'Global warming not affecting India'



Former scientific adviser to the Prime Minister and eminent scientist Vasant Gowarikar feels that global warming has not affected the Indian climatic system. Speaking at the inauguration of a National Council for Science & Technology Communication (NCSTC) sponsored workshop at Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA), Gowarikar pointed towards the India Meteorological Departments data on cyclones and rainfall, which are indicators of global warming. ``If we look at the last 115 years of data on cyclones, we will find that the highest number of cyclones (10) hit the country in 1893, 1926 and 1930. If we check last 20 years' data, the highest number of cyclones in that period, which is six, hit the Indian shores in 1992 and 1998,'' Gowarikar said.

He then pointed out that the highest rainfall recorded in the country was in 1917, with 1457.3 cm of rainfall and the lowest was around 913 cm in 1918. ``In the last 20 years, the highest rainfall was recorded in 1988 with 1288 cms while the lowest was in 2000 with 939 cms. If climate change has taken place in terms of warming, that should reflect on this data. But there is nothing to indicate the claims of warming affecting the Indian climate system,'' Gowarikar said.

According to him, many scientists across the world have claimed that the global warming has affected India, which was not true. ``Many point out to the heavy rainfall over Mumbai on July 27 in 2005. But it is to be noted that while places like Santa Cruz received 94.4 cms of rainfall, Colaba recorded only 7.3 cms of rain in a period of 24 hours,'' Gowarikar said. According to him, the monsoon is one of the most complex weather phenomenon as it involves both local and global factors.

Gowarikar blamed the western countries for global warming and suggested that the developed nations should be putting in more efforts to undo the harmful effects of all these years. ``India should not be made the part of a gang responsible for global warming. It is a phenomenon that is affecting the western nations more,'' he said.

Gowarikar also expressed his concerns about the damage been done to the hills in the name of development. ``Without the hills, we won't have any rains. Moreover, the ground water levels are depleting day by day. This will eventually lead to desertification, which is an irreversible process,'' he said.

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Don't forget: Politicians share blame with Lay for energy debacle

By Dan Walters -- Sacramento Bee Columnist

The purveyors of revisionist political history are back at work this week, inspired by the death of Enron Corp. founder -- and convicted felon -- Kenneth Lay to revive the myth that were it not for Enron and Lay, California wouldn't have experienced its 2001 energy crisis. "We cannot allow his death to rehabilitate his image," state Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, was quoted in one obituary. "This is a man who is responsible for damaging millions of lives." Dunn led a legislative investigation into Enron's exploitative energy trading schemes, and this year ran for state controller as "the man who cracked Enron," an overblown claim that didn't save him from being rejected by Democratic voters.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer had the good manners to remain silent about Lay's death from heart disease three months before he was to be sentenced for lying to mask the failing company's condition. It was Lockyer who in 2001 told an interviewer that "I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.' "

Dunn and Lockyer have been the most vociferous politicians in blaming Lay and Enron for California's energy woes, but they're not alone. Gray Davis, the governor when the crisis struck, claimed vindication last May when Lay was convicted along with associate Jeffrey Skilling. The energy meltdown -- soaring costs and blackout-inducing shortages -- began Davis' political slide that culminated in his 2003 recall.

Did Lay's Enron play a role in the crisis that continues to cost California consumers tens of billions of dollars? Of course, but it was just one of many factors, and not even the most important one. Lay was an advocate of electric utility deregulation, but so were many others. Properly constructed, deregulated energy markets have worked elsewhere and could work in California, but the state's politicians fumbled.

In the mid-1990s, then-Gov. Pete Wilson and Daniel Fessler, Wilson's Public Utilities Commission president, pushed for deregulation, saying that competition could bring down California's high power rates. The PUC formulated a plan but the Legislature -- especially a state senator named Steve Peace -- decided to intervene. Lobbyists for utilities, power generators, traders such as Enron and consumer advocates engaged in marathon negotiating sessions known in the Capitol as the "Steve Peace death march" and produced a scheme that legislators, including Lockyer as a state senator, unanimously endorsed in 1996.

Retail power rates were frozen while utilities bought juice from a newly created wholesale market at prices that had no caps. It worked well enough for a few years because wholesale rates were low and stable, but when power shortages -- chiefly from a drought in the Pacific Northwest -- emerged in 2000, utilities began experiencing billions of dollars in new costs that they could not pass on to their retail customers, driving them toward bankruptcy. The illogical system began to collapse.

The scheme's flaws were compounded by Davis' paralysis when the first shortages hit in 2000. Had he and his PUC president, Loretta Lynch, acceded to utilities' pleas to abandon the spot market and sign long-term supply contracts, the crisis could have been averted. Even Enron was willing to sell long-term power for about 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. Davis' deer-in-the-headlights procrastination encouraged the market manipulators and six months later, when the state finally sought long-term supply contracts to avert blackouts, prices were much, much higher.

It was California politics at their worst. The system grants every "stakeholder" on a major issue a virtual veto if it is not satisfied with the product, and satisfying every interest often results in unworkable monstrosities. The 1996 scheme was one such product; all interests were placated but in the rush to ratify the agreement, no one explored potential downside risks -- the same expedient approach that later generated the state's chronic budget deficits. It's convenient for politicians such as Lockyer and Davis to blame Enron, but if they had been doing their jobs 10 years ago and six years ago, the crisis wouldn't have occurred.

