U.S. Called 'Only Real Problem' At UN Climate Conference

The U.S. delegation attending the 11th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference this week in Montreal is being labeled the "only real problem" at the conference by liberal environmental groups. "When you walk around the conference hall here, delegates are saying there are lots of issues on the agenda, but there's only one real problem, and that's the United States," said Bill Hare of Greenpeace International, who was attending the early stages of the conference in Montreal last week. Hare and other liberal environmentalists charge that the U.S. is trying to undercut the U.N. conference.

The Climate Change Conference, which runs until Dec. 9, is the first meeting since the greenhouse gas limiting Kyoto Protocol was put into effect in February 2005 with Russia's ratification. Russia became the 156th country to ratify the pact -- the necessary number for it to take effect, but the U.S. is not part of the group. It has long-standing objections to the protocol's 2012 goal of getting top industrialized nations to cut their industrial emissions by 5.2 percent from the level that was produced in 1990.

Senior U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson showed no signs of backing down when he addressed the delegation in Montreal last week. "I reject the premise that the Kyoto-like agreement is necessary to address this issue," Watson said.

Several of the nations that ratified Kyoto, including the United Kingdom and Canada, either have expressed reservations about their ability to meet the emission goals set in the protocol or are struggling to meet emission reductions. The conference, being held in French-speaking Montreal, is being attended by more than 8,000 government leaders, environmentalists and scientists. Organizers are calling the conference the largest meeting since the Kyoto Climate Conference in 1997.

At the 2004 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Buenos Aries, Argentina, environmentalists conceded to Cybercast News Service that the Kyoto Protocol would not affect climate change and would instead be a "symbolic" gesture.

Despite the insistence by liberal environmentalists that the scientific debate surrounding human-caused "global warming" is settled, many scientists and a new report call into question any such consensus. The journal Quaternary Science Reviews in November published a study by Swiss researchers, stating that human impact on the climate may be minimal compared to natural climate variations. The study noted that natural temperature variations over the past 1,000 years were so large that they would "result in a redistribution of weight towards the role of natural factors in [causing] temperature changes, thereby relatively devaluing the impact of [man-made] emissions and affecting future predicted [global climate] scenarios." The study also noted that if natural factors played such a significant role in rising temperatures, then "agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol that intend to reduce emissions of anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases would be less effective than thought."

Skeptics of the science behind "global warming" were quick to seize on study published by Quaternary Science Reviews to refute the claims made by many in the scientific community and the worldwide environmental lobby. Steven Milloy, the publisher of JunkScience.com, noted in a Dec. 1 column, titled "Global Warming Blues," that, "the available scientific data simply don't add up to their desired conclusion that humans are harming the global climate. "Even if we were to forsake science and consider a position of 'erring on the side of caution,' the economic cost - two percent or more of global economic productivity - is a steep and certain price to pay for extremely uncertain and potentially negative consequences," Milloy, said of the greenhouse gas limiting Kyoto Protocol. Milloy is also an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute.

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MORE HOLES IN THE GULF-STREAM STORY

In the December 1st issue of Nature magazine, Harry Bryden and colleagues at Britain's National Oceanography Centre report that the Atlantic meridional circulation (also known as the thermohaline circulation (THC) -- the density driven current that carries warm surface water northward and returns colder deep water southward -- has slowed by 30 percent between 1957 and 2004. The significance of this finding is difficult to assess in light of other recent observations.

Climate model simulations estimate that a complete shutdown of the THC would result in a cooling of Europe of 4§C or more. So, shouldn't a 30% slowdown have some noticeable impacts, such as a pretty sharp cooling trend?

Just two days before the Bryden results were published, a report from the European Environment Agency detailed all of the ills that Europe has been facing recently because of how warm it has been, and prominently proclaimed that Europe's four hottest years on record were 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004. And yet, how many breathless news stories, like the one in London's Guardian, played the Bryden paper as reflecting a long-term (read: anthropogenic influenced) trend in the THC?

A close read, however, shows that the THC changes have really only taken place sometime since 1992. Since 1957, the characteristics of the Atlantic Ocean that Bryden et al. used in making their calculations were sampled 4 more times -- in 1981, 1992, 1998, and 2004. No remarkable changes were detected between 1957 and 1992, but since then, Bryden found indications that the THC had slowed a bit by 1998, and further in the 2004 data.

