"Water, water everywhere, but ..."

As Summer temperatures are set to be some of the hottest on record, and much hyperbole is written about whether this is influenced by man's activities, Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomberg, is about to set off to Australia to promote his new book, How to Spend $50 billion - a book on how to get the best bang for the buck on interventions in the developing world. One of his simple conclusions is that trying to correct human-induced climate change is not a cost-effective intervention, whereas improving water supply is a far better initiative. And in the heat, ready access to water, whether in California or the Sahel, or the most arid continent on earth (Australasia), is vital. Unfortunately Lomborg's analysis doesn't address the world's largest water problem -- gross misallocation of agricultural water. This is a pity because his destination, Australia, has a well-honed solution -- the market.

The Problem

Alarmists have been crying wolf about water wars for years, but like many green exaggerations they have a kernel of truth. Freshwater is being overused and polluted in many parts of the world. Aquifers from as far afield as Beijing and Dallas will last only another two or three decades; perennial rivers in many places are now often running dry at least during some parts of the year. In short, we have a problem: there is enough water but it is being used inefficiently almost everywhere and at current rates it will run out soon.

In India over one million children die due to diarrhea and other easily preventable water-borne diseases every year. Few Indians (perhaps 30 percent) have close access to decent sanitation and high quality drinking water. Not only does this expose the majority to dangerous dysenteries and other water-borne disease, but it provides requires back-breaking toil for those (usually women and children) who have to make long journeys to collect it every day. The indirect costs are even more staggering with salinity levels rising in so much irrigation water that crops fail, farmers commit suicide and thousands of the poorest starve.

The main water allocation problem is the result of Soviet-style management over agricultural water. In most places around the globe, governments decide who gets how much water, when they can use it and often what for, and if they don't use their allocation (regardless of how they use it) they will lose it. Once governmental allocations are made, officials rarely reallocate, even when massive changes in agriculture, industry, mining, domestic and rural demand occur. The result is politically favored allocation and grotesque situations where farmers often pay 100 times less than other types of users, and the poorest in slums often pay 10 times what rich domestic consumers pay, and for unsafe water.

While human access to drinking water and sanitation is obviously vital, far more water is used -- about 70 percent of globally withdrawn freshwater -- and vastly more water wasted in agriculture than in any other allocation. Improving agricultural water allocation use and assigning flexible rights to it can result in more efficient outcomes and ultimately fairer allocations to the world's poor in the aridest parts of the world.

Water reallocation is also becoming vital in the fastest growing areas of South East Asia. Due to burgeoning agriculture, China's surface water is rapidly depleting, and according to the respected think tank the Rand Corporation, water shortages could indefinitely lower annual growth by as much as 2 percent. India's quasi-illegal water rights trading system was valued at over US $1 billion a year in 1999 by the World Bank. While this questionable system is improving agricultural output, it is also leading to even faster aquifer depletion and pollution than in China. China needs to adopt individual and communal water rights, and India should legalize its own system, in order to prevent an ecological and health-related disaster in the coming decades; both nations can learn a lot from Australia's rights trading system as well as from successes elsewhere.

A partial solution

Countries and regions that have redefined and traded water rights have seen water access for the rural poor increase in volume and fall in price. All users -- agricultural, industrial and domestic -- have seen their supplies increase in reliability and quality with infrastructural improvements. Aside from making economic sense, there is a moral imperative for pushing for such a reform of water rights -- access to better quality water reduces disease and death.

Chile, South Africa and Australia provide the best examples of how trading can take place, improving farm output while benefiting the poor. Chile's trading has increased access to water for the vast majority of poor rural users. Meanwhile, the US has lost its way: Its western states initially led the pack with legal structures to encourage trade but overburdening federal environmental regulations and perverse litigation against market trades by environmental groups have limited flexible allocation.

Australia's trading system along the hundreds of miles of the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) is now the most sophisticated and effective in the world and should be analyzed closely by all countries where agriculture dominates water usage. Progress is perhaps best exemplified by the 'Watermove' website now operating in the MDB. This sophisticated system allows users to trade water on the internet. Moreover, it breaks down the right to water into its constituent parts, including access and distribution.

Trading has promoted a reduction in low-value cropping activity like cereal production; it has encouraged non-farming enterprise owners (including municipalities for domestic water use) to buy traded water in the very arid state of South Australia. Trading has lowered water use and increased farmer productivity; as some farmers leave the business others flourish and choose crops more suitable to the climate (including grapes to make great Australian wines). But regardless of which specific sector buys the water, the clear pattern has been a shift to higher value production and more efficient water use.

Only time will tell whether China and India, and western US states, which within 20 years will also have chronic and acute water problems, will adopt the sophisticated trading techniques of Australia, but it will be a great deal better than decision by government fiat. Water trading allows time for individuals to adapt to changing conditions -- man-made or natural -- and the conditions are changing. Sticking one's head in Gobi or Mojave sand won't help future Chinese or Californians.

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OK coral

Weeks after the National Science Foundation released a report about the connection between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the acidity of the oceans, doomsayers continue to prophesy that global warming will kill the coral reefs off our picturesque Florida coast.

The NSF study, released with two other federal research entities and entitled "Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs," landed with a thud, and it is remarkable how the press has received it. Writers have editorialized about it, literally with one voice, without any critical fact-checking. In a July 11 editorial, the editors of the Cincinnati Post wrote, "This report is a fraction of the available evidence indicating anthropogenic climate change....The evidence is clear and convincing. The global-warming critics are neither." On July 12, the Albuquerque Tribune, in its own in-house editorial, printed the same words (without attribution).