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COERCION ADDICTION

In a recently published missive I had expressed skepticism about Al Gore's story of global warming and climate change. So not surprising I received some harsh rebukes for this.

I am not a trained climatologist and so I rely in my understanding on those who make themselves clear to me and also embrace certain principles as they propose solutions to problems they identify. Now this means, very briefly, that the sort of call to arms found in Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" and similar offerings is unacceptable.

As an example of his predilection to go to government for solutions, Al Gore is most upset with George Bush for refusing to increase government regulation of whatever has an impact on the environment. Gore's solutions, in other words, are exclusively coercive -- give more power to the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (under his leadership, of course) and we will then be on our way to solving the problems he and his team of experts have identified.

What Gore & Co., ignore is not environmental but economic science and sound principles of political economy. Economist have successfully shown the inefficiency of government intervention for purposes of solving nearly any problem at all. For his work on this issue, James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in 1986. He developed "public choice theory," a set of principles he and his colleague Gordon Tullock laid out in their book, Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 1962). It shows beyond any reasonable doubt-certainly less doubt than what Al Gore gives us -- that when one entrusts problem-solving to government agents, one can expect that there will be mismanagement because bureaucrats promote their own vested interest and agendas when they hold their positions, not the so called "public interest." (Part of the problem is that in most cases what some group labels "the public interest" is actually the private or vested interest of that very group. Yes, even scientists working for government exhibit this behavior pattern-they are very interested in garnering government grants and subsidies whether the work these support has anything at all to do with the welfare of the citizenry.)

OK, now it follows from this that whatever problem is at issue, calling upon governments to solve it is very risky if not outright delusional. My own skepticism about Al Gore & Co. isn't so much about the diagnosis but the cure, although even the diagnosis shows plenty of evidence of special pleading. (Nearly all the predictions are put in terms of what "may" happen, not what will.)

But most of all what is of very serious concern is how readily the likes of Al Gore will toss aside considerations of due process and civil liberties, not to mention private property rights, just so as to implement what they call "precautionary" policies, ones that do as much damage to the principles of a free society as any part of the Patriot Act. In another words, Al Gore & Co., are-and pardon my derivative language here-addicted to government.

Now there are those who will cavalierly dismiss my concerns as right wing, oil-interest-driven ideology that simply blinds the likes of me to what is imperative for humanity's survival and welfare. Au contraire! It is, instead, the folks lined up with Al Gore who show an unwavering, dogmatic commitment to handling all problems by means of coercion, the governmental way. (There is a wonderful book about this, Jonathan R. T. Hughes' The governmental habit: Economic Controls from Colonial times to the Present [Basic Books, 1977; republished by Princeton University Press, 1991].) To test whether I am right about this, just ask anyone who joins Gore & Co., what their solutions involve. They involve state imposed restrictions, higher taxation, an environmental disaster czar, and similar measures that are not becoming of a free society but of a top down tyranny.

Until and unless those showing great concern for the environment demonstrate that they understand the public choice problems of reliance on government and they respect the rights of individual human beings as they approach the problem, they do not deserve respect. Some of what they produce may be diagnostically sound but as to their cure, forget about it.

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CLIMATE CHANGE MAY FOSTER CIVILIZATION

I don't wholly agree with the analysis below but the underlying point seems sound: That the human response to climate change may make that change beneficial rather than disastrous

One of archaeology's "big questions" is explaining the origins of civilization. In anthropology, "civilization" has a technical definition. To qualify as a civilization, a society must have all or most of the following characteristics: cities with large populations; a hierarchical social organization, with a king, pharaoh or president at the top of the organizational chart; an economy based on agriculture; monumental architecture; and a system of record-keeping.

The earliest civilizations arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and northern China. Based on this definition, there were no indigenous civilizations in the Ohio Valley. And the arrival of European civilization derailed any chance of one developing.

Various theories have been proposed to explain how this social complexity developed and why it developed in some areas and not others, but archaeologists and historians have not formulated any one satisfying explanation. Nick Brooks, a climate-change researcher at the University of East Anglia in England, offers his idea in the latest issue of Quaternary International. "The emergence of complex societies coincided with or followed a period of increased aridity," which began 8,000 years ago but intensified periodically in subsequent millennia, he said.

In this view, global climate change caused the profound social changes that have been referred to as the "urban revolution." Brooks states that during large-scale droughts, people would have been forced to concentrate in places where water was available. The social consequences of this aggregation included the formation of managerial elites who controlled the distribution of resources and directed the construction of large monuments to represent and justify their authority. Brooks sees these worldwide social upheavals as ways societies adapted to changing environments.

Most anthropologists reject such explanations as too simplistic. The environment, they say, cannot alone determine human responses. But when cultures worldwide adopt similar solutions to similar problems, perhaps it's useful to view civilization as a successful, if not inevitable, response to global environmental changes.

The editors of this issue of Quaternary International point out that although "no simple rules seem to govern human (cultural) evolution," it is crucial to try to understand how humans respond to environmental catastrophes. It is increasingly relevant to us today in the wake of devastating tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and the threat of global warming.

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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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