"COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY SOON BECOME WORTHLESS

Europe next week will likely reveal a key flaw in its flagship strategy to tackle climate change -- a net surplus of pollution permits, says Louis Redshaw, Head of Environmental Markets at Barclays Capital. The price of permits -- or carbon credits -- could then fall as low as 5 euros, having already collapsed to 12 euros on Monday from a peak of 31 euros three weeks ago, Redshaw said. Such a price fall would almost certainly trigger further drops in power prices across Europe.

The European Union last year handed its heavy industry the tradeable credits at the launch of its carbon market to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2). Crucially for the market to work there had to be fewer credits than actual emissions, to drive pollution cuts, but this is now looking unlikely. "Based on the trend we're seeing we'd expect the whole market to be long in year 1," Redshaw said. A UBS report last Friday also saw the market long on credits.

Already a clutch of EU countries have reported their 2005 carbon emissions, and all but Spain revealed emissions below their permit quota, triggering the recent price collapse. The European Commission will publish data on remaining countries on May 15. Redshaw saw a price fall to as low as 5 euros a possibility, but did not expect a complete collapse yet because of continuing uncertainty about future energy and therefore carbon demand.

More here





MEDIA SPECULATION: CANADA TO JOIN ASIA-PACIFIC CLIMATE PACT?

A left-centre political party, in office for 13 long years, had grown tired and unfocused and was ethically challenged. So it was no surprise when a resurgent conservative party won the national election. And so it was, in 1996, that John Howard became prime minister of Australia. He's still in the job today, at 66, and next week he will visit Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has invited the Australian leader to address a joint session of Parliament, a rare honour. This visit might be an opportunity for Canadians to learn some more about the foreign policy of the Harper government. We hope so, because except on Afghanistan and relations with the United States, we still know little about the new government's view of our place in the world.....

Australia has not signed onto the Kyoto accord on greenhouse-gas emissions, and Harper's environment minister, Rona Ambrose, has made it clear that this government will do nothing much to honour the old Liberal signature on that deal. Still, Harper and Ambrose have promised detailed environmental policies by fall, including plans for controlling - nobody has said reducing - greenhouse-gas emissions.

So Howard's visit could be an opportunity for Canada to announce plans for adherence to the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a sort of club for Kyoto skeptics. Members are Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States.

The partnership emphasizes commercially viable technological solutions, an approach critics denounce as insufficiently rigorous. That's probably correct - governments will have to lead if the world has any hope of slowing the pace of climate change.....

The Montreal Gazette, 10 May 2006





NEW STUDY QUESTIONS LINKAGE BETWEEN MAJOR HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING

New research calls into question the linkage between major Atlantic hurricanes and global warming. That is one of the conclusions from a University of Virginia study to appear in the May 10, 2006 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. In recent years, a large number of severe Atlantic hurricanes have fueled a debate as to whether global warming is responsible. Because high sea-surface temperatures fuel tropical cyclones, this linkage seems logical. In fact, within the past year, several hurricane researchers have correlated basin-wide warming trends with increasing hurricane severity and have implicated a greenhouse-warming cause.

But unlike these prior studies, the U.Va. climatologists specifically examined water temperatures along the path of each storm, providing a more precise picture of the tropical environment involved in each hurricane's development. They found that increasing water temperatures can account for only about half of the increase in strong hurricanes over the past 25 years; therefore the remaining storminess increase must be related to other factors. "It is too simplistic to only implicate sea surface temperatures in the dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said lead author Patrick Michaels, U.Va. professor of environmental sciences and director of the Virginia Climatology Office.

For a storm to reach the status of a major hurricane, a very specific set of atmospheric conditions must be met within the region of the storm's development, and only one of these factors is sufficiently high sea-surface temperatures. The authors found that the ultimate strength of a hurricane is not directly linked to the underlying water temperatures. Instead, they found that a temperature threshold, 89 degrees Fahrenheit, must be crossed before a weak tropical cyclone has the potential to become a monster hurricane. Once the threshold is crossed, water temperature is no longer an important factor. "At that point, other factors take over, such as the vertical wind profile, and atmospheric temperature and moisture gradients," Michaels said.

