"USA TODAY" EDITORIAL: GLOBAL WARMING ACTIVISTS TURN STORMS INTO SPIN

Hurricanes feed off of warm water. So the one-two punch to the Gulf Coast from Katrina and Rita has naturally led many people to wonder: Is global warming to blame for back-to-back major hurricanes slamming into the United States? European officials and some environmentalists have been quick to assert a connection. After Katrina, Germany's environmental minister, Jurgen Trittin, called America "climate-polluter headquarters." As Rita bore down on the Texas coast, British scientist John Lawton cited it as evidence that the United States' policies on curbing pollution were responsible.

Not so fast. The science backing a link between global warming and devastating storms is preliminary, skimpy and contradicted by many hurricane experts. Even the researchers who suggest there may be a link caution against leaping to conclusions without lots more study. That sensible restraint hasn't slowed those who would exploit a tragedy to score political points and advance their agendas. Global warming is real, and reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels requires urgent action worldwide, according to the National Academy of Sciences and 10 other leading world bodies. But jumping out ahead of the science sensationalizes the issue, polarizes the debate and damages the credibility of those who make outlandish claims.

Because hurricanes form and intensify over warm ocean water, and water temperatures have risen slightly in recent years, it's understandable why there's much speculation that global warming is causing the increased number and ferocity of storms. But there's far more reason to be skeptical:

* Science doesn't support a link between global warming and recent hurricane activity, notes Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. Katrina and Rita are part of a natural cycle. The increase in number and intensity of storms since 1995 is hardly unprecedented, says William Gray, a leading hurricane expert based at Colorado State University. He points out that two major hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast only six weeks apart in 1915, mimicking the doubly whammy of Katrina and Rita.

* If global warming were to blame for recent storms, there should have been more typhoons in the Pacific and Indian oceans since 1995, Gray says. Instead, there has been a slight decrease - at the same time China and India have increased their industrial output and emissions of greenhouse gases.

* The impact of hurricanes might seem more severe because of the intensity of news coverage and because more people are living in hurricane alley. That means more property damage and more loss of life. The current cycle of more and deadlier storms could last 15 to 20 more years, notes the National Hurricane Center. It's worth researching whether global warming is affecting the frequency and intensity of those storms, but there's certainly no proof at the moment. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking economic growth is an important challenge. Blaming Katrina and Rita on global warming just adds to the hot air surrounding the issue.

Source





UK MEDIA IN DENIAL OVER POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE?

Post lifted from Prof. Stott

Now, I am no Instapundit, nor even a Daily Ablution, but I think I know a key story when I see one.

On Tuesday last week, I reported the distinct cooling of Tony Blair, the British PM, towards the Kyoto Protocol based on the answers he gave in mid-town Manhattan on September 15 at the Clinton Global Initiative [see: 'Mr. Blair quietly kills off the Kyoto Protocol.....', my September 20 blog]. I even sent a verbatim copy of the Blair quotations to various British media outlets that have often responded in the past to information I have provided them. You would thus think that our media might have jumped at such a story. Yet nothing appeared. I also aired Blair's change of attitude, en passant, while appearing on the excellent 'Daily Politics' show (BBC 2), mid-week.

At last, today, certain Sunday newspapers have started to pick up on the story, if only in short, inside-news pieces - and this, remember, is ten days after Mr. Blair made his carefully-worded remarks. The Sunday Times is one such newspaper (see: 'News', p. 5), while The Observer is another, with 'Blair is accused of Kyoto U-turn' (on 'News', p. 2). The sub-heading for the latter is particularly amusing: 'PM moves closer to Bush's solutions.' The best coverage is probably in The Sunday Telegraph with 'Why Kyoto will never succeed, by Blair'. And the most hysterical? Of course, what a surprise, The Independent on Sunday, with the inevitable headline, 'Blair falls into line with Bush view on global warming', and vocabulary like "outrage", "undermined", "endangered", and "sold out". Yep, you can rely on The Indy. How about, for a change, "sensible", "politically realistic", "practical", and "economically sound"? [See also this parallel comment on the interesting Clive Davis blog: 'Blair & Kyoto redux', (September 25)].

In addition to all this, the ever-redoubtable Professor S. Fred Singer has let me know that the section of a typically-clear interview he did for BBC-4, in which he quoted Tony Blair's ("whom we much admire") statements from the Clinton New York conference, "where he pulled the plug on Kyoto", was cut from the final broadcast. He adds tellingly: "The BBC guy didn't like this at all." Quite.

