal should be to make carbon-free energy economically viable, and that will require heavy investment in such technologies as solar photovoltaics, carbon sequestration and hydrogen technology. Governments need to get away from targets and penalties, and concentrate on maximising the potential of research. Because this is what the Bush Administration has been saying, the Gleneagles summiteers will not want to admit that Kyoto is a bankrupt strategy. But the issue is too important for pride to trump common sense





Chirac vs. the Anglosphere: At the G8 Summit, Chirac will again beat a dead horse

When French voters rejected the draft European Union constitution drawn up by former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, his successor Jacques Chirac reverted to the cornerstone of French policy for the past 400 years: Blame it on "les Anglo-Saxons." His people had rejected the constitution not because of its limits on French sovereignty, he decided, but because the constitution was too liberal, imposing free markets and other elements of the dreaded Anglo-American economic system on an unwilling French public. Ignoring that his country had just plunged the EU into a crisis, he immediately precipitated another one by attacking Tony Blair very publicly at the recent EU summit. The bell will sound for round two of the fight at the G8 summit today. This time, however, he will be throwing a few punches at President Bush as well.

The issue in question will be global warming. Jacques Chirac long ago hailed the Kyoto Protocol as "the first component of an authentic global governance." By authentic, he presumably meant dirigiste, as its prescriptive demands for limitations on greenhouse-gas emissions that would artificially suppress the energy use that powers economic growth are certainly not Anglo-Saxon in intent. When Tony Blair announced that he would be making "climate change" a focus of the G8 summit in Scotland, Chirac could have been sure that Kyoto would be mentioned.

Yet it has not worked out that way. The U.S. Senate recognized early on in the process that Kyoto was not so much an environmental treaty as an economic one, on the basis that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck — whatever name others give to it. Now Tony Blair has realized that Kyoto is a dead duck. While Britain is striving mightily to live up to its commitments under the treaty, the rest of Europe isn't. Nor, for that matter, is Canada. Or Japan. The only difference between these nations and America is that the U.S.A. is honest enough to say it isn't going to comply.

Indeed, European ministers have been quietly shelving the idea of binding energy-reduction targets. On June 29, the EU Council of Ministers scrapped every binding element of a proposal to increase energy efficiency. The EU Commission had proposed a binding target of a 9 percent decrease on retail energy consumption by 2015. The parliament had increased that to 11.5 percent. Yet the Union's energy ministers took out those provisions and replaced them with a nonbinding target of 6 percent reductions over a six-year period starting at some undisclosed date.

Faced with the president's principled opposition to and the EU's unprincipled disregard of the Kyoto agreements, Blair appears to have decided to concede defeat. According to British officials speaking off the record, the G8 communiqué on global warming will not include any reference to targets for emissions reduction or to Kyoto itself. Environmental groups will be horrified, and will presumably go through denial, anger, and depression before finally accepting that their Kyoto dream is dead.

Jacques Chirac, on the other hand, will see this as a perfect opportunity for a fight. He told French officials that he would hold out for a mention of Kyoto in the communiqué text and also a concession that the warming problem requires urgent corrective action (presumably of the sort Europe has been unwilling to take). Indeed, Chirac seems to believe that he can use Britain's membership in the EU as a bargaining chip. A senior French figure told The Times of London on July 1, "[Mr. Blair] can fudge the issue by coming up with a compromise between ourselves and the Americans which suggests we agree when we don't. And that will not fly. The other possibility is to say, without generating any crisis: 'Britain, as a member of the EU, cannot say that we agree when we don't.' Blair has an opportunity to show that he is a good European and that, on a matter like climate change, he will not give up and have a compromise at any cost."

This tactic is unlikely to work. Having attacked Tony Blair and Britain itself at the recent EU summit, Chirac has inadvertently driven Blair towards a Euro-skeptic position, something that has proved very popular in the U.K. As the Jacques attack was completely unprovoked, it is unlikely that the prime minister will be in conciliatory mood. In fact, Chirac's attacks at the EU summit and the G8 seem to have driven the Anglosphere allies closer together still. If the prime minister and president play this right, they will be seen as forward-looking, advancing an agenda and acting with global vision. (The British have now joined the Americans in conceding that the Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians must be involved, although somewhat eccentrically they are claiming credit for bringing the parties together.)

Chirac, on the other hand, should be seen as the reactionary, stuck in the past, advocating failed solutions while ignoring inconvenient facts. In that, at least, he is reflecting the views of the French people.

From Iain Murray





SOLAR VARIABILITY HAS MORE SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE THAN THOUGHT

Another excerpt from an academic paper -- this one showing that variations in the activity of the sun could lie behind a lot of climate change. And the sun has indicated that it will not sign the Kyoto treaty either. From "Advances in Space Research" Volume 35, Issue 3 , 2005, Pages 451-457 Doi address here

Influence of solar 11-year variability on chemical composition of the stratosphere and mesosphere simulated with a chemistry-climate model

By: T. Egorova a), b), E. Rozanov a), b), V. Zubov c), W. Schmutz b) and Th. Peter a) a) Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Hoenggerberg HPP, ETH, Zurich CH-8093, Switzerland b) Physical-Meteorological Observatory, World Radiation Center, Dorfstrasse 3, Davos 7260, Switzerland c) Main Geophysical Observatory, 7 Karbyshev street, St. Petersburg 194021, Russia

Abstract

An understanding of observed global chemistry and climate changes caused by solar activity changes is a high priority in modern geosciences. Here, we discuss the influence of the ultraviolet spectral irradiance variability during solar cycle on chemical composition of the stratosphere and mesosphere with chemistry-climate model that fully describes the interactions between chemical and thermo-dynamical processes. We have performed several 20-year long steady-state runs and found a significant influence of solar irradiation on the chemical composition in the stratosphere and mesosphere. An enhanced photolysis during solar maximum results in destruction of methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs providing an increase in the chemical activity of the atmosphere with more pronounced effects in the mesosphere. In the mesosphere, an increase of HOx caused by more intensive water vapor photolysis results in significant ozone depletion there. More intensive methane oxidation gives statistically significant rise to the stratospheric humidity. The influence of dynamical perturbations has been identified over high latitude areas. The response of OH is found to be in a good agreement with observation data. The response of the other species is hard to validate, because of the lack of theoretical and observational studies.