While there has been extensive recent discussion about whether or not human-induced global warming is currently playing a role in the increased frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, Michaels downplays this impact, at least for the current climate. "The projected impacts of global warming on Atlantic hurricanes are minor compared with the major changes that we have observed over the past couple of years," Michaels said. He points instead to naturally varying components of the tropical environment as being the primary reason for the recent enhanced activity. "Some aspects of the tropical environment have evolved much differently than they were expected to under the assumption that only increasing greenhouse gases were involved. This leads me to believe that natural oscillations have also been responsible for what we have seen," Michaels said.

But what if sea-surface temperatures continue to rise into the future, if the world continues to warm from an enhancing greenhouse effect? "In the future we may expect to see more major hurricanes," Michaels said, "but we don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that we have seen in the past."

AScribe Newswire, 9 May 2006






RIVER DISCHARGE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN: 1964-2000

Discussing: McClelland, J.W., Dery, S.J., Peterson, B.J., Holmes, R.M. and Wood, E.F. 2006. A pan-arctic evaluation of changes in river discharge during the latter half of the 20th century. Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2006GL025753.

Background

The authors note that "increasing freshwater inputs may slow North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation, a major driver of [the] Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC)," and that "a slowing or cessation of [the] MOC in response to global warming could lead to relative cooling in some regions and amplified warming in others," perhaps the most significant of which phenomena is a postulated failure of the Gulf Stream that is often claimed to have the potential to dramatically cool much of Europe. The question they thus consider within the context of their research is: "How may changes in arctic and subarctic river discharge affect [the Atlantic] MOC?"

What was done

In a study designed to provide some perspective on the issue, McClelland et al. analyzed discharge records of 16 Eurasian and 56 North American rivers over the period 1964-2000. Of these rivers, all Eurasian ones and 14 of the North American ones flow directly into the Arctic Ocean, while the other 42 North American rivers flow into the Hudson, James and Ungava Bays (HJUBs).

What was learned

The five researchers determined that "discharge to the Arctic Ocean increased by 5.6 km3/yr/yr during 1964-2000, the net result of a large increase from Eurasia moderated by a small decrease from North America," but that "discharge to Hudson/James/Ungava Bays decreased by 2.5 km3/yr/yr during 1964-2000."

What it means

McClelland et al. say they "expect decreasing river discharge to Hudson, James, and Ungava Bays and increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean to have opposing effects on NADW formation," which leads us to ask: How significant is the net result for the maintenance of the Atlantic MOC?

The researchers go on to say that "the observed changes in river discharge over 1964-2000 amount to an increase of about 0.007 Sv to the Arctic Ocean and a decrease of about 0.003 Sv to HJUBs by the end of the record," and that "these values are relatively small compared to the ~0.1 Sv [increase] that lead[s] to abrupt reductions in NADW formation in a variety of models (Clark et al., 2002; Rahmstorf, 2002)."

McClelland et al. are right on the mark in this assessment. In fact, the net increase in freshwater discharge to the Arctic Ocean that is revealed by their analysis to have occurred between 1964 and 2000 amounts to only about 4% of the "tipping point" value that is predicted by some climate models to lead to an abrupt Atlantic MOC reduction. Hence, there is little cause for alarm in their findings. In addition, it has recently been noted by Wunsch that the models that predict decreases in, or even a cessation of, NADW formation and the Atlantic MOC are still too crude to be given much credence. In fact, he reports that depending on how the mixing coefficients are modified, fresh water additions can actually increase the North Atlantic mass circulation (Nilsson et al., 2003).

In conclusion, the totality of these several observations suggests that all of the hype surrounding the subject of a Gulf Stream shutdown due to a warming-induced increase in freshwater input to the Arctic Ocean is without a sound basis in either observation or theory.

CO2 Science Magazine, 10 May 2006

Below is the journal abstract of the study mentioned above

Several recent publications have documented changes in river discharge from arctic and subarctic watersheds. Comparison of these findings, however, has been hampered by differences in time periods and methods of analysis. Here we compare changes in discharge from different regions of the pan-arctic watershed using identical time periods and analytical methods. Discharge to the Arctic Ocean increased by 5.6 km3/y/y during 1964-2000, the net result of a large increase from Eurasia moderated by a small decrease from North America. In contrast, discharge to Hudson/James/Ungava Bays decreased by 2.5 km3/y/y during 1964-2000. While this evaluation identifies an overall increase in discharge (~120 km3/y greater discharge at the end of the time period as compared to the beginning for Hudson/James/Unvaga Bays and the Arctic Ocean combined), the contrasting regional trends also highlight the need to understand the consequences of adding/removing freshwater from particular regions of the arctic and subarctic oceans.

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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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