It could have done something more original and scrutinized the NSF report. There's a major problem with it, right at the beginning. Its first paragraph states correctly that, as a result of the burning of fossil fuel and other activities, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is rising. From there, however, the report loses its way. "Rates of increase," it says, "have risen from 0.25% [per year] in the 1960s to 0.75% [per year] in the last five years."

Really? The standard reference for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is that registered at Mauna Loa Observatory, beginning in 1958. The average rate of change in the 1960s was 0.30% per year, and in the last five years, it was 0.55%. This last value is not statistically distinguishable from the average rate for the past 25 years. The real change from the 1960s to the last five years is 0.25% per year, while the NSF-sponsored report gives it as twice that.

The precise figure is important, because the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide is directly related to the amount of warming it creates and to changes in the acidity of the oceans; computer models using a carbon dioxide increase rate twice that which is observed show twice as much warming. And that is precisely what has occurred: there are now four separate, taxpayer-supported reports "intercomparing" the dozens of climate models for global warming that have evolved in recent years. Each one uses a carbon dioxide increase of 1% per year, or twice the real rate. Ever wonder why they predict so much warming?

It gets better (worse). The coral report then states that "The current atmospheric CO2 concentration...is expected to continue to rise by about 1% [per year] over the next few decades." "Continue"? The average increase for the last decade was 0.49 per year, for the decade before that was 0.42%, and for the decade before that was 0.43%. Again, about half of what the report expects to "continue." The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 380 parts per million. Before we industrialized -- back when life expectancy was in the 40s -- the concentration was about 280.

Fewer than 100 million years ago, or 400 million years after corals first arose, the carbon dioxide concentration was a bit less than 3,000 ppm. Around 175 million years ago it was pushing 6,000. If there was that much more carbon dioxide around, the oceans would have been that much more acidic, which would have killed the corals. And yet they lived.

How does the report take this problem into account? It balances the increase in acidification that these concentrations of carbon dioxide would bring about with some countervailing change in its opposite, alkalinity. So the report speculates that "ocean alkalinities could have been higher during periods with high CO2 levels." (Emphasis added.)

Then there's the problem of identifying a definite decline in corals. The report says that it is "difficult" to find this effect, and that "on average" it does not exist, because the rates of coral growth are controlled by many other factors that are apparently obscuring their decline.

How on earth did all of this make it through peer review? Or do we no longer care enough to get the facts right before expressing opinions under the mantle of scientific authority? To many editorialists, when it comes to global warming, facts don't matter. But here are a few: corals have been around for half a billion years, on a planet that was much, much warmer, had much more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, got hit by an asteroid or two, experienced ice ages and is now in the midst of a slight warming trend. You can bet that they'll be around a long time after humans have come to the end of the evolutionary road.

Source







GERMANS CHEATING OVER COAL

Plans to exempt new power stations from the next phase of the EU's CO2 trading scheme could lock Germany into highly polluting coal-fired power plants for many years, warn researchers and NGOs.

The German government on 28 June 2006 submitted its national allocation plan to the European Commission for the second phase of the EU's CO2 emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS) covering the period 2008-2012 (see EurActiv 30 June 2006). The ETS is the EU's flagship instrument to fight climate change and meet Europe's Kyoto pledge to reduce its emissions of global warming gases by 8% by year 2012. Germany's national CO2 reduction pledge amounts to a 21% cut because of the sheer size of its economy. Its emissions are currently about 17% lower than in 1990, the reference year of the Kyoto Protocol.

Planned exemptions under the second phase of the EU emissions trading scheme mean a new breed of cleaner coal-fired power stations are on their way in Germany, according to Christian Egenhofer, a senior researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels. But it could also lock the country into high carbon fuels for many years to come, he warns.

Under Germany's draft National Allocation Plan, which was submitted to the Commission on 28 June, every new power station built between 2008 and 2012 would be allowed to opt out from carbon emission restrictions for a period of 14 years (EurActiv 30 June 2006). Egenhofer says the opt-out would allow investments into cleaner yet more expensive coal-fired power stations to become economically viable, thus helping the country meet rising demand for electricity. "There is a rational reason for the Germans doing this, it is the security of supply," says Egenhofer. "The German fuel mix is perfectly balanced at the moment, one third gas, one third coal, one third nuclear. So it seems to be a deliberate choice".

The EU carbon trading scheme tends to favour electricity produced from natural gas because it emits lower levels of carbon dioxide. Coal, on the other hand, has higher carbon intensity, which means coal-fired power stations need to buy pollution credits on the market to be able to operate. This in turn pushes their costs up, eventually forcing electricity produced from coal out of the market in the long run. "If you let the market unfettered, then you go towards gas," Egenhofer says. "And all of it will have to come from Russia so you might run in over-dependence. Again, [Germany's] fuel mix may not end up as balanced as it is at the moment".

So is Germany taking the right option in asking to let new coal-fired power stations out of the ETS? "It is a double-edged sword," says Egenhofer. "In the sort term, it helps to move to a cleaner technology within the fuel in question. If you give this 14 year opt-out, you may get this investment because it is a good economic deal. But [the Germans] may at the same time put themselves off-track if you look beyond the Kyoto Protocol," he warns. "From an economic incentive perspective it is a non-sense," Egenhofer says. "If you really want to bring down emissions you want to move to low-carbon fuels. If you get all new installations based on coal, they may be very efficient but they are still very high in carbon intensity so you lock yourself on a certain track. That is a risk."

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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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