A large-scale, arguably "natural" event took place during that same time. Karcher et. al. recently reported a large freshwater release from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic Ocean in the mid-1990s as a result of atmospheric circulation patterns resulting from an extremely intense North Atlantic Oscillation (or NAO, a measure of the pressure distribution over the North Atlantic Ocean basin). Since the early to mid-1990s, the NAO has returned to more normal values indicating that the trend from low NAO values characteristic of the 1960s to the historically high values in the early 1990s has ended. The return to normal NAO conditions has also, according to Karcher et. al., resulted in a more normal degree of freshwater input to the subpolar North Atlantic. Addition of a pulse of freshwater to the North Atlantic is one mechanism for slowing the THC, and so it is possible that the freshwater release in the mid-1990s identified by Karcher could have acted to slow, temporarily, the THC -- perhaps an effect picked up in Bryden's analysis.

And further, a recent paper by Knight et. al. reconstructed the history of the THC in the Atlantic for the past 125 years or so based upon a combination of climate model simulations and sea surface temperature observations. They concluded that the THC had increased substantially since the 1970s -- a finding in opposition to that of Bryden et. al. Squaring these disparate findings is not a simple matter and indicates that the situation is much more complex than perhaps realized.

Science magazine's Richard Kerr covers the Bryden et. al. findings in the December 2nd issue of the magazine with an article titled "The Atlantic Conveyor May Have Slowed, But Don't Panic Yet." Kerr's look at the issue is a bit more critical than most other mainstream press reports. He notes that the trend reported by Bryden et. al. is hardly bigger than the uncertainty in the calculations, and even quoted Bryden as telling him "we don't know enough about the ocean to know whether [our result] represents a trend" that will persist. Here is how Kerr concludes his look into the issue:

The picture is still fuzzy, however. "It would be dangerous to jump to the conclusion that there's a persistent weakening" of the conveyor circulation, says ocean and climate modeler Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K. Wood, Rhines, and Bryden all worry that the near-instantaneous snapshots taken by the ocean surveys might have been misleading. Like any part of the complex climate system, the conveyor is bound to slow down at times and speed up at others. The two latest surveys, Wood says, may have happened to catch the Atlantic as the conveyor slowed temporarily, giving the impression that a permanent change had taken place.

On the other hand, the [Bryden's] analysis may not have even captured what happened in the past decade or so. Climate models simulating the conveyor in a warming world don't call for such a large slowdown until sometime in the next century, Wood notes. In fact, climate researcher Jeff Knight of the Hadley Centre and colleagues recently reported that changing sea surface temperatures suggest that the conveyor has speeded up a bit since the 1970s (Science, 1 July, p. 41). And physical oceanographers Carl Wunsch and Patrick Heimbach of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just crunched far more oceanographic data from a variety of sources over the interval of dramatic change (1993 to 2004) in the NOC analysis. In a paper submitted for publication, they report a small slowdown, a quarter the size of the NOC group's. The change in heat transported northward is negligible, they calculate.

So has the conveyor slowed? Might it continue to slow? "We don't know," says Wunsch. And it may take a decade or two more of watching and waiting to know for sure.

Together, all of this points to a far less clear picture about the state of the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean than is generally being reported. On the other hand, if Bryden et. al. have discovered a real long-term change in the THC, then this will in turn change the paradigm as to how the THC relates to a huge host of climate parameters -- parameters that, at present, don't seem to be behaving like they should if the THC is indeed slowing dramatically. Not often does one anomaly break a paradigm. It happens -- but rarely.