I think this is all extremely illuminating. Much of the British media has invested enormous amounts of uncritical, emotional, soggy 'left' capital in support of the Kyoto Protocol over the last ten or so years. They have too willingly failed to apply critical journalism to the politics of climate change, with far too many commentators and news broadcasters allowing their own prejudices (not to mention their innate anti-Americanism - Mr. Blair is right about this too!) show.

Now, to their horror, these soggy left 'Green' pundits are finding themselves abandoned by the world, and they are sounding more and more shrill (and extremely shallow). They are increasingly in denial, often failing to pick up on the plate tectonic shifts in climate-change politics that have been slowly accumulating around the globe - shifts which that ever-consummate politician, Tony Blair, has more astutely grasped.

Anyone with even a smattering of understanding concerning the international politics of climate change knows that the Kyoto Protocol has been moribund for some time. Moreover, the world has moved on, shifted to the Pacific Rim, to technological solutions, and away from the 'command-and-control', socialistic, Old European formulae. The issues now (correctly) focus on energy, and on world energy needs, for growing economies. As Mr. Blair himself admitted in Manhattan, no country is going to opt for reduced growth, especially China and India - and most certainly not a UK under Mr. Gordon Brown.

As I have said before, it is time for the British media to grow up over the politics of climate change. The infantile foot-stampings of newspapers like The Independent should be left in the nursery. And, once again, Mr. Blair has demonstrated that New Labour is the only serious party on the British political landscape. Yet, even he is failing to make vital decisions over issues like clean coal and nuclear power.

The British media must recognise that 'global warming' is neither simplistic science nor the politics of the kindergarten.





The Conservation Hoax

President Bush tells us to drive less and limit trips to only the essentials, while the EPA's EnergyStar program is urging us all to "change a lightbulb" in our homes, from a regular one to a government-approved one, which they claim will save hundreds of millions. You are also supposed to take a pledge: "I pledge to do my part to save energy and help protect our environment by changing a light in my home to an ENERGY STAR qualified one"--then the government will send you a free "zipper pull."

We can see where this is headed: back to the days of relentless brow-beating, intimidation, regulation, and calls for national sacrifice-possibly even regimentation and control-all in the name of saving energy. (How much energy is consumed in making and sending the zipper pull?)

Just in time to check this growing mania comes The Bottomless Well, by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills (Basic Books, 2005). It provides nothing less than a total shift of paradigm for viewing the energy crises that have animated the media for at least the past 35 years. For those to whom the book's revelations are largely new, a lifetime's habits of thought on the subject of energy face complete refutation.

And here it is: energy is abundant, virtually everywhere, and with technologies already in use, is accessible to man's appropriation and use. And while the use of energy can create pollution of various forms, all such pollution is subject to abatement by . . . use of more energy. Breathtaking corollaries cascade one from the next both in consequence and in support of this proposition, such as, the more energy is used, the more can be found and exploited for any and all of the growing range of purposes to which energy applies.

Many of the book's revelations are delivered through what might be called shift of point of view. The authors identify the familiar steam engines of Newcomen and then Watt as the beginning of use of energy for mechanical power. But for what purpose were these machines devised? Why, to get more energy (specifically, to remove water from coal mines)! And by no coincidence, their fuel was that very coal that they were helping to mine.

Canards of conventional thinking tumble like tenpins. Chief among these may be the widespread, ill-considered assumption that improvements in efficiency, such as those mandated for vehicle engines by the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Act of 1978, can produce reductions in total energy consumption.

Using both a priorireasoning long familiar to Austrian and other enlightened economists together with a tsunami of empirical data, the authors demonstrate that the reverse is ineluctably true: improvements in efficiency lead to the consumption of more energy, whether in vehicle engines, electrical appliances, electricity generation, or computation.

Another of these is that Earth must eventually suffocate or burn up under a growing mantle of carbon dioxide and other emissions from the process of burning fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum. Theories of global warming have been debunked both well and often prior to this book, but this book brings to the discussion three facts that overcome the concern even if it should in fact be grounded in reality.

* First, technologies exist to reduce carbon-dioxide and other emissions that require for their implementation little more than the will to consume the additional amounts of energy required for their use.

* Second, nuclear power, an obvious and available solution to greenhouse-gas concerns since the 1960s, is today safer (against both terrorism and operational mishap) and more efficient than it ever has been, such pollution as it generates in the form of spent fuel being far easier to deal with than anti-nuclear interests have led the public to believe.

* And third, perhaps most astonishingly, North America, with its massive total and per-capita burning of fossil fuels, is evidently not a producer of carbon to global processes, but according to reliable measurements, actually absorbs carbon in net from other parts of the world whose carbon accounts are in surplus.

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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