Conclusions

In this paper, we document the response of several important atmospheric species (CH4, N2O, H2O, CF2Cl2, OH, HO2, NO2 and ClO) to the observed increase of the solar irradiance from minimum to maximum of the 11-year solar activity cycle simulated with state-of-the-art CCM SOCOL. The response of ozone, temperature and dynamics to solar irradiance variability have been analyzed by Egorova et al. (2004) and here, we concentrate only on chemical aspect of the issue. Our results confirm that solar variability has significant influence on the chemical composition of the stratosphere and mesosphere. We found substantial changes in the concentration of several source gases as well as reservoir and radical species that are responsible for ozone destruction in the atmosphere. Enhanced photolysis rates during solar maximum lead to additional destruction of methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs providing an increase in the chemical activity of the atmosphere with more pronounced effects in the mesosphere. In the mesosphere, an increase of HOx caused by more intensive water vapor photolysis results in substantial ozone depletion there. More intensive methane oxidation gives statistically significant rise to the stratospheric humidity. The application of the fully coupled CCM allow tracing of dynamical changes influence, which appear as a pronounced decrease of source gases over the high latitude area.

However, from our CCM results, it is impossible to distinguish between chemical and dynamical influence with high level of confidence. An additional run of the same model in off-line mode (i.e., with prescribed dynamics and temperature) may provide the solar signal solely due to chemical processes and subsequent comparison with interactive run can help to elucidate the dynamical contribution. It should be also noted that the model is not capable of simulating transport effects properly because of the steady-state approach used in this study. It is particularly true for long-lived trace species, which have transport times of several years within the middle atmosphere. We will address this issue using the results of our ongoing transient runs.

However, we think that the presentation of the solar signal using steady-state approach is necessary step forward in our understanding of the atmospheric response to the solar irradiance variability. It helps to comprehend the chain of physical and chemical processes responsible for the formation of the solar signal in the atmosphere and provide a basis for future analysis of the solar signal obtained from the transient simulations. Simulated response of the hydroxyl radical is in a reasonably good agreement with theoretical prediction and observation data presented by Canty and Minschwaner (2002). The ozone response does not agree well with the solar signal in ozone extracted from observational data (Egorova et al., 2004). The responses of the other species to solar flux variability (while they are close to the theoretical expectations and qualitatively agree with previous estimations) are hard to validate, because almost no observational studies are available at the moment. We hope that in the nearest future such studies will appear and we will have reliable data to validate our model results. This investigation will help to answer the question why simulated ozone response is far from the observational evidences and which process could be missing in the model.






MORE PROPERTY THEFT IN THE NAME OF ENDANGERED SPECIES

Unfortunately, the dreadful Kelo v. City of New London ruling isn't the only nightmare facing property owners this summer, the American Policy Center (APC) reported today. According to draft language obtained by the Center, the "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005" (TESRA 2005) is a major sellout to property rights advocates nationwide. Appropriately, the Center has dubbed the bill "Kelo II." "I can't believe what I'm looking at," said APC president Tom DeWeese referring to the draft language. "Just as the Supreme Court's decision on Kelo has strengthened local governments' ability to run roughshod over the Fifth Amendment, TESRA 2005 strengthens the federal government's ability to steal private property under the Endangered Species Act." According to the documents obtained, the TESRA 2005 language was produced by Congressman Richard Pombo's House Resources Committee office.

The language states that the federal government can take up to 50 percent of a landowner's property before it ever has to pay the landowner a dime. "This is a sellout to property rights advocates, plain and simple," said DeWeese. "Stealing 50 percent of a person's lifeblood is out and out theft, but Congressman Pombo wants to make it federal law." A particularly frightening provision in the Act "provides new authority to protect listed species from harmful invasive species." DeWeese calls this "an outrage," noting that radical environmentalists have sought regulatory authority over so-called invasive species for years. Property rights advocates have fought such authority tooth-and-nail, as it would lead to property rights abuse far and above even what the current Endangered Species Act allows. "If this is Congressman Pombo's idea of help for property owners, I'd hate to see his idea of hurt," said DeWeese.

According to an Executive Order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1999, invasive species are broadly defined as "any species, including seeds, eggs, spores, or other biological material capable of propagating that species, that is not native to that ecosystem." DeWeese notes that Kentucky bluegrass and English ivy, found on most lawns and golf courses, are just two examples of common invasive species that could open the door to government regulation of a person's property.

The Endangered Species Act has a thirty-year history of shredding Americans' constitutional protection of private property, and it has ruined countless lives in the process. DeWeese warns that the Pombo plan to reaffirm the Act's unconstitutional power to take private property, and give the federal government the additional power to regulate invasive species, is an absolute disaster for anyone who owns land. He gives it an emphatic two thumbs down. "Like most sequels, it would have been much better if Kelo II [TESRA 2005] had never been made."

Source

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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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