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EVEN THE NYT IS NOW PRINTING DOUBTS ABOUT CLIMATE "CONTROLS":

"Today, in the middle of new global warming talks in Montreal, there is a sense that the whole idea of global agreements to cut greenhouse gases won't work. A major reason the optimism over Kyoto has eroded so rapidly is that its major requirement - that 38 participating industrialized countries cut their greenhouse emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2012 - was seen as just a first step toward increasingly aggressive cuts. But in the years after the protocol was announced, developing countries, including the fast-growing giants China and India, have held firm on their insistence that they would accept no emissions cuts, even though they are likely to be the world's dominant source of greenhouse gases in coming years. Their refusal helped fuel strong opposition to the treaty in the United States Senate and its eventual rejection by President Bush. [Actually, the U.S. Senate]

But the current stalemate is not just because of the inadequacies of the protocol. It is also a response to the world's ballooning energy appetite, which, largely because of economic growth in China, has exceeded almost everyone's expectations. And there are still no viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases. Then, too, there is a growing recognition of the economic costs incurred by signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a proponent of emissions targets, said in a statement on Nov. 1: "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge." This is as true, in different ways, in developed nations with high unemployment, like Germany and France, as it is in Russia, which said last week that it may have spot energy shortages this winter.

Some veterans of climate diplomacy and science now say that perhaps the entire architecture of the climate treaty process might be flawed. The basic template came out of the first international pact intended to protect the atmosphere, the 1987 Montreal Protocol for eliminating chemicals that harmed the ozone layer, said Richard A. Benedick, the Reagan administration's chief representative in the talks leading to that agreement. That agreement was a success, but a misleading one in the context of climate. It led, Mr. Benedick now says, to "years wasted in these annual shindigs designed to generate sound bites instead of sober contemplation of difficult issues."

While it was relatively easy to phase out ozone-harming chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons, which were made by a handful of companies in a few countries, taking on carbon dioxide, the main climate threat, was a completely different matter, he said. Carbon dioxide is generated by activities as varied as surfing the Web, driving a car, burning wood or flying to Montreal. Its production is woven into the fabric of an industrial society, and, for now, economic growth is inconceivable without it. Developing countries - China and India being only the most dramatic examples - want to burn whatever energy they need, in whatever form available, to grow their economies and raise the living standard of their people.

And the United States - by far the world's largest producer [and absorber!] of greenhouse gases - continues to say that emissions targets or requirements would stunt economic growth in both rich and poor nations. All this has turned the Montreal meeting, many participants have conceded, into, at best, a preliminary meeting on how to start over in addressing the threat of global warming.

Indeed, from here on, progress on climate is less likely to come from megaconferences like the one in Montreal and more likely from focused initiatives by clusters of countries with common interests, said Mr. Benedick, who is now a consultant and president of the National Council on Science and the Environment, a private group promoting science-based environmental policies. The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.

Enormous investments in basic research have to be made promptly, even with the knowledge that most of the research is likely to fail, if there is to be any chance of creating options for the world's vastly increased energy thirst in a few decades, said Richard G. Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit center for energy and environment research. "The train is not leaving the station, and it needs to leave the station," Mr. Richels said. "If we don't have the technologies available at that time, it's going to be a mess.""

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SOME UNUSUALLY FRANK COMMENTS FROM THE BBC:

DON'T BELIEVE ALL YOU READ ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

By David Whitehouse (Science Editor of BBC News Online) -- in BBC Focus, Issue 158

The fact is that we don't know very much about the natural cycles of ice growth and decline in the Artic. Detailed measurements only stretch back barely two decades and that is just too short to tell what is really happening. The ice on our world is always changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. When we look at glaciers and become worried that they may be shrinking and what it might mean, bear in mind that only 2000 years ago there were no glaciers at all in the Alps and hardly any in Norway. Their spectacular growth since then has had nothing to do with human influence. It has been due to natural cycles of climate change that we have lived through successfully.

The media are also not telling the whole story, but rather are 'cherry-picking' the news that fits the credo that the world is warming and the ice is retreating because of human influence. It must be noted that for every glacier in the Alps or Greenland that shows signs of shrinking, there are others elsewhere in the world that show signs of growing.

While the headlines blaze that the Arctic is declining we should take a look at the ice at the other end of the planet. By far, most of the world's ice is held in Antarctica and the evidence there is, by and large, that the amount of ice there is growing.

Many scientists know this, but the mantra of 'global warming happening due to humanity's flagrant release of greenhouse gases' is now an established political correctness. Many of them realise there are significant areas of doubt but if they voice that doubt they run the risk of losing research funds. When scientists are afraid to express doubts we are all in trouble, human-made global warming or not.

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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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